Remembering both sides on Yom Hazikaron
‘Killing Palestinians would not bring my Yaeli back; nothing would,’ a grieving father tells a joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial service, recalling his daughter who was murdered in a terror attack
For Ben Kfir, the funeral for his daughter, Yael, a young IDF soldier killed in a September 2003 terror attack, was the turning point.
Softly and candidly, Kfir described to a crowd of several thousand in north Tel Aviv on Sunday night how he contemplated committing suicide or going out and killing Palestinians in retribution for Yael’s death. “Many [Palestinians] worked at the construction site right near my home,” he said. “I was so full of rage then, I would have done anything,” he said. But a small, lucid voice stopped him.
“Killing them would not bring my Yaeli back,” he said. “Nothing would.”
The idea that the Palestinians and Israelis are not merely each other’s partners for a future peace deal but also companions on the long road of pain and loss to get there was echoed at a Combatants for Peace joint memorial service for Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. The annual ceremony aims to bring the two sides together via a shared sense of grief.
Kfir recounted thinking that killing Palestinians would just fuel the circle of violence and cause another family to experience the tragedy he went through. “The tears of a Palestinian father are just as bitter, just as salty, as the tears of an Israeli parent,” he said. He ultimately opted for a path of peace and activism.
“Neither the Israelis or Palestinians are going to just give up; we know that by now. We [Israelis] only have one country, and we will protect and defend it,” he said. “But we’ve paid an awful price… Is being right enough?”
Addressing a packed audience of over 2,000 people plus several hundred who watched a live feed outside the venue, grieving Palestinians and Israelis recounted vastly different personal tales but also shared the common outlook that everyone is a human being. This idea — trite and banal — took hundreds of years for people to recognize on a fundamental level and enact into laws and human rights, Eva Illouz, a sociology professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in her speech.
‘Between who’s right and who isn’t right, there’s a space. Let’s meet there’
A silver lining of hope, Illouz added, is the existence of such Israeli-Palestinian cooperative forums. “I can’t think of another conflict that went on for nearly 100 years in which people from both sides met and shared things with each other,” Illouz declared. “I don’t know that the Irish and English held such meetings.”
For Jamil Kassas, a Palestinian man from the Deheisheh refugee camp outside Bethlehem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken members of three generations of his family. One of the 44 Palestinians given entry to Israel for the service Sunday evening (109 had requested permits), Kassas spoke about the emptiness that follows the loss of a loved one.
“My grandfather was killed in 1948 because he refused to leave his village [outside Beit Jibrin, south of Hebron],” he said via a pre-recorded video that was made in case he couldn’t make it to the event.
The second generation of his family killed was his uncle, who died during the first Lebanon War at a Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut. Next was his 14-year-old brother, Nasr, who was killed by Israeli soldiers in 1989 after the IDF imposed a curfew in their village. Nasr was walking to his brother’s house at night when soldiers told him to stop, but he got scared and ran instead, and they shot and killed him, Kassas said.
“Since his death, the smile has left my face,” Kassas said solemnly.
Like the other Palestinians active in Combatants for Peace, Kassas chose to engage with Israelis and ignore calls for anti-normalization — to end the cycle of violence rather than perpetuate it.
Getting on stage after his video clip, Kassas said he only had a few words for the mostly Israeli audience. “I take Palestinian groups to Yad Vashem occasionally, and every time I go there, I am saddened by the Holocaust and what happened to the Jewish people. I know how much you have suffered… And maybe that’s why it’s sometimes expected of you to be the most righteous, and the most kingly,” he said.
“You are the ones with power here. So be righteous, and be kingly, and don’t make another people pay for the awful horrors that were done to you.”
Another poignant speech came from Avner Horovitz, whose father, Shmuel, was killed outside Ismailia, in north Egypt, in a 1990 terror attack carried out by a Palestinian cell from Jordan. His father was an activist “before people were called activists,” Horovitz recounted. His family lived outside Jerusalem, in Har Adar, and often drove Palestinians home from work, and shopped at their stores. Shmuel learned Arabic because, he said, “to understand your neighbor, you need to speak his language.”
Shmuel was killed when gunmen shot at his tour bus and a mortar exploded under his seat. His wife, also injured in the attack, dragged his blood-drenched body off the bus for his last breaths.
Years later, when Horovitz became active in Combatants for Peace, he listened to a Palestinian man describe witnessing a targeted killing by an IDF aircraft in the West Bank. The man’s proximity to death was a traumatic memory he carried with him, he said.
When Horovitz heard the Palestinian man describe pulling the body, soaked in blood, out of the targeted car, it triggered the memory of his own father’s death. But he said to himself: “How can you even compare these two situations? Your father was an activist, and this Palestinian was a terrorist!”
Nonetheless, something about the dripping blood of a limp body and the image of a living man’s final breaths resonated with him.
Horovitz added that for years he never questioned what his father, Shmuel, did for a living. Shmuel was in charge of planning settlements in the West Bank, a role that gave him great pride, Horovitz noted. It took Horovitz many years, but he concluded in time “that there is nothing Zionist about that enterprise,” he said, referring to Israel’s settlement expansion and military control of the West Bank.
Like other speakers at the memorial service, Horovitz came from a very Zionist background. Commemorating his father in a joint Israeli-Palestinian service didn’t so much mean he was giving up his Israeli pride as it signified his desperate search for a new reality, he said, one that exists beyond the sorrow and the blame.
As one grieving Palestinian father said at the start of the ceremony, “Between who’s right and who isn’t right, there’s a space. Let’s meet there.”
