A Team Stays Together in a Time of War

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in The New York Times in November 2023. The conflict between Israel and Hamas escalated significantly afterward. When Junior Scholastic went to press, at least 29,000 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis had been killed in the conflict. At press time, the team was still swimming together.

For decades, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs interacted in the city’s shops and restaurants—but they remained divided by a history of wars, displacement, and fighting. 

The goal of the swim team is to overcome those divisions. Emanuel May, the team’s coach, says his passion isn’t to produce winners. It’s to foster unity among young people in Jerusalem. “The spirit here is to swim together, just human beings,” May says.

Four years ago, the team won funding from the Jerusalem Foundation, an organization that works to improve the city. The swim team’s mission appealed to Shai Doron, the foundation’s president. “Swimming brings people together in the most natural way,” Doron says. In the pool, “it’s impossible to tell who’s a Jew and an Arab.” 

The younger Israeli and Palestinian children take swim lessons separately because they lack a common language. (Most Israelis speak Hebrew; most Palestinians speak Arabic.) By age 8 or 9, many of the kids can communicate in Hebrew and English. That’s when they begin to work out together. The strongest swimmers join the Greater Jerusalem team.

Shams Srour, 14, a Palestinian girl, says she hopes to do just that.

“I want to compete, and I feel very comfortable here,” she says. “I’ve been training with Jews since I was little. It’s normal.”

The war has tested that normalcy in ways the team is still processing.

Mustafa Abdu, 18, is one of the Muslim swimmers on the Greater Jerusalem team. The day after the October 7 attacks, he uploaded a photograph to his Instagram account. The photo showed a Palestinian child being carried by men with grief-stricken expressions. The child was wrapped in a white cloth, which Muslims use for the deceased.

A caption above the picture read, “Where were the people calling for humanity when we were killed?”

Mustafa also posted a warning that sometimes it can be hard to tell which side really is in the wrong. 

The swimmers on the team follow one another on Instagram, so Avishag saw the posts. Shocked, she texted Mustafa in an exchange she later shared with The New York Times.

“Musta, do you know how bad the situation is in Israel right now? I respect what you have to say, I’m truly asking you.”

Mustafa replied, asking whether she thought, like some people on social media, that all Palestinians were murderers. 

“I didn’t say you were, Musta,” Avishag wrote back. “It’s the Hamas organization.” Children, older people, entire families had been killed or kidnapped, she added. “I saw videos that are never going to leave my mind,” she said, offering to forward them if he wanted but saying that she didn’t recommend watching them.

We are not murderers, Mustafa wrote in response. “Israel was attacking us from a long time, and everybody know that.”

“What???” she replied. “With all the respect, that’s not true.”

He said, “Always we are wrong and always you are the right.”

“That’s not what I said,” Avishag responded. “Right now Hamas are in the wrong.”

She told Mustafa to tell her if he wanted the videos. She wanted to prove her point but also to save their friendship. She texted him, “I have to ask if we are cool?”

He placed a heart on her message and typed “yes” in Spanish. She hearted his message too. It seemed they had achieved an uneasy peace, although they couldn’t be sure until they swam together again.

In the following days, Israel prepared to invade Gaza. As it did, it launched airstrikes on Gaza and blocked food, fuel, and other supplies from reaching the 2.1 million people crowded onto the narrow strip of land. Meanwhile, Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel.

On October 11 came another Instagram post, this one from a different Palestinian member of the swim team. The post predicted a quick victory for Hamas. (The swimmer who posted it did not agree to participate in this article.)

Shira Chuna, a 16-year-old Israeli swimmer, saw what her teammate had written. She felt betrayed by someone she trusted. 

As soon as the team’s coach learned about the posts shared by Mustafa and the other swimmer, he contacted them. Both teens immediately deleted their posts.

“I took it down because I respect them,” Mustafa says of his teammates. “I don’t want to talk about the war. I just want to talk about swimming.”

By the time the swimmers reported to the pool again on October 16, the death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza was rapidly rising. And Israelis were still reeling from the violence that Hamas had committed. Would the conflict divide the team?

“I told myself, I’m going to behave as normal,” says Alex Finkel, 17, an Israeli swimmer. “Outside it’s a bit scary, but I grew up with the Palestinians. I’ll do everything we always do, and that’s it.”

Before practice, May called a team meeting to talk to the swimmers as one group. Then the teens kicked into high gear, training hard to make up for missed practices. But there was no joking or chatting between drills. A heaviness hung in the air.

Yet the deep bonds formed over years were still there. By the next day, several swimmers say, the tensions had eased. 

Within a few weeks, it was once again impossible to distinguish Israeli from Palestinian swimmers. They all wore goggles and swim caps as they swam laps. Conversations were cheerful and safe. Alex teased Mustafa about beating him at butterfly.

At one point, when Avishag had not waited long enough before pushing off the wall, she touched Mustafa’s toes with her fingers as she completed a stroke. Mustafa turned and gave her a playful look as if to say “Really?” before resuming. Avishag broke into a smile.

But the realities of war loomed. Shortly after Israeli forces entered Gaza in October, Shira learned that her cousin, an Israeli soldier, had been killed. She missed a couple of days of swim practice. Upon Shira’s return, Mustafa approached her to say he was sorry for her loss.

“I felt he cared,” she says. 

As a recent practice wrapped up, Mustafa emerged from the pool, pulled off his cap, and headed to the hot tub with the rest of the team.

“This is my second family,” he says. “If we have a problem, we fix it like a team.” 

—Miriam Jordan is a correspondent for The New York Times. With additional reporting by Patricia Smith.