“Vivian’s Land: His Mother Was Killed by Hamas. Her Death Transformed His Life”, The New York Times Magazine

By Emma Goldberg,

The son of a peace activist brutally killed on Oct. 7 is determined to make sure that her dream for Israel does not die with her.

Yonatan Zeigen in Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel, in August, visiting the home where his mother, Vivian Silver, was killed during the Oct. 7 massacre.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

Emma Goldberg is a features writer who spent months interviewing Vivian’s son and traveled to the kibbutz where his mother was killed by Hamas.

The day Vivian Silver’s home burned, her backyard was scattered with her grandchildren’s toys, a blue plastic boat upturned near a rubber duck. Vivian often spent days preparing for their visits, planning trips to the petting zoo and baking birthday cakes molded into the shape of a Barbie or a dinosaur. Her sons, Yonatan and Chen Zeigen, reminded her that she didn’t need to do so much, but Vivian measured her life by the way she made other people feel. The boys teased their mother: As a self-declared no-nonsense feminist, a renowned Israeli peace activist who was used to the sound of mortar fire, how had she stayed so soft?

Listen to this article, read by Gabra Zackman

Last year, in the days leading up to Oct. 7, Vivian was once again busily anticipating the arrival of Yonatan’s family from Tel Aviv. He and his partner, Maayan, would be packing their three floppy-haired children into the car for the familiar drive to his mother’s home in Kibbutz Be’eri, a desert village with socialist roots three miles from the border with Gaza. They were coming not only to celebrate Simchat Torah, the festival of the Bible, but also the 77th anniversary of the founding of the kibbutz.

But then Yonatan and Maayan changed their minds. It was time, they decided, to have their own private holiday. Be’eri, where they both grew up, was such a tight-knit community that a childhood nickname could stick to a person until they died. There, Yonatan would always be known as Vivian’s son. He wanted to separate himself: He and Maayan would build their own lives, create their own traditions. Yonatan, defiant and a little guilty, told his mother they wouldn’t be coming that day.

Twenty-four hours later, Yonatan woke up in Tel Aviv to the sound of sirens. Opening WhatsApp, he learned that hundreds of Hamas militants had crossed the border. Many of them had surged into his mother’s kibbutz.

Vivian, that morning, was utterly herself. Hiding in her safe room, as fighters came down her street, she cracked god-awful jokes in text messages to Yonatan. “Say something,” he wrote. “Something,” she replied. “I’m trying to keep my sense of humor.”

From her safe room, Vivian did a radio interview with the public broadcaster Galei Zahal, insisting the attack showed the urgent need for a peace deal. Afterward, on the phone with Yonatan, she was frustrated, recounting how the interviewer had dismissed her. In the background, he could hear gunfire and militants shouting. It sounded like his petite, 74-year-old mother was standing on a battlefield.

“Do you want to continue speaking, or should we say goodbye?” he asked her.

“Let’s say goodbye,” Vivian told him.

When she texted him that men were inside the house, she wrote: “I’m afraid to breathe.”

“I’m with you,” Yonatan wrote.

“I feel you,” Vivian replied.

“Are you safe now?” he wrote. “Mom?” There was no response.

Yonatan lay down on his bed, his children watching cartoons in the living room. Through the night, his phone glowed with messages naming the dead at Be’eri. His mother was not among them, and by Sunday he was convinced that she had been taken hostage in Gaza. He threw himself into campaigning for her safe return, taking a leave from his job and forming a task force to lobby for her release. But five weeks later, a government liaison appeared at Yonatan’s door with the news that archaeologists had discovered bones inside Vivian’s safe room. Militants had set the house ablaze, and the bones were too damaged from the fire to be tested for DNA, but one had been matched to Vivian’s jaw through an old CT scan.

There it was, finally: sick and impossible closure. Yonatan felt an absurd longing in that moment to tell his mother how hard he had worked for her release. Then she would have understood just how much he loved her. It felt infantile, but he wanted to hear he’d made her proud.

Stories about Vivian ran in Israeli and American newspapers. NBC called her a “revered peace activist,” writing: “The silver-haired grandmother is regarded on both sides of the border as an irrepressible force.” The BBC described her as “one of Israel’s best known advocates for peace,” co-founder of the 50,000-person movement Women Wage Peace. “This is a woman who dedicated her life to peace — who built bridges with Palestinians and drove sick Gazan children to the hospital herself,” said a filmmaker who had interviewed Vivian. If Hamas had killed her, some thought, perhaps there truly was no hope for peace.

More than a thousand people came to Vivian’s funeral, many of them sobbing. Yonatan was mostly stoic. His grief sat in his head. There were plenty of ways that he resembled his mother, but sentimentality wasn’t one of them. When they buried Vivian in the cemetery at Be’eri, he thought about how jarring it was to watch soldiers shovel dirt over the body of a peacenik, while tanks rolled down the nearby highway toward Gaza. After the funeral, his older brother, Chen, an archaeologist living in Connecticut, flew back to the United States to resume his daily routine and mourn their mother privately. But Yonatan felt he could not return to normal life.

Jewish ritual asks mourners to cover up mirrors in their home, so they think not about themselves but about the dead. For Yonatan, grief itself was a mirror — a call to think about who he was and who he ought to become with his mother no longer in the reflection of his life. He had spent years purposely disengaged from the conflict and from his mother’s activism, determined to focus only on his young family and his job as a social worker. He had done all he could to avoid thinking too much about his country’s grim political future. Now Yonatan felt he had been shamefully absent.

There are borders that crop up in the landscape of a person’s life. On one side is the country of before, and on the other is the land of what comes after, rockier and unmapped. That was how Yonatan felt the day he learned that Vivian had been killed. The war’s death toll was climbing rapidly, and he quickly saw how Vivian’s loss could be used as justification for more killing and destruction. On television, he heard politicians transmuting grief into talk of military might. They were celebrating a bombing campaign that had already killed thousands of civilians, and that, in Yonatan’s mind, would only result in more devastation, not security for either side.

Perhaps, Yonatan thought, his grief about his mother’s death could be expressed only through political action. After all, how could Vivian’s memory be separated from the stances she took — from her decision to call herself a “conditional Zionist,” who believed in a Jewish state only if Palestinians had a state too? How could he mourn her without continuing her activism?

Yonatan decided that grieving his mother would mean remaking his life.

To Yonatan and Chen, she was never just Vivian, their mother. She was Vivian, the activist. She seemed to shower care on her children and the wider world in equal measure. She taught them how to nurture relationships, reminding them to text “mazel tov” to old friends getting married and to keep track of birthdays. She nudged them to call each other more often. But sometimes, especially when they were little, Yonatan felt that the political side of their mother swallowed her up: Weekends were filled with phone calls, and late nights were spent poring over project proposals. Yonatan saw his mother’s work as an “addiction.”

Vivian grew up in an observant Jewish home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and came to New York in the 1970s, where she became a feminist activist. (She met my mother there, and they became lifelong friends. I’d spend time with Vivian whenever she visited my mother, often hearing stories about her family.) In 1974, Vivian moved to Israel to help build a socialist kibbutz. 

Vivian believed that ordinary people could help bring peace to the region. If more Jews could understand the distress of their Arab neighbors, she thought, the next generation would be more willing to exchange land for peace. In 2000, she helped create the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, and later became its co-executive director, with her Bedouin colleague Amal Elsana Alh’jooj. It grew to be one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Israel devoted to equal rights. It created jobs in impoverished Arab communities and brought Arab and Jewish young people together to volunteer. 

Vivian’s politics formed the backdrop of family life. Chen remembers riding on his father’s shoulders at the peace rally where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, an event that triggered the unraveling of the Oslo Accords. The boys went with Vivian to visit friends in Gaza, even as crossing the border became challenging. Yonatan and Chen remember densely packed streets, meat spinning on sticks and the taste of hookah, which one of Vivian’s friends let them smoke at his home. “Careful, Vivian,” he laughed when Yonatan inhaled. “This isn’t his first time.”

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Once, when Yonatan was young, a Palestinian worker whom Vivian employed in the kibbutz’s construction crew was prevented from crossing the border for work. Yonatan asked where his friend had gone. Vivian explained that their country was in conflict with its Palestinian neighbors. “What is it about?” Yonatan asked. Vivian replied: “Land.” Yonatan filled a bucket with dirt and brought it to her, asking if that was enough land to bring back his friend.

As he got older, Yonatan felt that his mother was becoming too caught up in the emotions of her job. Vivian cried easily. Her staff liked to tease her, warning, “She’s about to cry again.” When she met with Arab families whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli government, Vivian’s face couldn’t conceal her anguish. “It can’t be this way, it can’t be this way,” a colleague remembered her repeating. “She would identify very easily with people,” Yonatan said. “I would scold her a lot of times, that other people’s pain isn’t hers.” He recalled telling her, “If you feel another person’s pain the same way they feel it, then you can’t help them.” She replied that he needed more empathy.

Yonatan reminded Vivian of herself. Like her, he was bullheaded, attached to his convictions and determined to act on them. As a teenager, Yonatan decided that “real leftists don’t eat meat,” so he became a vegan. Chen joined the Israeli Army after high school, as is typical for Jewish Israeli men because of the country’s mandatory military service. But Yonatan decided that he wouldn’t enlist, a heretical decision. Yonatan said he didn’t want to be part of an army “occupying another people,” and was disturbed by the way he heard friends justify shooting a gun. “Yorim v’bochim,” they said, which meant “shooting and crying.”

“I didn’t buy into it,” Yonatan said. “I won’t cry after I shoot. I won’t shoot to begin with.”

Yonatan moved to Haifa to get a law degree, planning to become a human rights lawyer. Though he didn’t see himself as an activist like his mother, he thought he could play some part in ending the cycle of violence by fighting for the rights of Arab Israelis. But when Maayan gave birth to their first son, in 2014, Yonatan was surprised by how quickly the lens of his mind refocused. The lofty conversations about history and politics that had consumed him seemed, suddenly, unimportant. His family became the center of his world. Yonatan decided he had agonized enough over a conflict that had only grown bloodier over the course of his life. He no longer saw himself as part of the effort to bring peace, which seemed at the time impossible. Instead, he got a master’s degree in family counseling and took a job as a social worker for the city of Tel Aviv. His days were a happy blur of diapers and milk, toys and child care.

Today he feels this change was partly rebellion, chafing at his mother’s obsessive tenacity. He disengaged while she plunged further in. At the time, in the summer of 2014, Vivian had recently retired. But then Israel went to war in Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week battle in Gaza. When the fighting ended, Vivian told Yonatan and Chen that she was helping to start a movement called Women Wage Peace, calling for more women to be involved in peace negotiations, because, she said, women understood how to compromise.

Yonatan and Chen were skeptical of Women Wage Peace. Yonatan didn’t think grass-roots organizing was effective: Why gather thousands of women to march for peace if the government was likely to dismiss them as angry grandmothers? He also felt that Women Wage Peace was trying to be too politically appeasing. The movement did not use the word “occupation,” because their goal was to get as many women as possible to join, including settlers.

“What is the movement if you don’t use clear language?” Yonatan asked Vivian. “You’ll have more members but no impact.”

Vivian replied: “Don’t criticize me while you’re sitting at home.”

What Yonatan calls his “political coma” lasted until the day Vivian was killed. Right after his mother’s shiva, the seven-day Jewish ritual of mourning, Yonatan quit his job as a social worker. He announced to family and friends that he would become a full-time activist for peace. He didn’t know how he would financially support his family, but with Maayan’s encouragement he gave himself a window to experiment: at least one year, which in Judaism is the official period of mourning for children who have lost their parents.

Becoming a peace activist after Oct. 7 was, in some ways, an absurd undertaking. The hope for peaceful coexistence that had animated Vivian’s work was shattered. Yonatan knew that many of his Israeli friends saw his calls to stop the bombardment in Gaza as naïve, though neighbors from Be’eri didn’t criticize him directly, because they were sensitive to his loss.

In many other parts of the world, America included, young people tend to be more liberal than their parents. In Israel, that trend is turned on its head. Polling published by the Israel Democracy Institute in 2023 found that 73 percent of Jewish Israelis between 18 and 24 call themselves right-wing, compared with 46 percent of Jewish Israelis who are 65 and over. That’s partly a product of demographics: Ultra-Orthodox families lean right, and ultra-Orthodox women have 6.6 children on average, compared with two for secular women. Young Israelis also grew up in the shadow of the second intifada, more socially isolated from Palestinians than their parents were.

In other words, Vivian was part of a generation of peaceniks fast dying out. Polling conducted after Oct. 7 found that Israelis were moving further right on political issues, including support for West Bank settlements and the re-establishment of a military occupation in Gaza. Last March and April, the Pew Research Center found that 39 percent of Israelis said the military response against Hamas in Gaza was “about right,” and 34 percent said it hadn’t gone far enough. For Yonatan, the rightward drift was motivation: “I feel this responsibility of trying to pull us in the direction of peace,” he said.

What that would look like wasn’t immediately clear to him. His mother’s life offered one blueprint, but he had to make his own. Unlike Vivian, Yonatan was skeptical of what protest alone could achieve. He didn’t spend much time at the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, where thousands were demanding a deal to bring the hostages home, because it was evident to him that Prime Minister Netanyahu wasn’t responding. Yonatan decided to focus on speaking to audiences abroad. He hoped that if other countries could make a peace deal possible, then public opinion in Israel would shift. “It’s not just that the international community is turning a blind eye,” he added. “They’re actively shaping our status quo, they’re bringing in resources without conditions.”

He traveled abroad, speaking at any organization that would have him. In March, Yonatan joined a delegation to Washington, D.C., organized by the Alliance for Middle East Peace. In a series of meetings with members of Congress and other government representatives, Yonatan argued that the United States should make its aid to Israel conditional on the country abiding by human rights law and making concessions for peace. He grew fed up as they nodded along politely. “I was under the impression I came to meet with a superpower, and you’re talking like, ‘We’re trying, we’re hoping,’” Yonatan recalled saying to one of them. “What do you mean? You have leverage.” He would have to find ways of increasing the pressure on them.

Together, Yonatan and Chen created an annual prize in Vivian’s name, recognizing a Palestinian and a Jewish woman working on peace, feminism or coexistence. Throughout the year, the brothers discussed their anguish over the war. Chen was thousands of miles away from the sirens that were sending friends to their bomb shelters, but all he wanted to do was obsessively check the news. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on his dissertation research, examining the ratio of isotopes in animal teeth and sediment from upper-Paleolithic sites in Israel. In May, Chen and his wife had a daughter, whom they named Lily Aviva, for Vivian. As a parent, Chen hoped to reflect his mother’s force of heart, her attentive care, but he chose not to be part of Yonatan’s political project. “I’m trying to take care of her as best we can and not really think about what world we’re bringing her into,” Chen said about his daughter. “She’s here. We’ve made the decision.”

While Chen tried to outswim the waves of grief, Yonatan dove in. He wasn’t really surfacing for air; he was trying to see if he could breathe underwater. Tensions were rising in the region, as Israel launched attacks on Lebanon and Hezbollah fired missiles at Israel. To many people, Yonatan’s plea — for Israel to immediately end the strikes on its neighbors and reach a permanent cease-fire — sounded detached from reality. But Yonatan felt that peace activists had to operate outside the confines of reality, to change what felt possible. He even thought about orchestrating a mock peace negotiation, a televised spectacle, to help people imagine what it would look like to have government leaders come to the table in good faith. 

In his mind, Yonatan kept repeating a parable he liked to tell his children: Every person has two wolves inside them. Which survives? The one you feed. Hope or despair, peace or war. To feed the hope, that was his work. Still, he wrestled with the knowledge that his activism sucked up energy in his household, just as Vivian’s did in his childhood home. During bedtime one evening, Yonatan’s 8-year-old son asked him, “When are you going to die?”

“Not for a long time,” Yonatan replied. “Why?”

“When Savta died,” his son said, using the Hebrew word for grandmother, “you replaced her by becoming a peacemaker. When you die, I’ll need to replace you, and I’m still a kid.”

In August, I went with Yonatan to visit what was left of his mother’s home in Be’eri. We pulled up to the yellow gate outside the kibbutz, where a guard was on duty. The air was dusty, and from the direction of the Gaza border we could hear the rumble of artillery fire.

“This is my mother’s kibbutz,” Yonatan called to the guard.

“Is she here now?” the guard replied. Yonatan paused.

“She died on Oct. 7,” he said, and the guard waved us through.

Beyond the kibbutz gate, Yonatan pulled up to what remained of his mother’s house, its walls covered in burn marks. In a community of 1,000 people, 101 were killed. Vivian’s neighborhood was the first line of battle.

Yonatan smoked a cigarette before we stepped inside Vivian’s home. The ground was covered in debris and the walls in blast marks. The living room was unrecognizable, all dust and ash. The kitchen was littered with shards of pottery: the yellow handle of a mug, the fading floral paint of a dish smashed to pieces. All that remained of the bedroom was a melted bed frame. The emptiest area was the safe room, which was cleaned out in the search for Vivian’s bones. Near the front door was the imprint of a menorah that once hung on the blackened wall.

Yonatan recalled the day last October when he first visited the remains of Vivian’s house. “I thought about the valley of the shadow of death,” he said. “When you walk this road of houses, everybody is dead.” He had been hoping to feel something, he told me. He thought he might cry, but he couldn’t. “I come here and analyze,” Yonatan said. He considered what it might take to protect other families from this kind of loss. It reminded him how different he and Vivian were. She barreled into the world with her heart open; he met every situation with his mind.

But were they really so different? He had pleaded with her not to let her passions overtake her life. Now here he was, turning his world upside down to fill the hole in him she left behind. Yonatan’s year of mourning was nearly up, and he hadn’t yet found a way to support himself as a full-time activist. The fight for peace now consumed his life, as it consumed his mother’s. Her death had dissolved the barriers he had built between the two of them, between himself and the pain of the conflict. Standing in the dust, Yonatan said that taking on his mother’s work has been a balm. “When I’m active, then I maintain hope,” Yonatan said. “If I sit at home, it seems less plausible.” He understands why Vivian clung to her optimism all those years: It’s better than any alternative.

We walked over to the area that was once Vivian’s living room. Sifting through the detritus, we found pages from three different books that were charred but still legible. The pages, improbably, were about children and parents, journeys and leaders, and also peril. One was from the Book of Genesis, and another recounted the moment that God sent Moses to wander the desert. The last page we found in the dust was from a book about Jewish identity. “What surfaces over and over again in these and similar speculations on Jewish vulnerability is the image of the Holocaust,” it read. “It could happen here.”

Yonatan looked up at the sky through a crack in the ceiling. The second level of the house, where his children used to sleep when they visited for holidays, was entirely burned. Sunlight filtered through. “Another person could come here and say this is the reason to kill Palestinians,” Yonatan said. “I stand here and say this is the reason to fight for peace. So this won’t happen again.” He believed that the cycle of grief could twist into something new. 

“Israelis always tell me that when the hostages were brought into Gaza, people cheered,” he said. “I think the same people will cheer when we bring peace.” If the very militants who destroyed his kibbutz came to him now saying they were ready to negotiate for peace, Yonatan told me he would listen openly. “Come,” he said. “Even if you killed my mother before.”

Read by Gabra Zackman

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Alec K. Redfearn

Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change. More about Emma Goldberg

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 6, 2024, Page 26 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Vivian’s Land.