Two weeks before Halloween 2024, a bus carrying 40 festivalgoers sped down the I-5 toward Southern California. They were on their way to see a music festival. And for a brief moment once they were there, young people danced under flashing lights, lost in the rhythm of the crowd. Then the shouting began. Then the gunfire. When the violence ended, 370 lay dead. Forty-four were taken hostage.

On Oct. 19 to 20, Stanford students went to view the Los Angeles Nova Exhibition where they were shown in an exhibit what it was like to be at Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023 in Israel, where Hamas, a terrorist organization, killed and captured concertgoers.

The exhibit showed social media footage and vlogs of people shouting about the sounds of rockets, the remains of scorched cars and bathroom stalls covered in bullet holes and personal belongings that were left behind amid the chaos. There were also tapes of phone calls to parents and friends from the concertgoers and footage taken from Hamas showing their perspective of the massacres. 

According to Julia Segal ’26, an organizer of the trip, the students that came “were sobbing, crying, saying they couldn’t imagine if they were in those shoes.” The Nova music festival was, in many ways, like Coachella, she said. The people there were college-aged, like the students that had gone to see the exhibit. 

Segal said some of the students who went to see the exhibit had no idea it had happened. For some, they learned about the massacre and abduction at Nova for the first time by way of the application for the trip. Others, Segal said, knew there was a war in Gaza, but did not know why there was one in the first place. And yet, all over social media and in real life, there was a pressure to speak out, to say something, anything, about the war. 

After the Oct. 7 massacres, students immediately began reposting infographics and posts to show their support for one side. For some Jewish students, they felt like there wasn’t space to process the attacks or have room for nuanced opinions, as they watched classmates, friends and other members of the community post black-and-white takes on a conflict they viewed as more complex.

“There was a lot of pressure to agree with a ‘simple’ story about good guys/bad guys, or victims/oppressors,” Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the Executive Director of Hillel, wrote to The Daily. “There was a lot of knee-jerk ‘liking’ of posts that made it feel as though opinions on campus were monolithic.”

When Aaron Schimmel, a sixth-year graduate student in history with family and friends in Israel, first heard news of Oct. 7, he had about an hour and a half to process the attacks before people on campus were posting signs and posters in White Plaza. The signs and posters he saw were anti-Israel, “and at times, very clearly crossing the line into antisemitism,” he said. He felt like he didn’t have time to process what was happening in Israel before things started to happen on campus. 

Tensions on campus rose following the attacks. On Oct. 20, 2023 a sit-in was established in White Plaza to urge the University to call for a ceasefire and condemn Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Rallies and walk-outs were also happening on campus. The University suspended Ameer Hasan Loggins, a non-faculty instructor of COLLEGE 101, because he “addressed the Middle East conflict in a manner that called out individual students in class based on their backgrounds and identities,” Stanford President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez wrote in a statement. A petition was circulated to reinstate Loggins. Pro-Israel protestors rallied against the sit-in. The Blue-and-Tent was set up across from the sit-in to offer another perspective. 

Despite the loud public discourse, Segal found that she was often surprised when having conversations with her non-Jewish friends — they seemed to know little about the issue, but they also demonstrated a willingness to hear her opinion and engage in a nuanced dialogue.

Some of the people Segal spoke with didn’t actually have a strong stance, and had been internalizing what they were seeing on social media and around them on campus, assuming that what they were seeing was the correct way to feel about the issue. Only after she spoke with them did she start to see more nuanced opinions that weren’t reflected on social media or in group settings. 

“One of my friends mistakenly thought that Hamas was an Israeli organization, which kind of hinted at a deep, fundamental lack of knowledge about what was going on,” Segal said.

Still, even people who are not engaged in the topic have felt pressured to express a public view.

At the Stanford Law School (SLS), the pressure to take a stance on Israel and Palestine existed even before the Oct. 7 attacks, according to Matthew Wigler ’19 J.D. ’25. When Wigler entered the fall of 2022, there were students who actively excluded and avoided being friends with Zionists, he said. (Since Oct. 7, this sentiment has grown demonstrably, with events and students often openly declaring that “Zionists are not allowed.”)

“During the height of everything that happened, there were tears. There were people who said nasty things to each other, both in person and online,” said Martin Rakowszczyk J.D. ’25, who is the co-president of the Jewish Law Student Association (JLSA), alongside Wigler.

When the law school tried to bring people together in their regularly held #SLSSocial Social Hour, which brings together students to mingle and have a drink in Crocker Garden, Wigler said Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) sabotaged the event. On Jan. 25, 2024, SJP posted on Instagram for students to wear black and their keffiyeh to show that they were standing in solidarity for calling for a ceasefire. Wigler said members of JLSA told him that they weren’t going to the social hour because they felt uncomfortable and didn’t want to be singled out if they didn’t wear black. 

Wigler also said it was very difficult to recruit and maintain people in JLSA, which he was also co-president of last year. Many of the people Wigler sat down with said they were worried they were going to face bullying, harassment and ostracization, and wanted to keep their identity hidden, he said, arguing that most JLSA events have nothing to do with Israel, but students are nevertheless afraid that if they come, they will be ostracized by others on campus “as a Zionist.”

According to the Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias Report, it found that there were cases when “Zionist” or a shortened form, “Zio,” were used in implicitly antisemitic ways. 

For Wigler, Zionism is the belief in the right to self-determination, which is the most commonly accepted version of Zionism’s definition. He said he believes in the Jewish right to self-determinate, but he also believes in the Palestinian right to self-determinate. 

“I’m very proud to support both the Jewish state and the Palestinian state,” Wigler said. “It’s because I’m a Zionist, but I also believe in the right [for] Palestinians to have a state because I believe in the principle of self-determination for all peoples.”

For him, the root of the problem of anti-Zionism “is a belief that Jews, unique amongst the nations, don’t deserve the same right.” 

Before Segal returned to campus this year, she felt scared watching how the world was responding to the attack. She started to hide her Star of David because she felt unsafe “as a Jewish person in the world,” she said. When she actually returned to campus, she felt less afraid. Now that the encampments were gone, she felt that the climate on campus had changed. 

However, some students still feel like they can’t talk about the issue. Larry Diamond B.A. ’74, M.A. ’78, Ph.D. ’90, co-chair of the Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias of the Jewish Advisory Committee, has conducted countless interviews with students over the past year about on-campus sentiment and repeatedly encountered a hesitancy to approach the topic. In some cases, Diamond said, students are afraid that if they talk about the issue, they will be shunned.  

“Who wants to be denounced, ostracized, whatever it might be?” Diamond said. “It would be very sad and not really in the spirit of the intellectual and social environment we’re seeking in the University if people felt there were issues where discussion had to be avoided because it was too dangerous, too explosive.”

“There was sadness and a sense of abandonment to see that our lives didn’t seem to matter as much,” Wigler said, but he also felt gratitude towards the people who were willing to have empathy and the people that checked in and stood by them. 

Clarification: This article was updated to clarify that the Nova Music Festival massacres happened in Israel and the students were heading to Los Angeles to view the exhibition.