Son of Canadian Israeli activist killed in Oct. 7 attacks wants to complete her life’s work of achieving peace
On the morning of Oct. 7, as Hamas-led militants entered Kibbutz Be’eri, 74-year-old Vivian Silver gave a phone interview to an Israeli radio show from her safe room. Even as fighters stalked the street outside her house, she argued the attack showed the need for a peace deal.
Born in Winnipeg, Silver moved to Israel in the 1970s. Kibbutz Be’eri, a community just a few kilometres from the border with Gaza, had been her home for more than 30 years. She was a tireless activist and advocate for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Her final text messages to her son, Yonatan Zeigen, were sent at 10:54 a.m.
“I’m with you,” he texted. “I feel you,” she replied.
For weeks, Zeigen and the rest of the family waited to hear news of Silver. Hers was not among the names of dead immediately released, and it was thought she’d been taken hostage into Gaza. But last November, her remains were identified by DNA and confirmation came that she had died in her house, which was set ablaze that day in October.
After his mother’s death, Zeigen quit his job as a social worker to pick up where her activism left off and try to fulfil her life’s work of seeing peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The 35-year-old father of three has spent the past year speaking out in the media, delivering speeches, fostering relationships with diplomats in Israel and travelling abroad to meet foreign government officials. CBC News correspondent Chris Brown met Zeigen at his home in Tel Aviv.
Q: Tell me, how would you characterize the work you do now?
A: I am not sure I have a good answer for that. Up until Oct. 7, I was a social worker. And the year before that … I was working here for the city of Tel Aviv with people who suffer from homelessness and addiction. I held on to this fantasy of normal life: going to work, raising my kids. Oct. 7 burst that bubble for me and made me realize that it doesn’t matter how much I’m meaningful to a certain person on the street if life itself in Israel and Palestine is not sustainable and if the system itself is broken. So it made me feel an urge and sense of responsibility to become invested and engaged in change, in telling a new story for Israel and Palestine and for creating an alternative reality that enables both peoples to share the land with security and liberation.
Q: Your transformation could have gone the other way. Someone who lost a relative, violently, at a moment when the entire country was shocked, but also furious about what had happened…. not all families and not all sons of victims chose the path that you did.
A: I accept the fact that it’s very natural for other people to be different about it. You know, when you’re traumatized, it tends to pull you in the direction of resentment and vengeance-seeking or this primal longing for order in the world that will come only if you’re a part of a very definitive community. But it’s just not the way I see order in the world. I tend to be more universalistic and to externalize problems, meaning that immediately after Oct. 7, I didn’t see the problem as Hamas gunmen murdering my mother. I saw the problem as the conflict and the occupation. So that leads to a different attitude towards the solution for the problem.
Q: Some people would be very surprised to hear you say that, because this was an act of profound violence, and your mother, by all accounts, was not that person at all. She was someone who dedicated her life against that violence and yet was ultimately taken by it in the end.
A: Right. That’s the logic in my mind, that she fought against that. If enough people would have listened, would have been invested in the same things, [Oct. 7] wouldn’t have happened. Because it happened in the context of a prolonged war, of a very long dehumanization process on both sides. Oct. 7 didn’t start time; it was an outcome. And at the same time, it’s kind of expected that if we failed to create circumstances that would have prevented that, then that’s what we got. So, if I don’t want that to continue to happen, I need to behave differently. We all do. If we don’t want another Oct. 7, if Palestinians don’t want the carnage [that is being inflicted upon them] since then, we need to find different outlets of behaviour to solve the issue.
Yonatan Zeigen speaks to CBC’s Chris Brown about how to break the cycle of violence that has perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Q: What do you think of the events of the last week up in Lebanon? What do you think your mother would think of it?
A: I think it’s more of the same. I think we get to the point where we feel, “Listen, we have to defend ourselves. We are with our backs against the wall. We have been bombarded in the north for 11 months and people are displaced. We have to push Hezbollah back militarily.” And you can think, right, there’s sense in that, but [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah himself said, “I’m going to stop shooting if the war in Gaza ends.” So every military action that you can think was inevitable actually was preventable, if you would have used diplomatic resources in advance. If you would have [sought] Palestinian partnership instead of divide and conquer.
Retribution is — I don’t know, it’s a disgusting concept. Because what is our interest? What do we want? Do we want secure lives? Do we want to feel secure? Do we want well-being? Is that achieved by retribution or does retribution just give us a very temporary sense of a catharsis. That’s it. Does it promote our security? No, it does not. And we have seen it again and again. Every time we kill the biggest monster, a bigger monster emerges. And every time we build the wall an inch higher, they find ways to get around it, because no wall is high enough and no weapon is sophisticated enough. The only way for us to be secure is to transform our enemies into our partners. That’s the only way to have secure lives.
Q: I think it’s a fair characterization that your view is a minority view in Israel at this moment. How difficult is it for you to be part of a minority when, as you say, most of the country is going in another direction, seeking resolution in a different way?
A: It’s true that my point of view is pretty marginalized in Israel. Sometimes even persecuted. But I do still have the privilege of living in at least a pseudo-democratic liberal state. It may not be that way in a short while, but it still is, within the fumes of it at least. So I don’t feel threatened walking down the streets. I don’t fear for my kids yet. I also believe it’s very dynamic. The public opinion issue is something that is all the time formed in relation to settings, in relation to political visions. It’s like trends. I truly believe that people who now are able to shout at me in the streets or to be joyful about the killing of Palestinian civilians will dance in the streets if peace arrives. And I won’t be standing there saying, “No, no, no, I don’t accept that. You’re not eligible to be joyful for peace.” No. Because that’s the point. It’s dynamic. We all have inside us … components of evil and good. And it’s a question of, what are the settings that provide each element of that to flourish? Right now we have difficult settings, but we can change that. It’s realistic to change that. I think it’s really simple to change that, and then the public opinion will change.
Q: How will you commemorate Oct. 7?
A: On Oct. 7, I’m going to [Kibbutz Be’eri] with my partner, who is also from the kibbutz. And we are very rooted in that community and we are going to spend the day there with our community … you know, it’s not only Vivian that died that day. We lost about 100 people. Each one of them is a part of my identity, and so that’s going to be an emotional day. My personal commemoration of my mother will be in November, because we established a prize fund in her name, the Vivian Silver Impact Award, that we will grant annually to two women each year, one Jewish and one Palestinian, that work in the fields of either cross-border or co-existence in Israel or the promotion of women to leadership positions. So each year, we will have a ceremony to grant the prize, and that will be my personal commemoration of my mother.
Yonatan Zeigen speaks to CBC’s Chris Brown about what losing his mother, Vivian Silver, has meant to his family and her community in Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel.
Q: You must miss her.
A: Yeah. I miss her. My kids miss her. She wasn’t only a symbol. She was also just a wonderful mother and a grandmother.
Q: What do you think your mother would be saying about the situation in Gaza now if she was able to look out of Kibbutz Be’eri to the other side of the walls?
A: I think she would have been heartbroken. Devastated. And maybe angry as well at our government. I can hear her saying, “Vengeance is not a strategy!” or “Not in my name!” Things like that.
Q: For Canadians who are trying to make sense or are watching all this unfold, would you have a message for them?
A: You know, I’ve been seeing from a distance what I call the importation of the conflict to North America and Europe. They have been importing our conflict instead of exporting solutions to us.
If they would have been really wanting to be constructive and to help the Palestinians and the Israelis, they would put down the flags and raise the banner of peace. Interfaith. Jews and Muslims, expat Israelis and Palestinians. I expect them to march together for peace. Because Palestinians will never be liberated without peace and Israelis will never be secure without peace.
Yonatan Zeigen describes his frustration with some of the reactions in the U.S. and Canada to the attacks of Oct. 7 and what he thinks supporters of Israelis and Palestinians should be doing instead.
When you have a pro-Palestinian march that is not calling for peace that includes the state of Israel, that’s not constructive for Palestinians. If you have a pro-Israeli march that is just obsessive about the victimhood of Oct. 7 and does not acknowledge the victimhood of Palestinians for generations and the need for Palestinian self-determination and Palestinian liberation, that’s not constructive for the Jews. It’s not constructive for Israel. It’s counterproductive to be in camps, because our future is shared.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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