I don’t remember the first time I noticed my family’s racism. It was probably as a teenager during a Friday night, Sabbath meal in Melbourne. An event in the Middle East would have occurred in the previous weeks, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem or a terror attack against Israelis, and one of my cousins would predictably erupt into a diatribe against the Palestinians and their leader Yasser Arafat. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet, so knowledge about a country on the other side of the world came from only a few sources.

Sometimes I stayed silent, wanting to avoid conflict. Other times I would forcefully respond, though my own understanding of the issue wasn’t complete at the time, because demonising an entire people for the actions of a few seemed irrational. Besides, due to our history as a Jewish family who fled Nazi Europe in the 1930s, I thought we should know better than to claim all Palestinians were Jew haters because some attacked Israeli interests.