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On Mourning

As spoken on October 6th 2024, at a vigil organised by Na’amod to mark a year to 7/10/23.

Erev tov. How do we commemorate that which has not ended? The sun is yet to set on that fearful, shocking, painful morning of October 7th 2023. For me, from afar, those hours were marked with unknowing. Who might be down south today? Who has family there? Who’s alive and who has been killed and who’s been taken hostage? And what happens next? That unknowing is ongoing. It persists as 101 hostages are still held by Hamas in Gaza, with my government refusing to make a deal for their return, more interested as they are in murdering Palestinians than in saving Israelis. The unknowing persists with so many Palestinians trapped under the rubble, under siege, under Israeli bombardment, with so many million fates hanging in the balance, dependent on the whims of narcissistic, corrupt, racist politicians around the world. The sun has not set, and yet, somehow, we are 365 sunsets later, and are gathered to remember and mourn.

In terrible, trying times, souls can get petty. When hope is scarce and pain abundant, one might feel the need to be stingy with grief.  To ration it and rationalise. To flee the unimaginable magnitude of hurt into narrow alleyways of political alignment and attempts at moral coherence.  However, I want to invite us this evening to mourn expansively, to push against the limits of our grief.

This does not mean ignoring the politics that have brought us here. It does not mean forgetting that we live under systems that render us un-equal, in life, as well as in death. Pushing against the limits of our grief is not a call for unpolitical thought, it does not replace the conviction that for any chance of a free, safe and just life between the river and the sea, we must pull the systems of apartheid, occupation, supremacy by their racist roots. But let us not treat empathy as an afterthought, duct-taped at the end of analysis, but rather, as political action in and of itself.

Tonight, we mourn so many people killed, by bullet, by bomb, by fire, by hunger, by a twisted, murderous, ethnocratic logic and the ripples of violence it creates on this earth. We mourn with the people who have lost their loved ones, their homes, who have lost limbs, who have lost their ability to sleep. We call out for those held against their wills, frightened, powerless, knowing not their future, in underground tunnels and in cells, and in traumatised minds. We grieve for women, children, and the elderly, but also for men my age, and for people of all genders and all ages. For those being annihilated first by arms, often made in the US, Germany, the UK, and then by a discourse that sees them, sees all the inhabitants of that land, as a shadow theatre for the performance of proxy politics. We mourn families, and communities destroyed or wiped out, we mourn so much knowledge and culture lost; the nicknames two cousins had for each other, recipes, poems, lullabies, ways of talking, and laughing, and thinking, works of art that will hang on no wall. We mourn so many animals slain, habitats destroyed, and nature combusted.

 

I also wish to mourn my society, plummeting ever deeper into fascism and moral decay. Becoming darker, more violent, delusional. The processes I have witnessed throughout my life are bearing rotten fruit, as spaces of resistance and refusal come under greater pressure than ever. Clamped down by hurt, by the manipulation of trauma, by self-censorship, by fear, by state violence, a complicit media and mob brutality, they shrink but do not disappear, and I keep them in my heart tonight.

-----

Yehuda Amichai wrote:

God pities the kindergarten children,

Less so, the children at school.

Those grown - he pities not at all,

Leaving them on their own,

And at times they will have to crawl on all fours

In the scorching sand

To reach the pick-up station,

And they are drenched in blood.

 

Perhaps the truly loving

He will shelter and shade

Like a tree over the sleeper on the

Public bench.

Perhaps, even we will spend on them
The last pennies of kindness
Inherited from mum,

So that their own happiness will protect us
Now and on the other days.

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Let us spend what we have. Reaching into our pockets and our souls, into our sleepless nights and blood-shot days, let us give with our hands, and our feet, and our voices, and our minds, let us be generous with pain, and bold in action. And let’s believe that there will be a day after. After this genocidal war, after captivity, after siege, after logics of supremacy, after the Nakba, after trauma, and its manipulation, after persecution and fear, after the arm deals, after the nation state, after the setting fire to lands and to homes and to people and to peoples, that there will be a day after, not in a next world but in this burning one, here.

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