This morning at Ben Gurion Airport, a ceremony was held marking the repatriation of the body of Sudthisak Rinthalak, a Thai farm worker who was abducted and murdered on October 7th.
This was the second such ceremony that I attended, out of four held in recent months. In recent months, I attended the same type of ceremony for Joshua Loitu Mollel, a Tanzanian agricultural student who was also murdered and abducted.
I left both ceremonies with similar feelings, but today was different for a few reasons. December 9th marks my five-year anniversary of making Aliyah and starting my life over here in Israel. I found myself using the day to pay respects to another person who came to this country in search of new opportunities.
Though our circumstances are inherently different, I found our common ground: coming to Israel would help us both contribute to the future we wanted to have. Unfortunately, he was in the line of fire and not protected as he could and should have been.
There were many parallels between Joshua and Sudthisak’s ceremonies; two men who came for work opportunities and were then robbed of a future at the hands of terrorists who murdered them for their own sick reasons. However, the most notable similarity was heartbreaking in another way.
The crowd at the memorial was extremely thin.
Where were the ministers? Where was the public that showed up in thousands to weekly protests? I could not wrap my head around the ministers, their deputies, and other community members who showed up for Joshua but not for Sudthisak.\
Turnout for farewell ceremony for Thai Hamas victim shockingly low
I understand that everyone may have a reason, a legitimate reason, and scheduling does not always work in everyone’s favor. Still, it did not make sense to me that, at an event hosted by the Foreign Ministry and its counterparts at the Thai embassy, neither the Foreign Minister nor his deputy was in attendance.
No ministers were in attendance in this morning’s ceremony, nor were any foreign ambassadors, including those who had attended the repatriation of their own citizens for proper burial. There wasn’t a clear support system among diplomats, showing up for one another.
I understand there are many factors beyond my view; government officials and diplomats have many important tasks, and a memorial may not top those priorities. However, though today was for a Thai national, it could have been any one of their own.
This memorial could have been for any of the members of the international community, and they would find themselves attending a ceremony of their own had it been one of their citizens murdered in Israel and repatriated.
Though the ceremony was beautiful, the attendance was much lower than it should have been in my view. The same for Joshua’s.
The primary advertisement for the memorial was not available in English and was certainly not widely distributed. My question is, why — why is it that thousands upon thousands of people have shown up weekly for nearly 800 days (and then some, including the protests that took place long before the war), yet less than 20 members of the Israeli public who were not reporters nor associated with a government body came through this morning?
In conversation with an activist who was in attendance, she disagreed with my stance that not enough of the Israeli public showed up. She commented that for the distribution of the advertisement for the memorial, the turnout was still quite good; we can agree to disagree.
My question is why: why was it not so widely shared? Why was this memorial ceremony not widely shared by the Hostage Family Forum?
Though it may not be feasible to get hundreds, let alone thousands, to this small area of the airport’s premises, it shocked me to see how few people showed up for his final journey home. I felt the same way about Joshua’s ceremony; his had at least twice the turnout of this one.
I strongly believe that if we can show up for one, we should do our best to show up for more.
He died for our country, and he was one of the last who should have had to. We show up in the thousands at the funerals of soldiers we’ve never met to pay our respects; the same should be true for Bipin Joshi, Joshua Mollel, Sonthaya Oakkharasr, and Sudthisak Rinthalak. This country failed to protect them and so many others on that painful day, and the failure to show up sends a message that these hostages aren’t high enough priority for their time.
Once again, I understand that everyone’s circumstances are different. People may not have been in town; other important life events happen daily and often without notice. Still, as a society, we must approach their memorials with the utmost respect. It could have been any one of us, but it wasn’t us — it was them.
We need to show up for everyone and use the same momentum to convey that these foreign nationals who died as a result of terror on our nation are indeed our own. We are one and the same, and let's mourn them as such.