Yahrzeit (Memorial) for October 7

PHOTO CREDIT: Al Jazeera

Jews in Israel and around the world marked the one-year anniversary (yahrzeit) of the deaths of 1139 people killed by Hamas and its allies in the shocking and brutal attack of October 7, 2023. Some will mark it on October 24, which corresponds to the Hebrew date of Simchat Torah eve when the attack occurred. The victims included 695 Israeli civilians, among them 36 children, 373 military, police, and Internal security (Shabak) personnel, and 71 foreigners. My family suffered a direct loss that day.

My niece, Liat Atzili, was taken hostage from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just across the border from the Gaza Strip. After 54 days in captivity, she was freed on November 29 in the only negotiated hostage/prisoner exchange to date. Twelve hours later she learned that her husband, Aviv, had been killed defending their home on October 7.

I would have liked to stand with other Jews and commemorate the death of Aviv and all those who perished on October 7 and acknowledge the ongoing trauma of many Israelis and Jews. But I didn’t feel comfortable doing so in most Jewish spaces.

Since October 7, organizations of the American Jewish establishment, like the Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League, have weaponized our grief, decontextualized it, promoted falsehoods about what happened that day, and deployed Israeli propaganda talking points to justify a genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip. Within days of October 7, Israeli political and military leaders publicly declared their intention to exact vengeance by destroying Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. Leading with a campaign of mass bombing in densely populated areas that could only result in massive civilian deaths, they have done so.

Israel’s conduct of the war does not conform to any reasonable definition of self-defense. Its armed forces have killed at least 42,000 Palestinians. Many more are buried under rubble and  have died or will die of malnutrition and preventable diseases, most of them women and children. Soldiers have boasted about their gruesome acts on social media. They have targeted universities, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, medical personnel, humanitarian workers, and journalists. Hamas is not defeated, and Israelis are no safer today than they were a year ago.

I participated in protests against the early stages of Israel’s post-1967 occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights when I lived in Israel in the early 1970s. Among the campaigns I joined was an effort to expose Ariel Sharon’s harsh measures to suppress resistance to the occupation in the Gaza Strip.

Gaza had been a center of Palestinian resistance to Israel since the 1950s. A large majority of its inhabitants were refugees who fled to the area during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War when Israel forced some 750,000 Palestinians to leave their homes and lands. Between 1953 and 1956 Israeli special forces led by Ariel Sharon conducted harsh, large-scale retaliation raids against refugee camps and other sites in the Gaza Strip for Palestinian attacks on Israel. Israeli forces executed two massacres of civilians in Khan Yunis and Rafah during their brief occupation of the Gaza Strip during the 1956 Suez War. Inhabitants remembered that history when Israel once again occupied the territory in the 1967 War.

On January 2, 1971 Robert and Preeti Aroyo were driving through Gaza City with their two children, 5-year-old Abigail and 7-year-old Marc-Daniel, heading to their home in Kiryat Ono, a suburb of Tel Aviv. A 15-year-old Palestinian boy threw a grenade through their car window, killing the children and wounding the parents. The family was well-known in Israel because Robert was an advertising executive and had used the children in a series of ads. 

General Ariel Sharon had been arguing for a more aggressive approach to Palestinian resistance for over a year. According to Sharon’s memoir, Warrior, after the deaths of the Aroyo children, he told Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, “[I]f we don’t take action now, we are going to lose control there.” After resisting Sharon’s earlier requests, Dayan gave him the go ahead.

Sharon’s troops bulldozed 2,000 homes to widen the roads in Gaza’s refugee camps to make them more accessible to Israeli tanks and armored vehicles. They evicted 16,000 people who were already refugees from 1948 and resettled them in other camps and the Sinai Peninsula. Sharon divided Gaza into small squares and instructed his forces, “…to know this square inside and out, and… to kill every terrorist within it.”

According to Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, “The policy…was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them.” Sharon’s forces captured the perpetrator of the Aroyo bombing, killed over 100 suspected militants, and arrested over 700 others. 

Sharon believed he succeeded in extirpating terrorism from the Gaza Strip. General Shlomo Gazit, the coordinator for Israeli policy in the territories occupied in the 1967 War, disagreed. Commenting on the expulsion of Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula he said, “There is no other way to describe this act than ethnic cleansing and a war crime.”

In an official PLO pamphlet, Arlette Tessier wrote that Gaza residents, “regretted and deplored… the death of the two Israeli children. But Gaza is at war….The fedayeen (commandos) lie in wait to attack any Israeli vehicle that passes. There have not been any tourists in the area for more than three years. The fedayeen obviously did not expect there would be small children in a car with an Israeli number plate. They did not aim at the children.” Tessier believed that the killing of the two children “could not possibly justify the weeks of terror, indiscriminate brutality to which thousands of Gaza people were subjected.”

The January 2, 1971 attack on the Aroyo family and Israel’s brutal response to it prefigure, albeit on a much smaller scale, the events of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath. Shlomo Gazit was correct. Israeli security cannot be achieved by committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Palestinian liberation cannot be achieved by murdering civilians.