Shortly after the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza, there was a women’s vigil in our town for the people who had died there, and I went along. Underneath a fluttering Palestinian flag, I found the organisers setting out a table with leaflets.
“We had a Zionist just now giving us a hard time,” says one of them. “But other people have stopped to say they admire what we are doing.”
Women arrive in ones and twos, and we are offered placards to hold. They say, “Israel has killed 26 people in Gaza since the ceasefire was declared”. I don’t take one. I am uneasy. Is this about the people who had died, or is it a political protest?
I chat to someone else. She tells me how Women in Black was set up by Israeli women who wanted to connect with others who have been bereaved by war, cutting across political boundaries. The vigil begins and we fall into silence. There are about a dozen of us, mostly standing, holding the accusing placards for passers-by to see. I sit down, feeling awkward.
A man shouts at us from the other side of the road. He is in his seventies, with dyed black hair, wearing leathers.
“Your lot f***ing murdered my cousin!” he yells. “You came over the border into Israel and you killed him! Now f*** off home all of you!”
None of us responds, and he moves on. His anger disturbs me. Why am I standing to remember deaths on one side, but not on the other? I feel uncomfortable, and anyway I have a bus to catch, so I leave halfway through.
In the next street I find him standing, looking around. I ask him if his cousin had been at the rock festival on 7 October. He says yes, and I say I am sorry to hear that. The conversation falters, and he tells me he is waiting for a friend to turn up. I get out of his way.
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How do we support peace in Israel and Palestine, Palestine and Israel? We need to find a narrative that holds both sides, and once you look, there are many examples. My favourite so far is this TED dialogue between Ali Abu Awwad and Ami Dar which speaks of the need for both sides to drop their sense of victimhood, and for the rest of us to support them to work things out.
The Israeli-born teacher of Non-Violent Communication Miki Kashtan similarly calls on those of us who live outside the area to hold a loving space for peace. Instead of taking sides, we can witness the pain of everyone involved, honouring their stories – the Holocaust, the Nakba, occupation, terrorism – and quietly insist on care, listening and hope.
This means inviting people to lay down their arms, physical and verbal, and unblock the path to peace. Kashtan’s idea has led to the foundation of Women in White who are organising vigils in Europe.
Meanwhile, there is the grief itself. What if we let it be exactly what it is – the pain of loss, that honours the thing we love – and have it teach us? Germaine Greer, no less, wrote that there was not enough rage to run the feminist movement, but that “if we can find ways of harvesting the energy in women’s oceanic grief we shall move mountains”.
It is hard to imagine a world at peace, but perhaps grief is the portal to that other way of being. That is the message of tomorrow’s 21st Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Ceremony, broadcast around the world and bearing the strapline “We are the Day After.” Let us join in with that.
Finding Our Power 