When scholar Omer Bartov described the “brutal” expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba, he was heckled and booed. Audience members at the Center for Jewish History shouted “Shame!” and one walked out.

For all their talk of “complexity” and “ambiguity,” the contributors to “Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict” are in fact as politically and morally engaged as those putative classroom brainwashers and ideologues who serve as their whipping-boys. Instead of being more scrupulous and balanced in their pedagogy, these authors simply have a particular historical and ethical “take” on the subject. The Zionist-Palestinian conflict is not so very morally or politically ambiguous.