On 22 March, one of FoST Sweden’s members had the opportunity to attend the ceremony for the latest recipients of the “Vivian Silver Impact Award,” a prize established in 2024 in memory of peace activist Vivian Silver, who was murdered on 7 October 2023. It is awarded each year to two women, one Palestinian and one Jewish, who work for Israeli–Palestinian partnership, to advance peace in Israel/Palestine, or to advance women to decision-making and leadership positions. The event was held in London, with about 100 attendees, and was co-sponsored by our sister group UK Friends of Standing Together.
The event was hosted by the New Israel Fund (NIF) and opened by Noeleen Cohen, chair of NIF UK, recognizing the current crisis and all the civilian lives being impacted and lost in Iran, the Gulf, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. The ongoing war in Iran impacted the event in many ways, the most visible being that neither the award recipients nor Yonatan Zeigen could travel to the event in person but instead participated digitally. The program had been changed at the last minute to include a final segment with speakers who could attend in person.
The main host of the evening, Christiane Amanpour (CNN), then took to the stage. She started by acknowledging very directly that it was not easy for her to be there today, “while Israel is bombing my country” but that she had decided to still stay true to her values and fulfill her commitment. To hear her speak honestly about her pain and conflicted feelings about the event was very powerful.
After the screening of a short video of Vivian Silver, Amanpour had a virtual conversation with Yonatan Zeigen, Vivian’s son and the founder of the award. Amanpour asked why all this [the award] matters right now, in a time when women’s voices and voices for peace are yet again marginalized and silenced. Who cares about these messages? It seems that the voices of war are louder than those who speak for peace. Yonatan’s answer was simple: Nothing will change if we do not change anything in our approach. It makes little sense to complain about the situation in Israel, including the high price paid for the war with Iran, while still speaking “the language of war”. The only way out of this reality of war is to change the approach.
Next there was an online conversation with the two award recipients, Attorney Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and activist (with Israeli citizenship), and Professor Yofi Tirosh, an Israeli legal scholar and activist for civil rights and gender equality. The conversation was held in English, but Mishirqi-Assad spoke in Arabic and had an interpreter. Both speakers discussed their work, and how the current situation impacts it. Tirosh explained how in the Israeli debate, every topic other than military talk of strategy and defense is pushed off the agenda at the moment, and how this tendency is weakening civil society and enabling a conservative take-over of more spheres of Israeli society, harming women and minorities. Mishirqi-Assad highlighted the urgent and dangerous situation currently developing in the West Bank, and how Palestinians are so focused on survival that “women’s issues” cannot be a priority. There was a tension between these messages, and the digital format and language barrier did not help in resolving it. Although their realities are intertwined and interdependent, this discussion felt more like a snapshot of two separate, bleak realities facing the Israeli/Jewish population and the Palestinian population in “the land”.
In the last segment, Amanpour invited on stage Jasr Kawkby from the steering group of UK FOST, a pediatrician from Gaza, and Sharone Lifschitz, academic and artist whose parents were taken hostage on 7 October 2023 and whose father Oded Lifschitz was later killed in Gaza. Particularly this last segment offered a rare kind of conversation, where none of the three participants shied away from feelings of pain and even hatred, but at the same time refused to let these feelings take over or guide their actions. The difficulties were not glossed over, but the panelists emphasized the need to find new paths, to refuse to hold on to hate, and to break away from “tribal allegiances”. In closing the discussion, Kawkby emphasized that calls for peace without calls for justice are not effective, saying that such calls “are perceived by Palestinians as calls for submission, and we will not engage with it”.