Activity Five

This lesson is to accompany Unit Five of the Curriculum Guide.

Incorporating the C.E.L.s:

• Independent Learning
• Critical & Creative Thinking
• Personal & Social Values & Skills

Concept Development Activity for:

• Nationalism
• Strategic Interests
• Partition
• Foreign Intervention

This simulation activity will involve students in a peace conference to seek a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The activity will allow students to gain an awareness of the complexity of the issues that dominate that region and to give them cooperative/group activities.

Knowledge Objectives

The student will:

• know that distinct populations sometimes have conflicting claims for specific geographic regions and that these conflicting claims can lead to violence;
• know that the Middle East region that has been contested by different populations and nations;
• know that both the Palestinian and Jewish populations have historic claims to contested lands in the region;
• know that the involvement of nonregional powers in the Middle East has served as a destabilizing element in the politics of the region; and,
• know that economic, political, and cultural forces are in play in the region and contribute to the complexity of the issues that dominate that region.

Skills Development

The student will:

• practise stating a proposition that is testable and guides the search for data;
• practise collecting data in a systematic manner; and,
• practise presenting analyses of the data to confirm or not to confirm the proposition by:
  • describing and defining the main parts,
  • describing cause-effect or other relationships.

Values Issues

The student will:

• discuss whether a population, that feels that it has been disenfranchised, has the right to resort to the use of violence in order to gain "justice";
• discuss whether distinct populations can successfully live together in one political unit;
• discuss whether the involvement of parties not directly involved in a conflict can help the involved parties to resolve the conflict; and,
• discuss whether a great power should supply military assistance to a smaller nation when the greater power is aware of the probable consequences.

Outline of the Activity

Step One

Review with the class the major historical events and parties involved in the dispute between the state of Israel and the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states.

Provide the students with the Student Information Sheets that focus on the various nations/groups in the Middle East.

• Note the historical events of this century that have shaped the politics of the region;
• Note the geographic importance of the region and the involvement of major nations in the region;
• Note the complexity of the region's politics;
• Note some of the major personalities who have shaped events in the region.

Individual students or teams will represent the major nations (or parties) of the region: Israel, Egypt, the Palestinians, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations.

The representatives of each nation/population will have the following responsibilities:

• research the position and involvement of their respective nation in the conflict;
• prepare an historical justification for their particular party's claims/objectives;
• determine the short-term and long-term political goals of their nation; and,
• prepare a presentation paper for the conference outlining a proposal for a settlement of the dispute.

Step Two

During the initial stage of the conference chaired by the United Nations representative, the groups representing each nation/population will present their proposed peace settlements.

The conference participants will then be given time to meet informally among themselves, and to attempt to seek mutually acceptable positions and proposals.

The conference may be reconvened for several sessions, with time allocated for informal meetings between the sessions to attempt to reach a settlement.

The success of the conference will not depend solely on reaching an universally acceptable peace agreement or plan but rather on the participants becoming more aware of the issues and parties involved and the complexity of the issues.

Alternative Learning Strategies:

Working as a class, construct a timeline of the major political and military events which occurred in the Middle East during the period from 1917 to the present.

• Indicate that both the Palestinian and Jewish people had been promised an independent nation by Britain early in the twentieth century.

Have the students prepare dialectical arguments supporting one of the claimants to Palestine.

• In preparing their arguments, students should consider:
  • population statistics and immigration over the time period;
  • the promises made by the controlling European powers;
  • historical presences in the region;
  • military activities of the two groups; and,
  • intervention of superpowers in the region.

The students will present their arguments to the class and be prepared to defend their positions.