Israelis, Palestinians hold joint online memorial: ‘Help our wounded humanity heal’
Amid war and lack of entry permits for Palestinians, controversial annual event is pre-recorded and livestreamed; Gazan who lost 60 relatives says all wanted to ‘live in freedom’
Alongside the more mainstream Memorial Day events Sunday evening, a livestreamed version of the annual Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial ceremony attempted to delicately deal with the immense pain felt by both sides in the shadow of the ongoing war on Hamas in Gaza, focusing this year on the pain felt by children during the war.
The ceremony, now in its 19th year, is organized by the left-wing group Combatants for Peace and by the Parents Circle — Families Forum, a grassroots organization of bereaved Israelis and Palestinians.
Since Israel has revoked all entry permits to Palestinians after Hamas’s mass invasion and massacre on October 7, no resident of the West Bank was allowed to attend in person this year. Organizers therefore decided to take the event online rather than hold an event for Israelis alone.
This year’s ceremony was pre-recorded on May 8 before an audience of 250 people. It was streamed online on Sunday evening, and in some locations, public screenings were held in volunteers’ homes. Organizers had predicted that hundreds of thousands would view it from around the world.
The assembly, which its organizers say is the largest peace event organized jointly by Israelis and Palestinians, has been controversial since its inception in 2006, but has also drawn increasingly larger crowds over the years, both in person and online. Last year, 15,000 attended the ceremony at Tel Aviv’s Ganei Yehoshua Park, and 200,000 watched it online from around the world, according to organizers.
While right-wing politicians have called participants “traitors” who “sit with terrorists,” and while Hamas authorities view participants as “collaborators with Israel, organizers maintain that the ceremony aims to supersede the traditional Memorial Day discourse that “war and death are inevitable and necessary,” and to present an alternative narrative that puts human lives at the forefront.
Among the Israeli speakers this year was Yonatan Zeigen, son of Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was murdered on October 7 in her kibbutz in near the Gaza border.
“Today I look at my children heartbroken from the thought that their father, too, might not live to see peace during his lifetime,” he said, according to Hebrew media. “How many generations of bereavement are needed until we grasp that the only way… is peace? We all must grasp that the occupation, October 7, the war in Gaza, Jewish and Arab terrorism and any sort of political violence are not unavoidable.”
Michal Halev, mother of Laor Abramov, a DJ from New Jersey who was murdered at the Supernova music festival, said: “When I manage to lift my head from my personal grief about the loss of my dearly beloved son… I find one goal to live for, and that is to look for what I can do to help our wounded humanity heal, so that no more mothers will be crushed by killings, loss, violence and war.
The Palestinian speakers included Ahmed Helou, who lost 60 members of his extended family in Gaza in the ongoing war.
“Behind each name there is a human with a story and a family and dreams,” he said. “All of them had one dream — to live in freedom and independence. This is the dream for which we are fighting, like all nations of the world.”
Naglaa, a Gazan woman who lost her brother Abdulrahman in the war, sent a written message, declining to give her full name for safety reasons.
“I joined the Parents Circle — Families Forum a few months ago,” she said. “I know that on the other side there are many people who believe in the message of peace and ending the occupation. I felt that my participation in the Forum was creating a new hope for both nations and building bridges for dialogue.”
The war broke out on October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists carried out a devastating attack on southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 252 hostages, while committing acts of wholesale brutality.
Israel’s subsequent offensive, aiming to destroy Hamas and free the hostages, has killed over 35,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. This figure cannot be independently verified and does not differentiate between civilians and Palestinian combatants. Israel says it has killed over 15,000 Hamas fighters since the war began and around 1,000 inside Israeli territory on October 7. In addition, 271 soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began, in Gaza and amid operations on the border.
Gianluca Pacchiani contributed to this report.
