With Gaza War Raging, Atlanta Think Tank Launches Courses on Understanding Israel 

With conflict flaring in the Middle East, an Atlanta think tank founded by a former Emory University professor has launched a series of online courses to help learners of all faiths and persuasions better understand modern Israel. 

Kenneth Stein, a professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history, said the new courses from the Center for Israel Education Inc. are in part a reaction to the events that have unfolded — and the ignorance put on display — since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s retaliatory war. 

But in some ways, the resource is an outgrowth of the CIE’s day-to-day work, which centers primary sources to give historical context to today’s headlines. 

“The baby was not conceived on October 7, to be honest,” Dr. Stein told Global Atlanta in an interview, noting that an effort to build the six online courses had been in the works for a while. 

But the conflict gave new urgency to their release, given the “absurd” commentary Dr. Stein heard even on mainstream media outlets in the aftermath of the attacks. 

“I realized that after Oct. 7 a lot of Christians, Jews and Muslims didn’t know about how the Middle East unfolded in the 20th century,” said Dr. Stein, who started teaching at Emory in 1977. 

The courses look at how Zionists created the state of Israel, why the center believes that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, the origins of Israel’s pluralistic society and democratic system, Israeli identity through pop culture, and the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both before 1973’s Yom Kippur War and from that seminal moment up until today.  

Dr. Stein said he realizes that in a polarized online environment ruled by social media algorithms, people are constantly confronted with information lacking in context, often crafted to push specific narratives. 

To avoid perception of bias, he leans on his training as a historian and experience as a professor, eschewing strictly personal views and instead relaying original source documents, often translated from the Arabic and Hebrew into English for people to peruse on their own. 

Using this method, he says, allows him to convey in leaders’ own words the motivation behind Hamas’ massacre of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, which some have since justified by pointing to Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

“I think it’s very important for people of all religions, especially Jews, to understand that this group of people is not just interested in killing Jews, which is horrendous in its own right. They want to eradicate the state. They just want to obliterate it. The proof of that comes from what their leaders say in Arabic. When you put that in front of someone, you can’t refute it,” Dr. Stein said.

On the other hand, Israel has been taken to task internationally for the heavy civilian casualties inflicted in its military campaign to root out Hamas and recover the remaining hostages. 

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says Israel has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, a number that doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. Many women and children have been killed, largely through devastating air strikes. Forced migration and restrictions on aid entering Gaza have also led to a humanitarian crisis. 

Dr. Stein said the current conflict is emblematic of how Middle Eastern history can often be skewed by religion and emotion, he said, both of which can lead to demonization of what one side perceives to be the “other.” 

“People don’t like to learn that maybe what they believed yesterday could be wrong,” Dr. Stein said. 

By talking to Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis and other international actors regularly within the region, Dr. Stein says he and his collaborators keep a fresh eye on how things are unfolding.

This set of courses, he said, is not geared toward the 10 percent of people with extreme views on either side, but toward the 80 percent who sincerely want to learn how the situation has evolved over time.  

Complemented with videos drawing directly from central players in historical developments, each course module takes about an hour to complete, and the Center for Israel Education provides resources for further exploration of each topic. Among the target audiences: teens who Dr. Stein says haven’t had a strong grounding in history, synagogue groups set to travel to Israel, college students and anyone else seeking a nuanced view of an intractable problem.

“It’s not aimed at someone who wants to spend seven minutes and understand the conflict,” Dr. Stein said. 

As a historian, Dr. Stein has tracked the Middle East since his studies in the 1970s and a stint in the 1980s at The Carter Center, with which he later parted ways in 2006 after President Carter aired what Dr. Stein believed were errant views in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” 

With more than 50 years studying a conflict that has led to untold death, destruction and sorrow — its latest flareup proving stubbornly difficult to solve — Dr. Stein takes some solace in the fact that he’s using today’s tools to make an impact far beyond the classroom. 

While he doesn’t have a personal Facebook account, the CIE’s website reaches more than 50,000 people a week, about 2.5 million per year. 

“The only way I can fight the idea of giving up is by providing someone an explanation of what happened so they can become smarter,” he said. “I feel like I’m in the service of people’s curiosity, and that is very comforting.”

Learn more about the CIE at https://israeled.org/ and buy access to the courses, priced at $15 each or $75 for all six, here.