I’m a Zionist but my parents are not – and it really hurts

We have a family WhatsApp group that we tend to use for things that aren’t particularly serious – it’s just for birthdays, our children’s news, that kind of thing. But the horror of October 7 just wasn’t mentioned, and that felt extraordinary.  Even now, with everything that has happened since, the silence continues. And I remain shocked.

On a call with one of my parents, soon after the attacks, I said, “I don’t understand the silence – maybe you and the family don’t feel any connection?” And the reply was, “At some point we’ve got to sit down and talk it through with Hamas.” I was like, “What are you talking about?”

But one Friday night my spouse and parents did start talking politics. The temperature was ramping up with incendiary language that included Zionist genocide.

It was too much. Horrified, I stood up and said, “Right, I think that means we’re going now.” I had to take the lead and take my spouse and young children home, before we’d even lit the candles.

After that, I gravitated towards a relative in Israel because I felt I needed some kind of familial connection.

My parents know my spouse and I go on marches against antisemitism, and on pro-Israel demonstrations. It feels like I understand history and they do not. There were 2,000 years of antisemitism before the creation of Israel – it’s not going to go away now that the Jewish state exists.

I also think they don’t get what’s happening in our own country. From the moment Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015, and we saw so much antisemitism online, my spouse and I got politically active.

At one point I told my parents: “You don’t see it because you’re not in that world.” So much of the world is online, and if you’re not online, how will you know what’s going on? And of course, that online hatred has now, predictably, spilled out into the real world.

After the Manchester synagogue attack, there was the tiniest mention of the murders in our WhatsApp group by other family members, but the conversation didn’t continue. And I’m not going to be the one person banging on about something. Were I that person, I’d have gone to town: how we’ve got to this point, all the antisemitic things that have made it to the protests, the pervading atmosphere, what the government’s doing, what they could be doing.

I don’t understand and struggle to empathise with their position. I don’t know at what point, if ever, their eyes will open.

After Manchester, I thought, “Well, surely you can see things now.” But they still don’t.

I can’t even talk about things with my sibling, but I wonder if they talk about me and my views. The lack of communication, of discussion about what for me is such an important subject, takes its toll. Is it right that I can’t expect anything from them? Or are my expectations too high?

It’s one of those situations where I don’t know what is normal or what is right, and it is making me more distant as a result.

What I do know is that I feel like the black sheep of my family. It’s different for my spouse, whose parents are more on the same page politically, so they are able to support each other. I would love to have that support and understanding from my parents. Instead, I feel isolated.

My two children are still very young so we don’t know how things will turn out in terms of their feelings towards the Jewish state. But I can tell you now that if they end up with the political views of my mother and father, I will be disappointed.

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As told to Elisa Bray