My name is Yonatan Zeigen, and on October 7, 2023 I went through a defining moment that completely split my life into 'before' and 'after’.
My mother, Vivian Silver, was killed in the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri that day. But for more than a month we believed she had been taken hostage by Hamas. Only later were her remains found in the safe room where she had been hiding. I was on the phone with her during her last hours, experiencing the end of her life from afar. She was a lifelong peace activist, but to me she was first of all my mother – someone who always made me feel like I was the most important person in her life.
She believed deeply in equality – that the same rights Israeli Jews deserve must also be a given for Palestinians across this land. But over the years, as right-wing extremism rose in Israel, our political leaders increasingly taught us to accept occupation and conflict as permanent realities – something to be “managed” indefinitely rather than solved. The sense of possibility I grew up with slowly gave way to hopelessness, and for about nine years, I slipped into what I now call a political coma.
When my mother’s voice was taken, I found my own responsibility and I woke up.
As a child, because of my mother’s work, I met Palestinians not as enemies or strangers, but as friends and colleagues. I remember visiting Gaza before I was twelve, walking through the market, sitting in friends’ homes, playing on the beach, and then noticing barbed wire and watchtowers. Even then, I was beginning to understand how easily our common humanity can be obscured.
The truth is that military force will never bring Jews security or safety. And over these past years, Palestinians have paid an unbearable price for a politics that continues to rely on force: mass bombing and destruction in Gaza, starvation and displacement, entire families torn apart, and escalating settler violence and military violence across the West Bank. None of this makes Israelis safer. Our security is bound together with Palestinian liberation. We can either learn how to flourish together, or we can continue these horrific cycles of bloodshed.
Standing Together matters to me because it is building the kind of Jewish-Palestinian power that this future will require – people organizing together not despite their different identities, but around a shared interest in ending occupation, inequality and endless war. In a reality built around separation, fear and the idea that our interests are fundamentally opposed, this kind of partnership is political. It turns the belief in a shared future into something we can organize around and build together.
Three years after October 7, I believe we have to decide what we do with our grief. We can allow it to deepen fear, separation and revenge, or we can turn it into a reason to fight harder for another future. I don’t believe peace is naïve, and I don’t believe it is less plausible than war. Palestinians must have freedom, dignity and self-determination, just as Israelis must have safety. Our land is one land, shared by two peoples, and neither of us is going anywhere.
Peace and partnership are not questions of plausibility. They are questions of will – of our determination, our imagination and our political courage. We have to transform ourselves from two peoples trapped in permanent opposition into people capable of solving a shared problem together, through shared struggles, shared hope and the decision to build peace together.
My mother spent her life believing that another future was possible. I want to spend mine helping Israelis and Palestinians build it together.
In solidarity,
Yonatan Zeigen, social worker and peace activist
· a good and complete synthethis, on facilitation practices
Monique Eckmann, 2004 : Identités en conflit, dialogue des mémoires - Chapitre 3. Conflit, rencontre et dialogue entre Israéliens et Palestiniens - Éditions ies (openedition.org) (in French)
· no position comes without a personal context. The trauma healing method is a tool developed by the Rossing Center and Holy Land Trust which traces the personal path (in English)
· New York Times, 14.12.2023, The Peace Activists Divided by Oct.7, Susan Dominus
A long and detailed article about the feelings and concerns of Tamar Shamir and Mohamed Abu Jafar, facilitators of the Parents Circle's « Young Ambassadors for Peace » hosted by Coexistences during the summer of 2023.
· Review of the situation in the field, Palestinian and Israeli civil society, Amal Tikva, 2024
. Review of the civil society organisations' needs, Amal Tikva, 2020
. An article on the long term impact of dialogue, Ned Lazarus, 2017
· The model of the International Fund for Peace in Northern Ireland
. Vision for an International Fund for Peace in Israel and Palestine
· Apeirogon: a novel, Colum McCann, 2020
· In this place together, A Palestinian's journey to collective liberation, Penina Eilberg-Schwartz with Sulaiman Khatib, 2021
· Painful hope, Ali Abu Awwad, TEDx, 2015
· Within the Eye of the Storm, Shelley Hermon, 2012
· Encounter Point, Ronit Agni, Julia Bacha, 2006
