When the War Ended, the Silence Began
By Khaled Salih
“The choice with which humankind is faced in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas.”
— Jonathan Sacks
I was at a small clinic with my elder son, waiting for a doctor to treat an ordinary infection. The waiting room was crowded and slow; the smell of disinfectant and tired patience filled the air. We had already been waiting for two hours when I decided to pass the time by streaming the speeches from the Israeli Knesset. My phone’s small screen and headphones became our fragile window into that moment of historic reckoning. As the ceremony unfolded, time began to move differently — not faster, exactly, but gentler. The tension of waiting dissolved into something else: a quiet ache I couldn’t name.
It was only after we left the clinic, stepping into the fading afternoon light, that I realised how heavy my heart had become. The speeches had reached something buried inside me, something that had been waiting decades to stir.
My mind wandered back to 1992 — the year I returned to Kurdistan after ten years in exile. I had imagined homecoming as healing, but it became something far more complex. When I left in the early 1980s, the war between Iraq and Iran was devouring everything. It raged for eight years, leaving behind poisoned soil and broken lives. Then came Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds — the bombings, the destruction of villages, the mass graves. You might remember Halabja, where the air itself became a weapon.
After the war over Kuwait in 1990, the Kurds rose again against Saddam’s tyranny, and once more the world looked away. Two million fled in terror when his army returned, terrified that the gas and death of the 1980s would fall upon them again. Only after the establishment of a safe zone by the US-led coalition did people slowly return, carrying the weight of what they had seen and lost.
When I returned in 1992, I became sick — not from infection, but from listening. The stories from friends, from relatives, from the television — they filled my body like poison. Yet one story never left me: a close friend of my father’s from Halabja. He had lost his entire family. He was the only survivor. He had escaped the day of the chemical attack by sheer accident. His voice trembled when he spoke of it, but there was something indestructible in his sorrow — something that forced me to write. I wrote to survive, to remember, to make sure that the fate of the Kurds would not vanish in the silence that always follows horror.
So when I listened to the Knesset speeches that day, with my son beside me waiting for an ordinary doctor, I felt the old currents of memory move again. The Israeli voices — their grief, their pride, their longing for redemption — echoed the Kurdish stories I have carried my entire life. It felt as though the pain of one people was speaking to the memory of another.
And so I imagined myself sitting there, inside the Knesset, among the mothers and fathers who had lost their children, the sons and daughters who would never again see their parents. I imagined their silence, their trembling, their need to make meaning from unbearable loss.
That night, when the house was quiet, I wrote this piece — not only for them, but also for the child I once was, for the stories I never stopped hearing and reading about, and for the hope that memory can still be a form of healing.
When the War Ended, the Silence Began
I sat there, surrounded by faces that no longer belonged to this world.
They were printed on posters once — now taken down, rolled into silence.
Two years they watched over the Knesset walls.
Two years they reminded us of what we had lost and what we still prayed to find.
That morning, the walls were bare.
And in their emptiness, I saw our entire country — bare, bruised, still standing.
I am a mother whose son never came home.
A wife whose husband’s name was whispered in the dark by soldiers.
A child who now dreams of a father’s voice that will never call again.
We all sat together in that hall, every one of us a wound pretending to breathe.
The Speeches and the Shadows
Speaker Ohana began first. His voice carried that formal, careful weight that politicians wear when their hearts are breaking but cannot show it.
He called it “the end of the longest and most just war.”
I wanted to believe that justice had something to do with it.
He said he removed his pin — the one given by a hostage’s mother.
I thought of that mother.
Of the way she must have cried when she handed it to him,
trusting him to carry her child’s memory through marble halls and televised speeches.
Now he took it off —
not out of forgetting, but as if closing a book he had no strength left to read.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke, his words felt like a sigh that had waited too long.
“A moving day,” he called it. “An exciting day.”
But his voice cracked on the word “moving.”
He spoke of 2,000 souls, “our love and laughter, our promise and potential, lost forever.”
The chamber fell into a hush so deep you could hear grief breathing.
Lapid’s voice trembled next. “Two years without air in our lungs,” he said.
Yes, that was it.
We had all forgotten how to breathe.
Each day a pause between prayers, each night a negotiation with hope.
The Mothers of October
They spoke of Sabine —
a mother who lost her sons on that morning when the sun refused to rise.
She watched that film of her boys’ last moments again and again,
showing it to the world so that truth could never be buried.
Netanyahu said he could not watch it twice.
But Sabine, he said, had strength like Deborah, Ruth, Esther —
women who turned grief into a sword of light.
Lapid quoted another mother, Galit:
“We don’t want revenge. We want redemption.”
Those words fell upon us like sacred ash.
Revenge burns quickly; redemption glows forever.
For the first time, I saw tears glisten on the marble floor of the Knesset.
The Colossus and the Crown
Then came the politics —
a strange light in the middle of our darkness.
Speaker Ohana called President Trump a “colossus,”
a modern Cyrus the Great.
It sounded almost biblical,
as if history itself had been rewritten in the language of gratitude.
They praised him — Jerusalem, the Accords, the hammer that ended the war.
Netanyahu said Trump told him:
“You’ll be remembered not for killing, but for peace.”
For a moment, even those of us who had lost everything
allowed ourselves to imagine that peace could come from the ruins.
Not as a treaty, but as a mercy.
What Comes After the Fire
Then they spoke of the future —
a Gaza without guns, rebuilt by the wealth of nations,
a Middle East reborn in gold.
Trump promised “a golden age of Israel and of the Middle East.”
Lapid and Netanyahu spoke of expanding the Abraham Accords,
calling others to join “the circle of peace,”
to replace “the ring of fire” around us.
Peace through strength, they said.
Hope as our national anthem.
I wanted to stand and scream —
not in anger, but in exhaustion.
Because hope is beautiful, yes,
but it is also cruel.
It demands that we live again.
And how does a mother live again
after burying her child beneath a flag that still waves proudly in the wind?
The Long Silence
When the speeches ended,
I imagined no one moved.
The applause died quickly,
as if even the clapping hands felt ashamed of their noise.
Outside, the air was warm.
The sky over Jerusalem was red and gold —
the colour of endings and beginnings.
I looked up and whispered my son’s name.
I whispered all their names —
the sons, the daughters, the lovers, the soldiers,
the tiny children who never learned what fear was until it met them.
We are a people made of graves and gardens.
We bury, we plant, we remember.
We will breathe again —
not because it’s easy,
but because our dead demand that we do.
And so I write this,
not as history, not as politics,
but as contemplation.
For every parent, every sibling, every child left behind —
for every broken body learning to live again,
for every night that will still end in tears —
I write this so that generations will know
that on the day the war ended,
We did not rejoice.
We mourned.
And in our mourning,
we found the courage to hope.
