Most Tufts students watched the conflicts in the Middle East this summer unfold through a series of CNN news reports. Some weren't so lucky.
Sophomore Neil DiBiase, who interned with a Pittsburgh agency for Jewish learning in northern Israel this summer, explains that he went out with friends the night that he learned Hezbollah guerillas had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed three.
"I didn't think about it at all," he said.
The next day, however, while DiBiase was in town with his host mother, an air raid siren sounded and shortly thereafter the pair saw a "black streak" in the sky.
"We heard an explosion and there was a kind of quiet, like nothing happened," said DiBiase. "All the cars on the road stopped, and then instantaneously everyone's cell phone went off."
The rocket he had seen hit a house in the nearby Arab village, about 500 yards from where he was staying, he said. The family later moved to a bomb shelter.
"[It was] the most surreal feeling you ever feel in your entire life because your mind can't grapple with the fact that someone is shooting a rocket at you," he said. "It just doesn't make sense; you hear an air raid siren and it doesn't compute that someone is trying to injure you."
Senior Dan McDermott, who is part Lebanese and has extended family in Beirut, said that living apart from the region did not exempt him from the fear that characterized the month of conflict.
"How can you go out and have a good time with your friends when you know that your cousins are hiding in the mountains?" he said.
Co-president of the Arab Student Association (ASA) Bader Ataya, who is Lebanese by birth, had similar worries over the summer, as his home town was one of the most heavily bombed areas, he said.
Moreover, as a Lebanese citizen, he is legally bound to serve six months in the army. His conscription was called in this summer, and now, he says, if he were to go to Lebanon again, he would be forced to immediately serve his requisite six months.
To compound his problems, the American government would confiscate his passport were he to serve in the military of a foreign country, he says.
Other Tufts students experienced trip cancellations and disappointments as fighting overcame the area and made travel too dangerous. Yet, only a month after a ceasefire was declared, these students wonder if the event will have any impact on the Tufts community besides on those who were immediately affected.
"Here, it seems like nothing even happened," Ataya said. "There is absolutely no conversation."
McDermott, who has heard what he calls the "outrage" of his Lebanese relatives at the war, felt that Tufts students as a whole barely reacted at all.
"Lebanon affected a very small minority on campus," he said. "In general, you're not going to hear much about it."
Others in the Tufts community disagree.
For Friends of Israel president Naomi Berlin, the war helped people to examine in greater detail the non-Arab element in the Middle East.
"What I think this summer really did just through the media alone was bring Israel to the forefront of many people's conversations," she said.
Yet, she also believes the atmosphere on campus will not change. The Friends of Israel group is already cooperating with the ASA and other organizations on an event dealing with Arab and Israeli cooperation. Although it comes at an opportune time, she says, "we've always tried to do things like this anyway."
Other organizations have mobilized to find ways to address the issues that the conflict brought violently to the forefront.
Sherman Teichman, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), says that members of the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP) group, a student think tank on Middle Eastern affairs, have been actively discussing the conflict and its implications since the beginning of the war.
According to NIMEP student Chair Alex Zerden, the group is non-political and instead serves as a resource for the students and the community as a whole.
"We are a forum to engage people, to have discussions, [and to] have people with opposing views come together," said Zerden, who found himself in Tel Aviv when the war began.
For students who involve themselves in the issue, he said, "there are mechanisms in place and resources here at Tufts to adequately address these issues and to appropriately channel people's passion for answers."
Teichman hopes, moreover, to send a delegation from the IGL to Lebanon "as quickly as we can."
Between those involved in discussion and those connected to the conflict personally, many Tufts students will not be forgetting the newest war in the Middle East.
DiBiase, who left his host family in Israel, now feels empathetically tied to the people who stayed behind.
"Once I was on the plane I got very upset," he said. "I realized that I had the ability to call my parents and come home, whereas my host family didn't have the same option."
