New Israel Fund London event celebrates Vivian Silver, peace activist

The late Vivian Silver was “a woman with a heart of gold and a spine of steel”, declared Noeleen Cohen, chair of New Israel Fund UK, as she opened a London event dedicated to honouring this year’s recipients of the Vivian Silver Impact Awards.

Canadian-born Silver was a pioneering peace activist who was murdered at her kibbutz, Be’eri, by Hamas terrorists on October 7 2023. Even as she was desperately hiding in her safe room hours before her death, she was giving an interview to an Israeli radio station in which she maintained the importance of pursuing peace initiatives.

The New Israel Fund UK, and a group of allied organisations which work to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs, set up the awards in 2024 in Silver’s name. Those honoured for 2025/6 are the law professor Yofi Tirosh and lawyer Qamar Mishirqi-Assad. Both have worked extensively to foster women’s rights among their communities: the Silver awards, of $15,000 each, will enable them to continue and expand their work.

A crowded event at The Conduit club on Sunday saw Silver’s son, Yonatan Zeigen, pledge to continue his mother’s work where he could. He, like all the participants, was interviewed by CNN’s chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour.

Amanpour, who is half-Iranian and spent her childhood in Teheran, admitted that she had had doubts about taking part in the event. “It’s not easy for me to be here today as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on my country and my people,” she said, adding that she still had cousins in Iran. But she had decided “to walk the walk as much as I talk the talk, so I’ve come here to do my part for reconciliation.”

Interviewed online, the lawyer Qamar Mishirqi-Assad chose to speak in Arabic, with a translator on hand, so that her message was available to Palestinian Arabs as well as the UK audience. Her main issue was that her community was “fighting for existence” as its top priority.

Meanwhile Professor Tirosh, also online, painted a bleak picture of an Israel in which women’s rights were almost always at the bottom of the agenda, describing a “rampant growth in gender-separated areas” and public transportation, not just in religious areas, where women were literally seated at the back.

“We are seeing a very worrying regression on women’s issues,” she told Amanpour, adding that it was ironic that when she had been invited onto TV programmes to discuss the marginalisation of women, all too frequently her segment was dropped because priority was given to analysis of the war on Iran.

Gaza-born paediatrician Dr Jasr Kawkby and the film-maker Sharone Lifshitz, whose father was murdered by Hamas after being taken hostage on October 7, took part in the last session of the event. Both are now based in London. She said: “Any work we are doing [to further peace] is better than sitting at home and screaming at our screens”, while Dr Kawkby spoke of the importance of “keeping hatred out” despite continuing violence in Gaza and around the region.