The news that the bodies of six young hostages had been found in an underground tunnel in Gaza, after eleven months of war, sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis out on Sunday evening, in one of the largest protests in the country’s history. By nighttime, Israel’s largest labor union had declared a rare general strike. Even Ben Gurion Airport shut down for several hours. The marches continued on Monday, and there is no telling when they will ebb. The nation seems once more at a breaking point.
It wasn’t the first time that several of the roughly two hundred and fifty hostages seized by Hamas terrorists on October 7th had been killed. Just this June, four other hostages were pronounced dead, including two over the age of eighty; their bodies are still being held in Gaza. I went to the vigils that followed those deaths. They were sizable, charged, and emotional—but nowhere near the outpouring of public fury unleashed this time around.
Perhaps the difference was that the killing of the six hostages by Hamas appeared to many Israelis to have been preventable. The Army has confirmed that all six—ranging in age from twenty-three to forty—were alive until just a few days ago, possibly as late as last Friday. According to the Israeli authorities, they were executed by their captors at short range. That knowledge, combined with reports that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, had insisted on adding demands to a proposed ceasefire deal that would have seen the hostages’ release, fuelled the public outcry. Three of the slain hostages had been expected to be freed in the deal’s first phase.
On Begin Road in Tel Aviv, the largest of the protest sites, I stood next to a woman who was holding a sign showing hand-drawn portraits of the six hostages, below the word “Sliha”—“Sorry.” Beside her, a young man waved a flag emblazoned with the symbol of Hapoel Jerusalem Football Club and a picture of Hersh Goldberg-Polin—the youngest of the dead hostages, an American Israeli who had been an ardent supporter of the club. The atmosphere at the protest at first was sombre and strangely quiet—the sound system had broken down. But then the voice of Einav Zangauker, whose son, Matan, is among the hostages still in captivity, came booming. “My boy is still alive!” she screamed. “But each passing day is like a Russian roulette that Netanyahu is playing.”
For nearly the entire duration of the war, mediators, led by the United States, have attempted to broker a hostage-release and ceasefire deal. The latest round of talks ended in late August, and a proposal was brought to Netanyahu’s desk for approval and was being considered by Hamas. But in a meeting of the National Security Council last Thursday, Netanyahu effectively scuttled it, by leading his Cabinet ministers in a vote in favor of maintaining a military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, the border strip between Egypt and Gaza. Netanyahu has recently begun to insist on this point, even as the heads of Israel’s security services have argued that priority should be given to hostage rescue and ceasefire. Many of his critics argue that his real motive in keeping the conflict going is to avoid losing his office as Prime Minister—which would leave Netanyahu, who faces multiple criminal charges, more vulnerable to prosecution. President Biden, asked by reporters on Monday whether he thought Netanyahu was doing enough to reach a deal, answered tersely: “No.”
Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have threatened to topple his government if he signs any deal that includes the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons—a key Hamas demand. On Monday, as much of the country shut down, there were growing calls for Netanyahu’s other coalition partners—the leaders of two ultra-Orthodox parties—to resign if he doesn’t sign a deal. In the parliament, a left-wing politician from the opposition turned to Moshe Gafni, one of the ultra-Orthodox leaders, and blamed him for not doing more to prevent the deaths of the six hostages. “You should have provided a counterweight to this messianic nationalism!” she lashed out.
Several hours later, traffic along the highway leading to Jerusalem snarled as thousands of Israelis came to pay their respects at the funeral of Goldberg-Polin, whose parents had been among the most public and energetic clarions for the hostages and their families. And not only in Israel. Last month, at the Democratic National Convention, Jonathan Polin and Rachel Goldberg took the podium to address the delegates in Chicago. They wore insignias bearing “320,” which indicated the number of days since Goldberg-Polin had been kidnapped, on October 7th, by Hamas at the Nova music festival in southern Israel.
After absorbing a prolonged ovation and chants of “Bring Them Home!,” Rachel Goldberg began her speech: “At this moment, one hundred and nine treasured human beings are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. They are from twenty-three different countries. The youngest hostage is a one-year-old red-headed baby boy, and the oldest is an eighty-six-year-old mustachioed grandpa. Among the hostages are eight American citizens. One of those Americans is our only son. His name is Hersh. He’s twenty-three years old, and, like Vice-President Kamala Harris, Hersh was born in Oakland, California.”
Both parents not only took care to describe their son—his injuries and suffering, his vitality, his love of music, soccer, and geography—and call for a settlement, but they also took pains to acknowledge and honor the horrific loss all around, in Israel and in Gaza. Jonathan Polin, who spoke after his wife, ended his speech by saying, “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.” He continued, “In an inflamed Middle East, we know the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring calm to the entire region: a deal that brings this diverse group of one hundred and nine hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza. The time is now.”
At the funeral, Goldberg-Polin’s parents eulogized him. For all these months, his mother said, “I tried hard to suppress the missing-you part, because that, I was convinced, would break me.” She ended by saying, “Finally, my sweet boy, finally, finally, finally, you’re free.” Just as painful, perhaps, was the recollection of Goldberg-Polin’s parents when they were still carrying on with a sense of hope, before all had been lost.
Last December, Goldberg went on the podcast “Unholy,” hosted by the Israeli newscaster Yonit Levi and the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, and described her days while her son was captive in the tunnels of Gaza. “I open my eyes in the morning and I immediately know, Oh, shoot, I’m still in the nightmare,” she said.
“I have to make a decision every day, and so does Jon, that we now have to pretend to be human,” she continued. “I still know how to kind of fake it and behave like a person. But I am in such existential angst and despair at all times. . . . There is this primal, maternal, innate need to save him and to save them. And the problem is, if I’m on the floor in a fetal position, in a puddle, it can’t really save him. So I have to take that and I have to put that somewhere else. And I have to go forward and I have to do every single thing possible to try to save him.”
Thinking back, one of the most devastating moments in that interview came when Goldberg described feeling joy for the parents of the hostages who were released last November and trying to imagine feeling the even more uncomplicated relief of her own son coming home. And the only way to do that, she said, “was picturing Hersh’s wedding” and what it would be like to hold a grandchild. “So I was creating joy, but I miss actual joy.”
At the funeral on Monday, Goldberg-Polin’s parents led a procession of thousands of mourners. Their shirts were torn—a symbol of mourning in the Jewish tradition—and they wore stickers reading “332,” the number of days that their son spent as a captive in Gaza before he was found dead.
An hour later, another funeral began in Kibbutz Be’eri: that of the oldest of the dead hostages, Carmel Gat, a yoga lover who was visiting her parents in the kibbutz on October 7th when terrorists killed her mother and took Carmel captive. Her family had learned from the press that Netanyahu wished to speak with them. But they refused to do so. In a statement, they explained that they did not want to “let him use us as justification and legitimacy” for scuttling another hostage-release deal. They buried Carmel next to her mother.
As night fell on Israel on Monday, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets for the second night in a row. They blocked major intersections, lit torches, and clashed with police. Several thousand marched to Netanyahu’s house in the coastal city of Caesarea. Netanyahu, under pressure, held a press conference in which he offered a rare apology to the families of the hostages killed. He spent much of the time, however, giving a slide-show presentation on the importance, in his words, of the Philadelphi Corridor. “We will not give it up and put ourselves in a terrible trap,” he said. Yair Lapid, the head of Israel’s opposition, called this insistence political spin. “He doesn’t care about the Philadelphi axis, only about the Ben-Gvir-Smotrich axis”—a reference to Netanyahu’s extremist coalition partners who had threatened to resign.
In Tel Aviv, the sound from the streets was piercing: drums, bicycle horns, shouts, and cries. And a throng of people, snaking their way through alleyways and backstreets toward the headquarters of Netanyahu’s Likud party, all chanting, “Why are they still in Gaza?” ♦
