In the warm October night 12 years ago my father Yaya offer was murdered by two Palestinian terrorists. They attacked him at home, at night, axes, landing on his body 41 strokes. Its killing was planned. My father, who left as a colonel in the Israeli army, was a central figure in my childhood. As an adult, I loved hiking with him all over the country and meeting people from all backgrounds. It was all gone in one evening. The attackers were sentenced to life in prison. Now, as part of an agreement on the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, one of these men goes free of charge.
With his freedom I came to peace.
Many of 1,000 prisoners who are released In exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages, people like my father, on their hands, are barely dry. Behind every cordially charming video hostage involving family members is the family like mine, which is forced to relive their own grief.
Knowing that a man who killed my father, leaves prison, evokes complex emotions, but I know it’s the right decision to release these prisoners if that’s what is needed to save hostages that have been held for almost 500 days. I believe that nothing can be more sacred than bring the hostage home – not my grief that will not end, and even my father, whose life I cannot restore. No, if we can revive our colleagues with compatriots who are still held in tunnels under Gaza.
I hope that the hostage exchange will end this long and terrible war that was on both sides that did not choose, reaching millions of people on both sides. And yet I am terribly afraid that after the exchanges are completed, when the soldiers withdraw, we find that the Israelis and Palestinians are now from peace than ever in our history.
I come from a family of peace. My father’s grandfather, born in Haifa, helped to free the Dachau concentration camp with the British army. My mother’s grandfather survived the Holocaust in Europe. After the war, he emigrated and promoted the treatment of post -traumatic stress syndrome.
After my father’s death, I also wanted peace, not revenge. So I joined the community for building peace, including the forum of parents-family family-group of surviving families, Israelis and Palestinians who brutally lost their loved ones in this endless conflict. In the friendship I created, I was looking for not only Israelis, but also Palestinians to understand their loss and mine. It was an antidote that was spiraling into a state of depression, fear and hatred. At the time of my father’s murder, I helped organize the annual Jerusalem season of a cultural project that connects Jews and Arabs for shared cultural projects, including music, art and theater.
There I met Yasser, a Palestinian from the Muslim district of the Old Town. Yasser was essential when he helped me to reformulate his anger and grief after the murder. He said that he and I fought on the same side against extremism in both of our societies.
Participation in these groups of shared losses and shared culture was used to feel like a character in a rabbinical folk story, those about planting seeds in an infertile country that one day will grow to become a tree that others can enjoy.
Since October 7, it seems as if the roots germinated with these seeds in the ground. During the war I know too many people on both sides who have left the peace camp through disillusionment, rejection and even radicalization. Many of them, which were pushed by the intoxicating attraction of social media, were tempted to accept extreme positions, such as the denial of the atrocities committed by their own side and dehumanization of the other.
It seems impossible to build bridges among people who follow alternative sets of facts. And yet I have some sparks of hope when I see those who lost the family 7. October, who joined us in the common area of grief, and did not insist that sorrow is unique for one or the other.
For me it is not just a question of ideals; It’s survival. My Kibbutz, Bahan, lies inside Israel, near the West Bank, where Hamas currently challenges the Palestinian authority for control. What happened in Gaza cannot be rooted there. After October 7, it may be an inevitable increase in theft between Israelis and Palestinians – both Israel and outside -.
There are steps that we can take, which will be more likely to be a peace on the road. The first change must be to find new leaders as soon as possible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coalition deepened the division within Israeli society and allowed unfiltered extremism to the heart of Israeli institutions.
In Ramallah, President Mahmúd Abbas from the Palestinian authority also failed to prepare his own people for reconciliation or coexistence. And as was the case in Gaza, many Palestinians on the West Bank now prefer the violent tactics that Hamas offers over the corruption of Mr. Abbas.
Both sides need leaders who are brave enough to tell us the hard truth that it is a conflict that can only be lost and won. We deserve leaders who know it is a compromise and compassion – not slogans as “resistance” and “complete victory” – which can break our cycle of loss and pain.
Hamas’s attacks on October 7 and the scope of Israel’s reaction most likely condemned my generation to perish in the desert before the promised land as the Israelites who fled Egypt of slavery. In 40 years, however, Israeli and Palestinian children can still live to see that the seeds we have planted in this barren country with our connection and our common grief will allow a tree to grow and bear fruit.
With one of the men responsible for the death of my father who returns to the world, I will also try to look for ways to plant new seeds, not despite the freedom of my father, but because of that. I will never allow him to define our shared fate in this country. My father’s heritage requires it.