(WWJ) – Violence has broken out over the last several days over disputed land that goes back a century. Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have been killed since Hamas launched an attack on Israel last weekend.
Southeastern Michigan has prominent Jewish and Muslim populations, both key components of many Metro Detroit communities.
On a new Daily J podcast, WWJ’s Zach Clark takes a look at how the fighting in the Middle East may impact the Jewish and Muslim communities in Metro Detroit.
Leaders of both communities have spoken out in the days since the violence erupted. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the Bloomfield Hills-based Jewish Community Relations Council called “the worst massacre of Jews in one day since the Holocaust,” saying the area’s Jewish community is “devastated.”
“My reaction is the reaction that God asks of all humanity in the Quran, in the Bible, and in the Torah that the value of one life is the value of all humanity and whoever kills an innocent life, it is as if they killed all of humanity and whoever gives life to one life is as if they’ve given life to all of humanity,” Imam Imran Salha of the Islamic Center of Detroit told WWJ earlier this week.
Sally Howell, a professor of history and Arab-American studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, tells WWJ this is “not a politically easy conversation to have.”
Here in Metro Detroit with no real boundaries between the Jewish and Muslim populations, Howell says “I don’t see that kind of tension and animosity reflected between Arabs and Jews or Arabs and Israelis” in Michigan.
“People work together, people go to school together, they can argue in the classroom,” Howell said. “I mean, there’s more equality here. I see these two communities, people working together, getting along together, people being each other’s neighbors.”
Howell says there has been a lot of solidarity between the two communities on campus and she doesn’t think this incident will affect that the same way it will overseas.
While noting it is a "sensitive" topic and a difficult conversation to have, Howell says she hopes we continue to see what she has seen in the past -- neighbors, friends and colleagues reaching out to each other amid the overseas fighting.