"It’s hard to over-state how much the climate has changed in the past
decade. A filmmaker friend summed it up: You used to need extra
security to bring a pro-Palestine speaker to campus. Now you need extra
security to bring a pro-Israel speaker.
At Oklahoma University, when I spoke to students in the flagship
Middle East studies program, I felt utterly redundant. They already knew
everything I was saying. The argument in class wasn’t whether Israelis
or Palestinians were to blame, but whether Israel had totally destroyed
the two-state solution. (Some of the students thanked me for being
straightforward and not dancing around the issues like most “experts”
did. I told them that was one benefit of not having a mainstream career
to lose.)
In the most remote place I spoke -- Seminole State College in a small
town in Oklahoma -- the faculty were fascinated and expressed gratitude
that I was bringing them “the other side of the story.” The students
asked not whether my stories were true but how it felt to be in the
middle of them. That was as big a surprise to me as any."
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