On Tripping over a Gaza-Shaped Hole in My Local London Park: Do You End a Friendship over a Genocide?

We’d meant to avoid the subject, my friend and I. We’d had some tense moments since October 7: a few barbed dinner party exchanges and a couple of conversations with raised voices on city benches, whereupon we’d agree that we should stop talking about the topic. Yes, we’d texted one another links and book titles to explain our respective positions, but they hadn’t helped. So we went to the park with an unspoken but mutual agreement to avoid mention of Gaza and Israel.

We planned to walk my dog Jasper, and to chat as we had during our nearly two-decade-long friendship, first forged when our youngest kids were kindergarteners. We could talk of families. Books. North London gossip. Wild European youths and long-distance daughtering and up-close mothering and sideways wife-ing. How cumin punched above its weight, herbally speaking. The Pixies and Mumbai and the moon and the marvelousness of Maggie Gyllenhaal. Writing in pictures and filming in metaphors. Ottolenghi stews and lawyers’ rates and what proportion of admiration to loathing Gwyneth Paltrow deserved. Cancer treatments and autistic traits and Italian islands. The price of filling up a fridge these days, even when you bought from the supermarket’s bottom shelves. Philosophies of time and Islamic modernist thought and Estée Lauder Advanced Night Serum. Hormones (see teenage, menopausal). Early Cassavetes and the late Queen. Car insurance and broken hearts. American fascism and Elena Ferrante novels. Among other things.

In short, we had many, many topics of which to speak, that spring afternoon. And we rambled delightedly for a while, catching up on the months since we’d spoken properly, while Jasper snuffled in bushes, then pissed on them.

But then, suddenly, there it was. Like a root tripped over in the undergrowth, that subject. We fell into the gaping Gaza-shaped hole we’d dug for two years.

And our voices hardened, my left jaw tightened, and my heart rate rose.

We were at it again, spitting out our half-remembered facts and talking points. Who was kicked out of their rightful home? Who was ethnically cleansed? Who had rights, and where? Why it was so wrong to have one Jewish State and so many Muslim ones. Why I disliked the concept of any ethno-nationalist state.

Our historical time frames differed wildly. She talked in terms of thousands of years, since the destruction of the Second Temple launched the Jewish diaspora. My anchoring date was 1948, and my exiled people were the 750,000 Palestinians living there then, whose grandchildren still held rusty keys to family houses they could no longer return to. I conceded that the issue went back a bit earlier, to the 19th century, when British anti-semites and imperialists wanted to send Jewish people to the Holy Land.

But what about Hamas and Hezbollah, and the states circling Israel that wanted to destroy it?

But what about genocide?

But what about self-protection?

And on we went, circling the park, Jasper glancing up nervously from time to time at our increasingly harsh tones.

Then, a moment pausing on common ground, when she spoke of her fear for the global Jewish community, pointing out how small and fragile it was. She’s not Jewish, but she feels empathy.

I said as a Jew, I agree; it’s scary. (But I know she’s skeptical that I’m truly Jewish, what with my bagel-and-a-schmear cultural references and my rarely-used menorah, but no synagogue, and little knowledge of my mother’s faith.)

I went on: Who is putting the Jewish diaspora in danger, but the pair of murderous psychopaths leading Israel and the US?

An oasis of agreement, found in our mutual loathing of Trump and Netanyahu. And then we started up again, our faces pinkening, our eyes reddening.

“Didn’t the Qur’an say…” she ventured.

“Don’t even start with the Qur’an,” I hissed. “I literally wrote a book on it, so don’t you dare lecture me on quotes ripped out of it by Islamophobes.” I know she thinks that all my years writing about Islam have made me naive about what Israelis face.

We’re scaring Jasper now, who in an unprecedented move in his 7 years on earth, tugged on his leash to leave the park and go back home.

Now we’re shouting in the middle of the park’s path, making nonplussed joggers and embarrassed-looking families with baby buggies steer around us.

“I am a Zionist!” she declared. “Yes—a Zionist!”

“I’m not!” I yelled back.

She’s in tears; I was near them.

I checked my watch. I was due at home, and told her I needed to go.

I walked her to her bicycle, trying to smooth things over without erasing the truth: that Gaza is a genocide, and Israel’s actions, and America’s support of it, are unconscionable.

She worries, she said, voice shaky, that she is out of step with the world’s opinion. I don’t say so, but I believe she is. Over the past year or so, my stance has become a mainstream one, and hers, an outlier held by minorities, albeit still one enabled by the overwhelming might and resources behind it.

She unlocked her bike, and we hugged tentatively. We promised to talk more and listen more.

As I walked a visibly relieved Jasper home, I knew I meant every word. I wasn’t going to break with her on this. I want to sit uneasily in this friendship we have built over the years, as our children grew and we went through sickness and health, through richer and poorer, all while the world grew hotter and meaner and more violent.

Many others have lost friends over Gaza, stopped speaking to family members, left synagogues and support groups. But what good, I wonder, does silence bring anyone? It certainly won’t help the Palestinians we have the luxury of arguing about while strolling in leafy Western parks.

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