When Silence Speaks Louder
For the past few months I’ve been participating in silent protests against the killing of children in Gaza by the Israeli army. Each time, we gather in a different location in the city. Last week, the protest was held in a central square on a hot, clammy Saturday evening. The cafes and bars close to the square were packed with people sipping cocktails and iced lattes. Others strolled along the boulevard or browsed for books in the nearby street library. I stood in a long line with other protesters, holding a poster of a darkhaired little boy no more than four or five years old, in a crisply ironed shirt, faint circles of fatigue under his eyes. His name was Sayid Shovir. Under his photo were details of when and where he was killed in Gaza.
Every week I hold a poster, every week a different child, a baby or a teenager, brothers and sisters. The words on these posters are in Hebrew, so that passersby will understand exactly what they’re looking at because this is Tel Aviv, Israel.
Sayid was killed on April 18, 2025, along with two of his siblings. At the time, they were at the wedding of their eldest brother in Khan Yunis. I don’t know who else was killed. I know what I was doing that day because it was my husband’s birthday and we had a quiet dinner outside as dusk fell. It did not feel like a celebration—in the background were faint rumblings coming from Gaza and once or twice airplanes flew over our house, en route.There was dread in the air. I remember that night.
Underneath the photo of Sayid the sign said: Since the ceasefire, more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, Israel, The West Bank and Lebanon. This, I must add, does not take into account the number of children who have been maimed, orphaned or starved. It also does not include children killed in Iran or Yemen, since these numbers are unconfirmed.
Our protests are silent ones in a sea of noise. The people who attend these protests are Israelis of all ages and professions. There are high school kids, there are retirees, people from all walks of life. We receive information about activities via a social media group. To date, there are around 400 protesters each week. This might not seem like a lot, but just a few months ago, when I joined, there were no more than a handful of people. This group has no affiliations. There are dedicated organizers who send updates, decide on locations and other logistics. At the beginning of every demonstration we are reminded to remain silent at all times. We are specifically asked not to hold flags, or wear t-shirts with slogans, or hold up any other signs, even those calling for an end to violence. The shoestring budget is funded by donations, which covers the printing of placards and purchase of little electronic candles that each protester can choose to hold.
While standing there, I focus on the child whose photo I’m holding. This is an hour of dignity for the dead, an hour in which to honor these children. It is an hour in which I think about the child, from time to time glancing at the poster. To remind myself.
Two weeks ago, I held a poster of a little girl, perhaps ten years old. Her name was Janna Bashir Abu Najia. She had pierced ears, hair held back in a pearly hairband, and she wore a pink sweatshirt with a silver zipper. She was smiling with her mouth closed, and I wondered if she’d been self-conscious about her teeth. I was, at that age.
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We form two rows, one sitting on the sidewalk, the other standing behind, and we hold this pose for an hour. During that hour, I enter a liminal state. I’m a vehicle of witness. The noise of the city fades into the background. The roar of cars in nearby streets, or music floating out of windows, becomes muted.
In “Prayer,” the poet Mary Oliver writes of “a silence in which another voice may speak.” Perhaps these protests are a form of prayer; perhaps they enable a collective pause, a heightened attention. On Saturday nights, when the main demonstration for an immediate return of the hostages and an end to the war takes over the city center, we stand in silence, holding the posters. We are urged not to enter into any form of dialogue with passersby; there are designated peacekeepers who do that. These peacekeepers position themselves every few yards, a buffer between us and people walking by who oppose our activity. They watch carefully for signs of potential escalation or violence, flare ups triggered by passersby who object to what we are doing.
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At one protest held on the promenade of Tel Aviv beach, things escalated quickly. A young woman in a bikini and flip flops screamed that people she loved were killed on October 7 and what were we doing. Another woman stood facing us, her back to the sea, and yelled we should get a one-way ticket to Gaza and then see how we like it. A guy in swim shorts, a towel flung over one shoulder, pounded up and down the promenade, causing a commotion. He was joined by others. That protest did not last an hour: as the tense atmosphere escalated, we were told to disperse. Placards were hastily collected by the organisers. As we headed back to the parking lot, the sun was already setting and the waves in the sea glinted in pale hues of gray and pink. I could still hear shouting drifting over from the promenade, or perhaps it was just an echo.
Usually, the protests are less volatile. Passersby often pause, stop for a moment or two, walk by slowly. Some hold a hand up to their mouth, some come up very close to get a better look, to peer at the photos, to read the words. One woman leaned in so close I could smell her perfume. A man pushing his toddler in a stroller stared straight ahead as he walked past us; his daughter, clutching a teddy bear, turned her head toward us, pointing at the photos, her eyes curious. Many people take videos of us on their cellphones, holding the cellphones at waist level as they move along. Some look away, or look down at the ground, anywhere but at us. Others yell, shake their fists: You should be protesting the Israeli hostages who are rotting away in the tunnels of Gaza! There’s no point retorting that I do protest their continued torture and incarceration, no point in saying that I feel for them and their families and hope they will be returned immediately. They are not listening. Last week a man walked up to a protester standing near me, and pushed him roughly. You should be ashamed of yourself, he said, defending Gazans while our own children were murdered by them. The peacekeeper rushed over to reason with him.
Israelis are angry, and grieving. They are more divided than ever, not just over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but over Israel itself—the increasingly polarized orthodox and secular, the right and left, those who believe the hostages should be released whatever the cost and those who talk openly of the ultimate sacrifice for the Land of Israel. At a solidarity protest for the return of the hostages, a car drove up to the sidewalk, the windows were rolled down and a young man leered out at us. Bibi is king! Bibi is king! He jeered, referring to Binyamin Netanyahu. The fact that someone would openly taunt people calling for the hostages’ return—something most Israelis desperately want—by celebrating Netanyahu, shows how fractured Israeli society has become.
Regarding the dire situation in Gaza, The Israel Democracy Institute carried out a poll in which 18 percent of Israelis expressed a lack of concern for starvation and famine there. More shocking is that 47 percent denied that the situation even exists in Gaza. This is why protests are essential.
On a recent trip to the UK, where I was born, I was told countless times that people abroad are unaware that these activities are happening in Israel, unaware that there are Israelis who care about the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank. So know this: there are Israelis who drive Palestinian children to hospitals in Israel; there are Israelis who sustain connections with people in Gaza, who regularly donate money and keep up contact with them; and there are silent protests. These Israelis are a minority—but a persistent one.
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Years ago, when I was working for Newsweek, I made a point of not going to demonstrations. Perhaps I’d spent too long watching from a distance, asking people their opinions while suppressing my own, searching for a mode of objectivity I realize now is impossible.
It's not easy to keep this up, week after week, but it’s necessary. It’s necessary to highlight what is happening in Gaza when the Israeli media mostly chooses to turn away, when the politicians would have us cry for revenge. This is not a case of which side to support: it’s about retaining a sense of humanity in a broken world.
Silence in the context of these protests is in itself a form of speaking out. Silence has its own eloquence. It is less the absence of a voice and more a presence; it is less withdrawal and more witness. Silence is "loud" when it creates discomfort, when it compels people to pause for a moment rather than move past it, when it refuses to let tragedy become background noise. Our ears are saturated by loudness. We exist in a world of constant auditory and informational bombardment, in which there is a competition to shout the loudest, to be the boldest, straining to be heard above everyone else. Our attention has been trained to respond to volume, to urgency, to the most sensational stimulus. We scroll past what doesn't immediately grab us. We've become desensitized. Yet this particular silence about children killed in Gaza demands attention precisely because it eschews loudness in a moment when loudness is expected. It bears witness, week after week.
The biblical Elijah discovered this on Mount Horeb: After the spectacle of wind and earthquake and fire had passed, God spoke “in a still, small voice.” Or as some translations render it, “a sound of sheer silence” and sometimes “a sound of thin stillness.” The divine presence revealed itself only in what could be heard when everything else stopped. Silence demands attention not despite being quiet, but because it is quiet.
In choosing this form of protest, there is a conscious effort to wait through the wind and the earthquake and the fire of the usual responses—the arguments, the justifications, the political posturing—until what comes after: the still small voice of truth, the sound of sheer silence, of thin stillness where these children's lives and deaths can be witnessed and acknowledged, not debated.
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I have been criticized plenty on both sides: for supporting the enemy, for not paying attention to the Israeli children who have been killed, for not doing enough for the Palestinians, for not doing enough for the Israelis, as if somehow caring for Palestinian children somehow diminishes care for Israeli suffering. I’ve been called a colonialist, a settler, and much worse than that. As if I must decide whose pain matters the most.
Next week there will be another child's poster. Another name. The protests will continue, and so will the arguments, the anger, the grief. But for one hour each week, in the noise of Tel Aviv, there is silence, and in that silence, the children are not debating points. They are Sayid. They are Janna. That's when silence speaks louder.
Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and literary translator whose full-length translations include Tehila Hakimi's Hunting in America (Penguin/Footnote, winner of Paper Brigade Prize) and Yonatan Berg's Frayed Light (Wesleyan Poetry Series, finalist for the Jewish National Book Awards). Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Narratively and other venues. She volunteers with Road to Recovery. @joannachen1