THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But if, along the way, you can peel away some people who think haters are on the right side of history you have done well. One such person is Professor Mohammed Dajani who has taken a group of Palestinian students on a field trip to Auschwitz. And has received more than his share of abuse for doing so.

In online posts and comments, Palestinian critics denounced the visit as treason. Acquaintances counseled the professor to keep a low profile, stay away from his university campus and consider taking a vacation abroad, he recalled.

“People said we were giving support to Zionism and promoting its propaganda, as if we were giving up on our rights,” Dajani said in an interview in East Jerusalem, the city’s Arab side, which Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.

He’s no stranger to controversy. The director of the American studies program at Al Quds University, Dajani heads an organization called Wasatia, whose declared aim is to promote a culture of moderation and reconciliation among Palestinians _ values that often seem in short supply in the festering conflict with Israel...

“In my community you see a lot of ignorance of the Holocaust, denial of the Holocaust. People don’t want to recognize the suffering of the other,” Dajani said. “I felt that I did not want to be a bystander, and wanted to bring more awareness and consciousness among Palestinians of this issue.”

Because of its crucial role in the creation of Israel, the Holocaust is freighted with political overtones in Palestinian society, where many think that their people have paid the price for the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Palestinians consider their mass displacement and expulsion in the war that followed the establishment of Israel a “catastrophe” of similar magnitude, and they recall it in annual commemorations just as Jews will mark Holocaust Remembrance Day this year beginning at sundown Sunday.

“The Holocaust is not taught in Palestinian schools and universities,” Dajani said. “It is a history ignored, mentioned as part of a plot to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, or as Zionist propaganda with exaggerated figures.”

Dajani has advocated publicly for Holocaust education among Palestinians and has devoted part of his own classes to the subject. The trip to Auschwitz was arranged as part of a reconciliation research project sponsored by the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, which also included a visit by Israeli students to Deheishe, a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank.

They will probably never be enough to end the madness that is Israeli/Palestinian policy but every one of them should be one less for the haters to use.