Describe the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the end of apartheid in South Africa, and explain how colonial-era policy contributed to the Rwandan Genocide.
After World War I, Britain governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. In 1947, the United Nations proposed a Partition Plan dividing the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states; the State of Israel declared its independence in May 1948, and war with neighboring Arab states followed immediately. Israeli independence was achieved alongside the displacement of a large Palestinian population, an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba ("catastrophe"). This course presents these events neutrally, as dates and documented facts: the conflict that began here remains unresolved and highly consequential for world affairs today, and it deserves continued, careful, fact-based study as you get older, rather than a simple verdict handed down in one week of a world history course.
In South Africa, the National Party government formalized apartheid, a system of strict legal racial segregation, in 1948. The African National Congress and leaders including Nelson Mandela resisted for decades; Mandela himself spent from 1962 to 1990 imprisoned, much of it on Robben Island, while international pressure and economic sanctions gradually built against the South African government. Apartheid was finally dismantled in the early 1990s, Mandela was released in 1990, and in 1994 he was elected South Africa's first Black president in the country's first fully democratic election -- one of the twentieth century's most significant stories of a peaceful transition after decades of entrenched injustice. A darker legacy of colonial policy appeared in Rwanda, where Belgian colonial administrators had hardened and racialized the distinction between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples, including issuing mandatory identity cards that classified every person by ethnicity -- a division that, after independence, contributed to horrific violence culminating in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in which an estimated 800,000 people, overwhelmingly Tutsi, were killed in roughly one hundred days. Taken together, these three stories -- a still-unresolved conflict, a hard-won peaceful transition, and a colonial-border tragedy -- show just how varied, and how consequential, decolonization's aftermath could be.
Mastery looks like: They can state the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's 1947-48 origins factually and neutrally, describe apartheid's rise and fall, and explain the specific link between Belgian colonial policy and the Rwandan Genocide.
Common stumbles: Taking a partisan side on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than presenting its origins neutrally, or missing the direct causal link between colonial-era policy and the Rwandan Genocide.