Remembering All the Victims of the Last Year

Today, 7^th October 2024, sees memorial events across the Jewish world, in memory of the roughly 1100 Israelis who were killed on October 7^th 2023. In Jewish terms it is the end of Shnat Ha’evel, the year of mourning that follows the death of a close relative. It is right and good to mourn them, and to remember each of them in all their individuality and specificity, not only as a group united by the day of their deaths. They leave behind a huge gap amongst their families and friends. May their memories be for a blessing.

We should also mourn the approximately 42,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza in the last year. It is right and good to mourn them too. It is harder, because the numbers are so much greater, but we must try to remember them too as individuals with full and rich lives, not just as a mass of victims. They too, leave a huge gap amongst those left behind, although we know that in many cases entire families have been wiped out. May their memories be for a blessing. We must remember them all the Israeli and Palestinian, not in separate ceremonies or in separate places but altogether – all victims of the same war. All their deaths were needless and preventable, all of them should have lived.

And let’s be wary of the effect of memorial dates, whether 9/11 or the 7^th October; they separate the date from everything around it, as if it existed as an island. This is an illusion. October 7^th would not have happened without the Nakba of 1948, without the occupation that began in 1967, without the blockade of Gaza which began in 2007. To say this is not to justify the violence of that day but to explain that it has a context. And the mass killings Israel have carried out in Gaza in the last year would not have occurred without the Hamas attacks of a year ago today, they came about as a traumatised society vainly tried through violence to restore its sense of safety and security. To say this is not to justify Israel’s military action but to show that it too has a context. There is no way to separate October 7^th from the war on Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon – it is all one war. And it is far from over. So in this sense memorialisation is premature

Still, a year is a year, and it is right to use the occasion to remember everyone who has died, so many of them children, with their lives still to live. Remembering only some of them is a recipe for prolonging the war. Remembering them together might provide a path for ending it. May all their memories be for a blessing.