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. On that day Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis at multiple sites, with more than 100 perishing at the kibbutz. Visiting her burnt-out home a few weeks later, Yonatan told Canadian television that he’d managed to salvage a few of her personal belongings, but “everything was ashes there”, as the killers had torched the 74-year-old’s home.
Vivian was born and raised in Winnipeg. She moved to Israel in 1973, wanting to be part of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was violently reignited the year she arrived in the Middle East by the Yom Kippur war. Her subsequent life was devoted to reconciliation.
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. Anger and hate are the feelings that could well have overtaken Yonatan; indeed, I suspect they’re the emotions most people would have exhibited, walking in his shoes, after her life’s work was so violently thrown back in her face. Those feelings would be perfectly natural, understandable, even expected. But then Yonatan is cut from a different cloth, woven by his principled mum.
Every single photograph I’ve seen of Vivian shows her with a broad, beaming smile. She’s a woman I wish I’d known. She was possessed of a sunny disposition it seems to me, despite living in one of the most volatile regions on Earth. When she died, she’d been the longtime director of the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation, an initiative she co-founded that organised projects linking communities in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. After the last major war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, she helped found a movement called Women Wage Peace, promoting initiatives joining together women from all communities, putting them front and centre of the peace debate.
Vivian was also a leading figure in the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, an Arab-Jewish organisation committed to social change. And she was a volunteer with the group Road to Recovery, which drives Palestinians needing medical treatment, mostly children, to hospitals in Israel. The right care is often unavailable in Palestinian Authority areas, and Road to Recovery says that while its work is humanitarian, it can also foster goodwill, and provides a “unique opportunity for Palestinians and Israelis to get to know each other”, creating hope and contributing to peace.
Vivian’s was a noble life, though I’m sure she never saw herself as “noble”, despite living so much of the time in the service of others. She was undoubtedly a human being possessed of a deep compassion, who also understood a fundamental fact: that whether Israeli or Palestinian, black or white, rich or poor, Muslim, Christian or Jew, we are all human beings; that, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, we are “fellow passengers to the grave”, and not different “races of creatures bound on other journeys”. Many of those who died at Be’eri kibbutz were fellow peace activists, including Hayim Katsman, who was 32 and worked with Palestinians in the southern West Bank. I was reporting on the Israel-Hamas war for the BBC in late October, when Yocheved Lifschitz, who helped ferry Palestinians from Gaza to medical care in Israel as a volunteer with Road to Recovery, was released from captivity, after being held hostage since 7 October. Her husband, Oded, who was also involved in peace work, is still being held.
In the two months after the 7 October massacres, I visited Israel and the occupied West Bank three times. I witnessed the country’s deep pain and suffering and saw the empty streets and cafes and schools and workplaces in the days following the killings, as people hunkered down in their homes and safe rooms, uncertain of the future. All the while, there were unwelcome ghosts of past pogroms and mass death. I also spoke with Palestinian families whose relatives and friends across the frontier in Gaza were suffering unbearable trauma as Israel retaliated. A population losing everything, with thousands of lives extinguished as death came from the sky. Who can forget the images of days-old premature babies, wrapped in blankets, lying on a hospital table and about to be evacuated to Egypt, instead of breathing clean air inside incubators, where they had a better chance of life?
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.
Clive Myrie is a BBC News presenter and journalist
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