A Palestinian professor took Palestinian university students on an unprecedented trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial in March, in an effort to break Palestinian taboos surrounding the Holocaust.
But when the group got back, there was uproar. Students demonstrated, the professor got death threats, the university distanced itself from the trip and other teachers kicked him out of the professors’ union.
Mohammed Dajani’s trip to Auschwitz was part of a project with Israeli universities, which also took Israeli students to meet Palestinian refugees. Dajani said he and his colleagues were researching how those kinds of encounters might create empathy for the opposite side’s suffering.