Over the years, Max Carter and students have taken dozens of service-learning trips to Palestine and Israel to volunteer at the Friends School in Ramallah, where participants learn from Palestinian and Israeli advocates for a just peace.

After more than three dozen trips, you’d think Max would know all there needs to be known about the always shifting Middle East dynamics. Max would be the first to tell you that you’d be wrong.

“We learn something new every single time,” says Max, retired William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies. A peace studies professor in Israel once suggested to Max to view the complex relationship between Israel and Palestine through the lens of the chaos theory, the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.

“You never can anticipate what's going on because of some little incident, maybe a rock is thrown in Janin and suddenly the army comes into Ramallah. There's something new every time,” he says.

In his new book, Palestine and Israel: Understanding Encounters, Max tries to make sense of the chaos.

“One of the problems with understanding the Middle East, Israel and Palestine, is that we get snapshots of what's going on,” says Max. “And then you have different media sources that have their own agendas, and so much of the information we hear from Palestine is third-, fourth-, fifth-hand agendas, and much of it very inaccurate or very pointed.”

That’s why Max and his wife Jane began taking students and other people to Palestine and Israel. “We wanted people to see for themselves the people on both sides and hear their stories,” he says.

Max mined those stories for his latest book. “We found it life-changing for folks who made the trip,” he says. “I don't know if it will be life-changing for people who read the book, but I hope that it will give them an opportunity to see through other people's firsthand experiences and appreciate what the realities are there.”