Greg Bouwer
IINZ
Israel has two Memorial Days.
Yom HaZikaron – to remind us of the cost of having Israel.
Yom HaShoah – to remind us of the cost of not.
This year, those words resonate with brutal clarity.
As Yom HaZikaron approaches, we prepare to remember the soldiers who gave their lives in defence of the State of Israel and the civilians murdered in acts of terror. This remembrance is not abstract. It does not reside only in black-and-white photos, grainy newsreels, or textbooks. It is recent. It is raw.
We remember the victims of October 7th, the darkest day in Israel’s modern history – the day entire families were butchered in their homes, communities destroyed, lives shattered. We remember those taken hostage, 59 still held in captivity as the world moves on. We remember the more than 600 Israeli soldiers who have died since the beginning of the war in Gaza, many just barely old enough to vote, all of them never given the chance to grow old.
Yom HaZikaron is always sombre, but this year, it is unrelenting. The war is not behind us – it is all around us. This year, grief is not a pause from normalcy. Grief is the norm. The ache of loss does not echo from the past – it defines the present.
And yet, as the sirens wail across the country, Israel will stop. The highways will freeze. Conversations will fall silent. A people who never stop moving will stand still – not only to remember, but to reckon with what it means to live in a Jewish state that has always had to fight for its existence.
We live in a world where Israel’s right to exist is denied, its legitimacy questioned, and its defense condemned. We live in a world where, even after one of the most horrifying acts of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, the outrage is met with “context”, the victims made suspect, and the perpetrators too often humanised more than those they murdered. This, too, is part of what Yom HaZikaron now asks us to confront – not only the human cost of defending Israel, but the global silence that so often accompanies our suffering.
Yom HaZikaron is not only about the soldiers who fall. It is about the mothers who bury their sons. The siblings who grow up with empty chairs at the table. The fiancées who never get to say “I do.” It is about young lives lost, and the generations they never get to create. It is about cemeteries that grow too fast, and the dreams that die with each grave.
And yet, this day is not meant for despair. It is meant for clarity.
It is a reminder that while peace remains our prayer, security is our responsibility. It is a reminder that freedom is not gifted; it is defended. That the Jewish people, for all we have endured and all we have built, are still living in a world where our sovereignty is not a given, and our survival is never guaranteed.
Israel, for all its imperfections and internal struggles, is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It is the answer to a 2,000-year-old question: Where can Jews be safe? Where can Jews live not merely tolerated, but free? The answer is, and must be, Israel.
The soldiers who fall do not fall for abstract lines on a map. They fall for something more profound: the right of the Jewish people to govern themselves, to raise children without fear, to walk in their own homeland speaking their own language. They fall for the right to live ordinary lives – lives that include love and laughter, debate and disagreement, routine and ritual. They fall for the future.
And it is no accident that Yom HaZikaron is immediately followed by Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Grief gives way to joy. The flag is lowered, then lifted. That sequence holds profound truth: there is no celebration without sacrifice, no independence without memory. We mourn before we rejoice, because we cannot separate the two.
The State of Israel is, in every sense, a miracle. But miracles have costs. Its soil is soaked in tears. Its streets echo with memories. Its citizens carry the burden of both history and hope.
So this Yom HaZikaron, we do not only remember. We recognize.
We recognize the cost of sovereignty.
We recognize the price of survival.
We recognize the pain that shadows the promise.
And we remind the world – and ourselves – that Israel has two Memorial Days.
Yom HaZikaron: to remind us of the cost of having a state.
Yom HaShoah: to remind us of the cost of having none.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
