“The betrayal felt when love and acceptance are made conditional upon silence or complicity in the genocide can be deeply wounding. In the context of Gaza, it adds an additional layer of trauma: not only is one bearing witness to mass suffering, but also paying a personal price for refusing to look away,” he said. “This leads to long-lasting stress and anxiety, which can reach clinical levels.”

To preserve relationships, he said families need to lead with “curiosity, not confrontation”.

“Especially when the topic is something as painful as war or genocide, facts alone won’t move people — naming the emotions underneath, like fear, guilt, or grief, often opens more space for real dialogue.”

Having such conversations isn’t easy.

Jonathan Ofir, a musician who was born in [a] kibbutz and emigrated to Denmark in the late 1990s, said that it was in 2009 that he realised he had “actually been indoctrinated into a propaganda that omitted a whole Palestinian viewpoint”. He read Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, describing that experience as a “turning point” for him.

Around the same time, he read other Jewish and Palestinian writers who “challenged the Zionist narrative”.

“[But] I didn’t share this publicly and I didn’t share it with my family either.”

In 2014, though, during Israel’s war on Gaza — the third within seven years — he said [that] he felt confident enough to express his critical views “outwards and publicly”.

More than 2,000 Palestinians — including 551 children — were killed during the 50-day conflict.

He took to Facebook to post an image of Israelis gathered on a hilltop near Sderot watching on as Gaza burned, a photograph that was featured in The New York Times.

A relative soon wrote him an email that concluded by recommending that Ofir “stop posting on the internet”.

“It became this heated debate, but it very, very quickly stopped.”

Years later, he learned that his family in Israel had decided to avoid talking about politics around him “so as to not legitimise my political views”, he said.

After the October 7 attack, he checked on his extended family who lived near the site of the assault. But the incursion did not alter his position.

“My outlook hasn’t significantly changed. But something changed in the Israeli society. And in that sense, you could say we might be more distant politically.”