Ethnic conflicts: Flemings & Walloons, Palestinians & Israelis

Because of mass demonstrations objecting to the presence of any francophone curriculum within a university situated in Dutch-speaking Flanders, the Belgian government negotiated a deal in 1968 that split the ½ve-hundred-year-old Catholic University of Leuven into two institutions.Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) remained in the old college town and became an entirely Dutch-(and English-) speaking university.A completely independent Frenchspeaking Université Catholique de Louvain (U.C. Louvain) was formed and moved to a brand-new campus in Louvain-la-Neuve, a new town created in the Walloon (or French-speaking) region, about an equal distance from Brussels.With the split, the existing library had to be divided.The disputants negotiated a typically Belgian compromise: those volumes with even call numbers went to U.C. Louvain and those with odd call numbers went to K.U.Leuven.When I arrived in Leuven in February 2006 as a visiting scholar, 1 I was aware of this history and knew about Belgium's language cleavage and linguistic frontier. 2But I thought the conflict between the Flemish and Walloon peoples was a thing of the past, of little contemporary relevance to my interest in ethnic conflicts in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular.Two experiences were soon to suggest I might be wrong on both counts.