The Tragic Legacy of Vivian Silver
By Razi Ginzberg
On October 4th of last year, Vivian Silver helped organise a women’s “peace rally” in Jerusalem, with over 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian participants. Three days later, Palestinian terrorists murdered her and burned her body so badly that she was only identified over a month later.
The rally on October 4th was the swan song in an activism career that spanned nearly fifty years. Most of the activism was in the Israeli “peace” movement, a movement that blames Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world, and claims that if Israel only gave in to the demands of the Palestinians, the conflict would be over.
Silver immigrated to Israel from Canada in 1974, and settled in Kibbutz Gezer, later in life moving to Be’eri, on the Israel/Gaza border. It was in Be’eri where she was murdered. Initially, it was assumed that she had been taken hostage, since there was no evidence of human remains in her home, which was gutted and burned.
Vivian’s murder by Hamas terrorists came exactly thirty years after the Israeli left’s crowning achievement, the Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in September 1993, gave the Palestinians autonomy over some of the disputed territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip, weapons with which to rule these territories, and allowed thousands of their exiled terrorists, led by Yasser Arafat, into the land.
While the Israeli “peace” movement was celebrating the agreement as the beginning of the end of decades of war, the Palestinians saw it – rightfully – as capitulation and surrender. The results of this “peace” were immediately clear. Within months, the Palestinians introduced a new aspect to Israeli life: suicide bombings. Palestinians wanted to kill Israelis before the Oslo Accords. Now they had territories under their control, which gave them the ability to better plan, and therefore better execute, attacks on Israeli civilians.
Despite the rise in Palestinian terrorism, the vision set out by Silver and her movement remained virtually unchallenged among Israel’s leaders. It was carried out by the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo Accords, Itzhak Rabin; following Rabin’s assassination in 1995, that vision continued to guide Israeli policy under his successor, Shimon Peres; and following Peres’s 1996 election loss, it remained at the core of Israel’s approach with its new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Every Israeli Prime Minister offered Yasser Arafat almost everything he said he wanted (or at least everything he said he wanted when he was speaking to a Western audience). And every Israeli Prime Minister was rejected.
When Ehud Barak offered even more than his predecessors did, in a summit hosted by US President Bill Clinton in Camp David, Arafat rejected the offer, and launched the second Intifada.
The violent uprising that followed Camp David showcased the Palestinian desire to murder Jews at a previously unseen level. For the first time, they used female suicide bombers, as well as children as young as 14. Mothers celebrated their own sons’ deaths when the sons managed to successfully sacrifice themselves for the most noble of causes: killing Jews.
Barak lost the support of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and subsequently the support of the Israeli people, who voted him out in a landslide in favour of Ariel Sharon, widely considered to be a hardliner. Most of the suicide bombings in the second Intifada happened during Sharon’s time in office, as did the rise of a new threat: rockets from Gaza.
The rockets targeted Israeli settlements within the Gaza Strip, as well as the towns and villages closest to it, most notably Sderot. Sharon’s answer was to follow the Israeli left’s doctrine: when in doubt, blame Israel. He proposed, and then carried out, the Disengagement, ending Israel’s military and civilian presence in the Gaza Strip.
Had Silver and her movement been right, this end to the “occupation” of Gaza would’ve brought about an end to hostilities from the Strip. Instead, what followed was an ever-growing threat of rockets with an ever-growing range, several rounds of Israeli military operations in Gaza aimed at mitigating the threat, and the final (for now), inevitable payoff of thirty years of capitulation: the October 7th massacre.
Vivian Silver was not the only “peace” activist slaughtered on that day. Stickers of Israeli left-wing organisations like Peace Now can be seen on broken windows of houses in the Kibbutzim, Marxist villages in Israel in which Silver’s views are the almost-never-questioned consensus.
In a video of Israeli female soldiers who were taken hostage, one of the soldiers tells a Hamas terrorist to call her friend in Gaza. She was part of a youth peace organisation, and seemed to truly believe that if she could only show this terrorist that she’s not some evil right-winger who wants to wage war, but rather one of the “good guys” who are fighting for a two-state solution in which Jews and Arabs can live side-by-side in peace and security, surely they would let her go. This was the extent of the influence of the “peace” movement: even when staring down the barrel of a gun, literally, Israelis believed what they were told about Palestinians by this movement, over what Palestinians were telling them, in words and deeds, about themselves.
The lesson of Vivian Silver’s life and death is as tragic as it gets. But the real tragedy is that that lesson hasn’t been learned at all.
In an interview for the BBC just days after the October 7th massacre, when Silver was assumed to have been taken hostage, her son, Yonatan Ziegen, was asked what his mother would say about the attack.
"That this is the outcome of war. Of not striving for peace, and this is what happens.
"It's very overwhelming but not completely surprising. It's not sustainable to live in a state of war for so long and now it bursts. It bursts."
The news of her death, and the mounting, undeniable evidence of the savagery of Palestinian society and the consensus over the desire to eliminate the Jewish state, have not changed Yonatan’s mind, or the minds of Vivian’s friends in the movement.
A “humanitarian” aid facility in Gaza has been named after Silver. The nauseating irony of aiding your enemy at a time of war, and naming the place where you provide such aid after one of the victims of the war, seems to be completely lost on Vivian’s former friends and colleagues. So lost that they take it even further.
The annual Vivian Silver Impact Award will be presented for the first time later this year. The prize will be given to two women—an Israeli and a Palestinian—who “show great promise or have demonstrated significant accomplishments in one of the areas that embody Vivian’s values and actions:
Building Arab-Jewish partnership in Israel
Promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace
Advancing women to decision-making and leadership positions”
In Gaza and in Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank, no peace movement exists. There are differences among Palestinians on who should lead them, and on what type of dictatorship they would like, but on one thing there is complete agreement: the future Palestinian state won’t live side-by-side in peace and security with Israel. It will replace it. And Jews aren’t welcome. Left, right, “pro-war” or “pro-peace,” they will all share Vivian Silver’s fate.