In Summer 2020, Sa′ed Atshan, and Katharina Galor will publish the book “The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians” with Duke University Press. The two authors present over 100 interviews with Germans, Israelis and Palestinians, exploring their difficult, complex relationship with both past and present. The book examines historical and social narratives in order to understand the special condition of these three communities living in Berlin. Atshan’s and Galor‘s is the first book that tackles the Israeli and Palestinian communities in Germany in this context.
Tugrul Mende: You come from two very different professional backgrounds, how did you meet in the first place and decide to write the book together?
Katharina Galor: I met Sa′ed during the last Gaza war in 2014. I had just returned to Brown University after spending the summer in Jerusalem, to teach in the fall semester. At the time, Sa′ed was a post-doctoral fellow, and he was invited to speak on a panel about the repercussions of the war. I was extremely impressed by him. He was the only junior panelist, all the others were senior scholars. I felt that he intellectually dominated the panel, I thus decided to walk right up to him and so we talked a bit. A week later, a Palestinian friend of mine and a Jewish friend of Sa′ed decided to bring us together and invited us to meet in a tea salon. We very quickly became friends as we realized we had so many common interests.
