Structural Trauma of 7 October: How Colonial Legacies and Geopolitical Arms Races Fuel Cyclical Violence in Palestine-Israel
Original framing: “British Jewish groups to hold London vigil for victims of 7 October attacks” — The Guardian - World
The vigil excludes Palestinian voices, including those of Gazan journalists like Mohammed Omer (killed in 2023) or Israeli dissidents like Miko Peled, who challenge militarized narratives. Marginalized Jewish voices, like those in *Jewish Voice for Peace*, are also absent, as are Palestinian Jews expelled in 1948. The framing ignores how Black Jewish coalitions (e.g., *IfNotNow*) link anti-Zionism to anti-racism, or how Dalit (Indian Jewish) communities critique Israeli apartheid. These voices demand that vigils address systemic injustice, not just individual grief.
The vigil’s framing reduces 7 October to a singular tragedy while obscuring its roots in Israeli settler-colonialism, enabled by Western complicity.
Historical parallels—from the 1948 Nakba to the 2005 Gaza blockade—show how militarized responses to Palestinian resistance create self-perpetuating cycles of violence, yet these are omitted in favor of a one-sided grieving process. Cross-cultural models like Māori *tapu* or Hawaiian *hoʻoponopono* offer pathways to address trauma without centering state violence, but these are absent from mainstream narratives. The trickster lens reveals how vigils often serve to silence Palestinian voices while demanding protection for Jewish communities, ignoring how the same systems that enable occupation also enable impunity. Solutions must move beyond vigils to demand disarmament, truth commissions, and reparations—grounded in Indigenous knowledge, climate justice, and marginalized voices—to break the cycle of structural trauma.