Palestinian Americans on working while grieving: ‘How many days off do you take when Gaza’s bombed daily?’
Nasser decided to call out sick from his job at the US state department on the third day of the Israel-Hamas war.
He’d been watching Al Jazeera English on YouTube – he couldn’t stomach American cable – in horror as Hamas’s attack on Israel unfolded. He knew Israel’s retaliation on Palestinians would be deadly, and indeed it was, as Israel launched its first airstrikes on Gaza over the weekend. “I couldn’t face dealing with work tasks and spreadsheets,” he said. “It was too depressing, too stressful.”
Nasser, who does data analysis for the state department but emphasized he does not work in foreign policy, doesn’t talk about being Palestinian American at the office. “It’s not like saying you’re German American, or British, or French – it’s an inherently politicized identity,” he said. In a workplace run by politicians who are aligned with Israel, where dissent letters signed by staffers calling for a ceasefire make national news, Nasser worried he could be accused of antisemitism and reported to HR if he were to openly voice pro-Palestinian sentiment. After an official resigned over the Biden administration’s role in the war, the state department announced it would hold “listening sessions” with staff – but Nasser doubted he’d speak up. “The nail that pops up gets hammered,” he said.
As the death toll in Gaza reached into the thousands, Nasser began working again but avoided going into the office for in-person meetings. He felt isolated and exhausted.
A quietly devastating struggle is unfolding for Palestinian Americans who, like Nasser, are attempting to do their jobs while mourning death on an unfathomable scale.
Since 7 October, antisemitism and Islamophobia have been rising in America, provoking fear among Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Americans. Some Jewish Americans, especially those whose Israeli family members are being held hostage, have expressed feeling lonely and betrayed when faced with silence from their peers. For anyone who speaks in support of Palestinians, the stakes are high: people have been fired from their jobs, while protesters who call for equal rights for Palestiniansare being harassed and doxxed. The only Palestinian American in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, was censured by her colleagues for using the phrase “from the river to the sea”, words that some Palestinian rights activists see as an anticolonial rallying cry, and that some defenders of Israel see as an antisemitic call to erase Israel from existence.
The Guardian spoke with several Palestinian Americans employed by US government agencies or corporations who, mindful of this stifling atmosphere, are choosing to self-censor and withdraw. They fear being accused of antisemitism or conflated with Hamas at work, where their livelihoods are on the line. Some are bothered by their employers’ and colleagues’ reactions (or lack thereof) to the war. They feel like their ethnic identity itself is a minefield, because, as one person described it, “the world denies our existence”.As the bombardment of Gaza continues, they’re filling their lives with work and grief and not much else.
An ‘abysmally inadequate farce’
“Most times in the corporate [world], the P-word isn’t mentioned,” said Tala, who works for a Fortune 500 global corporation. So she was shocked when a manager reached out to her on 8 October, offering her mental health days and asking: “I want to make sure you are OK. You have family in Palestine, right?”
Tala (who is going by her first name only) is half Moroccan, half Palestinian; she said dozens more co-workers expressed empathyafter the September earthquake in Morocco than now. “For him to say that just really acknowledged my existence, my identity. To make sure my family was OK, especially after innocent Israeli citizens were killed, it actually meant a lot,” she said.
Nasser received a few boilerplate, state department-wide emails that vaguely referred to the Middle East without mentioning Israel or Palestine directly. Tala also received a companywide email that she did not find comforting. It had several sentences about Hamas attacking Israel, killing people and taking hostages, and promised that the company felt for “all civilians suffering in the region”, but didn’t mention Gaza or the West Bank. It made her so disheartened that she asked another manager if she could skip her inperson meeting that week. “It’s just awful what’s been going on in the news,” he told her when he approved her request, carefully choosing his wording.
That seems to be the typical corporate response to this crisis, according to Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consultant: to send out an email or two recognizing it, perhaps offer employees some mental health resources, and that’s it. Zheng said this was grossly disproportionate to the nuanced needs of the workforce right now, particularly for marginalized groups.
“Folks are treating October 7 as the one horrible event that people need to recover and heal from, but it’s one horrible event followed by [many] days of comparably horrible events that has no end in sight,” said Zheng, who is hired by Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and organizationsto help steer their DEI initiatives. “This is a completely different class of tragedy.”
After the protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, DEI job openings rose by 55% and requests for antiracism training in corporations surged. But corporate accountability efforts have since dipped, and DEI roles are being laid off at a much higher rate than non-DEI roles.
Palestinian Americans feel that corporate DEI was never inclusive of their experience anyway.
Nasser found his first state department listening session, which was moderated by a DEI leader, to be an “abysmally inadequate farce”. No anonymity was granted, so he did not feel comfortable being candid – and even if he had, the moderator said leadership would not respond to concerns employees raised. Mostly, the session was filled with long stretches of silence.
Eventually, the moderator (in what Nasser called “this ASMR voice”) offered: “Guys, we’re sitting here in silence. I feel empowered and solidarity with you all.” People chimed into a group chat to agree, which was surreal for Nasser: “So we’re listening to nothing and people are meditating on how that’s somehow good, that we are achieving enlightenment.”
He wondered if the point of the listening session was for the majoritywhite audience to say they felt bad in a neutral way – without having to identify exactly what they felt bad about or say much of anything at all.
Oscillating between work and grief
Farah had been explicitly told not to talk about being Palestinian American in previous jobs, so when she started a new gig at an oil and gas company, she kept her background to herself. Then the airstrikes began. By the second day, 17 members of Farah’s family had been killed in Gaza. Farah told her manager she had family there and was having trouble focusing. Her manager escalated the news to the “higher-ups”, who expressed their support, gave $100,000 to Save the Children, and offered to match donations from employees to organizations in the Middle East.
As the death count in Farah’s family grew from 17 to 50, she began to speak up more about her grief at work, including emailing her company’s CEO, whom she had never met before. She was pleasantly surprised when he responded with a compassionate email, recalling his Israeli-Palestinian neighbors he was close with and expressing his sympathy for her loss. “It was the most humane, beautiful response,” Farah said.
But Farah’s immense feelings of hopelessness are threatening her ability to keep her performance up to par, and she doesn’t feel she can afford to take the time off she was offered. “It’s a double-edged sword in the US,” she said. “I appreciate the offer, but I know that it’s going to affect my compensation.” She adds that for now, since she’s remote, she can step away from her desk occasionally to cry or lie under a weighted blanket.
The offer of time off can be a paradox, especially during a crisis. In American work culture, if you need to take time, the assumption is that work will continue without you, meaning you will likely lose opportunities or status. Nor is a few days off a proportionate answer. “How many days do you take off when every single day Gaza has been bombed? Is that three days? Is it as many days until the bombing stops?” Zheng said. They added that similar criticisms were raised about big employers after other recent crises, like the murders of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans, and the Club Q shooting. “We need a recognition that work itself in this time of unprecedented violence, hate, conflict, war, climate change is different than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago,” Zheng said.
Loay (who is going by his first name only), an engineer at a US government agency, doesn’t feel he has sufficient vacation days to take time off; he’d rather save the time he has to visit family. Meanwhile, he’s trying to distract himself by focusing on designs, emails and meetings.
Loay’s parents moved to Germany 12 years ago but were making a rare visit home to Gaza when Hamas attacked Israel. Now they’re stuck. Every three or four days he hears from them for a few minutes before the phone lines get disconnected. He wishes his agency would offer him a mental health hotline or a counselor to speak with. “I sometimes feel like I need to wake up, it’s a nightmare, it’s not even real,” he said. For now, he keeps getting pulled back to the TV during his workday to keep track of Gaza neighborhoods as they are bombed.
Like Loay, Annie (who is going by her nickname) said she oscillated between trying to be productive at work and feeling useless when swept up by grief. She specifically remembers the day of the blast at al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza. A healthcare worker, she was at her own hospital when she saw the news alert on her phone. “Hospitals to me are supposed to be safe places where people go to get help,” Annie said. “I was upset and was telling my co-worker: ‘Can you imagine us being at work right now and then all of a sudden we’re in the middle of a war zone? And the world is watching?’” They responded: “That sucks.” She said she was “pretty useless” after that.
Annie does take comfort when coworkers who do not have ties to Israel or Gaza ask her questions about Palestinian history. A common thread among the Palestinian Americans interviewed by the Guardian is that they appreciate the chance to teach colleagues genuinely curious to learn more. Still, Annie said there was a level of dissociation that her co-workers could achieve that was impossible for her. She can’t stop thinking about how every week, part of her paycheck is going to taxes, which are funding military supplies being sent to Israel: “My people are being killed with my money.”
‘Empathy is seen as taking a position on the issue’
At Google, employees wrote an open letter claiming leadership allows “freedom of expression for Israeli Googlers” but not for Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Googlers. Microsoft, Meta, Nike and Instacart were also criticized by employees for how they addressed the war. Tala said that at her corporate job, her colleagues were being “very careful” with what they said: “Even if they side with Palestinians and realize that this is a genocide, I think there’s a lot of people who are fearful of even saying that out loud with the fear of losing their jobs.” She’s concerned about being called out for going to a protest, while Loay said he was worried about repercussions for tweeting.
“I think a really tragic thing about this particular crisis is just the hyperpoliticization of it,” Zheng said. “Even a display of empathy is seen as taking a position on the issue.”
Many Palestinian Americans at work are still tiptoeing around their devastation as the death toll in Gaza passes 11,000 and Israelis demand the safe return of hostages. But some of those who are not directly affected by the war – or the subsequent rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism in the US – are returning to their pre-7 October routines. Annie gives grace to the fact that everyone has different emotional capacities and personal hardships, but it leaves her feeling even more isolated in her grief.
Nasser said the heaviness of his isolation was slightly lightened by the
dissent letters within the state department. He appreciates people understanding Palestinian viewpoints about their own suffering. Still, as he looks to the future, he feels helpless: “Am I enabling – with my tax dollars and my career and my contributions – the dispossession of Palestinians and worse?” He’s grappling with this question every day.
Some names in this article have been changed upon request.Job titles and companies are not specified to prevent professional repercussions