Why ending mean forgetting

This week, for the first time in more than two years, the relentless count of days ended. The last Israeli hostage – the last body held in Gaza – was brought back to Israel. With that, something shifted. 

Not in the way wars usually end, with declarations or ceremonies. But in the realisation that, for the first time in months, there were no names left on the list of people we had been agitating – and praying – to see come home alive. 

For a long time, most of us didn’t allow ourselves to ask what comes next. Not because we never wanted to face it, but because we couldn’t afford to. Waiting required a certain suspension of the future. Now, strangely, we are in the privileged position of being able to ask the question. 

For years, we carried yellow ribbons; pins on jackets; and “Bring Them Home Now” necklaces close to our chests. Objects as expressions of our hearts. Posters taped to walls, noticeboards, shul entrances, fridge doors. Some people pinned photographs of the hostages to their bags. Some kept posters folded in wallets or taped above their desks. Others wore the faces themselves on their clothing. These items became part of our daily life, part of how we moved through the world while waiting. 

They weren’t accessories. They were acts of presence. A way of saying: I see you. I remember you. I am not moving on. 

Now that waiting has ended, people are beginning to do something else. Not because everything is healed, but because the state of waiting itself cannot continue in the same way. 

In recent days, posters have begun to come down. Quietly. One by one. Not ripped down in anger, but removed with care. In some Jewish communities, yellow ribbons and boards listing names have been intentionally taken down or set aside. Some have used the word “retired” to describe this – not discarded, not erased – but acknowledged and put to rest. 

This isn’t a movement. There’s no campaign. There are no instructions. What is happening is far more human than that. People are recognising, often privately, that the meaning of these symbols has changed. 

I have heard friends talking about wanting a form of closure that matches the intensity of what we all lived through. Not closure in the sense of forgetting, but in the sense of transition. Some have spoken about placing posters somewhere private rather than keeping them on display. Others suggest folding them carefully and keeping them in a box. There are proposals to bury them in a garden or a meaningful place – not as a ritual for those taken captive and murdered, but for the waiting that defined the past two years. This may sound abstract, but psychologically it makes sense. Humans create rituals not only for death, but for endings. Waiting, too, can end. And when it does, it leaves a hollow space behind. 

In Jewish thought, there is the idea of tzava’ah – a legacy or ethical will. It’s the notion that what someone leaves behind isn’t only material, but moral. An intention that continues even after the moment has passed. In that sense, the symbols we carried were never only about the hostages themselves. They were about who we chose to be while the world was noisy, cruel, distracted, and often indifferent. 

Here in South Africa, I haven’t yet seen public ceremonies of removal, and perhaps that’s fitting. What I have seen is quieter. People deciding, privately and without urgency, what to do next. 

I have heard people talk about how strange it feels to unclasp a necklace that became second nature. How empty that space feels once it is gone. These objects were touched daily, sometimes unconsciously, like worry beads. Letting them go can feel like a loss in itself. 

I have chosen to keep my “Bring Them Home Now” necklace hanging from a board above my desk. As I write this, it’s there in front of me. A reminder of what we lived through. Of what we cannot allow to happen again. How exactly that translates into the future, I don’t yet know. But I find myself touching the Magen David I now wear permanently around my neck. That, too, is new. I didn’t buy it as a statement. I bought it because something in me needed weight. Continuity. Identity that does not depend on slogans. 

The war changed us. The hostages changed us. The waiting changed us. 

We can give these objects a second life. Some will become part of communal memory. Some will rest quietly in drawers or boxes. Some will remain visible, transformed in meaning. What matters is not uniformity, but intention. 

Letting go isn’t forgetting. It’s recognising that a chapter has closed, even if the book is far from finished. And that recognition, difficult as it is, is something we are finally able – and perhaps finally allowed – to face. 

• Paula Slier is a veteran journalist and foreign correspondent who has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She writes on media, geopolitics, and information warfare.