Remembering the victims of war is a first step toward peace

There are two feelings, some might say traits, that are hard to come by when countries are in a state of war: empathy and sympathy.
These constitute our ability to share in the feelings or experiences of someone else by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation, or to understand and care about someone else’s suffering.
In the midst of a war there are those who condemn the harboring of such feelings as a show of weakness that interferes with the notion of that elusive goal of absolute victory and total defeat of the enemy.
Nothing could be further from the truth; such feelings are a show of humanity that delineates the horizon of where a conflict ends and peace begins, beyond the horrific bloodshed and immense suffering that wars inflict.
It is in this spirit of shared humanity that for the past 20 years thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have held a joint annual memorial ceremony to commemorate all those who have lost their lives in this never-ending conflict, always in the hope that the latest year’s victims will be the last.
This year’s ceremony took place this week in Jaffa, Israel, with a parallel event at Beit Jala, in the occupied West Bank, for Palestinians who are prevented from entering Israel even for such a commendable expression of camaraderie between people who acknowledge each other’s losses and longing for peace.
Organized by the groups Combatants for Peace and the Parents Circle — Families Forum, the event brings together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict, and their supporters, in honor of their losses and in a joint call for peace.
This year’s ceremony was broadcast live to 160 locations across Israel, the Palestinian territories and around the world. As I attended one of them, it was both a privilege and very much a humbling experience to be in the company of people who have the inner strength to rise above their personal and endless grief, and share it with people whose nations are at war and who have suffered a similar fate.
To have the ability to share this pain in a message of peace and reconciliation is not an obvious response to such suffering, especially not during these most horrendous days when tens of thousands of people on both sides, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been added over the past 18 months to the long list of victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sacrificed on the altar of distorted ideologies and failed leaderships that are becoming increasingly heartless.
Nevertheless, who can better understand what every one of these families is going through — the anguish, the pain, the constant longing for loved ones they will never see again — than those on both sides of the conflict who are experiencing the very same excruciating pain. In a cruel irony of history, they share a tragedy that crosses political and geographic borders.
This joint memorial ceremony is also referred to as the Alternative Memorial Day ceremony, because it takes place on the same evening as the official Israeli Memorial Day for soldiers, members of the security forces, and civilians killed in the conflict.
In the present environment of intolerance for any joint activities between Israelis and Palestinians, a sharing of loss and pain in a ceremony of this kind is far from being a general consensus in either society. In Israel, one of the synagogues that screened the event was attacked by mindless, right-wing hoodlums, with the support of their politicians, who violently assaulted attendees as they left the building. Comments too vile to repeat were also posted on social media. 

Pleas for humanity in the midst of conflict deserve our admiration.

Yossi Mekelberg

Among Palestinians, there are voices that mistakenly claim the event to be one that promotes “normalization” of the occupation, and so some of the harrowing stories about the experiences of entire families wiped out in Gaza, which were related alongside courageous calls for peace and coexistence, had to be delivered anonymously to protect the identities of those reading them.
Sharing one’s pain and sense of humanity is not “normalization,” it is turning one’s loss into something meaningful. The history of war teaches us that in times of conflict the slightest expression of empathy or sympathy for the opposing side is the first step toward peace and reconciliation. It also helps us to preserve our humanity.
Falling into the trap of believing that our side’s survival depends on the absolute defeat of the other side only leads to more suffering. In such circumstances, in an attempt to justify and maintain the unabated killing and devastation, the “other” is demonized and dehumanized in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, to perpetuate a war and the losses that come with it.
We are indoctrinated and socialized to internalize our right to inflict pain for the purposes of self-defense — but in too many cases, self-defense quickly turns into revenge and punishment, generating a vicious cycle of unjustified and inexcusable violence.
Hence, there is tremendous power in gatherings of those who have suffered the agonizing pain of losing loved ones and yet are still prepared to turn such a tragic experience into a positively transformative one, as a warning to the rest of us not to be sucked into this black hole of hatred and revenge in which there can be no winners, only losers.
Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. so boldly put it: “An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”
Pleas for humanity in the midst of a war, especially coming from those who have only recently lost a family member, deserve our admiration and should serve as our moral compass. The animosity faced by those voicing these pleas comes from those who are too scared to hear them, or too immersed in a cycle of violence and anger that provides them with the justification to perpetuate this same pattern.
For those involved in the conflict who are driven and motivated by extreme ideology or religious fundamentalism, appeals for them to acknowledge the humanity, let alone the mutual suffering, of “the other” will probably fall on deaf ears.
However, the vast majority of people are not like this; instead, they are motivated more by the fear and distrust that is fed to them by those more interested in prolonging the conflict than resolving it. Such fear and distrust can be overcome by people who engage with each other in normal daily activities such as working or studying together, sharing public spaces (and hopefully private spaces too), and even sharing their common grief and pain.
It is through such engagement that we start to see each other as people, as human beings, and not simply as faceless enemies.
The acclaimed American poet and activist Maya Angelou once said: “I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”
The sharing of sorrows of bereavement by those on both sides who have lost loved ones represents a first, and extremely important, demonstration of courage through empathy. This is the gift that the bereaved families who commemorated their losses together are giving us.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House.
X: @YMekelberg