October 7th: Can you mark anniversaries for a day being replicated over and over and over?

Anniversaries suggest closure. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have had theirs yet. But amid the great, terrible rending, a fabric is being furtively mended, and a future is being weaved.

Photo by quentin on Unsplash

I thought I'd be writing a big analytical piece on the anniversary of October 7. Where we've been, where we're going. What I got wrong, who got what right. And maybe I'll write some of this yet.

But in truth, it doesn't feel like the day for it. Not only because I don't want to add to the cloud of analysis on a day so many people, from every side, are coming up here to share their own personal pain. But mainly because it doesn't feel like an anniversary. Anniversaries imply revisiting an event defined in time: a death, a marriage, a birth, the establishment of a state, the publication of a book, the inauguration of something, the ceremonial end of something else.

None of this applies. October 7th never ended, and not just because Israeli TV seems to eternally return to the stories of that one day at the expense of so many other stories. October 7th never ended because it became October 8th and October 10th and 12th, and then we killed Refaat, who loathed the Israeli state but taught Hebrew poetry to his students in Gaza; and Vivian's body was found and 'missing' was augmented to 'dead' over and over again, and children were blasted apart, so many children, and we may or may not have torched that first hospital but we've flattened so many more since, and so many hearts broke, and broke again, and broke again, or cracked, or hardened, or simply stopped. And we killed hostages and they killed hostages, and in the midst of it all, one hostage, an older woman, on her way home, stopped before one of her captors, and bid him farewell, and the world saw his hand come off the trigger of his assault rifle to reach out and shake hers.

“No one is, in fact, is under an obligation to become a better or more of a forgiving person because of their trauma.”

And then we went right back to it, and it got worse, and worse again, and we graduated from disproportionate violence to genocidal almost seamlessly because most genocides snowball from tiny decisions and from impunity, not from a flowchart in a letterhead notepaper in a villa by a lake; and every red line any of us ever imagined turned out just that - imaginary: because it turns out that yes, people who've been through horrible things, or feel like they've been through horrible things will do horrible things, and film themselves doing it because it turns out that yes, people who've been through horrible things, or have been told, vividly and repeatedly about horrible things people just like them have been through, will do horrible things, and film themselves doing it, and make stupid jokes about doing it, and then do them again, all the while feeling like they're the victims; and no one should be surprised because no one is, in fact, under an obligation to become a better or more forgiving person because of their trauma.

And meanwhile, folks on, say, Twitter, will piss all over the graves of yours or somebody else's loved ones, excuse or shrug off every atrocity, and then imagine atrocities not yet committed and loudly luxuriate in wishing those on people they never met, their fists pounding their keyboards, their teeth chattering even if their jaws are clenched or stretched in a rictus grin - because alongside the rage everyone is afraid, or afraid of being afraid, or afraid of seeing each other or seeing each other in each other; and behind the clatter of the keys, there is a thin, almost constant, almost silent scream: WHY CAN'T YOU SEE ME and HOW DARE YOU NOT SEE ME and, HOW DARE ANYONE SEE YOU WHEN THEY SHOULD SEE ME, or, somewhat more sanely, can't they please, please, see me, for a change. See us.

And it's still going on, expanding, corroding every bit of the land, and now it’s in Lebanon and in Syria and in Yemen and perhaps even soon in Iran, and it's poisoning even distant democracies, and the same politicians are still making the same excuses - yes, the same politicians; because incredibly, or all too credibly, not one person directly responsible has lost their job (except by assassination, which really isn't good enough.) It's Oct 7 v.366, and Sinwar is still here, and Biden's still here, and, God help us, even Netanyahu's still here, now and for the foreseeable.

And so are we.

And it is this, quite simply, which gives me - not so much hope, which can make for a dangerous medicine; but rather the plain knowledge of perseverance. We are still here, Palestinians and Israelis, clenching our homeland or stretching to it from great distance. Still here.

(I don't for a minute take this for granted; I was fairly sure, for example, that all surviving Gazans would be pushed out to Egypt within the first quarter; this hasn't happened yet, and I'm almost sure that it won't; among the great cruelty, a small, bitter mercy.)

We are still here, and among the great rending there are countless stitches that hold - tying us to the land and to each other: in part thanks to people managing to stay human, in part thanks to very hard, unglamorous small-scale mediation work, we have not yet become Rwanda.

And there are new stitches being made every day. New dialogue groups open and instantly get oversubscribed. New projects, single-identity and cross-community, are being thought up, organised, put into play. New ideas, sidestepping or venturing far, far beyond a reheated Oslo process; new alliances, new ideas, new vocabularies, new modes of being together and being apart, new ways of thinking about each other even for those who aren't talking to each other yet. The Palestinian liberation movement is rejuvenating and rebuilding. Israelis you would never expect to be taking on the toughest challenges and questions, or to give radically new answers, are doing just that.

Amid the great rending, there are many stitches that still hold us together: Palestinians, Israelis, the land. And away from the cameras, new stitches are added each day.

There's a lot going on. Anaemic? Bit dull? Bit flat? Not as evocative as the horrors I listed earlier? Perhaps. We are generally not wired towards things like community work, mediation, deconfliction; you don't need adrenalin pumping and heart racing and every nerve in your body engaged to draw lines on a flip chart, or sit in a room for the 30th time trying to catch the subtlest change in tone or in language that hints at a possible opening to change. But this, too, is the work that needs doing and it is being done, on scales more grand and more granular than many of us might imagine.

So yes. It's October 7th, the 366th of this war. Year 95, if that's how you count, of the conflict. Year 76 of the Nakba & of the Jewish state. And the work goes on. Because even if we aren't there yet, there is an "after" to the now. And we're still here, and there is much good work worth doing - some now, some being prepared for later, some being written for much, much later on.

What more can one say. Condolences to those grieving in ways I can't even conceive of.