Yonatan Zeigen, who lost his mother Vivian Silver in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, says his goal in life is to decrease the overall pain and suffering in the region – not to avenge the murder of his mother, who was a trailblazing co-founder of the peace organization Women Wage Peace.
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Silver, 74, was well known for her work promoting shared society movements and especially women-led coalition building between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
She was at her home on Kibbutz Be’eri, which she helped build, when terrorists entered the kibbutz that morning.
Yonatan had managed to speak and exchange WhatsApp messages with his mother that morning; her death in the attacks was later confirmed.
“I saw pain and loss, and trauma, like a substance… a quantity… in the world. And I suffered from it,” said Yonatan speaking about the shift in his life post-Oct. 7 and what drives him to continue his mother’s work.
“In my logic, I need to reduce the quantity of that [pain, loss, and trauma] in the world.”
Yonatan says the idea of retaliation makes no sense.
“If I want adults to suffer, it means I raise the amount of suffering in the world in general. And, in order for others not to suffer from what I have suffered, in order for my kids not to have to go through this same experience, I need to reduce it.”
Zeigen was in Toronto this week, along with his older brother, Chen Zeigen, a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Connecticut, for a special event June 4 in tribute to their mother.
Organized by a committee led by Silver’s close friend, Lynne Mitchell, the event was one of the first presentations by Women Wage Peace (WWP) Canada East, with backing from the New Israel Fund of Canada. Last year, WWP groups formed around the world, including a Canadian one with Vancouver and Winnipeg members.
The Israeli WWP organization, along with the Palestinian organization Women of the Sun, were nominated for a 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, and WWP recently won the 2025 David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award at a ceremony in New York.
Tel Aviv-based Yonatan Zeigen, who quit his job as a social worker to dedicate his life to continuing Vivian’s work, described the need for shifting the circumstances in which people can find themselves killing others, whether as radicalized attackers or as trained soldiers in the IDF.
Sitting beside his brother Chen at Mitchell’s home in Toronto, Yonatan told The CJN it’s a fundamental change of circumstances for viewing one another that would create conditions for lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I see it as: we need to promote the effort to create settings that [do not] bring us to meet [through this] terrible component in human beings, and I think that [it] is realistic [to say] that countries and combating sides are able to shift the circumstances and the settings in order to not let young men engage in battle and violent resistance and all of that,” said Yonatan.
“Then we would have been able to meet the specific person who killed our mother in a different kind of atmosphere where we wouldn’t have encountered the capability [to] murder.”
The brothers spoke at the event, which raised funds for the Vivian Silver Impact Award, a prize they helped create, along with the US-based New Israel Fund. The award is given to one Jewish and one Palestinian woman annually to support and recognize those continuing the work of peacebuilding and women-led organizations.
Peace activism had become a dangerous activity for civilians in Gaza ever since the Second Intifada, which started in 2000, and for years under Hamas authority, Yonatan notes.
His mother had been a longtime volunteer with the Israeli organization Road to Recovery, driving sick patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for appointments and back, often several times weekly.
In the Israeli and Palestinian civil society peace movement, there’s a recognition of a different starting point than he often sees in the North American discourse around Israel, the Gaza war, and a permanent solution for peace, safety, and national self-realization.
“There is a consensus [in that movement] about the overlooked fact that both peoples are there to stay, and we need to shift from a ‘two opposing sides violently negotiating or not negotiating on the rights to the land’ to a mutual, equality-based, problem-solving group that figures out our shared problem of how to share the land.
“Because our future is shared, we need to start cutting back [working backwards] from that understanding into pragmatic steps towards that,” he said. “We don’t see that,” especially in social media polarization, in North America.
“We see only more division, only more dehumanization. Only more fantasies that each side can prevail and be exclusive on the land,” he said. “In North America, when people choose sides, and don’t elevate the discourse of a shared future, they just feed into that unrealistic fantasy, that the Palestinians will be liberated and form, I don’t know, an Islamic nation or Palestinian exclusive state on the land. That will never happen by resistance,” he said.
For Israelis, it’s a different unrealistic vision, he says: “That we will control the whole of the promised land, and live secure lives, in well-being… that will never happen,” [and not] through sheer military means.
“We are, in the peace movement and civil society, we are working together towards that shared future,” whether that’s a sustainable two-state solution, a “confederation” or another resolution for the land, he says.
“We will solve it technically when we sit together in the room from a standpoint of equality.”
Meanwhile, someone raising a flag in Canada or the United States and calling for “intifada” is counterproductive “to the Palestinians in Palestine,” according to Yonatan Zeigen.
Similarly, “When you raise an Israeli flag and blindly cite ‘we have a right to defend ourselves’, when we are actually aggressors, you are counterproductive to the Israelis, to the Jewish people in Israel, on the ground.
“If you were able, like we are doing tonight in Toronto, to bring Diaspora Jews and Palestinians to talk together under the banner of peace, under the understanding that we need to end the occupation and solve the conflict together, then you promote both of our peoples’ ability to live good lives in Israel and Palestine,” he said ahead of the event.
The international community has a role to play, and it’s one Yonatan feels could be more assertive in ending the war, and “promoting a diplomatic process holistic that ends the conflict in general.”
“We won’t do it by ourselves,” he said.
He approved of the joint statement issued last month by Canada, France and the U.K. that rebuked Israel and warned the country of sanctions over continuing its military campaign in Gaza and the blockades it had imposed on humanitarian aid, and calling for consequences if Israel expands settlements in the West Bank.
“When Canada, France, and the UK came out with this announcement, I said ‘better late than never,’” said Yonatan.
“A lot of times [conflicts] erupt between two sides, but they are always either enabled or solved with the intervention of third parties. We, up until now, have ‘enjoyed’ only the enablement part of the international community intervention,” said Yonatan.
“We need to start enjoying the capacity to solve problems, and ending the war is a necessity… a necessary first step in our ability to live viable lives in Israel and Palestine.”
Sitting next to Yonatan, his older brother Chen pointed out the tendency, from both sides of the Israel-Palestine discourse, to focus on righting the wrongs of the past instead of forging solutions for those living on the land, and their future generations.
“We are saying: don’t ask how we right the wrongs of the past, because there’s no end to how much further back you can go,” said Chen. “Ask how you can bring justice to our grandchildren, and not our grandparents.”
The sold-out event in Toronto drew around 320 people for the evening, said Lynne Mitchell, and featured several presentations, including video messages from the inaugural winners of the award, Dr. Rula Hardal, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and May Pundak, an Israeli Jew. The award comes with a prize of $15,000 USD to each of the two winners.
A musical combo that included vocalists Erez Zobary and Aviva Chernick performed some of Silver’s favourite tunes for the evening, including Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Speakers also included Rabbi Donna Kirshbaum, of Women Wage Peace’s Canadian branch, and Amal Elsana Alh’jooj, who formerly co-directed the Arab Jewish committee AJEEC-NISPED with Silver, and is now an associate professor at McGill University’s school of social work and the executive director of the organization Promoting Leadership for Empowerment, Development and Justice.
Israeli documentary filmmaker Hilla Medallia, who’s at work on a film about Silver’s life and legacy, attended the Toronto event to share a sneak peek at the work in progress. Missing Silver, a co-production with Montreal-based producer Ina Fichman, began film production last year.
Mitchell told The CJN the event was important for the community and that it was dubbed “In Her Voice” because “everyone who spoke presented their reality and the charge to the audience was to listen as Vivian would,” without reaction or judgement, she said on June 5.
People didn’t have to agree, only listen, she says.
“Be open to more than one reality in the conflict… and it’s hard to listen when you’re afraid.
“How can anybody become a peacemaker, and what can you do? Everyone who participated spoke to that… Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian,” said Mitchell.
“Listen as Vivian would listen,” the audience was told, Mitchell said. “That’s her legacy.”
