The Mothers’ Cry: ‘Za’akat Ha’Imahot’

I am a member of a group of mothers in Israel calling ourselves The Mothers’ Cry, in Hebrew: Za’akat Ha’Imahot, crying out for an end to the war. Most of us are mothers of young men, soldiers, many of whom are now deployed in Gaza. I myself am a mother of two sons: a 21-year-old currently serving in the Search and Rescue Unit of the Israel Defense Forces and a 17-year old in 12th grade. The Mothers’ Cry group was founded and inspired by Michal Brody Bareket almost immediately after Oct. 7, before the dust had even settled, when the shock what took place hadn’t yet been processed, if it ever will be or can be. Our first action was to call for a halt to the drum beat of war — an attempt to prevent the ground invasion into Gaza. We knew then and we know now that as appalling as the events of Oct. 7 were, the war was NOT inevitable. There were many possible political responses to that terrible day. This was not a “no-choice war.”

We have been calling for an end to the war for 12 months.

Twelve bloody months.

Twelve months in which we have watched in horror the nightmarish, unthinkable chain of events, starting with the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.

And for 12 months, we have now been watching, in despair and with a sense of helplessness, the continuous attrition of our soldiers, our sons — and sometimes, our daughters — some of them now many months inside Gaza with no end in sight in this long, deceptive and accursed war.

For 12 months, we hold our breath each time we hear the dreaded words on the news “names allowed to be published.” Next time, it might be someone we know: a father, an uncle, a neighbor, a brother, a son. We have become all too familiar now with a society made up of thousands of grieving families, wounded soldiers and post-trauma sufferers. So many lives have been derailed by this brutal and unnecessary war.

For 12 months, we have been unable to breathe thinking about those whom the state has abandoned to their agony in dark tunnels underneath the ground in Gaza. It’s hard to believe that the State of Israel, which has always taken pride in its ethos of never leaving anyone on the battlefield, has abandoned the hostages to their fate, despite the fact that an agreement is on the table that could save them (see negotiator Gershon Baskin #threeweekdeal).

We hold our breath each time we hear the dreaded words on the news “names allowed to be published.”

For 12 months, we have been watching with horror the images emerging from Gaza as our country digs deeper and deeper into the morass, reigning terror down on innocent Gazans who are not and have never been supporters of the atrocities of Oct. 7. The dimensions of the destruction and killing in the Gaza Strip are unimaginable.

Most of the tens of thousands of dead are women and children. In these very moments, thousands are dying just a few miles from Tel Aviv in the absence of clean water, sufficient food, medical care and basic sanitation. Most of the hospitals in Gaza were significantly damaged or completely destroyed. Water, electricity and sewage infrastructures were destroyed, making their lives a living hell. The images, videos and photos from the Gaza Strip look like the place has been hit by a man-made earthquake. And it is our men who have made that earthquake. This is hard to live with and harder still to live in.

And now the north of the country is also on fire, even though Hezbollah has announced that it will terminate its hostilities when Israel signs a deal and a ceasefire with Hamas. My family lives in the north of the country in Gesher Haziv, which has now become the northernmost border town in the western Galilee as all other villages and towns to the north were evacuated. My teenaged son’s friends and classmates have been displaced from their homes in the north for a year, and the return date remains uncertain. My 84- year-old mother must spend her days close to a shelter or protected space, and not in the sunny coffee shops that she so enjoys because at any minute, a rocket might land in Nahariya or Shlomi or Rosh Hanikra or Gesher Haziv itself. My son’s entire school was moved further south so that the kids would be safe, but now even further south isn’t safe, and school is on Zoom for the foreseeable future. And the war keeps escalating. The Israeli public is slowly collapsing under the burden of war. Businesses falter and fail; the economy moves ever closer to ruin.

The State of Israel has abandoned the hostages to their fate, despite the fact that an agreement is currently on the table that could save them.

And what is the purpose of all this? What is the point of such a mega-tragedy that includes countless daily tragedies, most of them in Gaza — about which the Jewish Israeli public hardly hears — and some of them in Israel itself? That is not a rhetorical question because there are three clear purposes for this war, and each one more egregious than the next. The first is, of course, the survival of the extreme right-wing government and the cruel psychopathic tyrant at its head. The second is the thirst for revenge that has washed over the public and has not yet been slaked. The third is the messianic vision that includes settlement in the Gaza Strip. And now there’s even talk of settling southern Lebanon.

This is insanity.

How can a mother, who does not agree with any of these three purposes, send her son into this ongoing hell? In the name of what did my now 21-year old son and his peers go out to the battlefield, risk their lives and souls and participate in the horrible carnage? In the name of what did my son’s friend and classmate Matan Malka, killed in the war last year, die? My heart aches as I say the words: “May his memory be for a blessing.” A young man barely 20 years old who used to walk home with my son from school and who didn’t get to grow up. You might say his death was in defense of his homeland, but we know that the powers that be had all the intelligence in advance and didn’t shore up our defenses, which might have prepared us for and thus prevented the Oct. 7 massacres and all the subsequent deaths.

Did he die for the sake of a tyrant, a psychopath, a megalomaniac who hides in a bunker and whose own son is safely ensconced in a penthouse in Miami? I refuse to allow my child to be sacrificed for his maniacal political ends.

Or did he die in the name of revenge? Revenge is a deadly game in which both sides lose. The well-known aphorism is “when seeking revenge, dig two graves.” We definitely have been digging a lot of graves recently. Revenge is a schoolyard game played by juvenile bullies on a playground, not for adults who hold the responsibility for lives and livelihoods in their hands.

Or did he die in order to conquer more land? We are being led by a fanatical and messianic group that is ready to sacrifice lives — the lives of our children and the children on the other side of the border. I don’t consider any children “the other side” because I am an adult, and every child is my responsibility. So, for the sake of a religious vision, all the children are being sacrificed. And if they succeed, large forces will be needed to secure the area and to protect these new lords of the land just as we see currently in the West Bank. We have already played out the story of the settlements and how violence has become routine, and the destruction of people, property, olive trees and agricultural plots are encouraged in the name of this extreme vision. Under the auspices of war and the cover of politics, and justified by a biblical interpretation that suits their vision, settlers raid villages, beat, burn, destroy, poison, drown and even kill. This is happening in the West Bank where my son is currently serving. He is a medic and his greatest desire is to save lives and yet through no fault of his own, he has become part of a deadly machine that keeps the violence going.

Gaza has become a ruin of corpses, sewage and disease. Hostages die, soldiers die, children are killed in their parents’ arms, and parents must endure the worst unendurable nightmare of watching their children killed. This is not a vision of the future. This is a vision of hell on earth.

Instead of striving for a solution, we see ourselves moving away from it. Instead of striving for life, we worship death. Isn’t our symbol — the symbol of the Jewish people — the chai, which means life? It seems that we are doing everything so that the land of Israel, which we claim to love, will be destroyed and strewn with death and dying for the foreseeable future.

In the midst of all this, I speak as a mother of a soldier and of a teenager, and as part of a group of mothers who found each other and joined hands and hearts in solidarity right after Oct. 7. We are activists who cry out together to stop the madness. With broken hearts and with voices ravaged by tears, we call for the embrace of the value of life over the celebration of death; for planting, building, growing and raising of children and not for destruction; we call for an end to the deadly suicidal rampage, so that we can all begin to breathe again.

We mothers are no longer prepared to send our military-age sons to senseless slaughter. Our conversations with our own children are fraught because we have discovered, to our dismay, that it is difficult to influence the opinion of a 17- or 20-year-old teenager who has been educated in the violent nationalistic mentality that has prevailed these many years in our country of Israel. I wish we mothers could stand up and refuse to serve on their behalf, but they are now adults with agency of their own. So all we can do is worry, support them, love them and pick up the pieces when it all breaks apart.

And Israeli society does indeed seem to be breaking apart. The military achievements brought about by the war are meager in view of the scope of the fighting and the unimaginable cost to lives and souls on both sides. The government is determined in its attempts to extinguish any possibility of hope for peace in the land. If only we had invested just a fraction of resources in diplomacy and political overtures instead of in military and force, our region would look significantly different today. If we had the will to forge a political agreement, backed by the nations of the world, we would be able to create a future and a new dawn in the Middle East. We know that in order to achieve this dream, we mothers will need to be at the negotiating table.

For it is the mothers and our supporters who have the moral authority to say: enough to dying by the sword; enough to upholding the cult of a madman; enough admiration for violence over peace; enough of the celebration of death rather than the elevation of life. In the name of life, let’s all say: enough.

And let us go forward with healing, with solidarity for all impacted by the deadly deeds we have witnessed, and let us raise our voices with a renewed call for life. For chai.

Amen.