O Women of Israel: Today, Have Fear and Grief Hardened Your Hearts?
On October 27, 2026, Israelis will vote in their first national election since the October 7 attacks, in a race already widely described as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership and on the legacy of October 7 itself (Al Jazeera; Chatham House).
The vote falls very soon after the war’s third anniversary, when some 50,000 people filled Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park for a memorial that closed with a plea from former hostage Eli Sharabi: “Investigate how it happened, don’t let time blur the truth” (Times of Israel).
The ballot is, in part, a choice about that reckoning itself. Three years on, there is still no state commission of inquiry into the failures of October 7 (BBC). Netanyahu’s leading challenger, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, has built his campaign around a pledge to hold that inquiry if elected (Haaretz). In the campaign’s final days, his Yashar party leads Likud in most published polls, though neither bloc is projected to win a majority (Times of Israel).
Today, the October Council of bereaved families and survivors is rallying in Hostage Square to put the demand for an inquiry back at the centre of the campaign (Jerusalem Post).
Israel is not simply choosing a government in the shadow of three years of grief. It is choosing, in the same breath, whether to examine that grief or defer the reckoning again. That same fork, examine or defer, runs through an argument Israeli women are already having with each other.
Ayelet-Hashakhar Saidof, a 48-year-old lawyer whose own son serves in the army, now leads Mothers on the Front, a movement she says speaks for roughly 70,000 mothers of active-duty soldiers, conscripts, and reservists, built largely around demanding an end to a war that keeps taking their children (Arab News). Rotem-Sivan Hoffman, a physician with two sons in uniform, helped found a parallel movement called Ima Era, “Awakened Mother” (Arab News).
Three days before the October 7 attacks, Yael Admi of the Israeli group Women Wage Peace stood with Reem al-Hajajreh of the Palestinian group Women of the Sun before some 1,500 women gathered at the Dead Sea, appealing together for an end to a “brutal cycle of violence” (The Guardian). Admi has continued that partnership in the three years since. Set against them, the bereaved families of the Gvura Forum have appealed to the Israeli cabinet with the opposite demand: “seize the initiative, resume the offensive, and complete the mission,” a full return to offensive combat until Hamas is destroyed (Israel National News).
In Israel, the question of what three years of grief should be made to justify has yet to be settled. It is being argued over, right now, by women on every side of it.
Writing from outside Israel, without a child in uniform or a name on a hostage list, I don’t presume to tell women who have buried sons what their loss should mean. I want only to hold open a question some of you are already asking each other: have fear and grief hardened your hearts, or can that same grief still be widened enough to hold another mother’s child in it too?
Fear is older than any nation. The same amygdala-driven alarm that once saved a body from a predator now fires at a siren, a headline, a kite drifting over a border (neuroscientists have traced this circuitry). It cannot tell a Star of David from a crescent; it knows only threat and safety, in every human brain. What differs is what it is taught — which stories, which grievances, which flags — until fear stops feeling like fear and starts feeling like identity.
That teaching begins early, long before a child can weigh it. In his essay “If I Were Neither Jewish nor Israeli”, Morty Bachar, Israeli-born son of Holocaust survivors and a former IDF soldier, recalls a young relative’s startled reaction to an Arabic call to prayer: “At six years old, he had already learned that liking something Arab required an explanation. Before he could understand occupation, terrorism, Zionism, Palestinians, or history, he had absorbed the division between ‘us’ and ‘them.'”
His conclusion is plain and unsettling: “A child does not naturally decide that one human life matters more than another because that person is Jewish. He learned that distinction.” Nor does the lesson usually announce itself as cruelty. “Dehumanization does not always begin with hatred,” Bachar writes. “Sometimes it begins quietly, with the belief that our people matter more.”
Avigail Abarbanel, who grew up in Israel and later trained as a family therapist, describes those identity stories as ones “taught uncritically right from kindergarten and in families even earlier” (Identity & Shared Humanity). Her answer is not to throw identity away but to stop simply inheriting it: “Our identity is not given to us, we need to choose it.” Custom, faith, and belonging can all remain, she argues, “but our fundamental guiding principle must be our recognition of our shared human experience.” In her words: “Our shared humanity provides all the moral guidance we need.”
Every one of us arrives the same way: naked, crying, and human. No child is born Israeli or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim. Nationality, faith, and culture are wrapped around us afterward, before we are old enough to choose them. They can be a precious inheritance. But they came second. What happens to us when we forget which came first?
Underneath all those inherited stories lies the same level of connection: a shared nervous system, a shared capacity for the specific grief of losing a child or loved one, a shared reflex to protect what is yours by making everything outside it smaller and less real.
Yael Admi found her way back to that connection with Reem al-Hajajreh at the Dead Sea, three days before it became almost impossible to find again. The bereaved families of the Gvura Forum arrived at the opposite conclusion just as honestly, out of the same grief, the same alarm system, the same love for their dead.
There is no question that Israel’s fear is justified. The real question is what that fear does next.
Can a people seek collective security and self-determination without turning another people into an obstacle to be removed, controlled or made lesser?
Can you bomb your way out of hatred, or kill your way out of fear? Will revenge bring back the ones you have lost, or only seed more grief, on both sides of the border and beyond it?
What, then, will you do with your grief? You cannot force your way to harmony.
Your own tradition has already named what is at stake.
Genesis teaches that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and the Torah returns to the stranger more often than to any other commandment: “you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” As one Israeli rabbi wrote recently, “No one loses that dignity because they are Palestinian, Muslim, or belong to a people with whom we are in conflict” (Jerusalem Post).
And if grief curdles into hatred, what does that do to the part of you God built to recognize another human’s face in your enemy’s mother and child, father and son?
Women of Israel, does your fear still let you reach her? Does your grief? Even your hatred?
Or has it built a wall around that recognition, one that stops you seeing the common humanity beneath?
This clip may carry some relevance for next week’s vote.
