Bearing Witness, Finding Hope

Optimists aren’t wired for hopelessness or quitting.

Optimism is a particularly valuable trait to have when navigating the rollercoaster of emotions that many of us feel about what is happening in Israel and Palestine, in the wider region, and about the exponential rise in anti-Jewish hatred that Jews in Britain are experiencing. My optimism levels have been faltering for a while.

Last week, busier than usual with my work as Chair of the New Israel Fund UK, my optimism barometer was rock bottom, hovering perilously close to hopelessness.

Heading to the Nova Festival Exhibition in Shoreditch with a group organised by the New Israel Fund, I carried the unfamiliar weight of hopelessness. I was somewhat tentative about what I would encounter. I had previously plucked up the courage to watch some of the raw bodycam footage filmed by Hamas operatives carrying out the attack on the Nova festival, murdering 348 people and taking 44 hostage into Gaza. I thought I was prepared.

I wasn’t.

Walking through the remarkably curated exhibition was a multi-sensory experience. The calming trance soundtrack and beauty of the revellers dancing in the opening space gave way to the gut-wrenching chaos of the site itself: video footage, phone messages and testimonies filled with fear, sexual violence and pure hate.

Then there were the personal items of the festival-goers. Shoes, glasses, wallets, laid out neatly on tables. The familiar faces of those who were murdered and taken hostage. They looked like my grown-up children. Like the one who was coming home from a festival that very day.

And then, the testimony of Doron, a Nova survivor who encountered people dying by the side of the road as he drove away from the horror. He described trying to save a young person whose legs had been blown off. In the end, their injuries were too severe. He realised that he had to save himself too, not just physically but emotionally.

We were there, bearing witness, coming face to face with the personal impact of a conflict that started long before Nova, and with the erosion of the very values that brought this festival community together: peace, hope and togetherness.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön says that bearing witness means fully exposing yourself to the suffering and discomfort of the world without shutting down or turning away. Rather than numbing your pain, this practice cultivates courage by meeting reality exactly as it is.

I carried that reality with me a few days later when I visited “Testimonies from a Troubled Land”, a powerful photographic exhibition bringing together images taken by Israeli and Palestinian photojournalists.

Working in partnership with Local Testimony founder and curator Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, this is the second year that the New Israel Fund has brought the exhibition to London. It is a carefully chosen selection from the larger exhibition held annually at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

Every image tells a story. Some are exactly what you see: compassion at the funeral of a soldier killed in Gaza; the unabashed hatred of settlers attacking Palestinian villagers in the West Bank; the oldest hostage released from Gaza, standing among his crops, reunited with the land he loves.

The defining image as you enter is an ancient olive tree with an angry orange hole seared through its trunk. A testament to the destruction of a land that desperately needs to be shared.

Again, we were present, seeing and feeling the suffering and discomfort of the world without turning away. Fully immersed in what it means to bear witness. To see Israel and Palestine as they are: broken and cruel, beautiful and caring.

While my optimism levels were still not much above the floor, the hopelessness I had been feeling had surprisingly shifted.

With this glimmer of hope still with me, I found myself sitting at a breakfast briefing organised by Yachad with our shared partners Breaking the Silence, looking into the haunted eyes of two young IDF soldiers who had come to share their experiences of serving in Gaza after 7 October. They spoke honestly about what it means not only to endure war, but to wage it; about the death and destruction they had witnessed and helped carry out; and about how those experiences had led them to wrestle with difficult questions about the conduct of the war, while remaining clear about Israel’s right to defend itself after the Hamas attacks.

I felt the immense gratitude of being a mother who does not have to see her child off to war, wondering whether they will return alive, or unscathed physically and emotionally. The testimony we heard from the soldiers was brutal. The impact of the war on their lives, even more so.

But in the midst of the pain, I saw hope for a future that may still feel too far away: a future in which Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace and security.

Hearing their testimony, seeing the images in “Testimonies from a Troubled Land” and immersing myself in the Nova Exhibition moved the optimism barometer.

Not dramatically. But enough.

Enough to cultivate the courage needed to face the reality of the present. Enough to summon the determination needed to continue fighting for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians. And enough to remind me that bearing witness is not only about seeing clearly. It is also about refusing to surrender to hopelessness.

Noeleen Cohen is Chair of the New Israel Fund UK.