Our dialogue event, Challenging Narratives and Conflict Resolution, took place on the
night of December 1st , 2017. A group of students from that summer’s GIEU: Israel-Palestine trip was inspired by our experiences there, the people we met and the stories we heard. We decided to share this new knowledge with the university community by creating a space for our Israeli and Palestinian guides to speak on the topic of the conflict and their personal experiences of it.
Along the process of planning, organizing, and executing this event, the biggest challenge we faced was that we had some of our main sources of support, through advertising, back out. They perceived the event as too controversial and polarizing considering the campus climate regarding divestment. There were moments when we really felt alone in the process, but luckily our team had very strong planning and organizational skills, and we were able to reach out to other sources for advertising support.
Through this event, our goals were to expose students from various backgrounds at the University of Michigan to global issues that they may not be familiar with. We hoped to educate them on the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict by emphasizing the importance of nuanced perspectives and multiple narratives.
By: Lisa Garcia
