Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day – a confused message
The joint ceremony staggers under the weight of its own confused message as a manifestation of grief.
By DONNA ROBINSON DIVINEAisha El-Rabi’s husband Yaakub speaks at the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony(photo credit: screenshot)
A worldwide streaming on Zoom may have bestowed more prominence on the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Memorial Day ceremony, but gave the event no more clarity of purpose or meaning. Believing that there could have been another path to reconciling their conflict, the Israelis and Palestinians who conceived of the project insist that paying homage to casualties on both sides of this deeply entrenched battlefield is a way forward to peace.No one is more anxious for the dawn of a new era of coexistence than Israelis, but can a ceremony defined as an alternative to what has become a sacred national day of mourning serve as anything but an ideological foil to a more complicated set of circumstances? The joint ceremony staggers under the weight of its own confused message as a manifestation of grief. Let me explain.Isn’t it just as easy to imagine the kind of reckoning that helps transform public opinion coming from the bereaved parents or from the children orphaned through the ongoing violence than from grieving for all casualties no matter the reason for their deaths? Like the Yizkor prayers recited in synagogues on designated days of the Jewish calendar, Israel’s Remembrance Day allows the population to mourn in community and also in a highly personal way. A measure of Israel’s grief is to note that the coronavirus forced the country to close its military cemeteries because on this day, these areas are too crowded to practice social distancing. Parents visit the graves of their children, most of whom died discharging their military service. Or children are brought to the site of one or another parent who never made it home from a war or from reserve duty. Many people, remembering their classmates struck down just as they were coming of age or their commanders caught in enemy fire, travel from one military burial site to another. Remembrance Day is personal: The songs sung, and the poems recited every year are narratives of families broken and friendships unfulfilled, people who have disappeared and are irreplaceable. With so many precious relationships lost, Israelis cannot help but ask what could have been done to have made things turn out differently. They want to know if a Jewish state could have been founded and secured without the ongoing wars and violence that have transformed Natan Alterman’s “Silver Platter” from poetry into prophecy.This political challenge confronts Israelis each year as they count their casualties publicly, never denying or obscuring the very high price they pay to establish and sustain the Jewish state. Yet despite, not because of their losses, Israelis still embrace the burdens of what seems necessary to preserve their lives, their society and their state, because they also see the blessings.To trespass on the day by declaring it insufficient in both its moral reckoning and in its potential for bringing peace seems both transgressive and irrational. Palestinian casualties are a tragedy, but why mourn them on a day dedicated to paying homage to those who died fighting for a Jewish state and whose satisfaction derives from the fact that they can mourn the dead in a such a state?Support extended from American Jewish groups such as the Union of Reform Judaism, J Street, the New Israel Fund, Peace Now, IfNotNow and Churches for Middle East Peace has already struck people as an attempt to conjure up dissent on a day that unites Israelis by honoring their sacrifices. Surely, there are better times to mourn all the casualties across the political divide as well as the battle lines. Or better yet, reserve a date and place to talk about what can be done to stop the ongoing hostilities.The author is Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies, Emerita, at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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