Two ceremonies show Israel’s conflicting narratives over Oct. 7

By Rami Amichay and Ari Rabinovitch

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – One commemoration of the Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel will be a live, public ceremony to be held at a large venue in Tel Aviv. The other on Monday, will be a pre-recorded televised tribute that leaves little to chance.

The first is organized by bereaved families who lost loved ones. It plans to dive deep into the failures as well as the heroism on display that day.

The other is set up by the government, which says its recorded ceremony will touch on remembrance, bravery and hope.

The distinction in tone is at the heart of a public discourse over how to remember the darkest day in the country’s 76-year history.

“You can say it’s a war on the narrative,” said Jonathan Shimriz, one of the organizers of the public ceremony.

“This memorial will tell the story of what we’ve been through on the seventh. That there was no army, but there were soldiers. There was no state, but there were citizens. And I think the government memorial will not mention the mistakes that happened.”

Shimriz is from kibbutz Kfar Aza, which was hit hard during Hamas’ attack. His brother was taken hostage into Gaza and was later killed by erroneous Israeli fire as he tried to escape.

“The tape of the government, the other memorial, it does not quite reflect how we want to remember what happened on the seventh,” he said.

A government that has not taken responsibility for its failures, he said, is disconnected from the people.

In charge of the state ceremony is cabinet minister Miri Regev, a close supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, who has been in power for most of the past 15 years, has faced heavy criticism for not taking responsibility for the intelligence and military failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies, and that sparked the devastating war in Gaza.

He says that everything will be investigated after the war ends. Opinion polls in the meantime show his popularity, which plummeted after Oct. 7, is slowly recovering.

Regev announced her plans a month ago, saying “I’m aware of the ongoing discourse among different parts of the public.”

The state ceremony will be broadcast after the grassroots ceremony in order to avoid conflict, she said. It was filmed in the small city of Ofakim near the Gaza border, which lost more than 40 of its residents in the Hamas assault.

“There is not a house in Israel that will not be touched by the ceremony,” Regev said.

Ofakim was also a stronghold in the last elections for Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and his conservative allies, as opposed to the smaller communities in the area that usually vote more liberal.

This raised questions for many in Israel, who saw it as an attempt to manage the narrative.

On hearing of the Ofakim ceremony, some of the bereaved families crowd-funded a competing ceremony in Tel Aviv’s central park. Within hours of going public over 40,000 tickets were reserved.

The crowd, however, will likely be limited to 1,000 people as the military, wary of missile fire from an escalating conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, is still restricting the size of public gatherings in much of the country.

Shirel Hogeg is from Ofakim and is highly suspicious about the government’s decision to have filmed its tribute there. His sister is from a nearby kibbutz and she was badly injured when her house was set on fire by the Hamas attackers.

He is helping to arrange the live ceremony in Tel Aviv.

“As you know, the politicians will try to do everything so the narrative will be fixed for them,” Hogeg said. “We don’t need a synthetic, TikTok movie.”