Israel is nowhere near ready to commemorate October 7

Sunday morning we sent our kids back to school after the holidays wearing white shirts in honor of yet another commemoration for the victims of the October 7 massacre and those killed in Operation Swords of Iron. Wait, why? Didn’t we commemorate October 7 already? I distinctly remember that two events took place on October 7, 2024, a grassroots ceremony in Tel Aviv at 7 p.m. led by hostage families and survivors of the Nova music festival, followed by a prerecorded official state ceremony aired.

Now, here we were again, mourning as a nation from Saturday night until Sunday night, with an official late-morning ceremony under the aegis of the Defense Ministry to honor fallen soldiers, and an official afternoon ceremony honoring the civilian victims of the Hamas massacre. The measures in place for the day — shuttering of entertainment venues, flags flown at half-mast, lighting of memorial candles, white shirts, and school ceremonies — echo Israel’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers. The familiar approach was adopted so that schoolchildren would not feel “disoriented.” Neither would adults.

As a scholar of the transitional justice process, I see us trying to run a marathon before we can even stand. The fact that we need four different commemoration ceremonies this year on two different dates is a clear sign that something is off. It is as if those in charge want to press the fast-forward button and move into memory mode without addressing what really happened. This simply will not work.

Consider those early Yom HaShoah observances, from 1946 until 1953, when Yad Vashem, the memorial to Holocaust victims, was established. Those memorial days were combined with the Tisha B’Av and Asarah B’Tevet fast days because socialist and communist survivors could not agree with religious authorities on a date on which everyone would feel heard and seen, and that would fit both the Gregorian and the Jewish calendar.

Our collective and national healing from the Shoah began with the 1945 Nuremberg Trial of top Nazi officials by international military tribunal and the 1961 trial in Israel of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. Both fulfilled different legal and sociological purposes. The Nuremberg Trial prosecuted the Nazi perpetrators with pre-recorded civilian witnesses, as well as live witness and international Allies media coverage. The Eichmann trial gave free range and ample time to more than 100 survivors to go into detail about their trauma, with full coverage by Israeli radio and multiple international media.

We then received financial payment from Germany after the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement, paving the way for “shilumim” — reparations payouts to survivors, which in turn sparked waves of heated protest and debate between supporters of the arrangement reached by David Ben Gurion’s government and those who agreed with Menachem Begin’s denunciation of the deal.

After that, West Germany apologized for the Holocaust and much later on, in 1970, Willy Brandt spontaneously kneeled in contrition at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw. We worked with West Germany to fix their history books for the next generation. We also made sure to invite them to our Yom HaShoah commemoration at Yad Vashem. In those interstices of time, we reconciled, consciously or unconsciously, as a people and a nation. We found a way to commemorate the deceased that suits most of us. Most Israelis stand motionless during the two-minute siren on Holocaust Remembrance Day: we feel included and seen in the commemoration facets.

The transitional justice process, which aims to restore social cohesion and trust in national institutions, requires a series of steps: trials and a truth commission for those responsible; payment of reparations; official apology; and revising history books, setting up museums and having an annual day of commemoration. These steps need to happen chronologically.

It is clear that first we need an internationally publicized trial of Hamas massacre perpetrators for crimes against humanity along with a truth commission on the national failure of responsibilities before and during the massacre. The Commission of Inquiry advocated by MK Yair Lapid and ex-prime minister Naftali Bennett is good, but woefully insufficient. We need a truth commission in which the survivors, the hostages who returned, and the displaced families, the army veterans, the widows, the orphans, can tell their stories. Everyone who was responsible for their safety on October 7 needs to hear those stories and make amends. Leaders in charge on October 7 need to show us that they feel a deep responsibility to hear about it all. And we, as a society, need to hear and listen to these horrific stories to share the burden of the pain before we can even start to commemorate our lost loved ones.

The people who shared their stories then need to receive reparation payments from the state for their rehabilitation. A specific unit needs to be fully state-sponsored to do the often lifesaving job of helping civilians and veterans with PTSD. Those survivors need to receive compensation and reparations to help them survive the financial burden.

After these two steps — and only after these two steps — there needs to be a deep-felt official apology for the mistakes that happened on October 7th. The official apology President Isaac Herzog issued on Sunday is an excellent first step, but a truly healing apology that explicitly validates the narrative of the survivors and shows greater contrition is needed from the entire political and military echelon.

Transitional justice scholarship teaches us that until Israel’s political and army leadership conducts a commission of inquiry into its own failures together with a truth commission for the survivors, and until organized and official reparation payments proceed, we will be hard put to agree on how to commemorate those who died on October 7th and during the Swords of Iron War. Only then will the various types of survivors feel seen, heard, respected, honored and equal. The unbearable rift between citizens and leaders will be healed. We need collective healing from collective trauma.