Sometimes, when I guide visitors through the massacre sites in the Gaza Envelope, people arrive there for the very first time. They come because they feel a need to understand, to see with their own eyes, to connect to what happened here. But at times I also encounter people who did not fully choose this moment. For example, couples in which one partner felt ready and strongly pushed for the visit, while the other clearly was not yet prepared. You can see it immediately. The body tells the story. The averted gaze. The difficulty of standing there. The struggle to look at the pain.

Moments like these remind me how difficult it is to confront the truth of what happened here. Some people feel a need to come closer to it. Others instinctively feel they must create a little distance in order to breathe. Both reactions are human. Yet as a society we cannot allow ourselves to turn away for long. Avoidance is not healing. It is only a postponement of the confrontation.

As someone who works in memory and commemoration, I encounter this question again and again. How do we tell the story of catastrophe. How do we hold painful truth without collapsing under it, and without distorting it. Because the real challenge is not only to remember, but to remember honestly. Not to inflate numbers in order to extract tears. Not to turn memory into performance. And not to select only the comfortable fragments of the story.

Over the years I have learned something else. Almost every great tragedy carries more than one story. There is the story of the community. The story of the families. The public narrative. And there are also deeply personal stories, sometimes unbearably painful ones, that struggle to be heard within the larger noise.

And not only different stories exist. Sometimes there are also different versions of the same story. Sometimes they are very close to one another. Sometimes they drift apart. Sometimes one version is closer to the truth, sometimes another. This too is part of how societies process catastrophe. The fuller truth often lies scattered across different places.

One of those stories is the story of Nirel Zini RIP.

Nirel Zini was murdered on October 7. Yet for his family, his story has not ended to this very day. For many months his family searched for answers. His father, Amir Zini, describes a long journey of inquiries and attempts to uncover the full truth of what happened to his son. Only about five months after the events did certain findings from the investigation begin to reach the family. From those findings, and from their own understanding of what they implied, the family realized that a crucial part of the story was still missing. That realization led them to demand that the grave be opened.

When the grave was opened, it became clear that Nirel had been buried without his head.

For the family, this discovery was not merely another horrifying detail within their loss. It also revealed that the investigation had begun too late, and that the recognition of Nirel as a hostage had also come too late. In his father’s eyes, the story of his son has not yet closed.

Because there is still a hostage in Gaza. Nirel.

This pain exists alongside another public debate that has unfolded in recent months around the Young Generation neighborhood of Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The neighborhood became one of the most painful symbols of the massacre. After months of discussion, the kibbutz decided to demolish most of the houses and relocate a small number of them to a memorial site outside the community.

Within the public discussion surrounding the evacuation of the neighborhood, different voices can be heard. Some emphasize the urgent need for the residents of the kibbutz to return to life. For many of them, living alongside the scenes of that morning is almost impossible. The desire to move the physical remains of the site away is not born from disregard for memory, but from deep exhaustion and the simple need to breathe again.

There is another consideration raised by those who support the evacuation. For them the decision is not only about memory, but about the future. Many believe that removing the daily presence of those traumatic scenes will increase the chances that residents will return to the kibbutz and allow the community to rebuild its life. In that sense, evacuation is also an attempt to restore life itself.

Within this framework another principle was established, according to which the decision about the future of the neighborhood belongs solely to the residents of Kfar Aza. The logic is understandable. This is their home, and they are the ones who will live with the consequences of the decision.

On the other side stand bereaved families who are not residents of the kibbutz. They seek to preserve the neighborhood as a complete testimony to what happened there. According to them, a professional proposal also exists, including architectural planning, which would allow a separation between the residential areas and the memorial area, so that the neighborhood could be preserved without becoming part of the daily life of the community.

Some of the families claim that this proposal was never fully presented within the discussions, and that the feeling among them was that the decision had already been moving toward a conclusion.

It is also difficult to ignore that there are additional voices surrounding this story. There are young people who lived in the Young Generation neighborhood but do not hold voting rights. There are also hostages from the kibbutz, among them Gali and Ziv Berman and Emily Damari, who expressed opposition to the evacuation but cannot take part in the decision. And there are bereaved families who are not residents of the kibbutz but lost those most precious to them there.

When I tried to understand this dispute more deeply, one sentence remained with me. Perhaps there is no single clear moral answer to this question.

But within all of this lies a deeper issue.

Is this really a question of memory versus resilience. Commemoration versus returning to life. Perhaps these are not true opposites at all. Rather, they are a tension that exists in every moment of life. And we must learn how to live within that tension.

When we decide that these are opposites and choose only life, we often end up living through avoidance. Through concealment.

This question is not only about one neighborhood in Kfar Aza. It is a larger question about our society. How we live with the memory of catastrophe without suppressing it. How we return to life without erasing what happened. How we move forward without becoming numb.

This dilemma is not unique to Israel. Other societies have faced similar questions. In places such as Auschwitz, Ground Zero in New York, and other sites of major tragedies, entire societies had to ask how to continue living without erasing the places where catastrophe occurred.

Amir Zini describes the issue through a simple but powerful metaphor. “When you read a book,” he says, “you turn one page and then another. But if you tear out some of the pages and leave only a few behind, can you really understand the story. Can you truly preserve their story?”

For him, that is what is at stake when discussing the evacuation of the place where these events occurred.

This discussion is not theoretical. It is taking place now, while the country is engaged in war with Iran and at the same time decisions are being made about evacuating the Young Generation neighborhood of Kfar Aza.

And this tension is not new to us.

The same avoidance of Hamas over the years, the enemy beyond the fence, also grew from the same deeply human instinct. The desire to live quietly. To believe that life can simply continue without looking too closely at what lies beyond the fence.

That is precisely why memory matters so much. Not in order to remain trapped inside pain, but in order not to suppress it.

Because sometimes the hardest things are the ones that remind us why we must not look away.

Not only from the past, but also from ourselves as a society. A society that is constantly learning how to live between memory and life, between pain and hope, without erasing one in order to make space for the other.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)