Twelve Days of Silence

A single minute of mourning devoted to every child killed by the young wars of Palestine or Ukraine would go on for days and days.

When a patient dies in the emergency department, the physician in charge will announce a time of death. Often, the physician will then call for a few moments of silence. This honor’s the death of a person about whom we often know next to nothing. (We will learn more later, from grieving family.) Outside of the room, the usual emergency department chaos burbles along. Inside, nurses, doctors, techs, paramedics and others stand quietly.

As the one who often calls for this open-ended moment of silence, it also falls to me to indicate when it’s over. I never know how long to draw the quiet out — but I guarantee I’ve never made it anywhere close to a full minute. Even 15 seconds of quiet contemplation in an emergency department feels like an enormously powerful statement.

We are more than a year into the Israeli war in Gaza, and more than three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Successive U.S. governments have poured billions of dollars into fanning the flames of both of those conflicts. Our leaders could have worked for peace. Instead, they invited relatively unsavory individuals like Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky to come address our Congress, and then roared approval in standing ovations, and voted to spend billions of dollars on senseless violence. American-supplied weapons have by now killed thousands of children, and since we have supplied land mines and cluster bombs, our weapons will continue to kill children into the future.

Thousands of Israelis turned out this week for the funeral of members of the Bibas family — a young mother and her two children, aged 9 months and 4 years. The Bibas family had been taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and then killed — Israel says by their Hamas captors, Hamas says by an Israeli air strike, but either way, it was a pointlessly avoidable situation that we in the United States have not helped.

Daniel Levy, a former peace negotiator for Israel (and before that a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces), testified movingly to the United Nations this week. “A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate,” he told the UN delegation — and then added, “as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.”

Add in the 659 known Ukrainian children killed and we’d be up to 310 hours. And those are just the deaths. Far more have been injured or made hungry or homeless.

Imagine our nation observing 12 days of silence for the children we did not save and in fact helped kill. What would it even look like? It’s not even logistically possible. Mahatma Gandhi would observe a vow of silence every Monday. If we simply fell silent for 12 Mondays in a row, the seasons would change. Assuming the wars continued, we’d have to keep adding Mondays.