It's Not 'Trendy' to be Pro-Israel

As hundreds of thousands of young people rush the streets in cities across the world to protest Israel, the Jewish diaspora wrestles with identity, politics, and crumbling social circles.

“The hardest part has been dealing with the fact that a lot of people just have not been the friends that I thought they were.” Discloses Isabella Vinci, a political science graduate from the University of Nebraska. After deciding to spend a year volunteering in an elementary school in the coastal city of Netanya, Vinci made aliyah, a term used for Jewish diaspora migrants to Israel. Three months into her relocation to the suburbs of Tel Aviv, war broke out and the vanishing of her support system from the United States came with it.

“I've lost a lot of friends more so recently than I did before. I lost friends when I moved here [Israel] and then I lost more when the war started. Dealing with the fallout of my social circle has been really hard and that was something that I expected at some point, but I wasn't expecting it to feel so intense.”

As the Israel and Hamas conflict wages on to its seventh week, protesters across the world are seen chanting dangerous antisemitic slurs. College campuses in the US are epicenters for contentious anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations, spurring hate and anguish.

Perhaps the most challenging platform for anti-Israel sentiment is social media discourse. Hashtags circulating on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram such as #freepalestine and #standwithus create reductionist allegiances that miss complexity and nuance. Susan Linfield, author of The Lions’ Den, Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, and journalism professor at NYU, describes how Zionists, anti-Zionists, leftists and rightists for decades have had “the greatest difficulty in seeing Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in their particularity rather than as stand-ins for other struggles and other histories” (47).

Viewing the current unprecedented attack in Israel’s 75-year existence through the distorted lenses of social media content distribution and misinformation, leads many GenZ activists to miss crucial elements in this geopolitical conflict, mainly, particularity and scope.

As an American living in Israel, Vinci’s war time experience is fraught with online debates, blockings, and defriending. Vinci describes how exhausting it feels to attempt to reshape public perception on Israel, especially to her online community.

“I wish that people would learn more about the region and learn more about how it [Israel/Palestine conflict] is different from other conflicts and not be so quick to compare it to other things. Because comparison doesn't really serve much in something like this. Comparing it to apartheid, comparing it to genocide, comparing it to colonialism in any other part of the world, it's not even those things. It's deeper than that. And I think a lot of the false comparisons come from ignorance and not really knowing history. It is easy to tag on these buzzwords and try and make it seem like you understand something when in actuality, the people who are the loudest don't know nearly as much as they think they do.”

As US public support falters, the Israeli community stays united as ideological differences are pushed aside and instead, attention to hostage awareness, the relocation of southern and northern communities, and support for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), are at the forefront of local engagements. Mobilization efforts in previous anti-governmental protest locations like Habima Square, the Tel Aviv Art Museum, and Kaplan St., are now spaces where the families of hostage victims are pressuring Netanyahu’s government. The slogan: “Bring Them Home” is on a community website, an Instagram page, chanted at the recent Israel rally in Washington, DC, and used as a hashtag online. The hostage crisis is one of the most valuable points of leverage Hamas has over Israel and a driving force behind the war campaign.

However, as Palestinian civilian causalities reach staggering numbers, the Israeli government is reluctant to take accountability for destroyed infrastructure and Palestinian resettlement. Despite increased tensions within the Arab population in Israel, Chaya Mushka Korkus, argues for Israeli responsibility.

“You have people, settlers, who treat the Palestinians very badly and banish them piece by piece from their land. It is not right. So you have a responsibility. And until the government of Israel recognizes the pain of the Palestinian people, it's not going to be resolved- this conflict is not going to be resolved.”

Raised in the religious community of Bnei Brak, prior to the war Korkus attended the Speak Up seminar in Germany. Focused on facilitating discourse between Israeli and Palestinian women, Korkus connected with participants from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, across diverse religious affiliations. Her commitment to bridging cultural misconceptions is evident in her minority opinion surrounding the current conflict. This minority view is in part due to the intensity of the trauma from October 7th. Korkus goes on to say, “Israelis are unable to, and I understand it with all of my heart, to accept the grief and the sorrow and the loss of the other side because they are dealing with their own.”

Perhaps what one can gather regarding the future of Israeli and Palestinian relations is the shared collective narrative of loss. However, it should not go understated that right now is one of the most challenging times to be a Jewish person in the world since the Holocaust. As a result, the Jewish diaspora often receives residual contempt in times of conflict in Israel.

English teacher Sarah Pollock, currently lives in Madrid, Spain, and prior to that, worked in the Bedouin village of Rahat in Israel’s Negev desert. Pollock echoes sentiments of isolation. After having an intimate experience with Israel’s communities, she now lives in a part of the world with little alliance to the Jewish people.

“I think in the beginning, being a Jewish person here [Spain], in the immediate days after October 7th, was really dystopian. No matter where I looked from whatever part of the world people were coming from or living here, I couldn't find a single person with direct ties to what was happening, or at best educated.”

The distinction between education and self-proclaimed expertism is vital in approaching productive dialogues. More importantly, accepting the dynamism of truths exists at the core of Pollock’s reflections: “The truth that Jewish people deserve to live safely and freely in the land of Israel gets to exist alongside the truth that Palestinians get to live safely and freely in the land of Israel or Palestine.” Pollock explains.

A majority acceptance of nuance, seems distant as protests wage on, creating more polarization in their paths. For Pollock, collective liberation and peace does not exist if there is still “a side that doesn't know peace.” and, “being pro-Palestinian, for the sake of the Palestinian right to live in peace and prosperity, should then at the same time go hand in hand with combating anti-Semitism and the right of Jews to live in peace and prosperity.”

The dual persistence for peace and simultaneous suffering is evident for both Palestinians and Israelis. The four-day ceasefire in exchange for 50 Israeli hostages and 150 Palestinian prisoners appears a hopeful turn in the conflict. However, as Jews around the world attempt to make sense of widespread animosity, ideas about Zionism, anti-Zionism, and pressures to identify political affiliations, they are confronted with an asymmetrical dogma that threatens how society conceptualizes this conflict. For the Jewish diaspora, most want the threat of terrorism eradicated and support from

their communities. While uncertainty over the future permeates public perception, solidarity in Israel continues to prevail.

Scenes from the youth neighbourhood of Kfar Aza, photography by Amit Elkayam

Hostage release process, photography by Amit Elkayam