This is an opinion column.

Meet Leah Nelson, a New York Jew who moved south to Montomery, Ala.

She’s a person.

Meet Ali Massoud, an Egyptian-born Muslim who grew up in Hoover, Ala., and now studies law at UCLA.

He’s a person, too.

Leah met Ali a few years back, but the two really came to know each other when they joined forces – she on behalf of Alabama Appleseed and he for the Alabama Council on American-Islamic Relations – to compel Alabama to let a Muslim man have an Imam present at his execution.

They failed, for the most part. Alabama allows only Christian solace when it injects poison into a person’s veins.

But Leah and Ali remained friends. They came from different backgrounds, different places, different faiths, different ethnicities and mythologies, but they saw themselves in each other. And they both saw possibility in people who thought or believed differently from themselves. They saw humanity in people whose circumstances – incarceration, for one – were designed to rob them of it.

Leah shared her culture with Ali. Ali shared his with her. And years passed.

Then came Oct. 7. Hamas killed hundreds of Israelis. Israeli retaliation killed thousands in Gaza.

Death and anxiety became too much to bear. They saw people cheer killings or bombings as if rooting for football teams. They saw friends walk on eggshells around one another, afraid to speak their minds, or their fears, to a wider world.

Leah struggled. She’d already been rocked by a series of threats to synagogues in Alabama, and worried about people in Israel.

Ali struggled, too. Because the death toll kept going up and those who talked the most openly about it faced backlash.

He was suddenly unsure how to talk to Jewish or non-Muslim friends, for it’s hard to find hope or words of comfort when bombs are still falling.

I am struck, listening to them both, that I don’t know what it’s like to be Jewish, or Muslim – or Hindu or Buddhist or a lot of other things, for that matter. I don’t know what it’s like to be a minority in any meaningful way.

I am, like many Americans, unfit to lay out the complicated history of Israel and Gaza, unsure what to say, to feel, to speak.

Except sorrow. Shock. Platitudes.

So it was almost a relief to hear that Leah and Ali also felt the awkward silences. They worried about what others presumed they felt about the ongoing war. They worried about each other.

Leah had questions for Ali. She wondered if he was bothered by the same thoughts that haunted her. She wanted to text him to ask:

Are you OK?

Can you sleep?

Can you think about anything but this?

But she had second thoughts.

“I think I had one moment where I was like, what if he’s mad at me? What if everything has changed now?” she said.

But she sent him a message anyway.

Ali was in the same headspace, binging the news, realizing the situation was really bad and bound to get worse, when he got that simple text from Leah:

Hey, how are you holding up?

It was nothing. It was everything.

“I immediately knew what she was talking about because I had the same question for her,” Ali said. “We saw the writing on the wall and knew it was gonna be rough.”

Ali began to reach out to other friends and colleagues, to a Jewish man he knew with family in Israel, to others who were deeply concerned about the war.

It is still hard to talk, he said, because the most important thing on his mind right now is a cease-fire. But he believes the conversations are essential.

“Every time something incendiary happens, the first thing I feel might be anger or sadness,” he said. “I have to take a step back and go to those friends and say, ‘How are you processing this?’ Because hearing how they’re dealing with it, seeing your feelings reflected in them, is an important part of this process.”

Their words struck home to me. I haven’t been the same since I spoke to a friend, Yasmin, after a formal discussion of the Mideast crisis that she felt gave little voice to people like herself.

She is an Arab-American – an American with Egyptian roots – a person, a strong woman, a mother, a friend close enough to feel comfortable giving me a bidet as a gift, part of her ongoing humanitarian effort to convert the world to Bidetism.

Yasmin had left that panel discussion in tears. And afterward I stood looking at her with an expression of somber empathy plastered across my face, the kind I wear at funerals when I have no confidence my words will do good, and plenty of fear they could harm.

I pursed my lips and nodded, as if I understood. And I did not. And she knew it, but did not say it aloud.

She hurt, for family and friends and lost lives and people who feared to speak aloud about death and pain. She hurt because she felt betrayed and isolated and othered by her own country. Our own country.

I offered nothing but ignorance and uncertainty, and that worried me.

Because silence, particularly in critical moments like these, is often misunderstood.

Both Ali and Leah say that reaching out, speaking out is really important because so many people are fighting, or withdrawing into their own worst fears. But it has to be intentional, purposeful.

“If you don’t reach out there is the potential for people to grow apart, for them to say ‘I haven’t heard from this person so … I guess we’re not friends anymore,” Ali said. “I’m actually thinking of people I know less well, who I haven’t reached out to and I haven’t heard from at all this month.”

Leah gets that.

“I’ve had a lot of people who have just not talked with me for the last month, friends who have not checked in, and I wonder if we’re still okay,” she said. “I’ve appreciated friends who said, “Are you okay?’ Or ‘How are you feeling?’ Just acknowledging that I’m probably not feeling okay.”

Silence is poison. It allows people to make assumptions, and allows more dangerous voices to be heard.

“Generally people to the left of me have assumed I have not made any space for how sad and horrified I am by what happened Oct. 7, and I am devastated by it,” Leah said. “And generally people on the right have assumed that I stand with Israel no matter what. Neither of those things is accurate, and both make me feel like I can’t talk honestly, or that I’m going to upset my friends when I tell them I’m horrified by what happened.”

It is compounded, Ali says, because people have been fired or canceled for expressing pro-Palestinian views.

There were moments when Ali and Leah disagreed. There were moments, clearly, when the words of one made the other uncomfortable. Maybe it was the fact that they had built up trust that made the difference.

Maybe they just knew that conversation is powerful, that silence feeds the bigots as much as anything else.

It feeds those who would look for an excuse to wipe out whole swaths of people. It threatens not just Israelis and Palestinians but the entire world.

So how do we talk to one another about war? Start by listening, of course.

And by recognizing, from the start, that the people we are talking to – Jewish, Muslim or otherwise – are first one thing:

People.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.