After Memorial Day, the Question of Shared Memory Remains Unresolved |
Israel’s Memorial Day ceremony still takes place. The siren sounds, the rituals unfold. But the conditions that once allowed it to function as a shared ground of meaning are no longer in place.
At the ceremony that opened Israel’s Memorial Day earlier this week, held at Beit Yad Labanim in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the day itself as “an anchor of unifying togetherness.” He placed October 7 as the starting point of a victory narrative, “since the October 7 attack, the IDF and security forces have been delivering blow after blow,” and joined Simchat Torah, the holiday on which Hamas attacked, to the list of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Treblinka: existential threat met by heroic survival. The framing was unmistakable. The catastrophe that demands a reckoning was positioned instead as the opening chapter of national revival, and the state ceremony as the place where this story is inscribed.
Such a story requires more than words. It requires a shared framework within which it can be told, and an audience willing to receive it as its own. Neither assumption holds this year.
A state ceremony is not a collection of gestures. It is a mechanism that organizes loss within a story, and that establishes how we are meant to stand before that loss. To function, it must presuppose a framework of shared meaning, and at the same time work to sustain it. Such a framework does not generate itself. It is built through investigation of what happened, determination of responsibility, and articulation of lessons. Public inquiry is not a luxury. It is the condition that makes it possible to speak at all about “the price of revival,” or “the meaning of loss.” Without it, these remain empty phrases.
In Israel, this is not an abstract claim. The Agranat Commission after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Kahan Commission after Sabra and Shatila, the Winograd Commission after the Second Lebanon War: each was a public accounting that, however painful and partial, made it possible for the losses of those wars to eventually become part of a coherent national story. State commissions of inquiry are the Israeli mechanism through which catastrophe becomes shared memory.
For decades, the framework held. Loss was absorbed into a narrative of national revival; Memorial Day did not stand alone, its meaning derived from the transition to Independence Day the following evening. The tension between mourning and celebration was not dissolved but carried. Even those who disagreed with parts of the story could still recognize the framework within which it operated.
Today that framework exists only on the surface. Beneath it, the conditions that sustain it are missing. No state commission of inquiry has been established for October 7. No facts have been established, no responsibility defined, no recommendations issued. In place of such accounting, the government offers a language of “unifying togetherness,” of “a generation of revival,” of “we have not yet completed the task.” This is not a rhetorical mistake. It is a choice: a call for unity positioned as a substitute for accountability, and a narrative of togetherness deployed as a shield against criticism.
This gap lies at the heart of the ceremony’s current failure. The public cannot be asked to accept the language of revival when those articulating it refuse to submit to the mechanisms of accounting. Not because the demand is politically illegitimate, but because it lacks the ground on which a state ceremony has operated for seven decades.
The resulting alienation is no longer just a feeling. It has become action. Families from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where entire families were murdered or taken hostage on October 7, traveled to the homes of government ministers and held memorial ceremonies there. Members of the October Council, an organization of affected families and survivors, stood outside the residences of the Prime Minister, the Knesset Speaker, and other ministers. Alternative ceremonies are proliferating across the country. Memory now appears not in a separate space, but precisely where, according to those who gather, responsibility is being refused. It sets a condition: a state ceremony cannot function as if the conditions for its existence are simply given.
The proliferation of ceremonies is more than a sign of political fragmentation. It signals that the framework within which memory could be collective, the framework that held for seven decades across unresolved tensions, is coming apart. When each group must construct on its own the conditions under which loss can acquire meaning, the loss itself struggles to belong to society as a whole. It is not the ceremonial event that is fragmenting. It is ceremoniality itself: the way a society attempts to remember collectively.
The state ceremony will not disappear. It still allows closeness to loss, a moment of stillness and public presence for grief. But the role it once played, of speaking in the name of the public, is no longer automatically its own to play. The question of authority is open, and its resolution does not depend on the ceremony itself, but on whether accountability will be taken, or refused, for what occurred. What is at stake is not only who will light a memorial candle. It is whether, a generation from now, this society will have one memory of October 7, or several parallel memories that never meet.
A version of this article originally appeared in Hebrew in Haaretz on April 21, 2026