The scene has become emblematic at many American college campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Students waving Palestinian flags face off against students waving Israeli flags, each group shouting chants that enrage the other side.
But sometimes, there is a quieter group standing in the middle.
Last spring, Mikey Aboutboul, an Israeli-born senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and about 30 like-minded people stood in the center of dueling protests and began chanting slogans that challenged both camps. They wore purple T-shirts to stand out from those around them.
“Palestinians and Jews, war and killing we refuse,” they chanted, inspired by a grassroots peace movement in Israel. “In Gaza and Tel Aviv, all the children want to live.”
Protesters around them turned and stared, wondering what to make of them. Then, some people from both sides joined in, Mr. Aboutboul recalled.
“That was kind of an amazing moment for me,” he said, adding, “These things resonate, because they are human messages.”
Mr. Aboutboul is a founding member of Students for Standing Together, a new student group at U.C.L.A. that aims to unite Israelis and Palestinians to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. In the long term, they hope to push for a peaceful, equitable solution for both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He is also part of another, broader group: Students and faculty members on college campuses across the country whose nuanced views place them between the extremes of Israeli-Palestinian advocacy. While the number of people organizing for coexistence from within that middle ground remains comparatively modest, they say their effort is gaining momentum, even if taking such positions can be isolating and difficult.
One of the stumbling blocks, those involved say, is that for both Jews and Palestinians, the key constituencies for these efforts, there is intense pressure to be fully supportive of one’s own people in a time of war.
Left-wing progressive Jews particularly can find themselves caught in a kind of partisan no man’s land when they try to take a complex position on the conflict, like being highly critical of the Israeli government and yet still believing in a Jewish state.
Palestinians who want to call for empathy for both Palestinian and Israeli civilians also don’t hear themselves reflected in chants that sound like zero-sum solutions, either them or us, said Zahra Sakkejha, 35, a Palestinian-Canadian and U.C.L.A. alumna. She was among those with Mr. Aboutboul last spring standing between the warring protest camps.
Ms. Sakkejha’s 18-year-old second cousin, who has a Palestinian father and Jewish Israeli mother, was among those kidnapped by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7, 2023, and later released in a hostage deal, she said. It underscored to Ms. Sakkejha that the fates of the two peoples cannot be separated.
While she also wants a free Palestinian state, she wants a peaceful way forward. “I think what made me really take a beat was just the sheer violence done in the name of the Palestinian cause,” Ms. Sakkejha said. “I just couldn’t stand for it. And I really just started to try to find others who were feeling the same way I was.”
At Columbia University, Aharon Dardik, an Israeli American student, formed a group called CU Jews for Ceasefire after finding that his viewpoint wasn’t fully reflected in the main pro-Palestinian student movement. He is a pacifist who spent his teen years with his family in the West Bank but who ultimately refused to serve in the army in Israel. He believes in working with Israelis and Palestinians toward collective liberation and a world not divided by ethnonationalist allegiances.
His ad hoc group now has over 100 members, he said. Some are anti-Zionist — meaning they think Israel shouldn’t exist in its current form as a Jewish state — while others take a range of viewpoints on the issue. But everyone, he said, has personal stories of being ostracized by some Jews for not being more pro-Israel, even as they are treated with suspicion by pro-Palestinian activists who reject dialogue with Zionists.
Mr. Dardik says he tries not to get hung up about it. “I would describe us as people who care very, very deeply about human life, both Israeli and Palestinian, and that doesn’t go so well in areas that care very deeply about Israeli life exclusively,” he said. “It also doesn’t do so well in areas that care predominantly about Palestinian life.”
At George Washington University, Celia Little, a junior, helped restart a campus chapter of J Street U, the college wing of a liberal pro-Israel organization. She hopes to give Jewish students who are devastated by the war a space to process and learn, “not in an abrasive way, but just teaching about it and having an open discussion.”
“As a progressive, sometimes it’s difficult to be in some Jewish spaces,” she said, “and as someone who really cares about Israel, it’s hard to be in more progressive spaces. My goal has been that there can be a space where having nuance is important and valued.”
As the war in Gaza grinds on, some students have become more entrenched and, in some cases, more extreme in their points of view. Some pro-Palestinian student groups, for example, now openly glorify armed resistance by Hamas and other organizations that the U.S. government considers terrorist entities.
But at Swarthmore, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Sa’ed Atshan tries to make sure there is complexity in everything he teaches in his Contemporary Israel and Palestine class. Mr. Atshan, a peace and conflict studies professor, is Palestinian, was raised in the West Bank as a Quaker Christian and is a pacifist.
“It’s never been more fraught,” he said.
He has hosted lectures featuring Jewish and Palestinian scholars, and taken positions that challenge expectations of how he should behave as a Palestinian, such as refusing to pledge that he would not penalize pro-Palestinian students who walked out of class as part of a protest.
“It’s hard because the pressure is very serious,” he said. “You have to have thick skin.”
At U.C.L.A., Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies, is stepping down at the end of the year as director of the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies after experiencing intense pushback from both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian critics, he said. As a tenured professor, he will continue to teach.
He had tried, even over the past year, he said, to turn his center into a space for discussion and understanding of Israel “that was neither pro-Israel, nor anti-Israel, but one that allowed for students from whatever their perspective, whatever their background, to come and learn and ask questions.”
But there was backlash nevertheless. The pro-Palestinian student movement last semester made the abolition of the Nazarian Center one of its central demands to U.C.L.A administrators.
Dr. Waxman also became a target of right-wing pro-Israel groups, including after he wrote on social media that he supported the International Criminal Court’s request for an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a position he said he took as a supporter of international law. The groups coordinated a campaign to flood U.C.L.A. administrators’ inboxes with emails demanding he be fired. A prominent donor criticized the center’s direction.
“I’ve been repeatedly accused of basically being a traitor, being a self-hating Jew and siding with the antisemites,” he said. “There’s a demand that if you are an Israel studies professor, or an Israel studies center, you have to support Israel.”
He said he was surprised, as someone who has dedicated his academic life to understanding Israel, by how much it affected him.
“It can feel very lonely,” he said.
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