After a 15-year social media hiatus, a Southasian expatriate returns to the fray, aiming to fight back with empathy and love. Whether Israeli or Palestinian, Hindu or Muslim, why do we not give others the same grace we give to ourselves?
By Ali Azad /Sapan News
After a 15-year hiatus, I recently rejoined social media and found myself hooked on short-form videos from strangers. I had come searching for my friends.
With each swipe, I revealed my history, culture, and interests. The algorithm served me music videos from the 80’s Pakistani band Vital Signs and sound bites from Fareed Zakaria, identifying my nostalgia for the past and my interest in the present.
It is in this context that I was served what I consider my first rage-bait video.
The one-minute clip featured a man — the academic Norman Finkelstein, I would later learn — speaking with calm certainty. He declared that Israeli society is a “lunatic society,” backing his claim with statistics: A poll showing that 47% of Israeli Jews support killing everybody in an enemy city when the IDF enters it, and another where 70% of Jewish respondents said there are no innocents in Gaza.
My gut clenched as I heard these statistics. How can Israelis be so cruel? Believing there were “no innocents” and “killing everybody” implied that they were fine with the murder of women, children, and even babies.
Core beliefs
I fact-checked the polls and read up on Finkelstein, hoping the polls he cited were fabrications.
One of my core beliefs is that humans are, by and large, inherently good but often misled. Figures like Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King held this as a central tenet.
Even if this tenet were not empirically true, I would still act as if it were. Believing in the goodness of others, we offer them more than just the benefit of the doubt; we give them a reason to be good. Distrust begets distrust. Hate begets hate.
But it turned out Finkelstein wasn’t making up the polls. Millions of Israelis hold, what I consider, deeply troubling beliefs. Growing up in Pakistan, I had encountered prejudicial views about Jews. Not all Muslims think this way, but some do. And I wondered if perhaps the prejudiced views were more right than I’d realized.
Ultimately, I looked for more context. I asked, how did Israelis come to hold these beliefs? Did they always think this way?
Here’s what I found: The polls were conducted after Hamas’s brutality on 7 Oct 2023 resurrecting the ghosts of the Holocaust and centuries of violent antisemitism, touching the deepest nerve of Jewish historical trauma. In addition, the Israelis are in their own media bubble; their screens were dominated by the faces of hostages and the funerals of their soldiers.
They saw very little of the starvation in Gaza because they are trapped in an echo chamber that relentlessly reinforces their own existential fears and prejudices. And, finally, the polls do not capture the nuanced, complex emotions of living, breathing humans. It reduces them to numbers and simple, unambiguous statements.
In this context, I concluded that Israelis are not a lunatic society. They’re regular humans going through something extraordinary.
Humanising ‘the other’
Now, imagine a young Muslim man seeing the same clip. He might never fact-check Finkelstein; he may just log it away as definitive proof validating everything his parents had told him about Jews. That they are not to be trusted because they once betrayed the Prophet, Muhammad, may peace be upon him. The tragic irony is that even if this individual fact-checked the claim — as I did — he would have found the data to be accurate. How can we stop someone like that from thinking Israelis are less than human?
One way is to look within and give others the same grace we give to ourselves.
Polling by the Pew Research Center shows staggering prejudices in the Muslim world. Take Pakistan, for example. As many as 75% believe draconian ‘blasphemy’ laws are necessary, 76% support the death penalty for leaving Islam, and a mere 7% accept the persecuted Ahmadi minority as fellow Muslims.
Muslims often bend over backward to explain such numbers away, contextualizing them as poverty, illiteracy, brainwashing by the state, and other factors.
Why not give Israelis the same grace?
The irony is that some of Israel’s supporters, while contextualizing Israeli society’s disturbing beliefs, do not extend that courtesy to Palestinians. They make the case that Finkelstein makes about Israel, but in reverse. Muslims, they suggest, are a lunatic society.
The American philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris has greatly influenced me. I’ve used Waking Up, his meditation app, to establish my own daily meditation practice, and also to learn about Sufism, Stoicism, and Buddhism from the countless practitioners and teachers he’s featured.
So, it is disappointing to see Harris adopt a partisan stance similar to Finkelstein’s.Take one small example from a long post, in which Harris asks us to undertake a thought experiment that will, he claims, immediately make the moral calculus clear and lead us to side with Israel. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel, he writes, is that “If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.” And, he adds, this “happens to be true.”
By imagining disarmament in a contextless thought experiment, Harris gives Israelis the benefit of the doubt — that they put down their weapons — but doesn’t extend the same benefit to Palestinians.
Let’s contextualize his thought experience.
Imagine that the context of the thought experiment is that Israel dropped their weapons as part of a process in which the two sides had meaningful dialogue, built trust, and healed wounds.
Is Harris still certain that Palestinians — as a group — will commit genocide?
Just like he cannot guarantee that every single Israeli will drop their weapon in any realistic context of peace, there is no guarantee that every single Palestinian will abide by it. But there is no reason to think, in any realistic context that includes a real peace process, that one side would behave better than the other.
The ‘Comparison Trap’
In Finkelstein and Harris, we see a manifestation of what the American depolarization group Braver Angels calls the “Comparison Trap.” Democrats and Republicans hold up the most uncompromising, extreme fringe of the opposing side as the true representative of that entire population, while evaluating their own side strictly through the lens of its most peaceful, well-intentioned citizens.
This explanation applies not just to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict; it has historical resonance for the Southasian community.
In 1924, Hindu-Muslim polarization reached new heights in pre-Partition India. Author Ramachandra Guha, in his 2018 book, “Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948” noted that Asaf Ali, a prominent Indian independence activist, and the first Indian Ambassador to the United States wrote to Gandhi deploring the “disgraceful outburst of distrust and passion which has engulfed” the people. He blamed partisan local language newspapers in which”…every street brawl is a communal fight, and every worthless delinquent who bears a Hindu or Muslim name is held up as a type of the civilization which each name is supposed to represent.” In other words, the Comparison Trap is an age-old phenomenon that’s rampant today. One hopes we — especially the public intellectuals — would know to avoid it.
Abiding by Sapan News’ Social Media Ethics Pledge, which I signed, and urge other writers to adopt, I give Finkelstein and Harris the benefit of the doubt. I assume good intent; that they believe they are doing good by speaking out the way they are. But I think they forget that speaking truth is a virtue that often competes with other virtues, such as teaching, persuasion, connection, and peace.
To quote a popular Pakistani journalist, Munir Attaullah, “The bitter pill of fact must dissolve in the sweet solvent of our beliefs if it is to be absorbed in our bloodstream of reality.”
Finkelstein and Harris may be speaking some hard truths, but they are, in my opinion, definitely not persuading or connecting with the “other” side. They are mostly fueling the partisan flames.
So, why am I back on social media? Because there is too much fear, anger, and hate on social media. And I want to fight back with empathy and love.
Ali Azad is a Pakistani-origin writer living in the United States, writing under a pseudonym for security reasons. Find more of his work on Substack, Spotify, & Apple Podcasts, and follow his latest updates on Twitter and Bluesky.
Lead Image: Yin and Yang symbol displayed alongside social media icons. Image via Canva.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.
Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian
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