On a warm October night 12 years ago, my father, Yaya Ofer, was murdered by two Palestinian terrorists. They attacked him at home, at night, with axes, landing 41 blows on his body. His killing was planned. My father, who had retired as a colonel in the Israeli Army, had been the central figure in my childhood. As an adult, I loved hiking with him all over this country and meeting people from every background. In one evening all that was gone. The attackers were sentenced to life in prison. Now, as part of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, one of those men will walk free.
I have come to peace with his freedom.
Many of the 1,000 prisoners who are being released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages have the blood of people like my father on their hands, some of it barely dry. Behind every heartwarming video of a hostage embracing family members is a family like mine, being forced to relive our own grief.
Knowing that the man who killed my father will walk out of prison stirs complex emotions, but I know it is the right decision to release these prisoners, if that is what it takes to save the hostages who have been held for almost 500 days. I believe nothing could be more sacred than bringing the hostages home — not my grief, which will not end, and not even my father, whose life I cannot restore. Not if we can bring back to life my fellow countrymen who are still held in the tunnels under Gaza.
I hope this hostage-prisoner exchange will bring an end to this long and terrible war that has been thrust upon millions of people on both sides who did not choose it. And yet I am terribly worried that when the exchanges are finished, when the troops withdraw, we will discover that Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from peace than at any point in our history.
I come from a family of peaceniks. My paternal grandfather, born in Haifa, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp with the British Army. My maternal grandfather survived the Holocaust in Europe. He emigrated after the war to Israel and pioneered treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
After my father’s death I, too, wanted peace, not revenge. So I got involved in the peace-building community, including the Parents Circle-Family Forum — a group of bereaved families, Israelis and Palestinians, who have all lost loved ones, brutally, in this endless conflict. In the friendships I formed, I sought out not just Israelis, but also Palestinians, to understand their loss and mine. It was an antidote to spiraling into a state of depression, fear and hatred. Around the time of my father’s murder, I was helping to organize the annual Jerusalem Season of Culture project, which brings together Jews and Arabs for shared cultural projects including music, art and theater.
There I met Yasser, a Palestinian from the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Yasser was crucial in helping me to reframe my anger and grief after the murder. He said that he and I were fighting on the same side against extremism in both our societies.
Participation in these groups of shared loss and shared culture used to make me feel like a character in a rabbinical folk tale, the ones about planting seeds in a barren land that will one day grow to become a tree that others can enjoy.
Since Oct. 7, it seems as if the roots sprouted by those seeds are withering in the ground. Over the course of the war, I know far too many people on both sides who have left the peace camp through disillusionment, denial and even radicalization. Pushed on by the intoxicating allure of social media, many have been seduced into adopting extreme positions, like denying the atrocities committed by their own side and dehumanizing the other.
It seems impossible to build bridges between people guided by alternative sets of facts. And yet I have some sparks of hope in seeing those who lost family on Oct. 7, who have joined us in the shared space of grief, not insisting that grief is unique to one side or another.
For me this is not just a matter of ideals; it is one of survival. My kibbutz, Bahan, lies inside Israel, not far from the West Bank, where Hamas is currently challenging the Palestinian Authority for control. What happened in Gaza cannot be allowed to take root there, too. Increasing alienation between Israelis and Palestinians — both within Israel and outside it — after Oct. 7 may make it inevitable.
There are steps we can take that will make peace more likely down the road. The first change must be to find new leaders as soon as possible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition has deepened divisions inside Israeli society and allowed unfiltered extremism into the heart of Israel’s institutions.
In Ramallah, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has also failed to prepare his own people for reconciliation or coexistence. And, as was the case in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank now prefer the violent tactics offered by Hamas over the corruption of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party.
Both sides need leaders who are brave enough to tell us the hard truth that this is a conflict that can only be lost, not won. We deserve leaders who know that it is compromise and compassion — not slogans like “resistance” and “total victory” — that can break our cycle of loss and pain.
Hamas’s attacks of Oct. 7 and the scale of Israel’s response has most likely condemned my generation to perish in the wilderness before reaching the promised land like the Israelites who fled Egypt out of slavery. But 40 years from now, Israeli and Palestinian children may yet live to see that the seeds we have planted in this barren land, with our connections and our shared grief, will allow a tree of common hope to grow and bear fruit.
With one of the men responsible for my father’s death returning to the world, I too will keep trying to finding ways to plant new seeds, not despite the freedom of my father’s killer, but because of it. I will never allow him to define our shared destiny in this land. My father’s legacy demands it.
The post I Do Not Want Revenge for My Father’s Death appeared first on New York Times.
