When I was 17, on Israeli Memorial Day, a friend from class told me that there was an alternative Israeli-Palestinian ceremony and invited me to come with her. I didn't fully understand what she meant, and of course I didn't understand exactly who the Palestinians speaking would be but curiosity did the job - sometimes things are that simple. As soon as the ceremony at our high school was over, together with some friends we ran to make it to the alternative ceremony at the Tel Aviv Port. By the time we arrived there were no places left. The hall was filled. I said I would go again next year to see what it was all about.
Thirteen years have passed since then, and every year I am there. Little by little I became more and more involved in this community, and in recent years I have become a facilitator at the youth seminars of the Parents Circle-Families Forum. This ceremony helped me develop my muscle of hope so strongly that even now while this terrible war is happening and the sorrow is so alive in all of us, I can imagine that [life] will be good here. Every year [at the ceremony] on the grass of HaYarkon Park, I ask myself if I too might have the strength to breathe through the pain and fight for peace like the speakers who lost the most precious thing of all, and at the same time I pray that I will never have to face this test.
Every year I am also exposed to the magnitude of the fracture and the pain in an extreme way when I see the tremendous rage of the demonstrators outside the event, and the institutional attempts to prevent the ceremony from taking place.
Every year the ceremony takes on a new meaning for me - when my brother enlisted [in the Israeli military], when I lived on a shared campus with Palestinian friends at the Arava Institute, when I watched the ceremony from afar on Zoom when I lived abroad. Or when simply another year of violent conflict, death and trauma passes and this is just normal, the way of the world, the ceremony always reminds me that it is not normal, not at all normal, or what we want, or our destiny.
The life and death of our two nations are intertwined on this emotional piece of land. For some of us, especially in the last few months, this piece of land has become hell on earth. This year more than ever this ceremony is a breath of fresh air in such a painful reality.
A gust of wind that reminds us that precisely from the pain and fear that is so alive and pulsing in our hearts and stomachs - we must hold fast that this is not destiny. War and violence are not destiny. Let's stop it together.
And the truth? This ceremony in itself is for me a glimmer, maybe momentary, but so deep, of repair. Repairing, for all those boys and girls, Israelis and Palestinians, who one day, I hope, inshallah - will not imagine their portrait projected on the screen at the Memorial Day ceremony in high school, or as a picture carried on a sign at a funeral with the word "martyr". Instead, for a moment we can close our eyes with the tens of thousands of other men and women on the grass in HaYarkon Park, and let the waves of sadness, hope and partnership that flow from the stage wash over us. Let it shed the cynicism, allow us to imagine life in a land where there is peace and reconciliation.
We, Israelis and Palestinians, deserve to ask for forgiveness from those who will never return, and to demand a good and safe life for those who live and will live here. We must ask for it together, it might even come true. This is what we do at the ceremony, Israelis and Palestinians, every year. And that's what it means to me.
Eve Tendler
