Israel’s Remembrance Day is one of the most sacred moments in the national calendar – a time of unity, reflection, and pain. It is a day to remember those who were murdered in terror attacks, and those who gave their lives fighting to defend the State of Israel. It is not a day to make political statements, and certainly not a day to promote dangerous false equivalencies between those who died defending our country and those who sought to destroy it.
This is precisely why the so-called “joint memorial ceremony,” held each year by the “Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum” and “Combatants for Peace,” continues to inflame the Israeli public. The event is framed as a call to peace and reconciliation, but its execution is profoundly controversial. The idea of grieving Israeli soldiers alongside Palestinians – some of whom died while committing acts of terror – strikes many as not just inappropriate, but offensive.
In 2018, then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman banned 110 Palestinians from entering Israel to attend the event. He explained his decision clearly: “This is not a memorial ceremony, but a display of bad taste and insensitivity that harms our most precious bereaved families.”
In 2019, then-prime minister and defense minister Benjamin Netanyahu also blocked entry to 176 Palestinian participants. Although the High Court overturned the ban for most, it ruled the defense minister could still deny entry to anyone with a security risk.
That question came into sharp focus again in 2023. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant prohibited Palestinian participants from entering Israel for the event, citing “the complex security situation.” Once again, the organizers petitioned the High Court.
This is not about denying anyone’s right to mourn, but about rejecting an event that has – year after year – been used to blur moral lines between aggressor and victim. The families of fallen IDF soldiers and victims of terror deserve a space to remember their loved ones without possibly unknowingly sitting next to those who may view those same loved ones as oppressors or occupiers.
And yet, none of that justifies the violence we witnessed this year in Ra’anana.
On Remembrance Day Eve, a group of far-right activists descended on a Reform synagogue where a private screening of the ceremony was taking place. They threw stones and explosives, injured four police officers, and physically assaulted participants. Some shouted “Death to Arabs.” Deputy Mayor Ronit Weintraub was kicked and spat upon. The synagogue’s rabbi had her car window smashed. Women were hospitalized.
Racheli Ben Ari Sakat, head of the Likud branch in Ra’anana, didn’t just condone the protest – she incited it. “This is just the first salvo,” she wrote on social media, calling the ceremony “a disgrace” and rallying the crowd with threats. They wanted to silence the ceremony—now everyone’s talking about it.
There is a legitimate argument to be made against the joint ceremony. But those arguments are lost when drowned in screams and shattered glass. What happened in Ra’anana dishonored not only the dead but the living – the law-abiding, grieving citizens who were targeted simply for attending a gathering others didn’t agree with.
Deputy Mayor Weintraub, who attended the ceremony after Ra’anana’s official memorial, said, “It felt like a pogrom.” MK Gilad Kariv, who accompanied wounded participants to the ER, said the mob’s violence had no place in a country that claims to respect its fallen.
The extreme right activists forced Israeli media, some not keen to do so, to cover the event – because of their violence. Instead of ignoring it and making it be considered as extreme and not important, it became the most visible ceremony in the country.
And yet, the silence from national leadership, particularly from those within the ruling coalition – and even from the opposition – has been deafening.
Ceremony is indeed offensive, but the violence against participants is abhorrent
It is possible to say two things at once: that this ceremony offends many in Israel who think that its premise is deeply flawed – and also that violence, intimidation, and incitement against its attendees is absolutely unacceptable.
Israel’s democracy must allow room for debate, even for what some consider to be bad ideas. But that debate must be waged through words, not weapons. On a day meant to honor the values for which so many died, we must be better than mobs and slogans.
The Ra’anana violence was a disgrace. It must be rejected if we are to preserve what this day is truly about: memory, dignity, and the moral clarity of knowing the difference between those who died defending Israel – and those who may have supported the attack on Israel.
