Metro Nashville Council members Zulfat Suara and Jacob Kupin knew it was ambitious to jointly author a resolution on the Israel-Gaza conflict, yet they hoped enough time had passed to minimize reactionary responses.
But fierce outcry, some more public than others, showed the two council members their deeper pursuit of common ground had little chance to take hold. So, Suara announced at a June 18 council meeting that she and Kupin were indefinitely tabling the measure.
“Unfortunately, what originally looked to be a promising picture towards progress turned into a mirror that showed the extent of our division,” Suara said in the meeting.
The outcome was disappointing and anticlimactic for a first-of-its-kind legislative attempt at navigating a climate that, especially among certain minority religious communities, seems a full reversal of historic interfaith progress. This resolution controversy highlighted just how difficult it will be to reanimate those bonds, but Suara and Kupin said it wasn’t entirely futile.
Kupin said the proposed resolution was valuable simply for breaking through a wall of silence, especially between Nashville’s Jewish and Muslim communities in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the Israeli war in Gaza.
“I think it took some of that awkwardness and that elephant in the room,” said Kupin in an interview. “I did think it created an impetus to force people to come together and have the conversation.”
At least, the resolution did that for its two authors — Suara, who’s Muslim, serves on the board of the American Muslim Advisory Committee, and Kupin, who is Jewish, serves on the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville, an organization for which a foundational priority is advocacy for Israel. Despite their strong disagreements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the two council members worked exhaustively toward a declarative consensus.
“This was as neutral as possible as it could be and this is us thinking about the impact on the people of Nashville,” Suara said in an interview. “Not just the people that are involved and have families. But also the relationship in the interfaith community; it is wounded, it is fragile.”
Nor was it easy. Open meetings laws prevented Suara and Kupin from directly communicating about a draft of the resolution, requiring them to go through an intermediary Metro administrator to suggest edits, removals or additions.
The council members defended language they considered nonnegotiable, while they agreed to concessions other times. The statement acknowledged Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia locally and abroad.
Despite those painful lengths, the public reaction to the proposal was nowhere near reciprocal. “The nerve this struck was so loud and so visceral,” Kupin said.
Suara cited her particular concern with criticism from some in the Jewish community toward Kupin as her reason for tabling the measure. The Jewish Federation condemned any attacks toward Kupin from fellow Jewish community members in a recent statement .
"What is not OK is to use dangerous language to diminish, disrespect or attack others personally. It is that type of internal strife and division that will cause us harm,” Deborah Oleshansky, the federation’s community relations director, said in the statement. “We cannot allow ourselves to turn on one another, or on our elected officials, over differences of perspective.”
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Restoring relationships, but unable to ‘go back to normal’
A rich tradition of interfaith dialogue informed Suara and Kupin’s initial optimism for their resolution, but the fallout displayed just how significant of a shift there’s been since Oct. 7.
Despite the relatively small size of their communities, Jewish and Muslim residents were a staple at practically every interfaith event and foundational to establishing new initiatives. Examples include the Family of Abraham in 2011, the Faith & Culture Center in 2014, and Millions of Conversations in 2017.
Also, many of those same people were at the frontlines of responses to acts of violence and hatred, such as support for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro amid protests in 2010, a prayer vigil following the white supremacist church shooting in Charlottesville in 2015, and denunciations of a white supremacist group that supported a far-right Franklin mayoral candidate in 2023.
To Kupin, that sort of collective stance against hatred might be an opportunity for bridging interfaith relationships that have been on pause.
“How can we build a relationship that’s not about this conflict?” Kupin said. “It’s more about groups coming together to say, ‘We have shared common interests. Let’s bond around that.’”
Seeking that alternative common ground sounds promising, but it may still encounter disputes that have emerged from the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, said Sabina Mohyuddin, executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Committee.
Mohyuddin said one example is the debate over whether anti-Zionist views are antisemitic. Meanwhile, Jewish community members feel hurt by the response from non-Jewish neighbors to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
Mohyuddin said conflict is so encompassing and complex, especially in its current state, that it all but guarantees any future interfaith dialogue will look different than it did years ago. “You can’t just go back to normal,” she said.
Suara agrees but hopes not at the cost of a more fundamental connection that was there before.
“We should not have to forget all of our relationship because we do not agree on one thing,” Suara said. “It’s a big thing. But why did we forget all the pains we share together and the love that we shared together.”
Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on social media @liamsadams.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How a contentious Nashville resolution on Israel-Gaza points to shift on interfaith talks
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