The Israel-Hamas War Has Turned Group Chats Into Nightmares

The day that Hamas attacked Israel, Jacob, a Jewish café worker in New York, checked his phone to find his family group chat flooded. His cousin Daniel was stuck in Jerusalem, and the ten relatives in the text thread were concerned. Quickly, the messages took an ugly turn. “Carpet bomb Gaza back to the stone ages,” Daniel fired off. Jacob’s sister shot back: “Thinking this isn’t the group chat to say things like that.” Their dad then sent a separate text to Jacob and his sister, encouraging restraint, but Jacob “wanted to have a clap back,” he says. Emboldened by an espresso martini, he sent Daniel a real knockout: “I’m so happy for you that you’re enjoying your xenophobic defense of a literal apartheid state. But moving forward, I’d appreciate it if you could keep the racist bullshit out of the family group chat. Thank you!! 😘.” Then he turned off his phone for the night.

Since October 7, group chats across the country have transformed into Thanksgiving-dinner nightmares, becoming zones of tension and outright hostility. And no group chats, it seems, have become more terse than those between anti-Zionist Jews and their friends and family members who expect them to defend Israel. Everyone I spoke to said these combative back-and-forths have poisoned those same relationships offline, and all requested anonymity.

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