Negotiators with extensive experience in the Middle East visited Cal Poly on April 9 to discuss the Israel-Hamas War and how to foster productive dialogue across differing viewpoints.
Dennis Ross, a former American envoy to the Middle East, and Ghaith Al-Omari, a former Palestinian authority negotiator, spoke at A Dialogue on Peace in the Middle East, an event hosted by SLO Hillel, Cal Poly Student Affairs and the Communication Studies Department.
More than 75 students and community members attended the free event in the Performing Arts Center Pavilion. Religious studies professor Stephen Lloyd-Moffett, who teaches Religion and Politics in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (POLS 380), moderated the discussion.
President Jeffrey Armstrong advertised the event along with the new antisemitism task force in a campus-wide email April 2.
Al-Omari and Ross have spoken together at more than 50 college campuses nationwide as part of the Hillel Teach-In Tour, which aims to bring diverse viewpoints to students on Israel’s history and “varying perspectives on the conflict.”
One of their main goals is to model solution-oriented discussions, Ross told Mustang News.
“We’ve been going to campuses to show the crazy idea that people who experience this conflict from different perspectives can still have a conversation,” Al-Omari added.
Industrial technology and packaging senior Morgan Folz said he came to the dialogue after attending a private session with the two speakers through his graduate-level negotiating class.
While Folz said he wished the speakers had delved into specific negotiation tactics they have used, he felt it was a unique opportunity to broaden his perspective on the issue.
“I always think it’s good to learn more about what’s going on in the world and hear multiple sides of the story,” Folz said.
Community member Vivien Orbach-Smith said she heard about this event through her synagogue. She recently moved to the Central Coast after retiring from her position as a journalism professor at New York University.
Orbach-Smith described the event as triggering. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, she believes the discourse on this topic is too far removed from reality.
“We will never find peace for two suffering peoples if we don’t hear each other’s pain, acknowledge each other’s pain and look for righteous solutions that don’t deny history, that don’t deny archeology and that don’t deny humanity,” Orbach-Smith said.
Students for Justice in Palestine condemns the dialogue
Students for Justice in Palestine at Cal Poly posted an open letter on Instagram criticizing the dialogue, stating that the dialogue “deliberately distracts from and obscures the ongoing genocidal crimes of the Zionist regime.”
This claim references the more than 51,000 people killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, The Associated Press reported.Â
“The university is also really ridiculous to me personally, because the only people on this campus who care about international issues like this care because they have a very strong opinion on it, one way or another,” said an anonymous Cal Poly sophomore. “I’m not exactly sure of who these lukewarm takes are supposed to pander to.”
The source requested anonymity due to safety concerns, including the detainment of students with pro-Palestinian views.
