As rockets flew in the Gaza Strip last month and the latest bout of violence in the conflict in the Middle East played out, university students across the U.S. and on the Hill had a choice to make.
They could retreat to their respective camps of opinion, stick to the facts they had been taught and hurl ideologically charged diatribes in the form of demonstrations or op-ed submissions, just as much of the rest of America was doing.
Or they could take the high road.
Campus leaders and those with an active role in discussions about the conflict have said that Tufts students, for the most part, chose the latter, creating an environment for complex dialogue that - at least this time - has remained tense but generally levelheaded and sensitive to the intricacies of the issues.
Senior Daniel Bleiberg previously served as the president of Tufts' Friends of Israel (FOI) and is now the group's representative to campus organization Tufts American Israel Alliance. He said that in his discussions with friends and other campus leaders passionate about the issue, he has found a rich and meaningful level of discourse.
"Overall, I thought that the atmosphere on campus was very civil," Bleiberg said. "I think everyone's been very respectful throughout these difficult weeks despite the intense controversy of the issue."
Sophomore MunirAtalla, a member of the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), said while the discourse in public and organized events has remained academic and considerate on all sides, the self-selecting power of social media sites and students' ability to use links and comments as a form of communication instead of face-to-face interaction has made the online discourse, specifically, somewhat more polarized.
"A lot of people on the Tufts campus kind of look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as falling into this false dichotomy of Israel versus Palestine and then kind of check out ... because there are so many emotions," he said. "I think that a lot of times you see people who have a very certain understanding of the issue posting on Facebook things that are very offensive and not really doing anything constructive."
In person, however, at discussions and vigils on campus organized by groups like SJP, FOI, J-Street and the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP), conversations have been largely devoid of hostility.
"The conflict is much more complicated than ... pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel, that's not the way things are," Atalla said. "I think that a lot of people do understand that nuance."
At a FOI-organized event called Cafe?Dilemma, at which attendees regularly discuss and debate issues related to Israel, students gathered following the November violence to address the situation. According to Bleiberg, the event was well attended.
"People were able to speak very openly and introduce challenging questions, and I really benefited from having that safe space to talk about it," Bleiberg said.
The campus' overall inclusion of a more diverse and multi-faceted approach to discussing the conflict in the Middle East is a recent phenomenon, new to Tufts in the past few years, Atalla said. He attributed this change partially to an increasing diversity of perspectives on campus -including the Palestinian narrative that SJP promotes - that has pushed the discussion away from what he once saw as a largely one-sided conversation.
"SJP is doing a lot of awareness-raising," he said. "We're a group that provides a variety of different views on campus, [and] we're bringing a different narrative to campus that was previously unheard," he said.
"For the longest time, there was only one narrative on campus, and it was a very Zionist narrative," he added. "Part of the reason things have gotten better is because our thoughts have picked up traction, and we have a lot more members now and a lot more people who are wiling to look at the issue from multiple perspectives ... and say, 'Let me try to figure this out on a more nuanced level.'"
FOI President ShiraShamir, a junior, agreed that the civility that characterized the public discourse on violence in Gaza was partially due to a proliferation of varying narratives on campus, but also said it was related to students' understanding of the most recent clashes as a humanitarian, as compared with political, crisis.
"I don't really think it has been particularly polarized," she said. "I think in large part [that was because], for this particular issue, that it was a very human one."
She cited a moment of silence carried out at an FOI event held after the violence began and vigils SJP and J-Street organized to honor Israeli and Palestinian victims.
"I think you're finding a lot of respect for the innocent people who are being caught in the crossfire here," Shamir said. "It was more of a focus on the human element of it."
NIMEP Executive Board member StephanosKaravas, a senior, said that while it's hard to generalize the conversations he's had since the November shelling, he has found that through NIMEP, the Tufts community has made an impressive effort to engage in organized discussion about the issues objectively rather than ideologically.
"At least once a semester, NIMEP hosts a discussion that somehow relates to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and they tend to be very charged, very ideological and sometimes heated discussions," he said. "This past one that we had was confined to a much smaller group of people ... [but it was also] a very policy-oriented discussion focusing mainly on the main questions that had to do with ... the strategic goals of Hamas, Israel and the Egyptian state under Mohamed Morsi."
"It was comforting to me given the past precedent of very ideological, very heated discussions on the issue to see that," he said.
On a personal level, however, outside of NIMEP discussions and organized vigils, Karavas said he was disappointed with the unyielding approach many of his fellow Jumbos took when discussing the violence.
"Naturally, in public individuals ... are more accountable for what they say. And what they say is under greater scrutiny, so they're a lot more careful with how they present their opinions," he said.
Among fellow students he's spoken to on a personal basis or via Facebook, though, he still sees room for improvement.
"I saw a lot more of the same of what I've seen over the past four years," he said. "[They're] very closed-minded people, people that have made up their minds about which side they find themselves on in the dispute and are very entrenched in their beliefs."
Perhaps because a university climate is more conducive to thoughtful discussion, or because there are more venues for open dialogue specifically at Tufts, most student leaders agreed that Tufts is an anomaly.
"I definitely don't think it's typical on this campus," Bleiberg said. "I can't speak for other campuses, but I do know there have been some very unfortunate incidents ... where students do feel polarized, and I haven't really heard of that kind of fighting at Tufts. People really ... grappled with the issues in a substantive way."
Atalla said the university setting and the relatively numerous groups dedicated to providing forums for discussion about the Middle East were contributing factors.
"We definitely have a lot of intellectual freedom at Tufts so we can play with this issues, and discuss them in classes and groups," Atalla said. "There are multiple clubs ... where people can take their ideas and develop their understanding of an issue and decide whether they feel like taking action on that issue."
