With friends like these…

After spending the first decade of my adult life in Israel, moving back to Australia was a welcome return to calm, at least for the first two years.

In the immediate days and subsequent months following the atrocities of October 7 2023, that serene calm gave way to chilling silence, which itself became deafening — gradually at first, then all at once.

It became an experiment, a kind of psychosocial Russian roulette that even Philip Zimbardo, the American psychologist whose prison experiment demonstrated the power of social situations to influence behaviour, might have balked at:

Will my officemate ask if my family are safe? Which colleague will post something gleeful on their social media while the rest of my newsfeed is filled with chaos and scenes of graphic violence? Which friend am I going to lose today?

When someone from your workplace, a university in my case, posts that "there is no such thing as an innocent civilian in Israel" — the week after October 7 — it becomes hard to see your colleagues as friends.

Seeing people turn any available wall or pinboard into a canvas to proclaim that "Israel doesn't have a right to exist", makes it similarly difficult to feel welcome in a place that otherwise champions Indigenous rights.

So you stop the experiment, right? You disengage from social media. You eat lunch alone. You carefully plan your routes to avoid posters and graffiti. And that should solve it.