Seemingly no international issue provokes as much heartbreak, consternation and demand for moral action for many right now as the fate of Palestinians and Israelis.

And few academics have as much insight into the challenges — and benefits — of honest discussion and scholarship about that region as Liora Halperin, Professor of International Studies and History and and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

She is a historian of Israel and Palestine with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, Jewish cultural and social history, language ideology and policy, and the politics of colonization and settlement. She is the author of “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” and is currently working on a book about the diverse urban Jewish communities of late Ottoman Palestine.

She is also a frequent public speaker and consultant for organizations trying to navigate around and discuss events in Israel and Palestine.

Halperin came into the national spotlight in 2021 when she signed onto a statement in response to a deadly assault on Gaza by Israel in response to Hamas rockets fired into Israel. That statement denounced antisemitism and Islamophobia, and in part, critiqued the influence of “settler-colonial paradigms” in Zionism. A 2022 article in Jewish Currents detailed how the University handled the political ramifications, including the returning of a $5 million endowment.

At 7 p.m. Saturday, May 3 at Vashon Havurah, 15401 Westside Hwy SW, Halperin will share historical frameworks and perspectives around the past, present and future of the Holy Land in a talk titled “Israel, Palestine, Gaza: Histories of the Present.” Learn more at vashonhavurah.org. (The talk is part of the Phil Cushman Memorial speaker series.)

Beachcomber editor Alex Bruell, himself a descendent of Austrian Jews who fled the Holocaust, interviewed Halperin ahead of that talk to get her insight on some of the most urgent questions around her scholarship. That interview, edited for space, appears below.

Bruell: Where does your interest in studying Israel and Palestine come from?

Halperin: My family is Jewish. … I went to a Jewish school, synagogue, Jewish summer camp. … I spent a good deal of time, my teenage years, living in Israel, all through the framework of Jewish, Zionist affiliated programs. … The Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising … was kind of shocking, and I realized that for all the time I spent learning about Israel, I didn’t really feel like I had the tools to understand what the heck was going on. And so I decided … I would study Arabic. … I arrived in college in the fall of 2001 … and found myself sitting in day one of first-year Arabic on September 12, 2001. [I thought], this feels really important. This feels like what I need to be doing. … [Also, when] I was 18 or 19 years old, my dad reminded me that his grandfather had been born in Ottoman Palestine in the late 1880s. … He came from a group of Ashkenazi Jews from Lithuania who had moved to Palestine in the early 1800s, which is quite early for Ashkenazi Jews. He spoke Arabic. He represented a story that wasn’t the typical story one hears about Jews in Palestine or Israel, and that was very fascinating to me.”

Is it even possible to study Israel — at least the modern state of Israel — without studying Palestine?

It’s a very fraught question, because the answer has political stakes. I think that the answer is no, and in fact, part of studying them together is studying why some people don’t want to study them together. Some of it is in the naming. Before 1948, Jewish Zionists called the land Palestine when they were writing in Western languages. … When the state is created, a big piece of claiming it [was about] calling it the State of Israel … not Palestine. And that happens in conjunction with the displacement of upwards of 700,000 Palestinians from the territory that became the State of Israel. … [Meanwhile] for Palestinians, Palestine is this much longer historical concept, and the fact that Israel comes in and takes over is kind of an aberration, an unwelcome, incredibly violent disruption. … So it’s inescapable to study Israel if you’re going to study Palestine. It’s the same space.

That linguistic evolution in how we talk about the project of Zionism is fascinating.

It’s enormous. Jews, especially in late 19th century Eastern Europe, have some very profound problems they’re facing — anti-Semitic violence, economic insecurities, concerns about Jewish culture. For some, they see settlement … as the path forward: Let’s start anew in this place that has significance for us. … Not only is the colonization going to help resolve our problems, but it’s also going to be part of signaling that we’re part of the community of civilized people. … Even at the time, [the people living in these places] are not just sitting by oblivious. … It’s only in the period of decolonization after World War Two that … anti-colonialism become widespread and start gaining the support of some Western activists … like anti-Vietnam [war] protests … [and] South Africa a little bit later. … Israel finds itself pivoting, over a period of decades, from saying “This modern colonization is something we’re super proud of,” to “Oh no, that’s not what it is. That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is different because this was our ancestral land, or because we were persecuted in a way that, let’s say, the British Empire was not persecuted.”

The Trump administration is arresting and attempting to deport students from colleges around the country for, in several cases, seemingly merely criticizing Israel. Is this an especially difficult time to be teaching in this field?

Yeah, and it keeps getting harder. It’s always been hard, at baseline. After October 7, there were some really raw emotions — people reacting to the attacks themselves, and to the devastation in Gaza, the starvation and denial of medical aid and bombing of whole buildings. A lot of anxiety — and then Trump comes into office. It keeps getting harder, and it keeps getting scarier. … And the folks who are most scared — like folks from the Middle East here on visas — they made sacrifices in order to be here. … It’s been evolving over several decades, this [attitude] that anytime someone’s expressing views of solidarity or condemnation of what Israel is doing, that it’s almost, in and of itself, anti-Semitic. It seems like the Trump administration is taking on [that framework] in a big way. … I think that’s pretty scary. I mean, anti-Semitism can make its way into any political movement, and it certainly makes its way into pro-Palestinian activism. But I think it’s really wrong to see the entire political movement as premised on anti-Semitism. I think that’s just a false perception.

What did you learn experiencing the UW campus protests last year? (Pro-Palestinian activists occupied a small but highly visible part of the UW campus for several weeks.)

I don’t know that I’ve fully processed it. I did visit the encampment as it was going on. There’s something a little bit magical in these spaces. … People are all coming out and feeding each other, and singing. … As far as I saw at UW, it was very peaceful and kind of a lovely space. Not to say that some of the slogans that were there wouldn’t have been seen as offensive to folks who didn’t share [those] politics. I think, for students who were involved in it, it was very, very formative.

Talking about Palestine and Israel without descending into shouting matches can feel impossible. How can we talk about this region and these people productively and respectfully?

I think there’s two answers. One is, how do I speak to communities … in a way that’s going to bring people in, even if they’re coming from different places? My approach for the last year and a half, as I’ve been going all over the place doing talks, is I think it’s so important to try to describe the different positions out there, including the ones that I might not personally [agree with] — like this perception that Palestinian activism is apparently anti-Semitic. [Let’s] name it and say: “This is the perception, and here’s why they see it that way.” … If I say some things that are going to speak to what various people want to hear, at least, I have found that it has been fairly effective in opening the conversation. … The second question is, how do you get people to talk? … It’s really, really hard, not just because emotions are hard … but also because nowadays … from multiple sides, there is [a perspective of] “Why should I talk to this person who wants to do harm to me?” … And sometimes my reaction is: “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t have to.” … But for those who are willing to have [those conversations], I think there are some good facilitation strategies out there.

These debates start — and often end — just over the words we use, by what we deem is reasonable to say at all. That makes it tough to engage.

That’s right. And there’s a lot of litmus tests. Are you or are you not using this word? … There’s so much about the terms of the discord. Is it or is it not a genocide? … [Genocide] is a category of international law that’s built on a document that, itself, was negotiated. And certainly the people of Gaza are experiencing this as utter and complete destruction — and genocide is kind of the word that we use for utter and complete destruction.

What do you hope people take away from your talk?

I think it’s great when people want to come out and learn and not be scared. … I hope that people come away saying: I learned something, or I had some questions answered, or maybe I came away with new questions.

For those who want to learn more, Halperin recommended the following podcasts on Israel and Palestine: Tel Aviv Review, Kalam, Occupied Thoughts, This is Palestine, The Tikvah Podcast, Jerusalem Unplugged, Haaretz Weekly and Identity/Crisis.