Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists clash at UC Berkeley and Columbia University

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Taking a
stand

Norman Finkelstein
at Columbia

Alan Dershowitz
at Columbia

Since the 1960s, the American university has often been less a free marketplace of ideas than a combat zone of debate. Partisan groups forcefully and sometimes fiercely argue their positions on national and world affairs.

Pro-Israeli student protests at UC Berkeley

Pro-Palestinian students set up a mock checkpoint at UC Berkeley

This film focuses on the University of California Berkeley and Columbia University in New York, where pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students struggle over the competing claims of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, over what history teaches, and whether absolute demands can ever lead to honorable compromise.

This seemingly intractable conflict half a world away has forced these students to think about allegiances to family, ethnicity and religion, and above all about the need to take a stand that will define them and their ideals.

''No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield''
— Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, The New York Times, 11/14/2006