On a cold December day during the Christmas holidays, Dalia Sarig’s 80-year-old father arrived at her home in Vienna after she had returned from a skiing trip.
He was there to pick up her stepsister, who had joined Sarig’s family on vacation.
She was convinced it would be her last meeting with her father, as their political differences were about to come to a head.
“I said goodbye. I hugged him,” she told media. “When I said goodbye, I said goodbye knowing that maybe I will not see him any more.”
Tensions with her Jewish family had been building for years. At 56, Sarig, a pro-Palestine activist, is at odds with most of her relatives.
Her parents adhere to Zionism, the nationalist political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state and is seen by Palestinians and their supporters as the system that underpins their suffering.
Sarig knew during that December meeting with her father that she intended to stage a pro-Palestine demonstration outside parliament in January that would be filmed by a local television station. The activist group she was a part of had put her forward for a broadcast interview. Appalled by Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and determined to speak up, she went ahead with it.
“The interview was broadcast and it immediately went to my family.”
She later heard that her father, who also lives in the Austrian capital, had told friends that “to him, I died”.
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