Yasmeen Tsipena

Images of babies buried beneath rubble, mothers clutching the lifeless hands of their children, and piles of helpless bodies in need of medical attention flood timelines and social media feeds around the world.

 

Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza has brought the decades long land dispute onto a global stage. As the death toll rises —now estimated at 30,000— the war’s impacts trickle down to the local level. In Southern California, Arabs and Jews mourn the loss of community members abroad while also fearing a rise in hate crimes as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia rise nationally.

 

On February 21 in Santa Barbara, the echoes of protest chants bounced from wall to wall, disrupting the usual quiet of the UCSB library.  Some clutched their skateboards and backpacks, while others held up the corners of painted tarps reading “End the Occupation,” as the group made its way to the other side of campus.

 

The demonstration attracted around 90 people, many sporting black and white Palestinian headdresses, or keffiyehs. Met with curious glances, uninterested headphone-bearing passersbys, disdainful stares, and the occasional woo of support, the group marched on. Among the crowd was Palestinian business owner Halima Sophia Fadila.

 

Fadila’s parents and seven brothers live in in the occupied West Bank, north of Jerusalem. She moved to Santa Barbara 28 years ago but struggles to leave her home in Palestine when she visits. For her, Palestine evokes family, the smell of bread, identity, the history of who she is.  A home she chooses to fight for.

 

Never did she anticipate the level of brutality that came with the aftermath of October 7. Expecting retaliation and casualties comparable to the Arab Israeli wars of 1948 and 1968, it quickly became clear that the intensity of this war was unlike anything she had ever seen.

 

“Waking up on October 7, it felt like somebody hit me with a knife,” said Fadila. “They were already killing Palestinians daily anyways, so I knew a lot of lives would be lost, but I really didn’t know the depth of the retaliation.”

 

Fadila, plagued with feelings of overwhelm and frustration, directs her energy into the organization of pro-Palestinian protests in Santa Barbara.  She is a member of the Central Coast Anti-War Coalition, an organization that spearheads many pro-Palestinian efforts in the area in tandem with the Santa Barbara chapter of feminist organization and non-profit CODEPINK.

 

“When you have a situation in your life that is overwhelming, the best way to cope is to be active and try to do something about it,” she said. “Even if you believe whatever you’re doing is not really putting a dent into what’s going on, you still do it. Because if you don’t, you fall into a dark hole that is impossible to come out of.”

 

Her frustration with local activism is that it is hard to see results on the national and international level, which sometimes leads to feelings of helplessness. Mobilizing opposition to U.S. policy does not seem to move fast enough compared to how quickly activity escalates in the Middle East. 

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Fadila’s work with the Central Coast Anti-War Coalition spans a large range of efforts. From educational workshops and conversations with pro-Israel organizers, to protesting weapons manufacturers and demanding local politicians to call for a ceasefire, she sometimes feels helpless in the face of it all. 

 

“You are so spread thin that you struggle to decide what to focus on because everything feels equally important,” she said. “You get overwhelmed on that level, on top of the stress of what feels like slow accomplishment.”

 

However, Fadila refuses to give up. She pleads for protest efforts to be geared towards demanding a ceasefire and getting humanitarian aid into Palestine.

 

“First thing is first, as human beings, we need to focus on Palestinian human needs, such as food, medicine, water, and electricity,” she said. Fadila emphasized that there cannot be political discussions and negotiations for peace between Israel and Palestine until they have the resources and energy to keep going.

 

She insists that these efforts are not futile, and that social media has given the Palestinian cause a platform it has never had before. Think tank and polling firm Data for Progress carried out a poll in December 2023 showing that 61% of likely American voters support the U.S calling for a permanent cease-fire, a majority that Fadila thinks is due to the role of social media in spreading awareness of Palestinian suffering.

 

Just a few miles away on State Street, Amy Katz, a Santa Barbara-based Jewish photojournalist, finds it frustrating that people are quick to empathize with Palestinians but unsympathetic to Israeli suffering. Having attended several pro-Israel rallies and vigils for her work, she said that she and others in the Santa Barbara Jewish community were shocked and grief-stricken by the October 7 attack, in which Hamas killed 1200 — many burned, decapitated, raped and tortured — and took 240 hostage, the worst single-day death toll for Jews since the end of the Nazi genocide that targeted them in 1945.  

 

“Israel is so integral to every aspect of Judaism. So even if people haven't been there, kind of in a metaphoric or mythological sense, they have … a connection through the teachings,” she explained. “So, to hear about the attack was very upsetting.”

 

The war seems impossible to process for Katz. She struggles to see a way forward and frustrated by the intensity of the divide between both sides. It is upsetting for her to see Palestinians dying but she believes the war would end quickly if the Israeli hostages were returned.

 

According to a 2024 report by The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, the majority of left-leaning Jews (57%) and Muslims in the U.S (78%) both favor a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. But the war distances Katz from her usual political leanings. “It's very upsetting to me, because I identify as a liberal,” she said. “But I have experienced myself how there's such extremism on the left and such ignorance when it comes to listening to the other side.” Katz feels that the left refuses to differentiate the policies of the Israeli government, such as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip, from the Jewish desire for self-determination.

 

On college campuses, both sides struggle to engage in productive dialogue with each other. Allen Schultz, film student whose family originally immigrated from Europe, finds himself frustrated with the “lack of nuance” in pro-Palestinian conversations.

 

The film major and co-president of the UCSB chapter of Hillel, describes October 7 as the “worst day of his life.” He immediately picked up the phone to check in with new friends and connections he had made while visiting Israel the summer prior.  He then had to get it together and craft a community response as co-president of their Hillel.

 

“It’s assumed that because someone is a Zionist, they support every action of the Israeli government and believe that it is immune to criticism. That is simply not the case,” Schultz said. “You have a lot of people refusing to listen and self-segregating in a lot of ways to avoid having these really meaningful conversations with each other.”

 

Schultz’s attention is directed more to the impacts of the war at home and on campus, than in the Middle East, he explained. He senses a growing intolerance on campus and focuses on cultivating safe spaces for Jewish students to talk about their fears.

 

“Some [Jewish students] people took activist roles relating to what’s happening in the Middle East, and amplifying [those] voices. But then there’s the side that is more focused on antisemitism and what the war has brought to the US in the last six months, which is primarily where I found myself involved,” he said.

 

Schultz also found himself leaning a great deal on the Jewish community for support, feeling isolated amid the public anger at Israel in the larger student population. Appreciative of the support of non-Jewish friends, he currently feels safest and most connected with his Jewish peers. Ultimately, his community fears rising antisemitic sentiment and the possibility of antisemitic violence, which Schultz feels is propagating quickly on social media.

 

“It really comes down to the lack of transparency and nuance that we're being fed on social media,” he said.

 

Ahmad Salam, IT project manager from Iraq and Irvine resident, also believes that social media plays a huge role in the way that the war is perceived and understood in the US — in a way that raises awareness of the Palestinian plight.

 

“Social media this year is the first time I’ve seen non-Arab Americans, to a large degree white people and African Americans, discussing Palestine and finding the parallels,” Salam said. “It’s done a great job in how it creates self-awareness and puts pressure on politicians.”

 

Salam has personal ties to Palestine, on top of being an Arab and sharing many cultural ties with Palestinians. His childhood friend now lives in Rafah—a south Gaza town that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to attack—but he has not heard from him, nor does he know if he is alive.

 

At the same time, following social media closely adds to a sense of overwhelm, flooding timelines with images and articles about the war. Salam finds himself only wanting to post about Gaza, because nothing else feels relevant or more important.

 

Major publications including Time, Forbes, CNN, and NPR have produced articles on the importance of protecting mental health in these times. A press release from the American Psychological Association stated they were “gravely concerned for the physical safety and mental health of the millions of Israelis and Palestinians affected by the growing surge in violence.”  And they were right to be.

 

“I feel very down.  I only post related items. I can't ignore it, and I don't want to, but watching everything just makes me sad and depressed,” Salam said.

 

Nomi Morris, a former Middle East correspondent and journalism professor at UCSB, is alarmed by the ways social media is affecting the dialogue about the war. After years covering Israel and Palestine, she champions voices and perspectives of coexistence. But social media mirrors the outside world, with each ideological camp entrenched in its side and demonizing the other.

 

“There is an extra level of despair. There’s always been the war, and the war of words. There’s always been two levels of this war going on at the same time. But the war of words, and the degree of venom and emotions is worse now than I've ever seen it,” she said.

 

She is most concerned with the lack of information on both sides and the distortion of facts on social platforms. Given that information is not coming from trustworthy journalistic sources, there is less commitment to spreading well-rounded perspectives and accurate information.

 

“There are all kinds of people of conscience, who are interested in the region, who get their news, not from traditional journalistic sources, but from sources that are cherry picking facts, to present a case on one side or the other. Everything is a quick meme or video. It’s what I would call the propaganda war. It is extreme, and it's what's educating people,” added Morris.

 

On the college campus level, the divide is abundantly clear. A tangible sense of frustration pervasively subsists, each camp threatened by the existence of the other. A die-in and teach-in at UCSB in support of a Palestinian state took place on March 8, organized by UCSB faculty in tandem with the student organization, Students for Justice in Palestine. As students lay on the cold concrete in front of the library raising pictures of human casualties, Jewish students standing only feet away at a Students Supporting Israel table cried into each other’s arms.