Conference Program

The volume The Other’s History: Israelis and Palestinians (PRIME, 2003) was published in Italy in 2003. It is a “small history manual” (ibid., 2003, p. 3) written by a group of twelve teachers, both Israeli and Palestinian. There are two versions of it: one in Arabic and one in Hebrew. The groups of students to whom the manual was addressed were presented with the history of the conflict both from the Palestinian point of view and from the Israeli point of view. The original manual featured both narratives on the same page, separated by a blank space: “so as to allow teachers and pupils to write their own observations” (ibid., 2003, p. 10). The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is characterized not only by extreme forms of violence and situations involving violations of human rights, but also by a conflict of memories, narratives, and imaginaries. Given the stratification of events as well as of memories, Daniel Bar-Tal (2024) places it within the framework of “intractable conflicts,” which have specific characteristics and are marked, on both sides, by the perception that resolution is impossible. Despite its complexity and the many difficulties involved, Bashir and Goldberg (2023) emphasize the need to bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba into dialogue in order to write “a new grammar and a new syntax” for the development of national narratives that are more complex, yet also more aware and effective. The Holocaust and the Nakba are defined by the authors as “foundational pasts,” borrowing the concept from Alon Confino (2012). They are considered as such because both memories assume an ontological dimension within Israeli and Palestinian societies respectively, and each presupposes the negation of the other’s trauma, thereby preventing forms of recognition and dialogue. The attempt to create a continuum between these two memories does not in any way aim to equate different events or to foster a competition of victimhood, as Said had previously argued (2011). Rather, through this project the authors seek to open up the possibility of mutual recognition in order to contribute to the construction of peace-building processes. The lesson of Bashir and Goldberg (2023) aligns with Todorov’s (2018) concept of “exemplary memory,” which presupposes the possibility of considering memory not only in a “literal” sense (narrowly tied to facts and contexts) but also as a tool for interpreting the present and contemporary forms of violence and conflict. Within these reflections lies the pedagogy of memory (Tomarchio & D’Aprile, 2021; Vaccarelli, 2023; Bravi, 2023; Vaccarelli, 2025), which conceives memory not merely as a commemorative moment but above all as a pedagogical device capable of becoming a driver of active citizenship, democracy, and processes of peace-building.