On a cold December day during the Christmas holiday, Dalia Sarig's 80-year-old father arrived at his home in Vienna after returning from a ski trip.

There he picked up her heir, who joined Sarig’s family on vacation.

She firmly believes this will be her last meeting with her father as their political divisions are approaching.

"I said goodbye. I hugged him," she told Al Jazeera. "When I said goodbye, I said goodbye and knew maybe I won't see him again."

Tensions with her Jewish family have been established for years. At 56, Sarig was a pro-partisan activist who had conflicted with most of her relatives.

Her parents insisted on Zionism, which called for a Jewish state, which Palestinians and their supporters saw as a system that suffered.

Sarig knew at a meeting with her father in December that she intended to hold a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the parliament in January, which will be filmed by local television stations. She is an activist group and she presented her with a radio interview. Israel was shocked by the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and determined to speak out, she kept moving forward.

“The interview was aired and was immediately handed over to my family.”

She later heard that her father also lives in the Austrian capital, and he told his friend "to him, I'm dead."

"But he never talked to me about it, he never reached out to tell me something like this. (He) just cuts the relationship."

Her 77-year-old mother lives in Germany and called her a week later.

"I still have it on my phone and say, you know, 'I won't accept your political activism. You're a traitor, you're dirtying the nest... If you change your political perspective, we can get back to normal. Stay healthy. Stay healthy.'"

She hasn't talked to her parents since then.

The family gap is not uncommon among Jewish families from the United States to Israel, but it has become more entrenched since October 7, 2023.

That day, Hamas, a group that ruled the Gaza Strip, led an invasion of southern Israel, during which 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were captured. Since then, Israeli bombing has killed more than 61,700 people in the enclave.

“I think one of the most interesting phenomena among free Zionists is the fact, and most people move to the right due to October 7, and minorities are even more confused about Israel and Zionism,” Ilan Pappe, a well-known Zionist and academic critic, told Al Jazeera.

Sarig's ancestors fled to Serbia in 1938, the year that Nazi Germany annexed. Later, they settled in Palestine under the British authorization in the present Israeli order. But by the 1950s, most of her relatives returned to Austria where she was born.

As a child, she celebrated Jewish holidays while learning Zionism from elders.

She was also told that the Palestinians “are enemies, they want to kill all the Jews…the Jews who live there (in Israel) want peace, but the Arabs don’t.”

At the age of 18, she moved to Israel and, with the encouragement of her parents, joined the left Zionist youth movement.

In Israel, she joined a Kibbutz, serving and getting married in the Israeli army. But it was when she studied politics and Middle Eastern history at Haifa University that her worldview began to change.

That was where she met Palestinian professors and later became a radical of Palestinian rights.

“It started with my Palestinian teacher on the lawn one evening when he told me the story of his family being displaced from a small village.

“I know the Zionist narrative I was told was wrong,” she said. “I started thinking about how he felt, how he felt, or how I felt as a Palestinian living in the Jewish state where our ancestors were fired.”

Back in Austria, her family would argue with her at the party, agreeing that they would never speak in Palestine and Israeli politics again, breaking their promises and clashing again.

In 2015, she gave up her Israeli citizenship as a gesture of opposing Zionism.

"It makes my activism easier," Sarig said. "I lost my Jewish community because I was considered strange and weird at best, and at worst a traitor."

But isolation from family can harm mental health, experts say.

“Since October 7, my outlook has not changed significantly”’

Faissal Sharif, a neuroscientist and doctoral student at Oxford University, believes that brain imaging studies show that “the experience of social isolation triggers activities in areas that otherwise respond to physical pain.”

"In other words, social pain is not metaphorical - biologically real," he told Al Jazeera.

He said that families often form "micro-culture" based on their own rules and positions on political issues.

"When love and acceptance are based on genocide silence or complicity, it can cause deep harm. In the Gaza context, it adds a layer of trauma: not only is there a witness witness witnessing mass pain, but it also pays a personal price for refusing to be extroverted," he said. “This leads to lasting stress and anxiety that can reach clinical levels.”

To maintain relationships, he said the family needs to lead with “curiosity rather than confrontation.”

“Especially when the topic is as painful as war or genocide, the facts alone are not moving – naming the emotions below, such as fear, introspection or sadness, often open up more space for real conversations.”

It is not easy to have such a conversation.

Jonathan Ofir, a musician who was born in Kibbutz, Israel and immigrated to Denmark in the late 1990s, said it was in 2009 that he realized that he had “actually been instilled in propaganda that omitted the entire Palestinian view.” He read Pape's book, Ethnic Palestine in Palestine, and described the experience as a "turning point" for him.

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

“(But) I didn’t share this publicly, nor did I share it with my family.”

However, during the Israeli war against Gaza in 2014, he said he had enough confidence to express his critical views “outward and openly”.

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

He went to Facebook to post an image of the Israelis gathered on the top of a hill near Sderot, which was on display in the New York Times when Gaza burned.

A relative quickly wrote him an email that ended, suggesting “stop posting on the internet.”

“It turned into a heated debate, but it stopped very quickly.”

Years later, he learned that his family in Israel decided to avoid talking about the politics around him “to avoid legitimizing my political views.”

After the October 7 attack, he inspected the extended family living near the attack site. But the invasion did not change his position.

"My view has not changed significantly. But there has been some change in Israeli society. In that sense, you can say we may be politically farther away."

“This is indeed the only problem today”

The 44-year-old Dutch Daniel Friedman was raised in South Africa by his father, Steven, a scholarly and voice critic of Zionism and his mother is part of a circle of anti-apartheid activists.

Friedman said that while his father remains an anti-Zionist, he and his mother have been in conflict with Israel’s genocide in Gaza since late 2023.

"It's really the only problem today," he said, affecting dialogue and bonds within some Jewish communities.

One of their earlier arguments argued that the debunking was that Palestinian fighters raped women during the October 7 invasion. After several uneasy disputes, often fighting by engaging in disputes in various newspapers to support their arguments on WhatsApp, they agreed to stop talking about politics.

"I love her, but what I struggled with is that I lost a lot of trust in her," Friedman said.

During Israel's previous war against Gaza, his mother signed a petition to demand a ceasefire, a move that left her rejected by some family members. "I think it has a big impact," he said. "She kind of went right."

He said he learned that for some people, stance means risking losing support from close communities. He said he chose to "deliberately remove many people from my life" after October 7.

Back in Vienna, Sarig was busy organizing a conference of Jewish anti-Zionists, including speakers such as British Holocaust survivors, American podcast and commentator Katie Halper and Jewish Israeli activists such as British Holocaust survivors, American podcast and commentators Katie Halper and Ronnie Barkan. Pape is expected to participate, too.

She said that as the killings in Gaza continued, her focus was on Palestinians trying to survive the Israeli fire.

“I’m not a victim,” Sarig said.