Vatican City, Feb 10, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
In 2023, the conflict between Israel and Hamas dragged universities around the world into a war of ideas with protests, proclamations, and accusations ramping up the tension.
The initial, almost unanimous support for Israel and the condemnation of the 1,200 murders and 252 hostages that Hamas took on Oct. 7, 2023, quickly turned into protests, some very violent, due to the overwhelming Israeli response.
“What happened in the academic world is that it became a place where people can no longer speak freely. Everyone takes sides and silences the other by saying: ‘We’re right, the others are wrong,’” Professor Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner.
“When I see my students go to a demonstration, I don’t tell them not to do it because I think it represents the issue that matters to them. The problem is when they repeat rhetoric that means nothing or arguments based on fake news; that’s when I feel that the university has failed in its purpose,” the professor commented.
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations held across more than 60 university campuses in the United States were replicated by students in Europe, Australia, and Latin America, who in turn organized hundreds of sit-ins in which they even demanded that each of their universities break academic ties with Israeli institutions.
All of this was forged in the heat of a torrent of social media posts orchestrated to manipulate public opinion, with images and videos that promoted two opposing and partial narratives.
In this context of polarization, the “Middle Meets” project emerged with the aim of creating a space for listening and understanding between Muslim, Jewish, and Christian students.
“We felt that universities around the world were becoming very divided and very extremist. And we wanted to create a platform for Palestinian, Hebrew, and American students to have an in-depth conversation, without superficial slogans and without going to extremes; just listening to each other in an open dialogue,” university student Tomy Stockman explained.
Two months after the Hamas attacks in Israel, this student from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem planted the seed that gave birth to Middle Meets, which is currently run by Bar-Asher Siegal. So far, 33 young people from Israel, Palestine, and the United States have participated.
The first meeting was held remotely in November 2024, but last week they met in person in Rome in an interreligious meeting promoted by the Vatican, thanks to the Pontifical Foundation Scholas Occurrentes.
“More than just meeting, they have lived together and forged bonds of friendship. It hasn’t been easy because they have spoken of painful situations, of war, of confrontation, but it has been a process of sharing pain and suffering,” Bar-Asher Siegal explained.
He also noted the significance of the Vatican lending its facilities for the occasion.
“When we visited Rome’s Campo de Fiori square, we were told that the Vatican banned the Talmud in the 16th century. But here we are now, five centuries later, invited by the Vatican. Things can change,” he said during one of the meetings held Feb. 4 at Palazzo San Calixto, headquarters of the Pontifical Foundation Scholas Occurrentes, located in the central Roman neighborhood of Trastevere.
Ignoring the other: the main cause of polarization
Jewish student Stockman, who attends classes at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with other Muslim students, said the lack of understanding between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is a constant factor.
“We ignore each other. Before this meeting promoted by Middle Meets, I didn’t have any Palestinian friends,” she revealed, adding that “Society is so divided that it’s almost impossible to start a conversation with someone from another ethnic group.”
In this regard, Stockman hopes the creation of a space for dialogue like this will succeed in forging fruitful bridges of friendship that overcome the divisions present in the social fabric of the Holy Land.
“At this moment there is an Israeli narrative and a Palestinian narrative about the conflict, and we are trying to create a third narrative based on the possibility of coexisting in peace within the societies of the country,” Stockman explained.
Shadan Khatib is one of the young women who participated in the Middle Meets project. She is Muslim and studies at a university in Tel Aviv. When she received the invitation to participate in the meeting, she was initially somewhat skeptical.
“It was very difficult to see your people, innocent civilians, die, and at first I thought that these types of organizations that bring Jews and Muslims together never get anywhere,” she said.
However, a friend who also participated in the project made her change her mind. After two days of living with other young Christians and Jews, she judged the experience to be “very positive.”
Thus, she said she is going back to Tel Aviv with the conviction that the mission of the young people is to “start a new chapter.”
“Peace is very far away now, but I have hope. I think there will be forgiveness if we find a solution that is equal for both parties,” she commented.
“At the end of the day we are all human, we all want to live in peace and happiness,” she emphasized.
One of the most anticipated moments of the program was a meeting with Pope Francis, which occurred at the conclusion of his Feb. 5 general audience. There, the young people had the opportunity to present the conclusions they had worked on, along with a letter expressing their desire for peace in the region.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Yes, ““At the end of the day we are all human, we all want to live in peace and happiness.”
How to do such interpersonal fraternity without confusing it with wider and more different things “interreligious”? How to differentiate the inborn and personal/universal natural law (and all that this entails) from mutually conflicted religions? For example, without such foundational human and somewhat autonomous (free and responsible?) things being religiously cancelled as blasphemy?
The coexistence of Middle Meets is concrete friendship and fraternity, but not a “pluralist” middle ground between religions as such.
So, what are the promising talking points between what the Judeo-Christian heritage and still the West differentiates as the universal “natural law,” and what Islam also detects, as “fitrah,” but then expropriates as “the germ of [solitary] Islam”: “There is not a child that he or she is born upon this fitrah, this original state of the knowledge of God. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim” (From the hadith as reported by Bukhari: Sahih, I 34).
Within the context of interpersonal friendship, and even global coexistence, what is the overlap between the whole of natural law and the fitrah piece of Islam’s eclectic and package-deal of Qur’anic law? Namely, the fused mosque-state, jihad both internal and external; the truncated Judeo-Christian commandments (soft on “thou shalt not”); the falsification of the self-disclosing Trinity, as a pagan triad of Father, Son…and Mary (!); and overall, fideistic submission to a totally inscrutable Allah.
And, alternatively, where is the evidence in the post-Enlightenment and rationalistic West of any continued faith in the living God, as more than simply an obsolete idea, that is, as the Ultimate Reality other than our positivistic, relativistic, and majoritarian selves?