Published: 3 January 2024
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Hamas’s murder of humanitarians such as Vivian Silver doesn’t show their work was in vain – it shows that more people need to listen, writes CLIVE MYRIE.
I wondered where Yonatan Zeigen found his strength; then I realised it comes from his dead mother. Vivian Silver was a Canadian-Israeli humanitarian and peace activist, who was murdered by Hamas gunmen at her home on Be’eri kibbutz, just a few kilometres from the Israel-Gaza border, on 7 October.
Yonatan is a man I have never met, but he’s someone I greatly admire, and I can see his mother’s convictions in her son. The interviews he has given since her murder show an even-tempered judgment and depth of thought that I suspect I would not have been able to summon, had my own mother been so cruelly taken from me.
Israel and Hamas are still engaged in their bitter war and there’s little to suggest its conclusion will finally bring peace to this blighted corner of the world. But there is hope, because of people like Vivian’s son Yonatan and so many others like him.
They’re all activists who believe that the conflicts involving Israel and Palestine – which I have been covering my whole life – can be resolved if people look beyond their own differences. Yonatan says the wars and bad blood continue not because his mother’s work was stupid or naive and futile, with both sides locked in a natural, never-ending enmity, but because her efforts were not pushed and championed by more people across the divide.
Yonatan’s experience has forced me to question what my own responses might have been in the same situation. Despite everything he’s gone through, he argues his mother had the right ideas, but not enough people listened. My hope for 2024 is that more people at least try to listen, and that her life and work wasn’t in vain.
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Out of the ashes, the dignity and compassion of Israeli peace activists gives me hope (Guardian)
