Friday March 29th, 2024
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Make War Not Love

Watch the Palestine-Israel conflict as it plays out on Tinder - of all places - in a new blog started by American teachers in Ramallah.

Staff Writer

Love was definitely not in the air in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as a group of foreigners living in Ramallah discovered while cruising online-dating app Tinder.

A Tumblr called Palestinder was set up a few days ago by a group of Americans who teach in Ramallah, featuring screenshots of conversations with Israeli matches.

More often than not, the conversations exhibited some surprisingly charged rhetoric as soon as the young American teachers revealed that they are living in Ramallah.

Flirtation quickly escalated into confrontation for many matches, with comments ranging from "Palestine does not exist," to "You are teaching terrorists."

Co-founder Caitlin Kent launched the website after she was swiping through Tinder and was "shocked to receive some overtly racist responses from Israeli matches once they found out that we were teaching Palestinian kids in Ramallah for the summer".

She invited her friends to try it out, and the results were compiled into the blog.

"We think that it is an interesting, honest and disturbing (and sometimes funny) reflection of the pervasiveness of racist sentiments within Israel," Kent also said.