As he got older, Yonatan felt that his mother was becoming too caught up in the emotions of her job. Vivian cried easily. Her staff liked to tease her, warning, “She’s about to cry again.” When she met with Arab families whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli government, Vivian’s face couldn’t conceal her anguish. “It can’t be this way, it can’t be this way,” a colleague remembered her repeating. “She would identify very easily with people,” Yonatan said. “I would scold her a lot of times, that other people’s pain isn’t hers.” He recalled telling her, “If you feel another person’s pain the same way they feel it, then you can’t help them.” She replied that he needed more empathy.
Yonatan reminded Vivian of herself. Like her, he was bullheaded, attached to his convictions and determined to act on them. As a teenager, Yonatan decided that “real leftists don’t eat meat,” so he became a vegan. Chen joined the Israeli Army after high school, as is typical for Jewish Israeli men because of the country’s mandatory military service. But Yonatan decided that he wouldn’t enlist, a heretical decision. Yonatan said he didn’t want to be part of an army “occupying another people,” and was disturbed by the way he heard friends justify shooting a gun. “Yorim v’bochim,” they said, which meant “shooting and crying.”
“I didn’t buy into it,” Yonatan said. “I won’t cry after I shoot. I won’t shoot to begin with.”
Yonatan moved to Haifa to get a law degree, planning to become a human rights lawyer. Though he didn’t see himself as an activist like his mother, he thought he could play some part in ending the cycle of violence by fighting for the rights of Arab Israelis. But when Maayan gave birth to their first son, in 2014, Yonatan was surprised by how quickly the lens of his mind refocused. The lofty conversations about history and politics that had consumed him seemed, suddenly, unimportant. His family became the center of his world. Yonatan decided he had agonized enough over a conflict that had only grown bloodier over the course of his life. He no longer saw himself as part of the effort to bring peace, which seemed at the time impossible. Instead, he got a master’s degree in family counseling and took a job as a social worker for the city of Tel Aviv. His days were a happy blur of diapers and milk, toys and child care.
Today he feels this change was partly rebellion, chafing at his mother’s obsessive tenacity. He disengaged while she plunged further in. At the time, in the summer of 2014, Vivian had recently retired. But then Israel went to war in Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week battle in Gaza. When the fighting ended, Vivian told Yonatan and Chen that she was helping to start a movement called Women Wage Peace, calling for more women to be involved in peace negotiations, because, she said, women understood how to compromise.
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