Israelis Must Get Up From the Yearlong Shiva for October 7 - Opinion - Haaretz.com
October 7, 2023 has passed; October 7, 2024 will pass on Monday. A year ago, this day seeded disasters the scale of which Israel has never known, and changed the country. Israel stopped on October 7, 2023 and has since embraced it and refused to say good-bye.
The scale of the disaster might explain it, but the suspicion cannot be avoided that the stubborn, unceasing, singular engagement with October 7, without taking a breath and without leaving room for anything else, is intended for other purposes. For Israelis, October 7 justifies everything Israel has done since. It is their kashrut certificate.
Wallowing in our disaster prevents us from engaging in the disasters we subsequently inflicted on millions of other people.r
The lives of many Israelis stopped on October 7; they were overturned and destroyed. It is enough to read the heartrending remarks of Oren Agmon, who lost his son (Uri Misgav, Haaretz Hebrew, October 2). Not only is it a duty to remember the atrocity, it's impossible to forget it.
Friends and family mourn Alon Lulu Shamriz, one of three Israeli hostages who were mistakenly killed by the Israeli military while being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, at his funeral last year.Credit: Violaeta Santos Moura/ Reuters
But ahead of the anniversary, the time has come to heal a little; to open our eyes to what has happened since. We must admit, belatedly, that when talking about the "massacre," it is not only the one of October 7. The one that followed is multifold greater and more horrifying.
Israel's attachments to its bereavement has deep roots. We were raised on it. No other society mourns it dead like this. There are also those who associate bereavement with the media and the education system – they say it unites a people.
In the 1960s we sang "Dudu" and cried for a soldier we didn't know, under guidance from above. Israel has more memorials than any country of its size and number of victims: a memorial for every eight fallen, compared with Europe, which has buried millions of its sons, yet where there is a memorial for every 10,000 fallen.
Every death is a loss; the death of a young man even more so. It is not certain that the death of a son from disease or accident is easier for his parents and friends than his falling in battle. It may be assumed that had the young Adam Agmon died of an aneurysm, his father would not mourn less.
People comfort mourners reacting by the shrouded bodies of victims killed in overnight Israeli bombardment on Wednesday.Credit: Omar Al-Qatta/AFP
The myth industry took his death farther. It imposed national mourning on everyone, and more forcibly in the past year. At the same time, it preventing dealing with the mourning of another nation and prohibited even recognizing it. For Israel, there is no such mourning, and anyone who insists on arguing otherwise is a traitor.
It is amazing how a country of absolute mourning dares to so shamelessly deny the existence of another bereavement and considers it illegitimate.
Even the Russians love their children, sang Sting, but tell that to the Israelis who are convinced that the Palestinians do not. I have covered the mourning of the Palestinian people for decades, and I can emphatically declare that they mourn just like us. Bereaved parents are bereaved parents, but you cannot even say that to Israelis, especially not in the past year, when they are huddled in their bereavement and are not willing to listen to anything else.
The past year, a year of great mourning, has elevated these tendencies to unrecognizable heights. A year of heartrending stories about hostages and tales of unceasing supreme heroism, death, heroism and quite a bit of kitsch. I do not mean to make light of the individual and national grief, but when it becomes almost the only issue, for such a long time, it seems it is meant to distract and divert from the main point.
My throat chokes when I read Oren Agmon's noble, moving words. My throat chokes no less at the sound of bereaved fathers in the West Bank and Gaza.
At the end of a year of mourning, it is necessary to get up from the shiva for October 7 and start to look ahead to a place we can go to – whose whereabouts are utterly unknown to anyone – instead of only hearing the words of Israel's heroism and ceaseless mourning.