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.

But it doesn't. You can't avoid sitting in meetings with coworkers wearing political statements on their sleeves. You can't pretend not to hear the protestors with Taliban flags chanting outside your building. And you can't open the workplace discussion forum without seeing blood libels and cruel comparisons of Jews to Nazis.

So you withdraw further, trying to work within the system and let senior management sort things out. Maybe a formal complaint will be heard. Maybe a mediation will defuse the tension. Maybe just work from home whenever possible.

But the experiment continues and I find myself wondering whether Zimbardo actually is behind this one. Despite the ongoing efforts to minimise myself and the sincere attempts of a few well-meaning managers, the system has failed.

This much became clear to me last week at an academic conference when I was publicly humiliated by a group of peers. Workplace bullying is never acceptable but I'd imagine most HR managers would shudder at the notion of bullying someone based on their ethnicity while they're on stage talking, amongst other things, about mental health and wellbeing.

Standing there blinded by the lights and staring out into a crowd of blank faces, I waited for the responses to an interactive poll designed to gauge the needs of my professional community – early career researchers. With the results projected in real time onto the massive theatre screen behind me, I watched the chaos roll in with unprofessional comments and Palestinian flag emojis featuring heavily as answers to unrelated questions.

While I struggled to maintain my composure amidst the embarrassment, I noticed a group of colleagues from my university sitting at the back of the hall. These were the friends who have become increasingly distant over the past 21 months — in some cases aggravating my social isolation by slandering me within our department. This group were some of the only attendees at this national conference who were aware of my connection to Israel.

Most people of Jewish and Israeli heritage no longer feel welcome at my university. Some small fraction will disagree, and I’m sure they have their reasons. But many might not deem it safe to even answer such a question. After all, what might be the consequences if they get it wrong?

One lasting impact from the careers of social psychologists like Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram, is the emphasis on ethical behaviour in modern research and a robust framework to ensure appropriate conduct in experiments. Extending the metaphor to its natural conclusion, you might wonder whether workplaces like my university simply need new rules or policies to address these issues.

The answer is an unequivocal no. The policies already exist. What is lacking is the courage and will power to actually enforce them in any meaningful way. Until that happens, Jewish and Israeli staff and students will continue to be unwilling participants in this experiment.

And until then, people who share my heritage or my values must continue to raise their voices against the deafening silence of inaction.