'Oct. 7 didn't start time; it was an outcome': Vivian Silver's son on staying true to her legacy

On the morning of Oct. 7, as Hamas-led militants entered Kibbutz Be'eri, 74-year-old Vivian Silver gave a phone interview to an Israeli radio show from her safe room. Even as fighters stalked the street outside her house, she argued the attack showed the need for a peace deal.

Born in Winnipeg, Silver moved to Israel in the 1970s. Kibbutz Be'eri, a community just a few kilometres from the border with Gaza, had been her home for more than 30 years. She was a tireless activist and advocate for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Her final text messages to her son, Yonatan Zeigen, were sent at 10:54 a.m. 

"I'm with you," he texted. "I feel you," she replied. 

For weeks, Zeigen and the rest of the family waited to hear news of Silver. Hers was not among the names of dead immediately released, and it was thought she'd been taken hostage into Gaza. But last November, her remains were identified by DNA and confirmation came that she had died in her house, which was set ablaze that day in October.

After his mother's death, Zeigen quit his job as a social worker to pick up where her activism left off and try to fulfil her life's work of seeing peace between Israelis and Palestinians. 

The 35-year-old father of three has spent the past year speaking out in the media, delivering speeches, fostering relationships with diplomats in Israel and travelling abroad to meet foreign government officials. CBC News correspondent Chris Brown met Zeigen at his home in Tel Aviv. 

Q: Tell me, how would you characterize the work you do now?

A: I am not sure I have a good answer for that. Up until Oct. 7, I was a social worker. And the year before that … I was working here for the city of Tel Aviv with people who suffer from homelessness and addiction. I held on to this fantasy of normal life: going to work, raising my kids. Oct. 7 burst that bubble for me and made me realize that it doesn't matter how much I'm meaningful to a certain person on the street if life itself in Israel and Palestine is not sustainable and if the system itself is broken. So it made me feel an urge and sense of responsibility to become invested and engaged in change, in telling a new story for Israel and Palestine and for creating an alternative reality that enables both peoples to share the land with security and liberation. 

Q: Your transformation could have gone the other way. Someone who lost a relative, violently, at a moment when the entire country was shocked, but also furious about what had happened…. not all families and not all sons of victims chose the path that you did. 

A: I accept the fact that it's very natural for other people to be different about it. You know, when you're traumatized, it tends to pull you in the direction of resentment and vengeance-seeking or this primal longing for order in the world that will come only if you're a part of a very definitive community. But it's just not the way I see order in the world. I tend to be more universalistic and to externalize problems, meaning that immediately after Oct. 7, I didn't see the problem as Hamas gunmen murdering my mother. I saw the problem as the conflict and the occupation. So that leads to a different attitude towards the solution for the problem.

Q: Some people would be very surprised to hear you say that, because this was an act of profound violence, and your mother, by all accounts, was not that person at all. She was someone who dedicated her life against that violence and yet was ultimately taken by it in the end.

A: Right. That's the logic in my mind, that she fought against that. If enough people would have listened, would have been invested in the same things, [Oct. 7] wouldn't have happened. Because it happened in the context of a prolonged war, of a very long dehumanization process on both sides. Oct. 7 didn't start time; it was an outcome. And at the same time, it's kind of expected that if we failed to create circumstances that would have prevented that, then that's what we got. So, if I don't want that to continue to happen, I need to behave differently. We all do. If we don't want another Oct. 7, if Palestinians don't want the carnage [that is being inflicted upon them] since then, we need to find different outlets of behaviour to solve the issue. 

Q: What do you think of the events of the last week up in Lebanon? What do you think your mother would think of it?