"A whole new world opened up"—The radical project taking Israel-Palestine into schools theguardian.com

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It has dominated the news agenda for the past 14 months, but inside most British classrooms, it’s as if 7 October never happened. Half a million pupils studied history at GCSE or A-level last year, but just 2,000 tackled the origins of the Middle East’s most contentious war: why Israel was born, what that meant for the Palestinians, and the decades of occupation and violence that followed.

It’s not that children aren’t interested. They hear about it at home, in their communities and of course on social media, where a bitter and bloody 100-year-old schism is boiled down to 15-second clips. But inside school, it’s all just too difficult. Too dangerous, even.

Some of the children looked nervous (“I was worried about saying the wrong thing,” one boy admitted afterwards, relieved that his fears had been unfounded.) The older pupils, veterans of the Parallel Histories method – which also has courses on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, as well as Putin and Ukraine, and “great” leaders including Churchill and Thatcher – were chomping at the bit.

Layla, 18, used to be at a school that was too scared to tackle contested histories. “We did the Vikings, Elizabeth I, British crime and punishment and the Nazis. So all very typical stuff. And then I came here and suddenly a whole new world was opened up to me.”