Intimate Catastrophe: Can Muslim-Jewish Women's Friendship in the UK Survive the Israel-Gaza War?

Through the philosophical-theological lens of the works of Jonathan Sacks, this paper will examine the multiple ways in which inter-faith friendships between Jewish and Muslim women in the UK have been held to account through the period of the (current) Israel-Gaza War. Conflict travels, and in this case especially, has been intimately felt by Jewish and Muslim communities globally. Arguably, friendship is ‘a relationship of ethical significance, with public, political, and spiritual dimensions’ (Ellithorpe, A., 2022) and friends necessarily have differing, often opposing, perspectives; each have complex communal and religious commitments; each wrestle with alternative truths. Inter-State conflict is a time when friendship might be seen to make excessive demands of us — to reach across what could be perceived as unbridgeable divides; this paper argues that although some friendships have inevitably fallen apart, others have been strengthened, deepened and have conspicuously intensified.