Book review
The Parallel Histories of Israel and Palestine:
Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
By Michael Davies
£21.50
Review by Mike Scott-Baumann
14 July 2025
Michael Davies was the founder of Parallel Histories (Parallel Histories ) and he completed this book in July 2024, the month in which he died. His friends subsequently saw the book through to publication in 2025.
Parallel Histories grew out of a school trip: in 2014. Davies, a history teacher, took a group of school students to Israel and Palestine. At first they spent time in Israel, visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and learning about Israel’s background. Then, he took them to Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, where they played football with boys in a refugee camp and listened to their story. In this way they experienced two conflicting yet overlapping narratives.
Davies saw how transformational the trip was for the group and, a year later, he founded Parallel Histories with the explicit aim of adopting a “dual narrative” approach to teaching the history of Israel-Palestine. He argued that teachers should not shy away from teaching contested, controversial history but should lay out competing narratives side by side and encourage students to immerse themselves in both. Only then, he argued, could students understand why the conflict endures.
This book is a scaled-down, mini version of what the website provides. It is, in the words of the introduction, a ‘primer’. On the left-hand side of every double-page spread is a summary of the Jewish/Israeli narrative (this is a video presentation online) of each of the main events or developments, such as the War of Independence/the Palestinian Nakba or the Six-Day War/the Palestinian Naksa of 1967, followed by selected sources, and, on the right-hand side is the Arab/Palestinian narrative and sources.
By contrast, the two early chapters, which cover the period from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the end of the British Mandate in 1948, are presented as “two sides of an historical argument” (“Should the British government be praised or blamed for its management of the Mandate?”) rather than as “Jewish versus Arab historical narratives”.
This book is, Davies writes, “a book for readers with little or patchy background knowledge of this topic”. In addition, it provides a foretaste of, and a way-in to, all that the website has to offer. It has its shortcomings: for instance, much of the source material, which is clear in its online form, is too small and is hard to decipher on the page.
The Parallel Histories organisation has a staff of five and 1,200 schools are regularly downloading its bank of resources, predominantly primary sources such as letters, official documents, posters and cartoons as well as passages from historians’ arguments. This provides the evidence which students analyse, evaluate and use to shape their judgments. The sources become progressively more challenging and deconstruction of the sources is required, e.g. getting one student to compose questions to ask of the sources (which in itself leads to closer reading) and a second to answer those questions.
The website also makes provision for formally structured debating, building up arguments using the sources. These non-competitive debates provide a safe platform for free speech, both online and face-to-face. Young people learn how to communicate ideas respectfully and how to disagree agreeably. Through careful listening and exchange of ideas, they grow to recognise that despite differences of opinion, they can hold much in common.
The organisation recognises that many teachers are unsure of their own knowledge and fear accusations of bias in their teaching or the risk of conflict within the class. To this end, it provides training sessions for history teachers on how to use the schemes of work and teach the subject. These one-hour, small group workshops take place after school and prepare teachers to teach this complex, controversial history in their classrooms.
Most of those who attend the training sessions use the scheme of work in Year 9 where there’s freedom to innovate while the students taking part in the debating are mainly Year 12/Lower Sixth. For those wishing to teach the Pearson Edexcel GCSE course, Parallel Histories provides a full range of materials.
All of those who teach, or are considering teaching, the history of Israel-Palestine should look at the online resources which Parallel Histories has to offer.