From revenge to peace: thousands attend joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial for victims of the conflict

Israelis and Palestinians at a joint memorial service for victims of the conflict, in Tel Aviv on 24 April 2023

Ran Shimoni reports in Haaretz on 24 April 2023:

Thousands of people attended a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony for victims of the conflict in Tel Aviv on Monday night, running the gauntlet of a handful of right-wing activists who shouted hated slogans.

For those attending the ceremony in Tel Aviv’s Ganei Yehoshua park, which is largely devoid of lighting, it was hard to find the right path. There were no signs to show the way, so – symbolically – people arrived at the ceremony in darkness and uncertainty. But they kept going, hoping they would eventually arrive at the right place, the one full of light. There could be no journey more suitable to the current moment.

“My heart was always here, but in truth, this is my first time here,” said Einav Oren, 38, of Kibbutz Revadim. “It’s really moving to be here, to see the people. There’s a special kind of quiet here.”

It’s hard not to sense the power of this quiet. It’s a quiet composed of thousands of people, Israelis and Palestinians, sitting on the plastic chairs placed on the lawn and waiting for a recurrence of the miracle that happens every year – an evening shared by bereaved families from both sides of the conflict, mourning together over the deaths of their loved ones and, more importantly, demanding that they be the last bereaved families.

One of them was Anat Marnin-Shahar. Her older brothers, Pinhas and Yair Marnin, were killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War when she was 16.  “Look at us,” she told the people gathered there. “People from whom the conflict has taken the most precious thing of all are willing and able to cry out, ‘Enough!’”

As has also happened in previous years, the Palestinian families’ presence at the event required a legal battle by Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle – Families Forum, the two groups that organize the ceremony every year. This time, too, even though the government is leading it to the gallows, the Supreme Court denied elected officials the power to prevent the Palestinians from attending.

“Every person should observe Memorial Day according to his own beliefs,” Justice Isaac Amit wrote in the ruling. “Every person bears his own sorrow, pain and rupture, each in his own way.”

Israeli criticism of the ceremony is well-known, and it was present just a few dozen meters away (“They’re having a Memorial Day for Palestinian Nazis,” one protester shouted through a megaphone during a tearful speech by Yuval Sapir, who lost his sister in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in 1994). But for the roughly 200 Palestinians who came, the road was even longer – not just because of their need to obtain a special permit to enter Israel, but because of the need to overcome criticism at home.

“I have friends at home who don’t understand me,” said Yousef Abu Ayyash, a Hebron resident in his 20s. “I have relatives who were killed because of the occupation. But if I want to promote peace, this is the best way for me to do it. Here I meet Israelis who want the same thing I do.”

Yusra Mahfuz, who lives in a refugee camp adjacent to Ramallah, spoke about the death of her son, Ala’a, in 2000. “At first, after losing my son, I felt a need for revenge. I initially rejected the very idea of sitting face-to-face with the enemy who took my child, but slowly the desire for revenge was replaced with a desire for peace and a better future,” she said. “I call on Israeli mothers who are watching me now: our bereavement is the same, our pain is the same. Today, more than ever, we can see how important it is to work together. And we’ll put an end to the bloodshed. Enough is enough.”

More Israelis than ever
There were more Israelis there than ever before. Tens of thousands of people signed up in advance, and several thousand more simply showed up. The organizers had no real explanation for these numbers.

Ishay Hadas, a key organizer of the protests against the government’s planned legal overhaul and someone who attends the joint ceremony every year, expressed hope that “something of the great democratic spirit of the demonstrations has also arrived here, restoring hope to people.” Nevertheless, he said he doesn’t think the turnout at the ceremony says anything about the direction the nationwide protests will take. “it’s sad, because the demonstrations provide an opportunity for real change, beyond preserving the status quo,” he said. “But Israeli society doesn’t want that.”  “I’m glad that here, at least, you can see the change,” he added.

Participants’ faces clearly showed their empathy, not for themselves – after years of harassment, threats and humiliation, they no longer need it – but for the other side. The Jews demand it of their own people for the Palestinians, and the Palestinians demand it for the Jews.

This entire ceremony requires empathy, not in the superficial sense of warm feelings, but in the original, deeper and genuinely subversive sense of the word – empathy whose goal is the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes. That is the soil in which the possibility of the “real change” Hadas spoke of can grow.

On this polarized Memorial Day, when bereaved families are fighting with each other and unprecedented anger at elected officials has been piled on top of the mourning, this shared memorial ceremony, which had already grown accustomed to being the most fraught event in Israel on previous Memorial Days, enjoyed a special quiet amid the nationwide noise of the infighting. This year, at least, the ceremony in Ganei Yehoshua may have been the most unifying memorial ceremony of all.

This article is reproduced in its entirety