The non-Jewish Israel supporters who have lost friends over Gaza

“This went on for weeks, all the rows were happening on my Facebook page. I realised I was inadvertently giving a platform to their views. So I blocked them and we no longer speak. One of them had been my friend since we were at school. I look around and I fear this new normal where it has become acceptable to be antisemitic and I don’t understand why no one is doing anything about it.”

Geoff, an old friend, was one of scores of people to get in touch with me after I put a call out on Facebook asking if any non-Jews had fallen out with friends over the Israel-Hamas conflict. I’d seen it reported in a More in Common poll that around four out of every ten Brits who were either firmly pro-Israel or pro-Palestine would consider dropping a friendship because of the war.

While I barely know a Jew who hasn’t fallen out with at least one person over the war, I was curious about how this issue had become so toxic for people who had no skin in the game – as it were – that they would fall out with friends. This is a conflict that is 2,000 miles away but its impact on our lives, our politics, has taken on a life of its own.

My post attracted 350 comments and was shared dozens of times. The comments read like a confession of pain. Person after person described how they had fallen out with friends, siblings, children and how sometimes the damage might be irreparable.

The direct messages also came in from people too frightened to say how they were feeling publicly. For many, the pain is abiding, yet they are also terrified about being further cancelled in this world of binaries.

In some ways, the messages were a balm: it has felt lonely being a Jew in this increasingly hostile atmosphere. These are people, strangers, who have our backs and have paid the price for their conviction in the most awful of ways. Sometimes that conviction has even involved them arguing with anti-Zionist Jews.

But also, they exposed me to a world of antisemitism that lingers beneath the surface – the way that non-Jews talk to each other when Jews aren’t in the room.

Let’s start with the left.

People in the Labour Party say I’ve become far right. But my politics have not changed. I just believe I can be a socialist and left-wing without being an antisemite

Joan (not her real name) is 61 and has been a member of the Labour Party since she was 16. She’s on the left of the party and even voted for Corbyn, although in the run-up the 2019 election she began to become concerned at the way he simply saw allegations of antisemitism in Labour on his watch as a conspiracy.

And then October 7. A day later, she saw people on her Labour WhatsApp groups planning to attend a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the Israeli embassy. “I’ve always been someone who has spoken against racism and antisemitism and I was shocked that there was nothing from my Labour branch about October 7, nothing from my local council.”

Within weeks, colleagues were putting together a motion to condemn Israel. When she pushed for a condemnation of Hamas too, she was ignored by colleagues who then accused her of becoming hysterical. She ended up leaving the party which had been such a big part of her life. “I see people I went through so much with and they give me the cold shoulder. They look through me. I do still have a few friends, and they show me comments that have been made about me on WhatsApp groups. They say I’ve become ‘far right’. But my politics haven’t changed. I believe I can be a socialist and left-wing without being an antisemite.”

Bella, 57, who is from the North East, joined Labour when she was 18 but saw the writing on the wall in the Corbyn years. Back then, friends began slowly dropping off but it was Israel’s war on Hamas that almost ended her closest friendship. “The woman who was a bridesmaid at my wedding started off being supportive of Israel, but as the weeks went by she started saying she wasn’t happy with what’s going on there.

“I tried to provide her with information but she was watching the BBC and also had a Jewish friend who hates Netanyahu,”  says Bella whose response was to start wearing a Star of David necklace to show her solidarity with Jewish people.

“I think the problem with the BBC is the information they leave out. So something like ‘Israel kills 28 Palestinians in an airstrike’ may be factually correct but they will leave out the context that it was retaliation to a rocket attack. For months and months, the news stories about the evil Israel is supposed to have perpetuated has been unrelenting.

“My friend has gone with this view that if you support Israel, you want to kill babies. We used to speak every day but our rows got so bad that we agreed not to discuss it. But it became a big wall between us and now we only speak every couple of months.’

Kate McDonald, a 62-year-old Australian, knows how she feels. “My friends – arty, leftist types, to a person – accused me of supporting a genocidal state. I had one friend who I was close to through our shared loved of dogs. She was a no-nonsense Aussie but she dropped me over the war. I miss her.

“The feminists have really let me down. All those decades for the law to take rape more seriously then, all of a sudden, rape wasn’t really a crime if Jewish women were the victims. I don’t even call myself a feminist any more.

“I will never understand the world’s hatred of the Jews and for me it is especially upsetting to see it on Australia’s left, which has always been quite small and rather powerless. Anti-Zionism has been a sort of gift for them, something they organise around.”

The war has also created  a massive schism in the feminist community. Last month, FiLiA, which hosts the biggest grassroots feminist conference in Europe, announced there would be no event next year because it was still dealing with the repercussions of the last one in Brighton, which ended in a physical fight between pro-Palestine and pro-Zionist feminists. The charity has referred itself to the Charity Commission for inviting a pro-Hamas speaker to the event.

I saw feminists arguing whether the blood on an Israeli woman’s trousers crotch was because she’d been raped or handcuffed

Freya Papworth is a 41-year-old psychotherapist and abuse survivor who was part of the radical feminist movement and a volunteer for FiLiA. “The thing that shocked me after October 7 was the absolute silence on the feminist WhatsApp groups,” she says. “There wasn’t the usual response of: where are we going to protest  and how are we going to support our sisters.

“And then after the silence, it felt like sides were being drawn. I found myself in the middle of something I didn’t understand when I saw women arguing over whether the blood on the crotch of an Israeli woman’s trousers was because she’d been raped or had come from her handcuffs. This wasn’t feminism, or at least a feminism I recognised. A lot of academic and left-wing feminists are very anti-Zionist. I ran a FiLiA feminist craft group where we sew, crochet and knit. But what had been a place of sanctuary, somewhere that was meant to be fun, has became a place of censorship. When I posted about the march against antisemitism, I was told to take it down.There were whispers, silencing. Anyone with Zionist sympathies is made out to be a nasty, terrible person.”

Freya, who has set up a new movement called Feminists Against Antisemitism, ended up resigning from FiLiA, “which was incredibly painful,” she adds: “I am still me, but I no longer call myself a radical feminist.”

Things are perhaps even more stark in the Muslim world where being an open Zionist can lead to all sorts of hatred and pain.

“This might be a generalisation, but I think most Muslims are antisemitic,” says Ahmed, a 60-year-old doctor who has a Pakistani father and a white British mother. He spent his first few years in Pakistan, where he says even at school, “I remember being told that Israelis and Jews were very bad people. I remember an actual quote from my teacher saying that Israelis always wanted to take their revenge and this was a time when the country was more West-facing than it is now.

“I have quite a few Muslim clients and whether they are observant Muslims or Muslims who like to drink, they are all obsessed with ‘the genocide’ and how Zionism is evil. It shows me how potent the really fundamentalist strain of Islam in the UK.

“I’m an apostate and so I am not a Muslim. Before October 7, I was on the fence about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I essentially thought ‘poor Palestinians’, and that the Nakba was a real tragedy. But after October 7, I realised how the war had become a flashpoint for virulent antisemitism. I started to find out more about the conflict, I read social media posts by military experts like John Spencer and Andrew Fox and realised there was a lot of stuff people were getting angry about that just wasn’t true.

“I started to write a bit about it on Facebook, and one person I had real pushback from was a friend I’ve known almost all my life. I had to unfriend him because of the things he said. I’ve lost a dozen or more Facebook friends and more than a few live in Ireland. One person I trained with, who isn’t Irish but who moved to Ireland, around the time I started posting about Gaza, unfriended me as did her partner. And this has happened in real life too; everyone on the Pakistani side of my family – and I have about 27 first cousins – is obsessed with this conflict. It’s not that surprising, but it is dispiriting.”

Non-Jewish allies have also been impacted by antisemitism in the workplace – and the world of healing and mindfulness is ironically of the worst.

Lisa Li is a breath trauma specialist who has met Israelis through travelling, and visited the country several times. She has been shocked by the dehumanisation of Israelis within the well-being community.

“It has been pretty devastating to witness the naivety, the hatred and the blame,” says the 41-year-old. I’ve lost a few clients for writing pro-Israel posts, but it’s more acquaintances, friends and peers. There has been a slow drip, drip of attacks. There’s an inability to communicate. I’ve lost so many friends, and it has changed everything for me.

Lisa Li[Missing Credit]

“People I’ve known for ever have turned on me aggressively, calling me stupid. There is one guy I know from this community who started by asking, ‘Why would you align yourself with Jews who hate you?’ and then he started ranting about how Ashkenazi Jews are not really Jews and then went on to how they killed Jesus. Antisemitism is so deep-rooted some people don’t even know they suffer from it. They literally think Jews are like demons on the planet. It’s wild.

“This particular row went on and on and the guy ended up saying, ‘Why should I listen to a childless woman who is uneducated and has nothing to show for her life?’ The whole episode was deeply shocking. And so I am left with my Jewish friends, my Israeli friends. For me, standing up for Israel is like shining a light – one that has triggered people’s shadows.”

It hardly needs stating that it takes a special kind of bravery to stand up against antisemitism on campus. Ciara, 21, is studying for a masters in terrorism and counterterrorism, but it was during her history degree that she first became interested in antisemitism. “I remember October 7 and seeing people celebrating it and I didn’t really understand what was going on, so I started researching it,” she says. “I did a module on antisemitism and I remember distinctly a moment in the library when a friend turned to me and said, ‘Do you remember when the war started and Netanyahu looked really sick? And now he’s killing all these Palestinian children and it’s like the blood of these children has rejuvenated him.’

“I said to him, ‘We have just come out of a lecture about the blood libel and you were in the lecture and now you are saying this?’ He replied: ‘I just don’t like Netanyahu.’ I started to write on social media how Hamas had consistently said no to a peace agreement. And people started unfollowing me. These were people that I had been friends with for years, who I had lived with even.

A lot of them are getting information from TikTok, especially clipped videos from Al Jazeera. They take it as gospel

“Sometimes it’s the scale of the ignorance that shocks me. I have a job in a coffee shop and the staff were going on about how the ‘genocide’ was so bad. I asked them about October 7 and they said, ‘What happened on October 7?’ A lot of them are getting information from TikTok, especially clipped videos from Al Jazeera. They take it as gospel.

“They go on and on about ‘genocide’ but when I ask them to look at the numbers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, they shrug. I am still trying to wrap my head around this and my only conclusion is that this is antisemitism. The funny – not funny – thing is that one girl I was friends with at university who decided not to be friends with me any more over this has a job as a diversity inclusivity apprentice.”

Ciara is brave but lonely. Most of the friends she has found are Jewish or non-Jews who feel like her. “I have another non-Jewish friend who is studying English, and there was a lecture about colonialism in which the lecturer launched into how Israel is a colonial state. She put her hand up and said this wasn’t true, as the Jewish people are indigenous to Israeli, and he called her out in front of her entire class: ‘Look! She’s a Zionist.’ She’s OK now but at the time it was really hard for her.”

And even people who don’t move in communities where the Israel-Palestine question is likely to come up have encountered antisemitism – from their friends and family.

“One person who had seen my Facebook posts on Israel said, or rather spat, ‘You know what, you sound like… one of them,’ says Oliver, 46, who works in textile manufacturing.

He shows me a long message from one former friend who said: “Denying Gaza’s starvation is no less vile than denying the Holocaust.” Another wrote to tell him, “Your eyes are blind and your soul is blackened.”

At one point I thought my marriage was over. My husband deplored October 7 but was then definitely impacted by the BBC’s reporting of the war

“My mother has forbidden politics chat on our family WhatsApp group after my brother-in-law and my brother’s angry reaction to an article I shared about antisemitism,” he says. “On a more positive note, a once-close school friend who I had connected with on Facebook suddenly started liking my pro-Israel posts. We started DM-ing and I discovered that he had kept his Jewish identity a secret throughout our schooling. We are meeting up next month.”

It has been a real touchpoint within families. One woman, Sara, even described how, “At one point I thought my marriage was over and I am not exaggerating.”

Her husband was furious at her for posting online about Israel in support of a half-Jewish friend.

“My husband just likes the quiet life. He deplored October 7 but was then definitely impacted by the BBC’s reporting of the war.”

Another, Emma, reveals that she cannot discuss Gaza with her children, who call her a genocide supporter. “Friends, you can drop. You can’t do that with your children,” she says.

Diane tells me: “I’ve argued with my husband’s family about this conflict and I am the only one supporting Israel. They are very well educated and I have always admired their insights. What I don’t understand is why they feel so strongly about this conflict when they are not emotionally involved. I am dreading Christmas this year.”

I don’t understand why my husband’s family about this conflict when they are not emotionally involved. I am dreading Christmas this year

What is it about this conflict that generates such anger? It is something many of our non-Jewish allies are struggling to understand.

James, 50, who works in publishing, has one friend who has blocked him with “no explanation”. He thinks the binary thinking that was so evident during Brexit has been exacerbated by the pandemic and social media. 

“I think a lot of what we are seeing now was driven by isolation during the pandemic and the searching out of connections on social media, of people who will agree with and affirm you,” says James, who describes himself as being on the left and who has also disagreed with a Jewish friend who has “gone full Likudnik”. If you forge connections in real life, they’re not quite so self-selecting.

“People have become so used to having their opinions reinforced that they see them as indisputable moral absolutes,” he says. “Thus, anyone who disagrees with them is doing so in bad faith, and means you harm.

“And the pandemic encouraged conspiratorial thinking – the origin story of which is always antisemitism, a hatred that is so sunk so deep in Western culture, people just parrot it without realising what they are doing.

“How often do we hear people say ‘Israel kills babies’ but not say the same about Russia, or Sudan, or Syria? The truth is that if you cared about Palestinians, you wouldn’t laud political groups that literally celebrate their own civilian casualties.

“It’s analogous to the Carthaginians burning their children alive to satiate Moloch.

“When people explain what ‘Free Palestine’ actually means, you understand that the impulse is hating the Jewish state. Because the truth is that this is a conflict over which we in Britain actually have very little influence.”