With college campuses seized by conflict over the war, is there anywhere for students who don’t want to choose a side to turn? Image by Yoav Einhar

The Patient: Izzy is a sophomore at Columbia University. He grew up in a liberal Jewish home in Southern California and went to a progressive private school and lefty Zionist summer camp. He is not particularly invested in Israel, and is critical of human-rights violations Israel has imposed on Palestinians. During a gap year in Israel, he spent some time working with Palestinian teenagers in East Jerusalem through a photography program.

The Problem: He feels caught between two groups on campus: Jews who are wrapping themselves in Israeli flags and walking around school tagging posts #standwithIsrael, and the Palestinian solidarity movement that is all about #freePalestine. Izzy describes watching them face off on Columbia’s central quad, literally separated by a fence. To participate in the protest, you had to pick a side. “And I couldn’t, so I just walked around campus by myself,” Izzy said. “But I can’t opt out of this and there’s nowhere for me to go.”

The Prescription: I am so struck by the visual, and I think it represents something that a lot of sane people are experiencing right now. It’s not only the push to pick a side, but the push to do it quickly, publicly and unequivocally. This is what binary politics and polarization mean. People create binaries and polarization to serve their agenda, but it doesn’t work for everyone.

Polarization is a strategy. People and groups aiming to polarize often do so in order to draw a line in the sand where they see a murky middle that demands disruption. They’ll point to or even invent a wedge issue, a fault line, and amplify that line to force others to identify themselves as on one side or the other.

Polarizers purposely make their message very simple, and declare those who get on board as on the “right side.” Those who don’t are defined as “wrong.”

As a communications professional and community organizer, I learned this strategy from responsible mentors who I believe use it responsibly.

When faced with intense polarization, ask yourself: Whose interest is it serving? Who wins when we feel forced to pick a side? What would that “win” look like?

In this case, there is a reality of two peoples living on one piece of land, neither of whom is going anywhere. So it’s very hard if not impossible to see how one side wins. Which begs the question: Whose interest does it serve for you, at Columbia University, to feel that in order to support Israel you have to close off your empathy or solidarity with Palestinians suffering? And whose interest does it serve for you to feel that the only way to support Palestinian freedom is to ignore the tragedy of Oct. 7?

We may not be able to identify a clear answer to these questions, but what we do know is that denying the realities, rights, pains, struggles or very existence of one people does not make the other side safer. The opposite is true. Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined and the only realistic future is a shared future. Most people living there understand that. So why fall prey to polarization here? 

There are a great many people in this country, including on your campus, who are desperate for a way to stand with both peoples right now. We want to condemn the horrors of Oct. 7, support the release of hostages, and be in solidarity with innocent Palestinians suffering bombardment in Gaza and violence or harassment in the occupied West Bank.

This means reaching deep and doing the hardest thing there is right now, especially amid the peer pressure on a college campus: charting your own course forward. The way to fight the binaries and the polarization is not to argue them away. That is a never-ending, always losing battle. It’s by creating an alternative that is humane, compassionate and clear. If you start small — a conversation, an informal meeting, an invitation — I think you’ll find a lot of people will be right there with you.

Are you struggling with a personal dilemma regarding Israel and its war with Hamas? Send a query to [email protected] and Libby may reach out to you for a future column or podcast.

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