By Sara Ferro, Reporter

MOUNT BERRY, Ga. – As tensions roil the Middle East, college campuses throughout the United States have been the sites of protest. At Berry, however, all is relatively calm.

Some students say they feel they likely wouldn’t make much of an impact if they were to protest. Others indicated an unwillingness to risk the approbation of college officials. Still others cited the illusory safety and haven of the so-called “Berry Bubble.”

“We’re such a small school that even if there were a group of people who wanted to protest, it wouldn’t get too far,” said Mitchell Ryder, a sophomore.

Senior Michael Berry said that if students at a college in Atlanta were to protest, they might get media attention, but he doubted whether Berry and Rome are large enough to make any sort of difference.

Sophomore Alyssa Manor said she takes caution from seeing the repercussions of student protests elsewhere, including arrests and violence.

“If there weren’t such a big risk, many students would consider joining in on a protest,” she said.

Berry’s relatively small size makes anonymity almost an impossibility, and it is the cloak of anonymity that leads to at least some of the violence on college campuses.

At Berry, “you will have the names, faces, and room numbers of everyone involved in the protest within the next day,” Berry predicted. Therefore, students are discouraged from protesting due to the possible punishments.

Junior Beth Tovarez surmised that despite widespread disdain for Israeli actions that have “gone a lot further than they should’ve,” a campus-wide protest hasn’t occurred because there lacks “the one person who’s willing to set something up.”

Berry said he would probably show up to a protest, “but if things started to get hairy, I would probably be the first one to dip.”

Chilling effect

Students aren’t alone in self-censoring. Faculty and staff, too, strive to balance the imperatives of community and belonging against the values of dissent and protest.

Dr. Kelsey Rice, an historian of the Middle East and an assistant professor of history, said she and some colleagues are anxious about speaking out on such a controversial issue for fear that they might lose their jobs or their credibility.

When Rice and a few other professors were establishing guard rails for a panel on Israel-Palestine last year, they determined to provide “basic context” about the issue, but to avoid personal opinions.

The silence doesn’t indicate apathy, however, at least for some. Students expressed sympathy for Palestinians caught up in the war, with some saying that they believed that the actions of Israel in response to Hamas’s invasion on Oct. 7, 2023 go too far. At the panel Rice participated in last year, student attendees seemed to be largely pro-Palestinian, Rice said.

“What Israel is doing right now is not self-defense,” said sophomore Husnia Jamal, who is an international experiences student advisor. She said she came to this conclusion after Israel widened its attacks to other Middle Eastern countries, including Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran.

Berry said he agreed, and pointed to the deaths of children as cause for deep concern.

“This is not as righteous of a conflict as some are making it out to be,” said Berry, a creative writing major. “There is no point in armed conflict that civilian children should be getting bombed.”

Multiple sympathies

That Oct. 7 and all that has followed is a tragedy, few would dispute. Dr. Anne Lewinson, associate professor of anthropology, who is Jewish, said the war is a devastating event from any perspective.

“One is capable of being broken-hearted for more than one group of people at a time,” she said. And even though she said she will stand with the people of her religious homeland, Israel, she also will continue to view this political conflict from as neutral a standpoint as is possible.

She said she is also concerned about becoming a target of protest.

“This conflict brings out the tendency to make others into non-humans,” said Lewinson, who joined Berry’s faculty in 2002. She said among what she describes as the “microscopic” Jewish community at Berry, there is fear about speaking out about the conflict.

This makes some even grateful for the relative calm on campus about the conflict. The synagogues in the city are “quite relieved” that there has been peace at Berry, Lewinson said.

Rice cautioned against a “binary understanding of this conflict.” Some struggle to distinguish the people of Israel from the actions of the Israeli government on the one hand and on the other the people of Palestine from the actions of Hamas.

“The world is not that simple,” she said. Very rarely in history is there armed conflict in which one side is fighting for justice and peace while the other is out to “destroy the world.”

Lewinson said she is trying to keep students informed and provide resources to educate and discuss the issues so that students can form opinions based upon facts.

“Who you get your news from is very important,” she said, emphasizing the role of higher education in providing accurate information and teaching how to have difficult conversations.

“If we can’t learn to do that, we’re really screwed as a society,” she said.