Israel puts mourning before victory — by design.

It is a nation that anchors independence in sacrifice, and refuses to let freedom be mistaken for something abstract.

photo: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1963, the Knesset (Israeli parliament) made a decision that, at first glance, feels almost counterintuitive. Why would a nation choose to place its day of national mourning, Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day), immediately before the day it celebrates its independence, Yom HaAtzmaut?

Why insist that grief sits at the very threshold of joy?

Surely, in a calendar already heavy with remembrance — Tisha B’Av, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day), the fast days that punctuate Jewish history — there were other places to honour loss without casting a shadow over independence itself.

But that, precisely, is the point.

Those other days remember tragedy in isolation. They mourn what was lost, without direct reference to what followed.

Yom HaZikaron is different. It is not a memory of loss alone; it is a memory of cost. It is the bridge between sacrifice and sovereignty.

In Israel, remembrance is not abstract.

Military service is mandatory. Almost every family is tied, directly or indirectly, to those who stand guard over the nation. The names read on Yom HaZikaron are not distant figures; they are classmates, siblings, parents, friends.

But they are not only soldiers. Yom HaZikaron honours fallen members of the IDF, and also police officers, border guards, first responders, and civilians murdered in acts of terror.

And that word, terror, must be understood for what it has meant in Israel.

This is not a single moment, not a single atrocity.

It is decades of buses blown apart during the first and second intifadas, restaurants turned into crime scenes, university campuses targeted, stabbings in the street, vehicles driven deliberately into bus stops. The purposeful, systematic murder of men, women, children, the elderly, killed not for what they did, but for who they were.

The events of October 7th — murder, torture, rape, and the kidnapping of over 1,400 innocent people — may have shocked the world, but they were not an anomaly. They are part of a pattern. There have been more than 5,500 Jews murdered and over 20,000 injured across more than 1,600 separate terror attacks since the formation of the state in 1948. All for one reason: because they were Jewish.

To separate that from independence would be to misunderstand independence entirely. Because Israel does not celebrate freedom as an abstract principle; it celebrates a freedom that was fought for, paid for, and defended relentlessly.

That is why the transition between these two days is so deliberately jarring. Tonight, on the evening of Yom HaZikaron, the country stands still. Sirens sound, cars stop in the middle of highways, an entire nation freezes in collective memory.

Then, almost impossibly, the shift begins. Flags are raised, music returns, streets fill, barbecues are lit. The same people who stood in silence hours earlier now dance. It is not a contradiction; it is a statement that the joy of independence is not diminished by the memory of sacrifice, but defined by it.

There is a lesson here the world would do well to understand. For the past 30 months and, in truth, for far longer, Israel has faced not only relentless physical attacks from actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis (all backed by the regime in Iran), and Iran itself, but also something more insidious: a global campaign of distortion, dressed up as “activism.”

Marches in major cities where chants of “Globalise the intifada!” ring out without consequence. Slogans like “From the River to the Sea!” and “Free, Free Palestine!” repeated by celebrities, influencers, and political movements, sometimes knowingly, sometimes blindly, but always with the same effect.

These are not neutral phrases, nor are they calls for coexistence. They are the language, the messaging, the ideological framework of those who have spent decades carrying out the very acts of terror we claim to condemn. To repeat them is to sanitise that history, to amplify them is to legitimise it.

And yet, the question that still goes largely unasked, at least honestly, is this: What did they hope to achieve? What was the objective of October 7th? What has been the objective, repeatedly, across decades of rejection of coexistence and peace?

Because if the goal was a Palestinian state, history offers an uncomfortable truth: There were opportunities, many of them. In 1947, with the United Nations Partition Plan. In 1948, by choosing coexistence over invasion. In 1967, following the Six-Day War. At Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001, across countless proposals, papers, and negotiations.

Again and again, the possibility of statehood was placed on the table — and again and again, it was rejected. Not because it was insufficient, but because it required accepting something more fundamental: the existence of Israel itself.

“From the River to the Sea” is not a negotiating position; it is a negation. And when the part one is unwilling to accept matters more than the part they could have, the tragic consequence is this: In pursuing everything, you lose everything.

That is the tragedy — not only for Israelis, but for Palestinians themselves.

Yet, despite everything, Israel endures not by accident, but by design, by resilience, by sacrifice. This is a country that has done more than reclaim land; it has rebuilt a people. It has gathered the scattered, revived an ancient language, absorbed exiles from the Soviet Union to Ethiopia, and forged them into a single, functioning society.

It has built one of the world’s most dynamic economies. It has sustained a democracy — imperfect, contested, but real — in a region where such a thing remains the exception, not the rule. It has taken a people shattered by the Holocaust and enabled them to stand, never again to kneel. Proud, sovereign, unapologetic.

Which brings us back to that decision in 1963.

To place Yom HaZikaron the day before Yom HaAtzmaut was not to dampen celebration; it was to anchor it; to ensure that independence is never taken for granted; to remind each generation that freedom is not inherited without responsibility, it is maintained through it.

Because there is another path, and this is not just a message to Israel’s enemies; it is a message to the world that continues to indulge them. It is a path that was offered before and could, in time, be offered again; a path that does not require the impossible ambition of erasing Israel, but the far more achievable one of building something alongside it; a future where, instead of encouraging a war that cannot be won, the world demands the creation of something that can endure; where there could be another independence day, another story of nationhood, another people choosing to stand not in opposition to history, but as part of it.

The tragedy is not that this future is out of reach. The tragedy is that it has been refused and too often, excused.

So as Israel moves from Yom HaZikaron on Monday evening and Tuesday, to Yom HaAtzmaut on Tuesday evening and Wednesday, from silence to song, from grief to celebration, it does so with absolute clarity that freedom is not free. It never was, it never will be. But once it is earned — truly earned, defended, and understood — it is impossible to take away.

For 78 years, the tactics deployed against Israel (terror, rejection, the refusal to accept reality) have led only to death and destruction on all sides. They have failed, and they will continue to fail for the next 78.

So here is a simple suggestion: Accept that history has already shown you where this ends, then try something new.

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