A year after the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel and Tel Aviv’s response to them sparked months-long protests and inflamed divisions on campuses across the US, some university administrations have turned to “dialogue” as the way forward.
They’re hoping that getting students talking to each other will serve as a salve for the turbulence of the last year, with its dramatic resignations, canceled graduations and thousands of arrests – as well as a deep disillusion among students with their universities’ ability to provide direction at a time of crisis.
Since then, universities have organized town halls, working groups and listening sessions, offered coursework on de-escalation and training for faculty. The efforts promote values like “open inquiry” and “constructive dialogue”, while often staying vague on the issue at the heart of the matter – Israel’s war in Gaza.
Just as peace talks in the Middle East have never achieved much, universities’ efforts at dialogue have often faltered. At times that has been because of administrations’ fears and capitulation to outside pressure, and other times because of backlash from students who see the initiatives as out-of-touch attempts to placate them and normalize campus life amid a raging war.
That’s not to say students aren’t trying – in fact, they have often been more nuanced, curious and willing to engage in frank discussions than universities have made room for.
At Harvard, for example, a group of undergraduates last spring organized a meeting between students who were participating in a protest encampment and others who had concerns about it.
The sit-down, on a grassy patch of Harvard yard near the encampment but not in it – because some students feared the consequences of being associated with the protest – came after months of escalating tensions on campus. In the fall, a rightwing group had funded a billboard truck that doxed pro-Palestinian students and branded them “antisemites”. In January, the university’s president, Claudine Gay, had resigned, weeks after a congressional hearing that had sparked cascading backlash. Anger and fear were rampant; dialogue virtually nonexistent.
“There was just a really intense stifling of conversation, people had really intense and often complex feelings about October 7 and about Israel’s response, and yet there was really only space to express kind of simple perspectives,” Noah Kassis, a senior at the university who described himself as a religious Jew with “crunchy, granola” views, said.
“The environment felt so incredibly tense.”
So Kassis and some friends organized the sit-down near the encampment, one in a series of initiatives they launched to create a space for nuance and critique they felt had been badly missing.
A couple dozen people participated, many of them Jewish students critical of Israel and curious but hesitant about the encampment. There were no Palestinians, and only a handful of students who were involved in the protest itself – an indication that such spaces might hold more appeal for students who are searching than those already entrenched on a side.
As each student spoke, some talked about being inspired by their classmates at the protest; others said that every time they walked by the tents they thought of their friends killed on 7 October. Nearly all condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, but they debated over the words “intifada” and “genocide” and the phrase “from the river to the sea”. Some students left the meeting in tears, disappointed and feeling unheard. Others felt the conversation was the most “in good faith” they had had in months, and asked for more.
The meeting was like “dipping toes into the water”, said Jeremy Ornstein, another organizer. “We just wanted to be able to walk around our campus and feel some kind of peace with each other.”
As US campuses became a microcosm last year of the country’s divisions over the war in Gaza, many universities’ missteps seemed to reflect the broader crisis of a society in which honest conversation seems hard to come by, whether due to intractable narratives, fear of cancellation or outside pressures.
“What we’re seeing in terms of the extraordinary divisiveness of this moment reflects some of the larger trends of extraordinary divisiveness of our country,” Maia Ferdman, director for the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. “If we don’t build the muscle and the capacity to understand how to even have a conversation with someone who’s different, even radically different from us, how are we going to live next to them?”
‘Breakage everywhere’
UCLA had planned to launch a multipronged dialogue program before the Hamas attacks, responding to that broader landscape of divisiveness. Among other initiatives, the school offered workshops for faculty and staff that came just as the protest encampment there was attacked, in one of the most violent incidents surrounding last year’s protests.
“October 7 reinforced the enormous need for this work,” said Ferdman. “Suddenly there was breakage everywhere.”
But not all universities that have attempted to foster dialogue have been willing to engage in truly honest conversations. Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian peace activist who often speaks on campuses along with Israeli activists, said that many universities seemed at once interested in dialogue and scared of it.
“Not everybody who says dialogue means dialogue,” Abu Sarah said, noting a tendency by some universities to invite “token” Palestinian voices who are moderate in their criticism of Israel, rather than tackling head-on the ideas students are grappling with, like whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. “It’s kumbaya, let’s all just hug and kiss as if there’s nothing happening.”
That timidity has undermined dialogue efforts and sparked backlash.
Universities have faced pressure from all sides – not only from alumni, donors and politicians, but also from Jewish students who have filed a host of lawsuits alleging antisemitism, and from pro-Palestinian students, some of whom have written off dialogue altogether as a form of normalization and reject the notion that debate can have any value while Israel continues to kill Palestinians.
As a result, some efforts at dialogue have imploded or backfired. In a sign of just how fraught the issue remains, a number of people who shared their experiences with the Guardian declined to do so on the record, fearing backlash from their peers or universities. But they described the challenges of promoting dialogue at campuses across the country.
One university, for instance, invited an Israeli and a Palestinian speaker on campus only to cancel after administrators and donors felt the event would “blow up”. At another, pro-Palestinian students posted flyers opposing a year-long dialogue initiative and participants feared being “canceled” by their peers if word of their participation got out. Yet another university sent out an invite for a faculty “conversation on Gaza/Israel”, later revised to a “conversation for challenging times”. At the event, Israel and Palestine were never mentioned; when pressed, administrators claimed the initial email had contained a “typo”.
Tiptoeing around
As the adults in the room struggled to find answers, and as administrators responded to protests in the spring by calling in police and later issuing a flurry of new rules restricting speech, some disenchanted students started their own, informal efforts to talk to one another.
Those conversations often had greater appeal with students, who saw them as more genuine, in contrast with university-led attempts to lower the temperature and appease critics. Universities could not at once claim to want to encourage dialogue and punish people for expressing their views, several students also noted.
A student who participated in the sit-down by the Harvard encampment said that there were people in attendance whom the university later suspended over their involvement with the protests.
“For the university to have the credibility to do this sort of thing, it has to stop punishing people,” he said. “For a university to earnestly care about these kinds of initiatives, they have to also earnestly support freedom of speech.”
Samy Almshref, a junior at Harvard, questioned the university’s stated commitment to dialogue when so much pro-Palestinian speech seems to be off limits.
“There’s a lot of just tiptoeing around the topic,” said Almshref, who is from Syria. “If I’m going to engage in anything, it’s going to be stating what I think is a humanitarian crisis, genocide, famine. But the university is not accommodating of dialogue that allows this perspective. It’s too radical; it might even be labeled as antisemitic.”
In practice, the kind of dialogue many universities promote has effectively alienated pro-Palestinian students.
“They’re interested in dialogue as a facade, but if you want to talk about the thing itself, then you’ll get backlash,” said Almshref. “When you want to restrict dialogue to sitting in a nice lecture hall, it’s difficult for us to go to it because the thing we’re protesting is people being obliterated.”
‘What’s the point?’
Calling for constructive conversation against the background of ongoing, overwhelming violence strikes some as plain wrong.
Ornstein, the grandson of a Auschwitz survivor, spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally last year only to be confronted by Jewish friends angry that he had not talked about Israeli hostages. When he invited some to the conversations he helped organize, they asked him: “What’s the point? They’re going to just try to convince me to give up our safety.”
Meanwhile, friends at the encampment were also skeptical, telling him: “We’re working to stop Palestinians from being killed in the streets – why are we going to leave that place to talk with people who feel guilty and weird and nervous and angry?”
Across political views, people feared putting themselves in a position to be misunderstood or pigeonholed, of being labeled antisemites or genocide supporters.
Pro-Palestinian students also felt that the notion of “dialogue” suggested a false symmetry – for instance by placing 40,000 people killed on the same level as Israel’s right to defend itself.
“We’re not really in dialogue about the same thing,” said Almshref. “Quite frankly, the Israeli position is weaker in appeal, which is why they may seem more drawn towards empty forms of dialogue.”
But those who have tried to create space for connection on campus said the experience has been a source of community and hope, even when mired in tension and disagreement.
“You watch CNN and you think every student has gone so ideologically crazy that there is no hope to even talk to them, and then I go to campuses, and I encounter the exact opposite,” said Abu Sarah, the Palestinian activist, who is currently on a tour of US universities.
“Every campus visit I’ve done so far I’ve had very meaningful conversations, tons of students who were open, excited, afraid, and wanted to have meaningful engagement.”
“Instead of shutting them down, I’d say it’s time to engage with them.”
