Tashroom Ahsan

The speaker lineup encompassed Israeli Supreme Court Justice Daphne Barak-Erez and former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, but among them, Ariane de Gennaro ’26 remembered mostly the Palestinian girls. They wanted to hear about Yale and about college in America. They were her brother’s age. “We only honestly made friends with them,” she said, “We all sat in the school and ate lunch together.”

Founded in 2012 by Uriel Epshtein ’14, the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative brings a competitively-selected cohort of Yale students and West Point cadets on a 10-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, as part of a year-long fellowship program. It is a fast-paced trip. Following itineraries designed by Yale student leaders, PDLI fellows travel to Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and parts of the West Bank. De Gennaro is one of hundreds of PDLI fellows who have learned about Israel-Palestinian relations from the proverbial horse’s mouth.

Epshtein is staunchly proud of PDLI’s connections with the Israeli government and senior members of the Palestinian Authority: “if we’re going to hear from someone who avidly believes that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, that person should come from someone who’s directly involved in the conflict.” 

For thirteen years, the program has endeavored to make abstract discussions about Israel and Palestine more tangible, allowing fellows to supersede state borders and step into the lived reality of both Israelis and Palestinians. Fellows say that PDLI fosters dialogue like few other spaces at Yale. They say that the trip to Israel and the West Bank was the most meaningful experience of their lives. Like De Gennaro, they cite moments of human connection as the most memorable of the trip: talking to a Palestinian woman in the old city of Jerusalem, speaking in Hebrew to a cigarette-smoking man, visiting a kibbutz. 

But what can little over a week of up-close interaction accomplish? Can empathy, with enough guidance, calcify into transformative insights on a century-long conflict?  

***

In 2011, Epshtein was a sophomore at Yale, and had just heard rumblings of a potential public debate between Norman Finkesltein and Alan Dershowitz, two academics who had notoriously clashed over the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein and Dershowitz’s sparring had long spilled over from intellectual disagreements to ad hominem attacks; in the most extreme instance, Dershowitz lobbied DePaul University faculty to deny Finkelstein from  obtaining tenure. Although the public debate never ended up happening, the mere suggestion of it was enough to motivate Epshtein to act. “You had speakers being [suggested to come to] campus who represented the most extreme versions of their respective arguments,” he said, “and what it resulted in was always a shouting match.” 

Unhappy with what he saw as a lack of interest in the “distillation of truth,” Epshtein wanted to create a space with a more moderate, nuanced approach to Israel-Palestinian relations. The program he created — the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative — relies on a high degree of buy-in. Epshtein is confident in PDLI’s selection process, resulting in cohorts who can “loosely hold strong opinions,” willing to dive into conversations about Israeli-Palestinian relations without attachment to dogma. 

Through occasional seminar-style discussions, PDLI fellows cover a range of topics: for the 2024 cohort, pertinent questions included — in addition to long-standing issues like religious groups in Israel and the Abraham Accords — “how to prevent another October 7th, whether Israel’s response was ethically proportionate, whether its [response] was a genocide,” Hassaan Qadir ’25.5 says. Despite the fellows’ with a wide spectrum of standpoints on Israel and Palestine, from involvement in pro-Palestine protests to pro-Israel groups, de Gennaro believes that PDLI was a uniquely moderate space during the 2024 spring encampments on Beinecke Plaza: “PDLI was actually one of the few places on campus where people were discussing the conflict in a really productive way.” Aidan Stretch ’25, another program alum, notes its difference from analogous spaces at Yale: “It wasn’t like [PDLI fellows] wanted to go to the [Yale Political Union] and argue and throw out their opinions.” 

To Epshtein, PDLI’s purpose is exactly the opposite of that of an organization like the YPU: to promote unfettered dialogue, shielded away from the limelight of scrutiny. “The conversations that happen within PDLI are […] never for a public audience, and that means that people can really be honest, and they don’t have to be afraid that they’re going to suffer some kind of social consequences for offering an unpopular opinion.” Fellows are never trying to seek the approval of a debate floor. PDLI succeeds, he argues, because of its premise of mandated discomfort — every PDLI fellow enters the program knowing they will hear something that will offend them and endeavors to withhold judgment.

Despite her involvement in pro-Israel groups on campus, de Gennaro says she found herself bonding with her roommate, an active member of Yale Jews for Collective Liberation in Palestine (then called Jews for Ceasefire), about their mutual dislike for a guest speaker from the Israeli right. While they didn’t stay close friends after returning to Yale’s campus, other PDLI fellows say that the common ground of engaging in good-faith, intense discussions allowed them to forge close relationships that have persisted far beyond the program. Stretch, a 2023 fellow, notes the benefits of the PDLI alumni network, which has remained active via alumni group chats and meetups around the country. 

***

Epshtein had a secondary goal in founding PDLI, beyond bridging the divide between Israeli and Palestinians: closing the civil-military gap on Yale’s campus. Each PDLI cohort consists of 20 Yale students and 10 West Point cadets, mentored by student leaders and two West Point professors, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Faint and Dr. Ruth Beitler. Faint and Beitler, who is the current director of Conflict and Human Security Studies at West Point, work closely with Yale student leaders to design the program’s themes, including its leadership training and civil-military components. As the program’s in-house military professional, Faint has also been an active resource during PDLI’s trip to Israel and the West Bank, explaining the “tactical capabilities of weapons systems or the strategic value of a piece of ground.” 

Before travelling together, West Point cadets and Yale students engage in cross-institutional exchange at the program’s kickoff “Military 101” presentations. On a trip to West Point’s campus this past January, Yale students visited the military academy’s on-campus museum, listened to a presentation about West Point life, and watched a hands-on demonstration of simulated military equipment. The program’s facilitation of relationships between Yale and West Point is so successful, Lieutenant Colonel Faint writes, that “at least one Yale/West Point wedding has occurred between [alumni].”

Alongside the rumors of a Finkelstein-Dershowitz debate, it was the rumblings of antimilitarism sentiment and protests at Yale that planted the seeds of PDLI’s creation. In 2012, the Navy ROTC program had just been making its return to Yale after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a U.S. military policy that prohibited LGBT+ individuals to disclose their identity during service. Yale’s decision to reintroduce the ROTC program was met with critical op-eds and mass protests. Just a year later, the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine proposed a joint venture with the U.S. Department of Defense to create a training center, the U.S. Special Operations Command Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience. Again, Yale students chafed against the notion of increased military presence on campus, drafting petitions in tandem with New Haven immigration groups. In response, Epshtein published an op-ed in the YDN defending military presence on Yale’s campus, lamenting “the divide between those who fight this nation’s wars, and those in whose names the wars are fought.” 

The primary difference between civilian and military students’ mindsets seems to concern the question of utility. Christian Dionisio, an alum of PDLI currently serving in the Army as an officer, notes the military’s emphasis on identifying “confirmable facts” during discussion about Israel and Palestine, particularly after October 7th. Dionisio explains that as members of the U.S. Army and graduating army officers, West Point cadets tend to be very careful about “the partisan nature of speech.” Aidan Stretch observed that his West Point peers “did not have the liberty to think in theoretical or abstract terms,” approaching discussions instead with concerns about the “real contingencies for American troops or resources on the ground [in Israel and Palestine].” Rather than wrestling between pre-existing political viewpoints, West Point cadets have historically been far more driven by practical questions: How do you go about getting the facts? Where do you get the facts? What facts do you trust? What is the truth? What can we confirm? 

Epshtein is particularly excited about West Point’s brand of apolitical empiricism. Unlike Yale students, who are often accustomed to history and political theory, Epshtein argues that West Point cadets bring nuance to the notion that “any type of military violent action is inherently awful.” Stretch agrees that by breaking down military action into its constituent parts — main stakeholders, environmental considerations, historical knowledge — the West Point perspective brings Yale kids back down to earth, compelling each PDLI cohort to engage with more pragmatic questions, rather than merely relying on idealistic approaches to a potential peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. Uriel cited an instance in which he and PDLI fellows watched a video of a raid. The natural human response to the video, he said, “will be ‘oh my god,’ that is awful’. And then the West Point cadets will look at that same exact video, and they’ll say, ‘we studied that in class.’ That’s exactly what we do. That’s best practice.” The ultimate purpose of the American military,” Epshtein argues, “is to be lethal.”

***

The crux of the program, after months of conversation and Yale-West Point exchanges, is ultimately the trip to Israel and the West Bank — what many fellows considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 

Numerous fellows and program leaders cited the trip’s presentation of Israeli multiculturalism as a large takeaway of the trip. They are eager to share their encounters with multihyphenated identities: visits to an Arab-Jewish Culture Center, meetings with an Israeli-Bedouin diplomat (Ismail Khalil) and an Israeli-Lebanese Christian LGBTQ+ activist (Jonathan Elkhoury).

Beitler recounted a dizzying scene of coexistence in Tel Aviv. Next to a mosque during the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, religious Jews got ready for Shabbat alongside others preparing for the Sabbath — all alongside a gay pride parade: “I remembered this Turkish student being like, flabbergasted. He just never knew that it was this open.” 

Beitler believes that in facilitating real, tangible contact with people they’ve never spoken to before — whether that be Israeli Jews or Palestinians — the trip to Israel and the West Bank tackles black-and-white generalizations, painting a more colorful picture of unexpected viewpoints. 

Stretch, who visited Israel and the West Bank in 2022, agrees. He recalls a visit to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank and speaking to families living there, many of whom were victims of violence or could not afford housing elsewhere. “Especially when you think about somebody being kicked out of their home and forced somewhere else, [Israeli settlements] can be hard to approach with empathy,” Stretch acknowledged, but “[the families] had all sorts of reasons why they were there and why they didn’t see themselves as colonists, or any other sort of word that we’d use to describe them.”

***

The Department of Defense’s measures for U.S military personnel after October 7th have prevented Beitler, Faint, and West Point cadets from travelling to the Central Command Area of Responsibility — which includes Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, among other locales. In the 2024 cohort’s accounts of their PDLI experience, there is a noted lack of Epshtein’s language of military-style pragmatism. 

Instead, the fellows noted the gratitude they received from Israelis and Palestinians for “coming to [visit] at such a hard time.” “People really do care when you’re American,” de Gennaro said, “it’s a big deal for them when you show up and listen. Because I think they know that matters.” 

Ultimately, it is the human element that sets the PDLI trip to Israel apart, pushing student’s horizons beyond academic jargon. Some of the most valuable conversations of the trip, fellows say, occurred with people on the street, who de Gennaro says “were almost more willing to engage in this discourse because they wanted [even more] to be able to live alongside their neighbors.” Tashroom Ahsan ’26, a 2024 fellow, recalls a memorable encounter with a cigarette-smoking man, who ended up divulging, in broken English, his experience in a refugee camp and political support for Hamas. Listening to “what sorts of frustrations [the Palestinian man] was experiencing in his family […] felt more real than talking about geopolitics,” Ahsan says. The argument of PDLI, in staging opportunities for fellows to closely witness the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is that these interactions will inform the fellows, allowing them to use their American leverage to make nuanced choices and careful rhetoric. Through iterative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli people, PDLI trains fellows to corroborate their geopolitical knowledge with narratives emerging from the streets, constantly reworking their relationship to the “facts” of the situation. The Board of Directors believe firmly that this visceral emotional experience — the gutting reality of Palestinian refugee camps and destroyed kibbutzim — will color their perspectives for the rest of their lives. 

But the events of October 7th have changed the trip’s itinerary. Fellows could no longer enter the West Bank, limiting the trip only to Israeli regions. The “on-the-ground” Palestinian perspective was largely supplied by Rami Nazzal, a U.S. citizen and resident of East Jerusalem who has been a decade-long collaborator of PDLI. A key new site added to the PDLI itinerary for the 2024 cohort was the Nova music festival site, along with Kfar Aza, a kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7th. One fellow described the experience of visiting Kfar Aza as one of cognitive dissonance. From the empty kibbutz — walls still tinged with blood from half a year ago — they could also see residual smoke from Israeli bombs striking Gaza, just a few kilometers over the border fence. 

***

Despite Epshtein’s emphasis that PDLI selects for strongly opinionated students who often have personal stakes in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, the fellows’ experiences in Israel and the West Bank seemed to confirm PDLI’s vision of moderated dialogue, skirting around pointed critiques of specific administrations. In Stretch’s account of visiting the West Bank in 2022, he noted that the lack of crosswalks for Palestinian school children gave him an “entirely different way of conceiving of what their problems are with a certain issue, or the background they’re coming from,” but emphasized that he did not want to point to a specific cause for the West Bank’s infrastructural issues. The point of PDLI, Stretch intoned, is humility: “It’s not about [agreement or disagreement]. It’s just by virtue of the fact that we were in their home talking to them about their issues.” 

And despite the program’s concerted efforts to expose fellows to “regular people” in Israel and the West Bank, these interactions are highly mediated. Within the boundaries of their tightly-packed itineraries, fellows only get around one to one-and-a-half hours of free time to engage in the personal, one-on-one conversations they all cited as the most memorable parts of the PDLI trip. Compounded with a language barrier, students’ natural inclination to remain within their bubble of Yale friends means that “you don’t fully get a sense of what people are thinking,” Ahsan says. 

Rather, a large portion of “on the ground dialogue” during the PDLI trip consists of conversations staged between fellows and distinguished speakers, densely packed into the trip’s ten-day span. For the majority of their days, PDLI fellows speak with the upper echelons of the Israeli government and military — Daphne Barak-Erez, a justice on the Supreme Court of Israel, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Yona Yahav, the former mayor of Haifa, Kobi Marom, a former Israeli Defense Forces commander, and Colonel Stephen E. Gabavics, a Commander at Guantanamo Bay. Out of the more than twenty speakers scheduled for the 2024 trip, only two were Palestinian — Salam Fayyad, former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Khalil Shikaki, a political science professor. 

While Epshtein characterizes PDLI’s speaker lineups as deliberately diverse, aiming to counter a monolithic perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, all of PDLI’s invited speakers are united by their “interest in communicat[ing] their story directly to Yale and West Point students” — an orientation that embeds an implicit narrative. Ahsan points out that in seeking voices who are amenable to the U.S., PDLI’s invited speakers skew bureaucratic, toward nonprofit founders, leaders of the PA, and diplomats. Fellows see the choice to only engage with former PA leaders, who have little real power in the West Bank, as one of the program’s key shortcomings. In Ahsan’s words, “it feels like a massive miss to not be talking to the people who have the most direct influence on the lives of Palestinians right now.” Whereas PDLI’s Palestinian speakers have little bearing on “on-the-ground” political realities in Gaza and the West Bank, fellows gain access to key players in the Israeli government, from Supreme Court judges to members of the Knesset. 

In the pursuit of nuance, some fellows contend that PDLI’s speaker list and general intellectual atmosphere seemed to prize the presence of competing narratives over an analysis of how they interact with each other. The result is that the Israel-Palestinian relationship is presented as an ideological issue which can be untangled through the force of iterative discussions and policy reforms, rather than a material issue which can only begin to be untangled by resolving land disputes between the two states. 

The program’s method of “dialogue,” Ahsan says, is predicated on the premise that the central issue underlying the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is a “clash between two people’s ideas of how they should live together, as opposed to land conflict or dispute.” 

Indeed, Epshtein himself frames the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the terms of a “values” — as opposed to a black-and-white morality  — debate. The issue, Epshtein believes, is not that there is one correct and legitimate state pitted against an incorrect and illegitimate one, but rather that they have competing notions of how to advance their own interests (though it is unclear what “values” Epshtein attributes to each state). 

“The [Israeli-Palestinian] conversation really is a never-ending one,” Epshtein stresses, “because this is one of the single most complicated conflicts in history, because there exists harm on both sides. There exists truth on both sides.” 

***

Across the board, PDLI’s program leaders also insist on their neutrality. Dr. Ruth Beitler emphasizes that the Directors “don’t hold a position or advocate” for a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Lieutenant Colonel Faint clarifies that he’d prefer fellows to leave the program with a “duty to understand.” Organizationally, Lieutenant Colonel Faint says, PDLI believes in the two-state solution — “two state for two peoples, [though] that will ultimately be a decision for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.”

Epshtein, who also claims neutrality, first formed his commitment to spaces of moderate dialogue through childhood trips to Israel, where his parents fled to as refugees from the Soviet Union. “That background informed a lot of my thinking, as I was first starting out to [be] politically conscious,” he says. He has a track record of advocating for the notion that the U.S. should occupy a central, active position in “achieving peace in the Middle East,” particularly through its strong alliance with Israel. In a 2012 op-ed for The Jerusalem Post, Epshtein wrote that “a broad range of Yale leaders agree that despite the many layers and complications that the region is famous for, America’s involvement is crucial to achieving peace.”

Indeed, the program’s cultivation of neutrality belies a larger vision: Epshtein is strongly convicted in strengthening the trajectory from PDLI fellow to future world leader. Citing alumni who were deputy assistant secretaries in the Biden administration, he believes that fellows who graduate from Yale will likely end up at the helm of government and spend their careers writing directives to the military. 

When it comes to the U.S.’s role in the current relationship between Israel and Palestine, Epshtein believes that there is a duty to act — to leverage the knowledge they’ve learned from PDLI as a mental model for “deal[ing] with incredibly complicated subjects and do something about it.” In providing Yale students with a better understanding of military concerns and lifestyles, Epshtein hopes to equip future policymakers with the ability to “explain to their soldiers why they are in a particular place, doing a particular thing.” Beyond the military, Epshtein hopes that the program will provide future diplomats or NGO leaders with “not pro one side or another,” but rather a “much deeper understanding of a very complex, difficult issue.”

***

By pushing students to engage with questions of peacebuilding and pursue careers in foreign policy, PDLI gestures towards a definite resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The PDLI program ends with a required capstone project rather than an essay, reflecting Epshtein’s mission of moving students beyond mere rhetorical flourishes into paths that “actually improve people’s lives.” 

Fellows themselves do not necessarily share Epshtein’s inclination toward solutions-oriented thinking.

“I don’t know if I would say, like, I had, like, some political revelation. I think I just had a lot of moments of understanding,” de Gennaro admits. 

The closest thing to a solution PDLI provides, at the end of the day, is still the continuation of rhetoric — the asking of more questions and better questions. When asked if they believe PDLI’s model of dialogue should be expanded throughout Yale’s campus, or even across other colleges, fellows and leaders answer with a resounding “yes.” 

“I think that [colleges should use] some of the criteria that we use for PDLI[…] to select for students,” Epshtein says. He believes that higher education institutions should start shifting their admissions questions and prioritizing the core ethos of PDLI, asking: “How can you disagree without being disagreeable? How can you disagree productively?” 

Fittingly, Epshtein’s most notable example of a successful PDLI capstone project was the podcast “Intractable,” founded by Skyler Inman ‘17. Inman, who was so inspired by her PDLI trip that she moved to Tel Aviv after graduation, started the podcast in order to “offer American audiences a balanced, multi-faceted, and contextual look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” 

Inman’s podcast makes the same promise as PDLI: with enough one-on-one conversations with the right stakeholders, the Israeli–Palestinian relationship will cease to become intractable. 

Both the podcast and PDLI offer no answers, only more questions — wrapped in a haze of nuance. 

Correction, May 13: This story has been updated to clarify the respective numbers of Yale and West Point students involved in the initiative.