Canadian activist Vivian Silver dedicated her life to peace. Her son has inherited her legacy

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In the before times, Yonatan Zeigen built a life for himself in Tel Aviv: a partner, three children, a career in social work. His childhood in Be’eri, a kibbutz a short distance from Gaza, would always be part of him, but he left Be’eri a decade ago. He made his own family home in Florentin, the city’s answer to Brooklyn, its walls decorated with graffiti.

Then came Oct. 7, the day Hamas militants led a raid on Israel, killing 1,200, a murderous rampage that shook the social foundations of a country thrust into mourning, rage and war. For Mr. Zeigen, the tremors were intensely personal. In the weeks after the attack, one of the missing was his own mother, the Winnipeg-born activist Vivian Silver, a leader who was among Israel’s most effective advocates for peace.

In mid-November, she was confirmed dead.

Mr. Zeigen found that life no longer felt the same.

“I had this feeling of before and after. I couldn’t go back to before,” he said.

He quit his job, with no clear idea of what came next, only that “I feel dedicated to change. Change in the area. In Israel. In Palestine.”

Ms. Silver was 74 when she was killed. Mr. Zeigen is now 35. Throughout his life – in the Palestinian workers he saw as childhood uncles; in the barbed wire and guns he saw on a visit to Gaza at the age of 12; in his mother’s efforts to bring together people from disparate backgrounds while decrying Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” – Ms. Silver’s work surrounded him, even if it never much involved him.

He agreed with much of what she stood for. The business of peace, though, was “her world.”

Then came the attack. Then came her death.

Waves of emotion rolled through. Despair. Frustration. Discouragement. Emptiness.

But also – as Mr. Zeigen found new determination for himself – optimism.

“I feel like I’m creating hope now,” he said.

By many measures, the Hamas attacks have devastated the movement that Ms. Silver spent her life building.

In 2014, she co-founded Women Wage Peace, which sought pragmatism over ideology – made up of both liberal activists and the deeply conservative settlers whose homes on Palestinian territory have brought them international condemnation. Together they wore the same uniform – white shirt, turquoise scarf – to advocate for a political agreement to end the conflict, one that included women at each step.

On Oct. 4, 2023, less than a week before she died, Ms. Silver helped to organize a conference that brought together 800 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli women.

“We were at the peak,” said Hyam Tannous, who leads Israeli and Palestinian relations for Women Wage Peace. “We felt like we can do it. We can change the world.”

In the bloodshed just three days later, “our world collapsed,” she said. What could they do now? “We feel that we failed.”

Surveys completed in December found an almost complete reversal in public opinion. A decade ago, 61 per cent of Israelis supported an independent Palestinian state. In the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, 65 per cent opposed it.

In 2017, 34 per cent of Israelis said they expected lasting peace. By December, only 13 per cent held that hope.

The war “has changed the peace movement. It has weakened the peace movement,” said Yeela Raanan, a peace activist who knew Ms. Silver for two decades. She herself hid inside a safe room with her daughter when Hamas fighters entered the family’s house. She imagines Ms. Silver opening her own door to Hamas, only to be killed. That thought “is very painful.”

The experience has nonetheless given her motivation – and made it even more clear that violence has not achieved peace.

“It’s about time people start listening to people like me and Vivian,” she said.

Others have concluded very differently.

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Avida Bachar’s home is in Be’eri, just a short walk from Ms. Silver’s. Like her, he was home on Oct. 7.

Unlike her, he lived – but only after more than 10 hours in his safe room as attackers fired at the family with guns, attempted to burn down the house and then set off three grenades inside the three-by-three-metre space.

First, he first watched his wife, Dana, die from a bullet wound. His 15-year-old son Carmel was also hit by gunfire, and Mr. Bachar spent hours fashioning a tourniquet with a belt and wires to staunch the bleeding. He was unable to stop the flow and his son died too, minutes after asking to be buried with his surfboard. Mr. Bachar’s own injuries were so serious that doctors amputated his right leg. He was not able to leave hospital until early April.

On Oct. 6, he supported achieving peace by creating neighbouring states for Israelis and Palestinians. He now finds that notion inconceivable. “Destroy them all,” he says of people in Gaza. “We can’t live together any more.”

Currents of heartbreak and rage have also coursed through Women Wage Peace. Among its nearly 50,000 members are numerous mothers whose children are fighting in Gaza. Peace activists have been subjected to abuse. Ms. Silver’s own disappearance was scorned, with one person writing on Facebook: “This is a story of an Israel-hater who made her bed and slept in it.”

Some women have left Women Wage Peace.

“We wanted to say clearly, ‘Stop the war.’ But not everyone agrees on that,” said Ghadir Hani, an Arab Israeli member of the group.

Ms. Silver’s “voice is really missing now,” Ms. Hani said. “She would have known how to deal with this situation.”

Still, Ms. Silver’s death has not meant her absence.

“All of us are thinking about how to be Vivian’s inheritors,” said Ms. Tannous. “Whatever we do, we think, ‘What would Vivian have done?’ In our demonstrations, we talk about Vivian’s dreams and Vivian’s hopes.”

Loss has provided new moral clarity. Yotam Kipnis’s parents were both killed on Oct. 7. In his eulogy, though, he begged for a break from recriminations: “Don’t write my dad’s name on a rocket. He wouldn’t have wanted it.”

“Revenge is a valid feeling. But it is in no way a valid policy,” he said. “The practical way to defeat Hamas is by an alternative. It cannot be truly achieved by military force alone.”

Both of Maoz Inon’s parents were killed on Oct. 7. An entrepreneur who launched hostels and tour services, he changed his business role to quiet partner so he could devote himself to peace. Last week, he and Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah opened TED 2024 in Vancouver, with an on-stage conversation.

Mr. Inon senses an opportunity “to channel our national trauma into a healing process.”

History gives him reason for optimism. It was only four years after the bloody Yom Kippur War that Israeli children waved Egyptian flags to welcome Anwar Sadat, the president who had been the country’s sworn enemy.

“We’ve done it in the past and we’ll do it again,” said Mr. Inon. “Start the countdown: Four to six years from now, there’s going to be peace.”

When he describes how to rekindle a desire for change, he enunciates a vision not unlike what Ms. Silver sought: building coalitions, reaching shared common ground, insisting on equality.

“She was a giant of peace,” he said. “And we’re stepping in her footsteps and standing on her shoulders.”

Mr. Zeigen, too, feels a sense of inherited legacy. The family is establishing a prize fund in his mother’s name. It is helping with efforts to tell her story in books and a documentary. She has become “a rallying point, a symbol,” Mr. Zeigen said.

Oct. 7 kindled a sense of urgency for him, a feeling that decades of unsolved problems must be addressed. He wonders, though, whether it’s time to move beyond the softer, bottom-up approach espoused by his mother, who devoted a half-century to grassroots organizing.

Israel has plenty of civil society. What it lacks, he said, is leadership.

“It doesn’t matter who is in power. It matters what they do with the power,” he said.

Ms. Silver’s death has created an audience for her son’s words. But for now, the most receptive audiences are overseas, not in Israel.

“I think that’s where the solution is,” he said.

Mr. Zeigen has lobbied the U.S. Congress. In June, he will go to Berlin to speak with diplomats. Canada, too, should consider what it can do, he says.

Like his mother, he is a Canadian citizen. One of the calls he received after Oct. 7 came from Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly. “She was very nice and supportive – reassuring,” he said.

But he has grown tired of platitudes. If Israel’s government won’t act for peace, he says, foreign governments must find a way to force its hand.

Why, he asks, have alliances formed to defend Israel but failed to do the same to demand solutions? “We need a coalition for peace,” he said.

He wants Canadian leadership to “wake the heck up. Be part of the change.”

“It’s time for bold politics,” he says. “I don’t think we don’t want peace because it’s too complicated. I think it’s complicated because we don’t want it yet.”

For Mr. Zeigen, advocating for change in a time of grief has been therapeutic, he says.

“It creates meaning for me. I also feel this responsibility to use these circumstances in order to convey the message – in order to build upon it.”