On the night of a hot October 12 years ago, my father, Yaya Over, was killed by two Palestinian terrorists. He attacked him at night, at home, with axes, 41 on his body. His murder was planned. My father, who was retired as a colonel in the Israeli army, was a central figure in my childhood. As an adult, I liked to hiking with him all over the country and meeting people from every background. One evening it was all over. The attackers were sentenced to life imprisonment. Now, as part of a fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, one of them will be free.
I came to peace with her freedom.
Many of the 1,000 prisoners released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages have the blood of people like my father, some of them are barely dry. There is a family like me behind every heart -wrenching video of the hostage hugging family, which is forced to overcome our own grief.
Knowing that the person who killed my father will go out of jail, gives rise to complex emotions, but I know that releasing these prisoners is the right decision, if saving the hostages of about 500 days. That’s what I benefit. I am convinced that nothing can be sacred more than bringing the hostages home – my grief, which will not end, and not even my father, whose life cannot be restored. This is not if we can revive our compatriots who are still in the tunnels under Gaza.
I hope that the exchange of the hostage hostage will end the long and horrific war that has been emphasized by millions of people from both sides who did not choose it. And still I am very upset that when the exchange ends, when the troops withdraw, we will discover that Israelis and Palestinians are now far more at peace than any opportunity in our history.
I came from a family of money. My father -in -law, who was born in Haifa, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp with the British Army. My maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust in Europe. He emigrated after the Israeli war and began treatment for post -traumatic stress syndrome.
Even after my father’s death, I wanted peace, did not seek revenge. So I joined the peacekeeping community, including the parents Circle Family forum-sarcastic families, a group of Israelis and Palestinians, who have brutally lost all loved ones in this endless conflict. In friendship that I created, I searched not only the Israelis, but also the Palestinians to understand their losses and me. It was a staunch to roam in a state of sadness, fear and hatred. At the time of my father’s assassination, I was helping to organize the annual Jerusalem season of the Culture Project, which combines Jews and Arabs, including music, art and theater for shared cultural projects.
There I met a Palestinian Yasser from the old city’s Muslim Quarter. Yasser was very important in helping me overcome his anger and sorrow after the murder. “He and I are fighting against extremism in both of my societies,” he said.
Participating in these groups of shared loss and shared culture is used to make me feel like a role in a rabbic folk story, which is about to plant seeds in barren land that will become one day a tree that will make the other enjoy Can
Since October 7, it seems as if the roots falling through these seeds are dying in the ground. During the war, I know many people from both sides who have left the peace camp through frustration, denial and even radicalism. Going forward by social media drug addiction, many people have been seduced to adopt extreme positions, such as denying the atrocities committed by their own side and disrespecting the other.
It seems impossible to build bridges among people who guide through alternatives to the facts. And yet I have some sparks of hope to see those who lose the family on October 7, who have joined us in the shared place of grief, do not insist that grief is unique to one side or someone else.
For me, this is not just a matter of ideas. This is one of the survival. I am located inside the Kabbatz, Bahan, Israel, which is not far from the West Bank, where Hamas is currently challenging the Palestinian Authority to control. What happened in Gaza is also not allowed to be rooted there. After October 7, the growing alienation between Israel and the Palestinians – inside and outside Israel.
There are steps we can take that make the road more likely to be comfortable. The first change will be to find new leaders as soon as possible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alliance has deepened the division within Israeli society and has allowed extraordinary extremism in the hearts of Israeli institutions.
In Ramullah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has also failed to prepare his own people for reconciliation or coexistence. And, as it was a matter of Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank now prefer the violent tactics offered by Hamas over the corruption of Mr Abbas’s victory party.
Both sides need leaders who are so brave that we have not won the tough truth that this is a dispute that can only lose, not won. We deserve the leaders who know that this is a compromise and sympathy – not slogans like “resistance” and “total victory” – which can break the cycle of our loss and pain.
Hamas’s October 7 attacks and Israel’s reaction to Mye My generation have been condemned that they condemn killing in the wilderness in the wilderness before reaching the promised land of Israel, who escaped from slavery to Egypt. Has been done. But 40 years later, Israeli and Palestinian children can still survive to see that the seeds we have planted in this barren land, with our contacts and our shared grief, the shared tree of fruit grows fruit. And will be allowed to bear.
Along with one of the men responsible for my father’s death, I will continue to try to find ways to put new seeds, not despite the freedom of my father’s killer. I will never allow it to explain our common destiny in this land. My father’s inheritance demands it.
