Over the past 16 months, I have held conversations with educators from pre-K through college about the way the conflict in Gaza has impacted their schools. The themes that started to emerge from these conversations were so unexpected — and so pervasive —that I started to take notes. Two things immediately became crystal clear:
- Everyone’s ideas and feelings were thoughtful, tender, empathetic, fearful, torn and complex; everyone was searching for answers.
- If the people I spoke with had gathered for a group conversation, everything they had in common, despite their differences, would likely never have surfaced.
Over the course of my conversations, I witnessed layer after layer of thought, feeling, connection, opinion and question. Nobody’s first statement was their only statement. Together, we found our way toward helpful reframes, ways to understand the enormity of the conflict in their communities and in their hearts.
Over a year of listening, supporting, workshopping and teaching, I have been so moved and also surprised. Beneath the volatile surface of this conflict, there is much connecting these diverse individuals who appear to disagree.
What follows is nine themes that have emerged over this past year. The divisions that surfaced will not disappear with the cessation of conflict and other developments to come. Following a descriptions of these themes, I offer recommendations for holding your community as you move forward.
Theme 1: Presenting this conflict as binary, as if it has only two “sides,” is inaccurate and unhelpful.
This is a complex situation that is often put into a binary. Many people have allegiances to both “sides” and don’t fit neatly into a binary “either-or” framing. Even when people took a side because they felt they had to, they were rarely 100% aligned with that side and expressed disapproval of the violent, absolutist or destructive views and actions expressed by others on their side. People on each side had empathy and compassion for the other side. As this paragraph makes clear, it’s hard to even talk about the fact that there are more than two sides, without using the word “side.”
The more I read about this conflict, the more I realize that this is not Israeli v. Palestinian. It is not Muslim v. Jew. It is not Black v. White. This is about governments, terrorist groups, Hamas, illegal settlers, innocent civilians, colonialism, U.S. investment in Middle Eastern politics, Muslim Palestinians, Christian Palestinians, secular Palestinians, Bedouin people, Arab Israelis, progressive Israelis, Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, Ethiopian Israelis, European Israelis, Russian Israelis, Zionists, Anti-Zionists, religious American Jews, secular American Jews, American business interests, American military interests, European military interests, Republicans, Democrats, Millennials, Baby Boomers, anti-Netanyahu factions on the right and on the left of Israel, oil companies, anti-Netanyahu factions on the left and on the right of the United States, the governments of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, non-violent peace activists, violent peace activists, children, doctors, nurses, chefs, university professors, parents, congresspeople with their own agendas, think tanks, politicians and more.
Theme 2: Nervous systems have been hyper-activated by this conflict.
This conflict has sent many people into our limbic systems, into our “lizard” brains where we are alert for danger — poised to fight, flight or freeze, and unable to access our grounded and rational selves.
People who peacefully co-existed in multiracial, multifaith schools before Oct. 7, 2023, have, in some cases, become violent, made threats and have surveilled fellow parents or teachers for having a different policy position or even a different cultural background. Some people’s nervous systems are so hyper-activated by this conflict that they cannot listen, they cannot engage beyond making threats or aggressively wielding whatever power they have. Conflicts have erupted over dress, language, social-media posts, public statements and silence.
Educators shared stories of finding themselves in conversations with other adults (often parents) ostensibly about how to best support students that ultimately became about convincing, debating or dumping and running, where educators felt used for parents’ catharsis, leaving them exhausted, heavy and burdened.
Most educators felt that there was no right thing to say and no right way to stay silent.
Theme 3: Many people are feeling like hypocrites.
Educators — of different political persuasions — expressed feeling like a hypocrite for loving or supporting people on the other “side.” Some examples include people feeling caught between what feels morally correct and people they love. Or when one’s political community dictates one allegiance while one’s personal relationships demand multiple others. Sometimes, people supported one side but did not want to align with an individual on that side who has violent or inhumane views. People who want space just to hold the people in pain felt they could be seen as copping out. People feel pressure to choose a side while wanting to hold space for all. People were accused of “both-side-ism” for not choosing.
It is not hypocritical to show up for people in your community, even if they come to different conclusions from you or your political community. Many educators want to — and should be able to — comfort students and families in their pain without declaring allegiance to a “side.” It is not hypocritical for an educator to support the individuals in their community. When people are traumatized or fearful, they cannot hear another person’s perspective until their fear and trauma have been heard. When others listen to their fear, anxiety and trauma, it enables them to show up more fully, to listen more carefully, to become more able to be in community.
There are people in your sphere of influence who will be able to show up well (or better than they would have) because you were able to listen to them. Hurt people hurt people. But healed people heal people. And healed people are better able to work together towards productive movement.
One caveat to this is that it requires us to distinguish between “good-faith actors” and “conflict-stirrers.” Listening to the pain and hurt of good faith actors can help them to grow beyond their automatic reactions and build their capacity to sit with complexity. But conflict-stirrers do not have openness to process; they do not want to understand the perspectives of others and use the process to further their own agenda.
We need to teach multiple perspectives about Oct. 7, so that people can grasp the depth, the global complexity and the historical relevance of the conflict while understanding the meaning in their own community as well.
Theme 4: We need more education.
Very few school professionals were experts on Middle East politics prior to Oct. 7. In November, December and the year that followed, they hustled to get up to speed but struggled to identify how to get more education without being fed a political agenda. As one person shared, “online resources and outside agencies would come in and tell us that one side is more important than another.” It has taken months of releasing statements, choosing not to release statements, hosting professional developments or choosing not to do so, and then processing the critiques that emerged in response to realize that there may not be an objective accounting of this conflict.
What we have then, are perspectives.
When I studied abroad in South Africa in 1998, the University of Cape Town realized that South African history could not be taught with any legitimacy if only one perspective was covered. Eight years after the end of apartheid, consensus about history wasn’t possible. And so each historical event was taught from multiple different perspectives.
It will likely take a long time before we are able to learn about or teach about Oct. 7, as well as the following 16 months, from just one perspective. There isn’t one statement that will make everybody feel heard and seen. Instead, we need to teach multiple perspectives, multiple “sides” so that people can grasp the depth, the global complexity and the historical relevance of the conflict while understanding the meaning in their own community and city as well.
Theme 5: In their pain, people sometimes forget the larger structures of oppression within which we pre-exist.
A Jewish parent asked a Black educator, “Do you know what it’s like to feel your children aren’t safe?” Because she recognized and related to the terror of not being able to protect one’s children, the educator leaned in. But she knew that on another day, this same parent would see the short-sightedness of her own question.
Educators who leaned towards supporting Israel hesitated to share their support publicly because they feared that they couldn’t explain their support sufficiently for others to understand. Some of those with whom I spoke who supported Israel and disagreed with the Israeli government nevertheless felt an emotional connection to Israel and to people who they loved who lived there. Israel was important to them as a homeland for Jewish people. They feared that their colleagues would misunderstand them, shame them or exclude them if they said what they really felt. Mostly, they felt sad and isolated from the people around them.
Some people shared that they could see that their Muslim and Palestinian students were getting less support from the school than their Jewish students. Terrified as they were, Jewish families were able to give voice to their terror, to ask for support. Muslim and Palestinian families felt afraid to speak up publicly in their school communities or to demand services from the institution.
Educators who leaned towards supporting Palestine felt that they would lose their jobs if they stated their support publicly. One person shared that her father told her that as a Muslim, she could get killed for supporting Palestinians publicly. Others did watch co-workers lose their jobs for the same reason. Mostly, they found spaces outside of school to share collective grief and express their views.
In another case, White people identifying as antiracist declared it racist to support Israel, raising the frustration of many People of Color in the same school, who felt it was an unhelpful and un-nuanced conflation, which ignored very real and unrelated local issues of racism.
Educators used words like “frozen over,” “imploded” and “underground” to describe the atmospheres they experienced at school.
Overwhelmingly, I heard from educators who wanted all of their students to feel safe, to feel valued, to be protected to practice their religion, to be protected to be themselves.
Theme 6: Educators seek personal integrity despite their individual political insignificance.
Educators recognized that even if they were to declare a personal position, and even if their institution were to take a stand for one “side” or another, it likely wouldn’t change the course of the conflict. And yet, it mattered to people to have a position. This seemed to be less the result of external pressure to choose a side (which also existed, as we’ve explored), but more the result of a desire to stand in one’s personal integrity, holding fast to one’s values. People sought the human way to respond. They desired to take a position or to learn more as a means of resisting naiveté or manipulation. They wanted to take decisive action without being hypocritical. They wanted to hold a personal truth without letting that truth obscure their vision of others’ truths.
Theme 7: Communities cannot be places that require 100% agreement.
Some educators felt two competing priorities: speaking up about injustice while giving students and families a place to air their fear and anxiety. They also realized that the words that are reaffirming for some are hurtful to others.
If you are being critiqued from two opposing groups, you might be walking a narrow line that lies between the two. Where a community stands on the conflict is not one point on a line. More commonly, it is a range, a spectrum in which there will always be outliers. A community could choose to remove the outliers (ostracize, alienate, ignore), but the new range will still be a spectrum — not a point. On the new spectrum, there will still be outliers. We can’t cut people out of our institutions (or our lives) simply because they’re not 100% aligned with the mainstream viewpoint. And we can’t let others in our community — in their grief and fear, which often looks a whole lot like anger — make that demand. When we do that, we simply narrow the spectrum of belonging. There will still people who don’t belong. Do we keep cutting people out until we are a community of one?
When talking to the community, all messages will be more likely to land if they are rooted in a larger shared purpose and mission that community members have fidelity to.
Theme 8: Educators want to protect their students.
Educators want to protect their Jewish students from antisemitism. Educators want to protect their Muslim students from Islamophobia. Educators want to protect Palestinian students from ethnocentrism. Educators want to protect their Israeli students from anti-Israel sentiment that is about their government, not about them as individuals.
What else is there to say? I met an educator who has been committed to Palestine rights their entire adult life. But when Israeli students moved into their classroom after Oct. 7, seeking a safe place away from Israel, that educator embraced and supported those individual students and their families, committing themselves to building a network of support for their traumatized students. I met Jewish educators, raised with an unquestioning allegiance to Israel, who cried together with their Palestinian students because both felt so much grief for a region they both saw as a homeland, and both struggled to find people who understood.
The educators I have met have strong ideological commitments. That is why they teach. They are people of moral principal and commitment to humanity. They long to take a stand because they believe in the power of the individual to stand up and make their voice heard. And yet, as educators, they put the psychological and physical safety of each of their students first.
When we fight about this in our local schools and communities, we do so because we are responding to one another as if our lives are at stake. This kind of panicked energy stops us from being able to hear one another.
Theme 9: Everyone wants to have a solution, because that’s what ends this.
Everyone wants a solution yesterday. That’s what facilitates peace. That’s what stops the killing. A solution would settle the fight, flight, freeze response that unsettles us all. But no one I talked to really has a solution. Many despaired that they fear there isn’t one.
In our institutions, we need to sit together with the frustration that we are not in charge, and that we are unlikely to solve the conflict no matter how perfect our statement or how determined our viewpoint. The fight, flight, freeze reaction that many of us experience demands simple, fast solutions. Sitting with messiness is a practice of building tolerance for uncertainty. It is a skill we can build for relating to one another amid the anguish we experience when we realize that we cannot end this thing right now by being righteous enough or sad enough or angry enough.
In order to build our capacity to sit with messiness, we must be able to ground ourselves. One method of grounding includes co-regulating by giving and receiving genuine empathy. Empathy does not mean agreement.
Remember that this is conflict is global, but it is waged locally. People all over the world are grieving. Only some people’s lives are at stake. When we fight about this in our local schools and communities, we do so because we are responding to one another
as if our lives are at stake. This kind of panicked energy stops us from being able to hear one another. If, in the very moment of the conversation, our lives are not literally being threatened, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that. We can support those whose lives actually are at stake by grounding ourselves in our own immediate reality and moving away from automatic panicked reactions.
Sitting with messiness is a practice of building tolerance for uncertainty. We cannot end this thing right now by being righteous enough or sad enough or angry enough.
Ask some people, and they will tell you the situation is complex. Ask others, and they will tell you it’s simple. When I asked a wise mentor what he thought, he responded, “Parts of it are complex. Parts of it are simple.”
Practices for healing as we move forward
Here are some strategies for engagement to keep in mind:
- Practice peace.
This invitation comes from both Israeli peace activist (Ami Dar) and Palestinian peace activist (Ali Abu Awwad) in this
TED Conversation who say that the actions of people abroad often deepen, expand and exacerbate the conflict, which does nothing to heal the conflict. But, they say, we have a choice to deepen, expand and practice peace, which actually does expand the peace in the world.
Practicing peace includes:
- Seeing people as three-dimensional.
- Remembering that most of your conversations and local actions will not change the conflict, but will have a big impact on the people around you in terms of their willingness to learn about it and engage with it.
- Multi-perspectival education for yourself and others.
- Resisting slogans that simplify complex emotions and experiences.
- Ask for consent to talk about the conflict.
I was recently offered this new way to apply the idea of “consent” to hard conversations, and I find it incredibly useful. It means pausing and asking if people are ready to have the conversation, rather than launching into it with your own questions or opinions. It means recognizing that conversations about Palestine-Israel can be deeply emotional, for some more than for others. For some it feels like a thought experiment whereas for others it can feel like their life (or the lives of people they love) is at stake. To have the conversation well, we need to be able to ask and give consent — to be able to consider whether we’re in a good enough space to talk about it and still go on with the day afterwards. This isn’t about policing interactions as much as it is about slowing down the conversational roll so that participants can be mindful about their time and energy. It is about having the conversation when all participants are ready to do so, so that any conflict engaged is healthy conflict.
People won’t always ask us for consent, but we can ask ourselves, “Am I ready for this conversation?” One educator mentioned that she notices how different her conversations are if she’s eaten recently (or not), and whether she has gotten enough sleep. She’s learning to postpone conversations when she knows that physically she doesn’t have the patience or stamina to be empathetic. She even does this with her solo engagement on the issue. As someone who is deeply invested in the people of that region, she has learned to ask herself whether she’s ready to take in the news. She finds all of the news reports to be emotionally overwhelming, and she has learned to pace her own consumption of the news so that she is able to take care of her own children and students without breaking down.
- Create opportunities to talk.
The two prompts I have found most useful are
– What was your first story, your first narrative about Israel and Palestine?
– How do we want to be with one another (at ______ school) with regard to this conflict?
This second prompt is not a prompt that invites people to share their statement or their politics. It’s about how we want to be with one another in this community as we process this conflict, as we engage in ongoing learning and support.
Other, more therapeutic prompts include:
– Where does it hurt?
– What is the human need that is being threatened in this moment, this conversation?
All questions should be slowed down and followed by reflective listening practices, so that they don’t turn into debates. Speed activates our panic responses while slowness makes it possible to stay grounded and open to listening.
- Build relationships.
Journalist and author of
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Amanda Ripley, shows that one way to keep conflict healthy is to stay in relationship. When the number of everyday positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, it creates a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy. Ripley cites research from John and Julie Gottman who say that, in marriage the magic ratio of positive to negative interactions is 5-1. The more opportunities we create for people to connect with one another as whole, three-dimensional human beings (not one-dimensional beings shaped by one singular aspect of our identities), the more we can learn to sit with one another in community, rather than grasping at each other’s necks in intractable conflict.
- Apply pre-existing community norms.
Revisit the community norms you use for other challenging conversations, whether they are about race, gender identity, politics or any other topic that requires perspective-taking, listening and learning. Get a small team together to discuss how those norms apply to talking about Israel and Palestine and share with the broader community. In doing this, you help to build the container for how your community can interact around this topic, and you are building it on existing evidence of having successfully done hard work together before. Remind your community of your capacity to do hard things together.
With students, it is worth asking what they need to feel supported, brave and informed in these conversations. How do they want to listen, support, challenge, be supported and be challenged? Most educators are excellent facilitators who can run this conversation without having to be an expert on global affairs.
- Help educators continue to educate themselves.
Create opportunities for learning. Access your history teachers, who (knowing history teachers) take very seriously the responsibility of teaching multiple perspectives. When seeking outside speakers, learn more about the organization’s approach and assumptions. The next step your community takes depends a lot on where they currently are, what they already know and what they need to know.
Conclusion
What we learned that painful weekend last October is that conflict in the land of Israel and Palestine is global. The aftershocks reverberate throughout the ground we stand on. The grief itself is geological, planetary. A temperamental gravity, it tethers us to and untethers us from the Earth, ourselves and one another.
Let us find our way back to one another and to community. Let us account for the orbit of these unpredictable forces and ground ourselves in our bodies and in our communities. Doing so will not solve the problem. But it will stay that panic and reactivity which prevent us from accessing robust internal and community resources that we have built over the past several years.
I invite us all to hold in our heart all those who grieve and feel fear. Hold and weather the contradictions without judging yourself as hypocritical. And move boldly in the direction of community, three-dimensionality and multiple perspectives.
[If you have practices or policies that have been effective in healing divisions, supporting wounded people, educating students, families, staff and faculty or otherwise addressing the ongoing pain of this time, please contact me via alimichael.org/contact. I’d love to hear and redistribute strategies for healing and learning.] 
One Response
Absolutely the Best essay I have read on the complexities of the horrible mid East conflicts and how much we have collectively struggled to learn, relate to others, navigate our emotions and hold space for the side spectrum of points, positions, parts and emotions that whirl in us not just post October 7 but on generational and collective levels in a wide range of contexts. Thank you so much for this clear, compassionate and pragmatic wisdom 🙏🏻💎💙✨