Broken World
Today I learned that Vivian Silver’s body was positively identified. Vivian, a staunch peace activist and co-founder of Women Wage Peace, disappeared on October 7th, presumed kidnapped by Hamas. I thought about her often, imagining her reasoning with her captors, imagining her encouraging the other hostages, somehow holding on to her characteristic sense of optimism and determination.
That very morning I’d heard her on an Israeli radio program, talking in Hebrew with a Canadian accent. At the time of the interview she was in her safe room in her house on Kibbutz Be’eri, southern Israel. She sounded worried.
Six weeks later, this train of thought has come to an abrupt end. Vivian Silver is dead and peace advocacy has lost one of its staunchest members.
I am sure Vivian would have known what to do. She would have pushed for a diplomatic solution, she would have said that violence only begets more violence. But it’s at times like this that the descent into mistrust and hatred is most slippery. It is easier to hunker down and support your own side. It is easier to lick your own wounds and dwell on the losses of your own tribe. In this broken world, I fear we are losing all traces of humanity and decency.
It is much harder to confront the harsh reality of both sides. Acknowledge the grief and the pain on both sides. Acknowledge the destruction. Nothing will be solved by the further killing of innocent children, nothing will be solved by the destruction of homes, of gardens where people planted trees and flowers, hoping for better days and fresher mornings.
As a person who has always believed in reaching out to the other side, I stand at a difficult crossroad today. It is not just unpopular but dangerous nowadays to show even a flicker of empathy for the other side. It is tantamount to making light of the loss and pain of your own people. Living in Israel, this does not mean I do not care about the hostages being held in Gaza — I care very much — nor does it mean I make light of those who grieve for their children, parents, grandparents, homes.
A few years ago, I participated in the Parallel Narrative Experience, a joint Palestinian-Israeli project organized by The Parents Family Circle. The project included three months of intensive meetings between Israelis and Palestinians in which we learned to acknowledge each others’ history. We went to the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem for a guided tour in Arabic (simultaneously translated into Hebrew) and, as we passed the pile of shoes displayed behind glass, one of the Palestinian women in our group turned around and walked to the other side of the room. I was taken aback, thinking she wasn’t interested, but then she stopped and fiddled in her bag for a tissue — I saw she was crying. “I didn’t know about this,” she murmured. We also went to Lifta, a former Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem whose residents were forced to leave in 1948. I was shocked when our guide explained how the longtime Arab residents had been attacked and expelled from their own houses, and how at first they did not believe what was happening. This beautiful place with a natural spring, dotted with olive and carob trees, had an alternate history.
It was not simple, I did not come out of the project thinking peace was knocking at the door, but I did come out with a better understanding of my neighbors. We listened, we argued, we felt compassion and frustration, and we often disagreed.
When the current war began, I was devastated by the slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis. My belief in humanity faltered, and I began to rethink my volunteer work with The Road to Recovery, an NGO that drives Palestinian children in need of life-saving medical attention to hospitals in Israel. Vivian Silver also volunteered here, driving children to and from the border with Gaza. Perhaps, I thought, I had been naïve all these years to think I could make a change, even a very small one. Perhaps my moral compass needed a drastic reset. For two weeks I allowed my fear to get the better of me — I stopped driving children. I spent my days volunteering with an Israeli family from the south whose daughter and son-in-law had been murdered. They had been evacuated to my village and were staying in a house down the street. I cooked and cleaned and did my best to make their lives a little easier. My husband and I also lined up for six hours to give blood to an Israeli hospital. As we waited, we recalled the last time we gave blood together, during the 2014 war between Gaza and Israel, at a hospital in East Jerusalem that was collecting blood for Gaza. Back then an Israeli acquaintance of mine raised her eyebrows at our act. “You should be supporting our soldiers,” she told me.
Two weeks after this current war started, as Israel continued to bombard Gaza, I reconsidered my trajectory and decided to resume driving Palestinian children. All children are entitled to medical attention; they should not be a part of this decades-long conflict.
Around this time I was invited to join a peace initiative of Israeli and Palestinian activists. Only one Palestinian joined the first meeting. Participants suggested demonstrations, sit-ins, and protests, but I was not convinced. I also attended an online meeting of The Road to Recovery. Several members of the group, aside from Vivian Silver, had been killed or taken hostage on October 7th. The mood was grim, and I left the meeting feeling despondent. Still, the next day I drove a 7-year old boy and his mother to Sheba Hospital, just outside Tel Aviv. On the way there I focused only on the child and his mother. When they got out of my car at the entrance to the Pediatric Emergency Room, the mother turned around, her child in her arms, and waved to me. I switched on the radio, news of further bloodshed penetrating the air, and drove away. Just to be alive felt good.
It is, indeed, a serious thing. Acts of cruelty do not give carte blanche for more acts of cruelty, no matter how painful. That’s what Vivian Silver would have said. We must not allow extremists to dictate how we respond to the world, as difficult as that is. I will continue to keep children on both sides in my thoughts and in my acts, and I will do my best to help my neighbors, near and far. In an excerpt from “Invitation,” American poet Mary Oliver wrote these words which I have copied onto a yellow Post-It note and placed on the lid of my laptop:
It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
Because for all of us, wherever we live, life goes on; we have no choice but to trudge on together in this broken world.
Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and literary translator from Hebrew and Arabic whose full-length translations include Agi Mishol's Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books), Yonatan Berg's Frayed Light (Wesleyan Poetry Series, a finalist for the Jewish National Book Awards) and Meir Shalev's My Wild Garden (Penguin Random House). Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Narratively and numerous other publications.