Three Years Later, We Still Haven't Figured Out How to Mourn

On this eve of the third anniversary of October 7th, so much feels stuck. The anniversary and its critical work of memory feels to me like a pill, meant to help us heal, but one that’s stuck in our throats, where we might choke on it.

A year ago, on the second anniversary, it seemed possible to imagine things might be at least a little better by now. A ceasefire was poised to begin, that should have allowed humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and rebuilding to start. The last surviving Israeli hostages were released just a few days later.

Instead, one year later, there’s no real ceasefire. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past year. Gaza remains in ruins. The West Bank is on fire with settler terrorism. Israeli families still go regularly to bomb shelters.

What’s stuck isn’t only the lack of progress toward any political resolution. Three years later, we still haven’t figured out how to mourn.

At many Israeli and American Jewish memorial ceremonies, those killed and kidnapped on 10/7 will rightly be honored with poems and prayers, songs and kaddish – but with a stern insistence not to include any mention of the Palestinians killed over the past three years, most of them women and children.

In pro-Palestinian advocacy spaces, people will rightly point out how much Palestinian suffering continues, and demand an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories – but with little if any compassion for the Israeli civilians killed on their kibbutzim or at the Nova music festival.

The war has hacked our empathy, flattened our ability to see people on the other side as fully human.

We can mourn for those lost on October 7th and still acknowledge the enormous imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians. Over the past three years, so much more death, destruction, and displacement has fallen on Palestinians. That’s why I’ve joined in calls to oppose U.S. military aid to Israel while it violates international law and Palestinian human rights.

Still, tomorrow I’ll be mourning the Israeli lives lost and shattered. I hope people who joined me in protesting Netanyahu last week will join me in reading Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s agonizing memoir When We See You Again, a love letter to her murdered son, Hersh. Or Eli Sharabi’s Hostage, about his 491 days in captivity, only learning after his release that his wife, two daughters, and brother had been killed. They are both harrowing accounts that could move anyone.

And I will also be mourning the Palestinian lives lost over these three years. I hope people who have joined me in condemning Hamas, and in standing with Israeli hostages and bereaved families will join me – in reading Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, a gutting account of what it has been like to be a human being in Gaza. If you prefer poetry, read Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise or Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die.

There are a few places where Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslim, are trying to hold their grief together. Tomorrow evening, I’ll be joining the Israelis for Peace NYC vigil in Union Square, where last year Khalil Sayegh and Aziz Abu Sarah spoke alongside Tamar Glezerman, all of whom have lost people dear to them.

The Parents’ Circle Families Forum held an online memorial today. Combatants for Peace have been holding joint memorial ceremonies for the past 20 years. Maoz Inon, whose parents were both killed on October 7th, and Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died after being beaten in IDF custody, mourn their losses by working to persuade others that The Future is Peace.

To be clear: the point is not to pretend that all we need is shared mourning. Nor to absolve Hamas for their war crimes. Nor to absolve Netanyahu and the IDF for theirs. Nor to equate the suffering on both sides.

Reckoning will be required. Accountability will be required. Real, sustained pressure on Israel will be required (I’ve been encouraged by the recent actions of the British government, under Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, and hope Democratic presidential candidates will follow in this direction). Some politics will be required, and some miracles (thankfully, the kind that sometimes happen).

But for the third anniversary, a day of memory, a good start is to try to resist the flattening of empathy, to let ourselves weep for all the lives lost, the children killed, the families torn apart, the homes destroyed. To remember that each person was created in God’s image, and that each was, as Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 teaches, an entire world. From there, maybe we can start to find our way toward healing.