Posting Empathy for Gaza Ended One of Her Friendships. An Expert on This Thinks That’s Fine.
Amal, a 30-year-old young professional living in Brooklyn, says she usually hates social media, and posting anything about her personal life gives her anxiety. But after the latest spike in violence in Israel and Palestine, she began posting again, and posting often.
Amal, which is a pseudonym, didn’t share her personal feelings about the new war in Gaza—she started by reposting images and fact sheets shared by other Muslims and Arabs in her social network that she felt helped explain what was happening. “I just felt this responsibility to start posting things trying to support the humanization of people in Palestine because Western media is so unbelievably opposed to humanizing the people that are suffering,” she said.
She got some pretty immediate feedback on her posts from a friend she made years ago, an Israeli national. “A lot of ‘empathy’ here, except absolutely zero empathy for 1300 Jews who got butchered in their homes completely randomly,” one comment said. “Doesn’t matter what we do, Jews are the devil. Thanks for clarifying,” said another.
“I was disappointed to get a message like that. It’s really sad to feel like you’re sharing about your own despair and somebody is twisting it,” Amal said.
Amal was taken back by the tone, and by what she felt it assumed about her. “It’s like you feel like your heart sinks, right? Because it just became really clear. Like, this is not somebody who thinks that my life or the life of Palestinians in Gaza is equal to Jewish lives,” she said. “[Palestinians’] right to the access of water is not antisemitism, but it is to him,” she said, of her friend’s sentiments.
Amal and her online friend—let’s call him Sam—weren’t exactly close friends. They met at a party years ago, and she remembered feeling apprehensive when he introduced himself as Israeli, expecting that her feelings toward Palestine would surely put the two of them at odds. But she also thought Sam was nice, and frankly she just never brought up Palestine around him, because it didn’t really seem necessary. It seemed to pay off: Over the years, he’d send Amal Arabic songs he said he loved, and she’d respond by telling him she remembered hearing her mom play them for her when she was growing up. “I kind of felt like maybe I was wrong to make my initial assumption. Like, this is someone who can appreciate parts of Arab culture. Maybe he can also appreciate Arab life? You know?” she said, laughing nervously.
She hoped she’d be able to clear things up with Sam, so she sent him messages explaining that while she was struggling watching the conflict, she knew he must be too. But she says he refused to acknowledge that the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians were both horrific. They mutually agreed to stop talking. But it didn’t end there. He kept messaging her and leaving comments each time she posted. “My friends kept saying block him,” she said. “But I kept thinking, no, if this is how I can reach someone, this is how I have to reach someone.”
Or at least, she tried to do that. After a few days of this, and feeling like the entire friendship was derailed, she quietly unfollowed him and cut ties.
This kind of tension—and these kinds of difficulties within friendships between people who have very different perspectives on the conflict—has been combusting over the course of the past two weeks. People I’ve talked with on either side of this conflict have told me they feel particularly sensitive right now. One friend of mine, who has a sibling with children living in Israel, feels betrayed and is blocking liberal friends calling for a cease-fire and waving Palestinian flags. Another friend told me they’ve blocked at least a dozen people on social media for using the hashtag #IStandWithIsrael, or misidentifying pro-Palestine protesters as pro-Hamas.
The underlying struggle here isn’t new, particularly for Atiya Aftab, a law professor and the chair of the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University. In the summer of 2010, she and Sheryl Olitzky, a Jewish American, co-founded the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom to build bridges and also ease tensions stemming from the Palestine-Israel crisis between Muslims and Jews in the U.S.
When I reached out to Aftab to talk about kinds of online skirmishes, I admit I assumed that she would offer some sisterhood-y words about how everyone can work through conflict in tough moments. Instead, what she said surprised me: Aftab isn’t opposed to people like Amal disengaging in moments like this. “There are people who I know who were like, ‘You know what, I need to shut down. I can’t engage.’ And I think that that’s very fair,” she said. “I don’t fault people for that, because we have to take care of our mental health. It’s true. If you don’t have the strength inside to deal with this, you are going to run yourself ragged.”
Though she is now a major advocate for interfaith dialogue, she is candid about how she approached this prior to the Sisterhood. Just like Amal, Aftab saw herself as an educator. At one of the first meetings, she likened the way she studied up on facts in the conflict to bringing a “hammer” into the room. But she didn’t even get the chance to make her case.
Instead, a former Israeli Defense Forces soldier took over and described Israel as an apartheid state. Curiously, Aftab’s attention shifted to the Jewish women in the room, who she could sense were very uncomfortable. “A lot of these women have been told a very different account of history and felt that if they did not almost have a loyalty to this government, that they were almost acting in a treasonous manner. And I needed to give them space. And I think that’s fair. And that’s something that I had to learn, that people change when they are ready to change,” she said.
The Sisterhood is about creating a space not for people to try to solve the conflict, but to build relationships with people on the other side, which might then lead to more thoughtful interactions down the road. But all this prep hasn’t made the Sisterhood impervious to tensions spilling over. I asked her if people have quit the Sisterhood in the past. She chuckled in response. “We’ve had board members resign. We’ve had people in chapters leave. Absolutely. People are here by choice,” she explained. “Not everyone’s ready to accept that kind of listening. You kind of need to be in a compromised position.”
Aftab herself was apprehensive about the viability of this kind of group, and readily admitted that other groups like it have collapsed. But she says those other groups often overburdened themselves. The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, on the other hand, she says, is not an advocacy group, but rather a dialogue group. “Our premise was different. It wasn’t the imam, the rabbi, and the priest walk into a room and talk about Religion 101. Our premise was, we’re having women come into our house, a place of vulnerability, they’re meeting my family, they’re seeing how I eat, and we’re going to have a conversation about a topic that you’re told not to talk about. And inshallah we will continue to do that, but it’s not easy,” Aftab said.
Over the years, the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom has grown, forming new chapters with thousands of Muslim and Jewish women members that span across the United States. Many women have joined and left the group since, but Aftab insists that the friendships established keep the group bound each time violence in the region flares up again. For example: One year an escalation coincided with the month of Ramadan. The group was convening at a Muslim woman’s house for iftar, and when one of the Jewish sisters arrived, she gave the host a hug and said, “If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t even want to see you right now with what’s going on overseas.” Aftab says that’s what the sisterhood is meant to do, just to make it a bit more difficult to dehumanize the other. “Maybe because we’re an organization of women, maybe we see things a little softer. A majority of us are mothers. We’re all daughters, of course. And maybe we have a different way of seeing life because we bring life into the world,” she said.
Amal wonders if there was a way to better communicate with her Israeli friend, and worries whether unfollowing him was the right decision, because of the possibility that she was the only non-Zionist person in his circle. “It’s a bummer that our friendship ended this way,” she said. “I felt guilty, because what if I’m the only Muslim this person knows? … I didn’t realize until after I unfriended him that I could have restricted him so then he could still see [some of] my posts. I don’t know. It’s crazy that I feel this guilt.”
Aftab doesn’t have advice for people like Amal who are doomscrolling about the siege on Gaza right now, beyond the obvious (but often hard to follow) admonishment to simply consume less of it. “I also have those type of people in my social media circle and quite frankly, I press X, hide, because I don’t want to see it. But I don’t unfriend them,” she said.
Aftab mentioned that while the past couple of weeks have felt particularly existential, among the first people to reach out to her to ask how she was doing were Jewish members of the Sisterhood. “I’m getting responses saying, ‘We’re here for you.’ There has absolutely been a feeling that we’re in this together,” Aftab said. “Sometimes there are things posted in these chats that are difficult. Of course they’re difficult. We actually have taken steps to say, ‘You know what, guys, unless there’s something positive, don’t post or repost things. Don’t go there.’ ”
But they’re not just in there patting each other on the back. They’re talking about what is happening. “Right now, it is very difficult because we don’t always talk the same language,” she said. “For me, hearing the word terrorist, I hear that differently than how my Jewish sister hears that. Just like when I say that we’re on the precipice of genocide, which I said in these chats about a week ago, that also is difficult for some Jewish ears to hear as well.”
Aftab takes comfort in knowing the group has held strong so far. “We have a conference coming up in November. That’s going to be a challenge. But all I can say is this has actually motivated me to continue this work, and this has actually motivated me to not run away.”
She knows that she’s in it for the long haul. “The situation, Israel-Palestine, has not sorted itself out,” she said. “So we just do what we can. We take one step at a time. And I, as a person of faith, I say, ‘Hey, I pushed that rock. And if that rock is not meant to move, that’s because it’s ordained by Allah,’ then I did my job and I can sleep with myself at night.”
