The dead deserve our remembrance; the living deserve our courage

All of us share a stake in bringing the hostages home — alive, safe, and somehow able to begin healing from this unimaginable ordeal. Yet for more than half of those held, and for so many who perished before them, that chance will never come. They did not survive the horror of October 7, 2023.

As their bodies are finally laid to rest, I pray their families find the strength to endure, and that all of us—Israelis, Palestinians, those from other countries, and those watching with broken hearts from afar—can begin to rediscover peace, compassion, and a sense of shared humanity.

But grief alone cannot carry us forward. Mourning must be paired with accountability—with the courage to ask how our government failed us, how it continues to fail us, and how we, as citizens, can and must demand better. Recovery will take honesty and moral resolve, not only for the families of victims and fallen soldiers, but for every one of us who must decide what kind of future we are willing to build from this loss.

Too many of us know from painful experience that grief can harden into anguish, and anguish into rage. That is a deeply human response. But when rage becomes the foundation of national policy, it threatens to consume the very moral fabric we seek to defend.

The challenge before us now is to transform pain into something more constructive: a demand for truth, accountability, and genuine security built on justice rather than revenge.

For Israelis, that reckoning must begin at home—with confronting the failures of leadership that allowed October 7 to happen, and the choices made in its aftermath that have deepened the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

A government that promises security above all else cannot escape responsibility when that promise is catastrophically broken. The refusal to admit mistakes, the instinct to silence dissent, and the prioritization of political survival over national unity have only deepened our wounds.

For Palestinians, it means facing a different but related truth: that the leadership claiming to fight for liberation has instead brought devastation and despair. Hamas’s actions on October 7 were not resistance—they were barbarism. They destroyed countless lives and ensured that the path to Palestinian freedom would be longer, bloodier, and more uncertain.

And for the rest of the world—for governments, organizations, and individuals who claim to care about peace—it means refusing to look away from moral complexity. You cannot claim to stand for justice if you excuse the slaughter of innocents on one side while mourning them on the other.

True solidarity means holding everyone to the same standard: the sanctity of human life.

Healing will not come from slogans or ceremonies. It will come—slowly, painfully—through remembrance, accountability, and the rebuilding of trust where it has been shattered. It requires rejecting the easy narratives that divide “us” from “them,” and insisting instead on empathy—for our own people, yes, but also for those on the other side who have also lost children, parents, and homes.

Too many of us already know what it means to wake up each day in a world changed by violence. Yet it is precisely in that fragile act of continuing—of refusing to surrender our humanity—that recovery begins.

The dead deserve our remembrance.

The living deserve our courage.

Our shared future demands both.