These Arab and Jewish Students Want to Talk About the War

On a cool February evening, students trickled into a small room tucked away in Williams Hall at the University of Pennsylvania. Some nodded at each other knowingly when they walked in. A few introduced themselves, shaking hands.

There were only 10 students gathered in the room, but that was deliberate. Organizers relied on word of mouth and friends-of-friends networks to share the meeting details with those open to its purpose: a discussion of the events that had transpired on campus since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

Promoting the event through Hillel or the Arab student association risked attracting people who would seek to disrupt rather than contribute to the conversation. The organizers knew many students wouldn’t be interested in speaking with the “other” side.

As the students settled in, Tova Tachau, one of the organizers, set a tone that sought to cut through any tension. “We want this to be a really safe space where you can feel free to share absolutely anything,” she said gently. “Just keep in mind that the goal is to foster an open conversation and dialogue where we can try and hear new perspectives and broaden our horizons.”

The event was the first dialogue hosted by the university’s chapter of Atidna International, a student-led organization founded at the University of Texas at Austin that strives to foster understanding between Jewish and Arab students on American college campuses. The organization’s name is a combination of the Hebrew word for “future” and the Arabic suffix for “our,” melded together to form “our future.” Atidna’s mantra: “to solidify Arabs and Jews as cousins, one united family, and not enemies.”

In the fallout since October 7, colleges’ ability to foster civil discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been constantly challenged. Campus protests and confrontations continued to escalate in the final weeks of the spring semester, yet some students, like those in Atidna, have craved spaces to talk about what’s happening and the toll it’s taken on their lives.

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Many of these students regard their peers as part of the problem. Peer pressure — whether it’s demands for virtue-signaling on social media or the fear of being ostracized by others who share their identity — has left students feeling torn. They’re also disappointed in their colleges. Administrators’ responses have failed to adequately support students on either side of the conflict, they say, which has helped stoke division.

While the discourse feels more fraught than ever and the cards are stacked against the small group of students in Atidna, they believe that more students want to unpack the nuances and better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That may be the case — the group’s following has swelled in recent weeks even as encampments have roiled campuses.

Still, it’s an uphill battle to convince students that engaging in conversation is worth the risks.

“I know a lot of us tried to kind of push these memories and experiences out of our minds,” Tachau told the group before opening the floor. “But we’re trying to flush things out here in a very accepting and open space. If you share, feel free to say your name — if you feel comfortable doing so.”

For a moment, no one spoke.

Atidna is the brainchild of Elijah Kahlenberg. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Kahlenberg, who’s Jewish, didn’t know many people who were Arab — much less Palestinian.

It wasn’t until he was 15 that he first really spoke with and befriended a Palestinian. His name was Ahmed. Kahlenberg was struck by the similarities of their cultures, from the clothing they wore to the rituals they celebrated, and their deep sense of connection to the land surrounding Jerusalem.

“We didn’t start off with any antagonizing statements. Neither of us were inherently talking about something polarizing, something meant to upset the other — we were just talking about our culture,” he said. “And through those conversations, we were saying, ‘Oh, look how similar that is to me.’”

It sparked something in Kahlenberg: a desire to find connections, develop understanding, and through those things, inspire feelings of camaraderie. Maybe he could even help others discover them, too. He just wasn’t sure how.

Years later, at the height of the pandemic, as he was scrolling through social media he stumbled on an organization called Roots, which describes itself as seeking to create “trust and partnership” between Israelis and Palestinians. Kahlenberg spent a summer in the West Bank with Roots, planting trees on Palestinian farms, leading youth groups with Palestinian and Israeli children, and facilitating conversations between local Jews and Arabs about the conflict.

Kahlenberg wanted something similar where he attended college, at the University of Texas at Austin. There was no mutual space for these two groups of students to come together on campus and “simply talk, to understand,” he said. “That’s why I see a lot of this tension built up on campuses.”

At the end of his freshman year in 2022, Kahlenberg founded Atidna. The organization has two main goals: to hold joint peace events, and to create a neutral space for open dialogue where students can both get to know one another and speak freely about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The only two rules that ground Atidna dialogues are that students must agree to discuss their viewpoints civilly and remain open to hearing others’ perspectives.

The group does not endorse any particular political solution, and not everyone agrees on what to do about the conflict, but that’s not the point. The mission rests on a more-fundamental premise, one that emphasizes common humanity and mutual respect.

“Through these conversations, we begin to understand the ‘other.’ We break down these tribalistic barriers,” he said. “It’s much easier to humanize someone when you see them like that rather than as the ‘enemy.’”

The organization kicked off in the fall of 2023 with a sole chapter at UT-Austin. Then October 7 struck.

The fallout was immediate. Around a dozen students left the group, and two Atidna officers — one Palestinian and one Jewish — resigned from their posts. Students who once wanted to be in a shared space could no longer bring themselves to participate. The pain, they told Kahlenberg, was too much.

One student who stayed was Jadd Hashem, a sophomore at UT-Austin studying government and Middle Eastern studies. His father was born in Nablus, in the heart of the West Bank, and Hashem grew up in Dallas hearing stories that instilled in him a strong connection to his Palestinian identity. But from a young age, he was often told by his loved ones not to broadcast that pride, because of the complexities of claiming a Palestinian identity in the United States.

“Many of us get told that our identity is fake or that we don’t actually belong where we are from,” he said. “That always hurt.”

When Hashem learned about Atidna, he saw it as an opportunity to hear Israeli and Jewish perspectives, and an opportunity for them to hear his story, too.

In the aftermath of October 7, Hashem had family members who fled Gaza for Egypt and the West Bank. He found himself wrestling with questions about what it meant to be a “good” Palestinian.

“How do we stand up for our people without also looking like we are appealing to terrorism? If we come out and we say something against terrorism, do we get called traitors? Should we defend the sort of resistance that happened, even though it resulted in terrorism?” he said of the concerns running through many Palestinians’ minds. “These are all valid questions.”

As others disengaged from Atidna, Hashem became its new vice president. Even as Hashem and Kahlenberg processed their own emotions, they recommitted to keep talking to each other. If anything, their work felt even more important.

On a warm Tuesday evening, Hashem and Kahlenberg were among around 80 people who gathered by the UT Tower. Jewish and Arab student affinity groups had held separate vigils there in recent weeks. But this was the first vigil on campus to mourn people killed in both Israel and Gaza. It was one of the rare joint vigils in the country to do so.

As the crowd formed, Kahlenberg stood on the steps leading up to the tower. “I’ve cried more in the past month than I have in my entire life,” he told the crowd, “because it pains me to see the vitriol and animosity so many possess to where they can’t even take a brief moment, in the middle of all of this chaos, to simply acknowledge human beings, Israelis and Palestinians, lost their lives due to the inhumanity of a select few.”

More speakers followed. Dozens of students, some wearing keffiyehs and kippahs, bowed their heads in a moment of silence. An imam, a pastor, and a rabbi all offered prayers. The Jewish and Muslim interfaith officers for Atidna invited the crowd to ascend the steps carrying battery-operated candles, placing them on a table filled with flowers and displaying an Atidna banner that read “one family mourning together.”

A few moments after Kahlenberg spoke, Hashem described the suffering that he’d seen the Palestinian people endure over the decades and during the past few months. “It’s brutal what’s happening there,” he said. “We must have some sort of end to this, and it’s gonna start with young people, like what we have here, coming together to say enough is enough.”

Kahlenberg acknowledged that he worries the opposite will happen — and that instead a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians would only be more “emboldened in their hate,” leading to “a never-ending cycle of violence, vitriol, and revenge.”

That evening, as Hashem and Kahlenberg watched Jewish and Arab students gather and mourn together, the duo felt certain they were filling a crucial need on campus. If students don’t organize and model unity for themselves, they realized, who will?

“We need to take charge,” Kahlenberg said later. “No offense — but the adults have kind of effed up the situation.”

In their view, colleges’ responses to the conflict in the Middle East have been driven by concerns about their reputation — and the impact on their pocketbooks — over the needs of students. Ultimately, they believe it’s left the students most affected by the conflict even more vulnerable.

That’s how the pair felt about UT-Austin’s response to October 7. Jay Hartzell, the university’s president, mentioned only Jewish students and antisemitism in his first statement following the attacks. A few days later, after campus backlash, he released another statement that focused on Arab and Muslim students, but no one was satisfied. It echoed the pattern that played out at colleges nationwide. Both Jewish and Arab students decried their colleges’ responses as failing to act quickly and decisively enough to make them feel valued on campus.

In response to The Chronicle’s request for comment, the university pointed to the statement Hartzell made last fall. “I have zero tolerance for the antisemitic actions targeting our Jewish community or the hate-filled actions targeting our Palestinian and Muslim communities,” he wrote. “Speech is protected on our campus, violence is not.”

To Kahlenberg, the floundering over statements exemplifies what institutions have lost over the past few months: the trust of their students. Consequently, he thinks colleges and administrators have wasted their chance to facilitate dialogue and education on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time when it is desperately needed. Now, he believes it’s up to Jewish and Arab students to come together and pick up the pieces.

The November vigil was a small but promising victory in the eyes of the Atidna student leaders. Across the country, however, such moments of unity seemed far out of reach.

That was certainly the case at the University of Pennsylvania, which quickly became one of the most contentious campuses in the nation.

A series of controversies surrounding the Palestine Writes festival — an on-campus event last September that drew heavy criticism — already had the university on edge. October 7 pushed the campus to a breaking point. Following controversial statements M. Elizabeth Magill, the university’s president then, made about the attacks, a chorus of donors and trustees pressured her to resign. Opposing student and faculty factions piled onto the backlash. And Magill’s ill-fated testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism dealt the final blow to her tenure.

Amid the turmoil, Tova Tachau felt lost at sea. A junior studying comparative literature and biochemistry, Tachau had come back to Penn at the start of the fall semester energized to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She’d just returned from a birthright trip to Israel, during which she visited Roots, the same nonprofit organization that Kahlenberg worked for in the West Bank.

The experience inspired her to do something similar at Penn — but she had trepidation about how the peace-driven message of Roots would be received on campus. “You go up to someone and if you say the words ‘Israel,’ ‘Palestine,’ or anything of that sort, you can see what kind of a wall goes up,” she said, adding that there’s “a stigma that is kind of instilled in you from your childhood, and people don’t question it.”

A Roots coordinator suggested she contact Kahlenberg for advice. He told her about Atidna, and she decided to start a chapter on her campus. In September, Tachau raised over a thousand dollars for a Roots event and sold T-shirts that spell out “Roots” in Hebrew, English, and Arabic. Her worries about how the organization’s message would be viewed on campus faded away at the sight of people wearing the shirts.

After October 7, however, the T-shirts Tachau was proud to wear weeks before became the source of an internal dilemma. She’d wanted to wear it to a campus vigil for Israeli victims, but she ultimately decided against it.

Then Tachau came across an opinion piece in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. The author questioned why the campus couldn’t come together to condemn all forms of hateful rhetoric — whether it be antisemitic, anti-Arab, or Islamophobic — and challenged administrators’ response to the conflict, especially their treatment of Arab and Muslim students. Still, the author encouraged the university to take all students’ calls for safety and support seriously.

“And in the absence of administrative action,” the author wrote, “I implore my fellow Penn students to be kinder to your Arab, Jewish, and Muslim peers during these polarizing times.”

The author of that piece was Faresi Alfaresi, a junior studying political science and Middle Eastern studies. Alfaresi has long felt that Muslim and Arab students lack support on campus, but an experience he had in class was the final straw that pushed him to write his opinion piece. While discussing separate campus vigils for Israelis and Palestinians in a Hebrew class, one of Alfaresi’s classmates said they were surprised that the university’s Arab student association would do anything that was not meant simply to counter Israel or espouse hate for Jews.

“I just, like, was dumbfounded by that,” he said, “that somebody would say that.”

His opinion piece received an outpouring of positive responses from students. But when Alfaresi asked them if they’d be interested in writing their own pieces, there were no takers. To him, it was evidence of how afraid students were to discuss the issue.

“They were all like, ‘No, because if I write this, I am not getting a job. I’m getting deported. If I write this, I am getting hated on by X, Y, and Z,’” he said. “It’s fear. I mean, we see what happened to Liz Magill.”

That’s when Tachau asked him to help organize a dialogue through Atidna. Though people weren’t willing to put their names to opinion pieces, he thought a dialogue could be a less intimidating way for students of different backgrounds to discuss what had happened on the campus throughout the fall semester. He signed on. (Penn did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.)

As they planned the event, Tachau and Alfaresi kept hitting roadblocks — booking a neutral space, finding a facilitator, debating whether or not to hire security.

But the biggest challenge the pair faced: recruiting students to attend. Tachau, who is very involved in the Jewish community on campus, knew that plenty of students were closed off to dialogue. Alfaresi ran into problems finding like-minded students, too. In the end, they took a page from Kahlenberg’s book and constructed the list of invitees through personal networks.

Still, a question lingered: Who would have the courage to show up?

At the start of the dialogue, a few beats of silence passed.

“Does anyone want to just start with any reflection,” Tachau asked. “Anything whatsoever?”

An Arab student studying chemical engineering weighed in first. Immediately after October 7, he said, many people contacted him over social media, seeking his opinion. The student newspaper asked if he would comment on the attacks, citing his affiliation with an Arab affinity group on campus. (The Chronicle attended the dialogue on the condition that it would not name the students involved without their explicit consent.)

“It felt as if people were constantly reaching out to me as an Arab individual,” he said. “I kind of felt forced to form an opinion before I actually felt informed enough to form an opinion myself.”

Alfaresi agreed, noting similar experiences where people would ask why he wasn’t posting online. “It was almost like people were surprised that I had a nebulous presence,” he said.

Some Jewish students described how they, too, felt pressured to prescribe to and profess a certain opinion. One Jewish student who identifies as being part of a “liberal crowd” recounted students and professors alike asking for their opinion. “It was divisive,” the student said, characterizing the experience as “tokenizing.”

Another Jewish student asked if others had felt pressured by peers to sign petitions. She recalled being “given a lecture about how it was important for me as a Jew to be a part of this list.” The student was also in the midst of applying for Ph.D. programs. Six professors advised her against signing anything. “You don’t want to appear to be partial to a specific movement while you’re applying to these things,” she said of the professors’ advice. “If someone pins you down and asks for your view on it,” a different Jewish student later added, “the smartest thing to say is like, ‘Um, can I go to the bathroom?’”

Social pressures pose the main barriers to dialogue, Atidna’s student leaders say. They believe many Jewish and Arab students fall along a continuum of views rather than at the extremes, but they’re held back from participating in events like Atidna’s out of fear of retribution from their peers. In Austin, Kahlenberg and Hashem said both the largest pro-Palestinian group and the largest Jewish group on campus have disparaged students who participate in Atidna, with those on the pro-Israel side calling Jewish students “traitors,” and those on the pro-Palestinian side calling participants “normalizers.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called a self-hating Jew just for saying we should be in the same room as Palestinians, having these conversations,” Kahlenberg said.

For Hashem, such criticism has never come from fellow Palestinians, but from people who call themselves pro-Palestinian, including many young progressives who say he isn’t doing enough to support his people. Still, he understands why getting involved in Atidna might be “scary” for Palestinians, who have longstanding concerns that speaking with Israelis or Zionists legitimizes the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians.

It’s a notion he pushes back against, but that narrative for many is set in stone. “Being told what to think or what to feel with your identity is something that I think a lot of us face,” Hashem said.

“It’s a lot easier to post things from a computer screen and yell at us,” he added, “than it is to actively engage.”

It’s the harder work of speaking face to face that Atidna’s leaders think is ultimately more rewarding. The value of talking — and of continuing to talk — came up at the conclusion of the Penn dialogue session, when a Jewish student who described himself as leaning pro-Israel turned to Alfaresi with a question.

“If we’re talking about this in person, what’s the best way to be respectful?” he asked, somewhat timidly. “How can I talk about this in a respectful way with you? Does that make sense?”

Alfaresi paused for a beat. “I think that makes sense,” he replied. “And I think precisely like this.”

The past several weeks — of encampments, protests, and police responses — have tested Atidna’s faith in open dialogue.

At UT-Austin, dozens were arrested before a planned teach-in on campus. The next day, 15 students attended an Atidna dialogue event.

As protesters gathered outside by the hundreds, the group talked about the recent events on campus. Some expressed fear that the protests would result in anger being taken out on Jews. Others felt that the protests were proud examples of the American tradition of dissent that has historically thrived on college campuses.

On one point, most participants agreed: The actions taken by the university and law enforcement against student protesters violated their civil liberties and deepened divisions.

To Kahlenberg and Hashem, the civil and open discussion felt like a sharp contrast to how their university was handling things. “There are nuanced positions that I think need to be heard,” Hashem said. “This kind of creates an environment for these students to have a safe space to voice their opinions, even while we have our disagreements.”

In a statement to The Chronicle, a spokesperson for the university said, “a need for a special designated space for dialogue on campus is unnecessary,” pointing to the Texas statute that makes all outdoor spaces open to students and the public as long as they “do not break laws or materially disrupt the school’s functions.” The protests in late April, the university maintains, violated those rules.

The overall reaction Atidna has received suggests that others agree with them about needing spaces for dialogue.

After receiving national and local press coverage, Atidna’s social-media account gained hundreds of new followers. Hashem and Kahlenberg have also held over a dozen meetings with institutions like the University of California at Los Angeles and Arizona State University, where students are interested in creating chapters. New chapters have already been founded at Columbia and Harvard Universities, the University of Chicago, and Williams College, along with a collective group for several colleges in New York City.

At Penn, Alfaresi and Tachau counted their February dialogue as a success. They both want to organize another session in the future with more people.

“The reality is not that Penn is so divided, just because the rallies are the loudest things that happen, and those are — obviously since they are rallies — going to be rather divided,” Alfaresi said. “I hope that through stuff like this [the dialogue], to whatever scale, the university can see that people can coexist.”

But the end-of-semester encampments and the charged environment they’ve fostered have somewhat shaken the Penn students’ faith in dialogue.

“In many ways, it’s intimidating,” Tachau said, “seeing these kinds of super-polarized responses in approaching this kind of work when you’re trying to create dialogue among people of all preconceived opinions and people of all walks of life.”

Such polarization would seem like a daunting obstacle to dialogue, but Tachau sees an advantage beneath the surface. She thinks the highly emotional response shows that people care immensely about the issue, and that it’s possible to channel that passion into a space for meaningful conversation.

“This is the way forward,” she said. “Even if it will take time.”