{"id":274398,"date":"2026-02-04T23:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T23:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/274398\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T23:11:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T23:11:08","slug":"i-served-in-the-idf-but-i-still-find-room-for-dialogue-at-columbia-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/274398\/","title":{"rendered":"I Served in the IDF, but I Still Find Room for Dialogue at Columbia University"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-testid=\"article-subtitle\">The campus feels like the morning after a tornado: the overt violence is gone, but the wreckage remains. I stay because here, Israelis and Arabs can have conversations that acknowledge one another&#8217;s suffering. I am confident these dialogues will have a far greater impact on the road to peace than any protest or slogan.<\/p>\n<p data-testid=\"rich-text\" class=\"x13faqbe x12ds5z6 x1rrzvkg x1txrjqu x115k1yo x126s5kd x1az39ph x1qxhirb xhhm3bp xjplvm8 x1ur7pbh x103ahzr x6ikm8r x10wlt62\">As an Israeli Jew who served three years in a special forces combat unit and as a reservist throughout the October 7 War, I have been asked by family, friends and cab drivers, &#8220;Why are you still enrolled at Columbia University?&#8221; From outside the campus, the news from the last two years about the reality for Columbia&#8217;s Jewish students has been daunting. They were afraid to walk around campus with Jewish identifiers, violence-inciting rhetoric was yelled with no shame and anyone remotely connected to Israel who came to campus, even advocates for peace, was greeted by massive protests. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The campus feels like the morning after a tornado: the overt violence is gone, but the wreckage remains.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-274398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}