Israeli Palestinian Joint Memorial Day

Please listen to the voices of those holding open the door to liberation

A word about Combatants for Peace and Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace, the organizations behind the Joint Memorial Ceremony, which will be broadcast live this Tuesday, April 29 (sign-up here) and later available on CfP’s YouTube channel.

If you want an end of violence, listen to those who have put down their weapons and forged a new community with their enemies, even their killers. If there is a path to justice, it can only pass through the arms of those who have paid the ultimate price.

Many in their own nations heap scorn, hatred, and violence upon them for their choice to liberate themselves from those paths to nowhere.

Admittedly, it is easier to enclose ourselves within our own communities of grief. Our pain is softened by the comforts of hearing the national story told again and again over the graves of the fallen. The way each people grieves its dead shapes the conflict more than any of the categorical and theoretical terms or isms thrown around by people safely ensconced abroad (including diaspora communities from both nations). You can repeat the rosary of the terms, we all know the terms, the terms we hope will pierce our enemies’ armor. But the terms don’t live in anyone’s hearts, where the fires of war are ignited. The war begins (or ends) in the hearts beating over the bodies of the dead. Bearing the mutilated and the violated, the bereaved stand in a place we cannot know, unless we are them. They stand on the border: between revenge and forgiveness. And which one truly leads to justice?

Deep behind our own borders, we stew in outrage. But it’s an outrage that betrays our embarrassment at our own safety — our distance from the (spilled) blood we claim to share. More than it protects anyone over there, our outrage feeds the moral self-gratification and strident pride we feel right here. I have heard so many people say they are aghast at seeing atrocities on their phones. (What an injustice to these innocent phones! These bionic extensions of our identities). Foregrounding your consumption of horror, your reaction, is the exact opposite of the humility demanded by such unspeakable trauma. In our vain attempts to witness, we ultimately seek to buffer ourselves from the unmediated reality of death, violent death, horrific death, unjust and unjustifiable death.

This joint Memorial ceremony can shatter your personal and national ego, removing the separation barriers. Submit yourself in silence and humility. Listen to the stories of the people who hold the heaviest weight, the weight of their loved ones, and who place it before the people responsible — who have chosen, nonetheless, to listen. The only revolutionaries are at this ceremony. They are the true warriors and freedom fighters.

Amidst great loss, it is natural to gather and mourn with one’s own. But what future does it hold? If you truly want to touch the hem of grief in this land, listen to the stories of the people whose pain is not mourned in your larger (religious, national, political) community. Nothing will impact you more. I say this from experience.

If the demise of an innocent person is wrong, it isn’t wrong because they are Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, martyrs, or victims. It isn’t wrong because of what happened to their grandparents or ancestors. It is wrong because no one should meet their end in a spray of bullets, in the blast of a bomb, in the hunger of a siege, in the inferno of a burned home. It isn’t wrong because it happened to us. It is wrong because it should never happen to anyone. And that means it should never happen to them.

I hope you will hear them now, even for the first time.