University alum Arik Cheshin served in the Israeli army from 1995 to 1998 and saw his commander killed in action, a friend maimed by a land mine and two men in his unit severely burned by Molotov cocktails, a type of handmade bomb.

Born in a Syrian refugee camp for Palestinians, LSA senior Carmel Salhi said he and his family can never return to their ancestral homeland because of the Israeli occupation.

From soldier to refugee, the victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cut across both sides of a decades-old clash that extends even to the lives of students at the University.

While the casualties of the conflict resonate on the campus, the same Israeli-Palestinian division does as well.

Whether it be guest speakers lecturing on the bias of media coverage of the Middle East or University discussions on divesting from Israel, the campus has been its own battleground for the conflict.

Spearheading these efforts are the various Israeli and Palestinian advocacy groups on campus, led by students like Salhi and Cheshin, who aim to educate the campus about their viewpoints on the conflict. The contrasting positions often mirror the tension in the Middle East.

Yet in the past week, a renewed search to find common ground among the groups has begun. Pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups met Thursday to listen to one another’s perspectives in hopes of fostering cooperation with one another. Despite their differing viewpoints, they agree that cooperation is the only solution that can achieve both sides’ most vital goal — peace.

Their desire for peace becomes most clear when the groups hold vigils. The frustration over the incessant violence and the necessity to preserve human life drives the groups to light candles on the Diag or fast for the victims, group leaders said.

“Any time you recognize the human cost of conflict, you highlight the true driving force behind peace,” said Salhi, president of the pro-Palestinian organization Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

“We’re saying that terrorism is wrong, and the killing of innocent people is not the right way to go. And the vigils are there to commemorate that. We are calling for an end to violence,” said Cheshin, advisor to the Israeli Students Organization and coordinator of the Israeli Community Ann Arbor.

On Oct. 7, when an explosion in a Hilton hotel in Egypt near Israel’s border claimed the lives of 35 people, around 40 members from the different Jewish groups on campus lit candles on the Diag. Out of coincidence, a SAFE vigil near the explosion, SAFE expanded the focus of their vigil to also remember the deaths from the hotel bombing. Members from both sides trickled across from one vigil to the other, in a rare moment of solidarity, Cheshin said.

But the moment was a fleeting one. Although seeking an end to the violence prompted the groups to hold the vigils, the vigils were still separate. Salhi said the need for the separate vigils stem from the different views on which deaths to commemorate and which to ignore. In some cases, the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups clashed over the vigils last year, when a group of students sang the Israeli national anthem in protest of a SAFE vigil, Salhi said.

Moreover, arguments over issues related to the conflict are often traded in the The Michigan Daily’s letter to the editor section, sometimes angering the different group members. For the most part, the organizations have remained separated from one another, left alone to carry out their own actions.

This continual strife between the groups needs to stop, said Or Shotan, chair of the Israeli Students Organization. Having witnessed the violence caused by the suicide bombers and the decay of Palestinian life as a medic in the Israeli army, Shotan said if the campus groups continue arguing, they will just embody the same cycle of violence occurring in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Shotan asked how peace can ever be achieved if students on campus, who have more in common than the leaders of the Israelis and Palestinians, cannot agree.

“There has to be a common ground. … We students should be able to reach an agreement with one another and end this arguing,” he said.

To break down the barriers between the two sides, last Thursday SAFE and ISO, along with two pro-Israeli groups the American Movement for Israel and the Union for Progressive Zionists, met at the coffee shop Espresso Royale on South University Avenue.