At the beginning of January, photographer Yonatan Blum and I traveled to Moshav Lavon in the Galilee to interview Kobi and Idit Ohel, parents of Alon Ohel. The clouds were full and gray, resting on the green hill where the Ohel family built their home—the home where Alon Ohel grew up before being taken hostage into Gaza at just 22 years old.
Kobi and Idit said they were taking care of the house, and the piano, themselves—so that when Alon, an accomplished musician, returns, he’ll have somewhere to come back to. They didn’t give many interviews during that time, didn’t move their residence to the center of the country, even though that’s where the main activity for their son’s release was happening, and they tried to protect his privacy. They wanted to keep quiet the fact that he was being held in a tunnel and had an eye injury.
Those were the days before the last deal, before Eli Sharabi and Keith Siegel returned emaciated, before Yarden Bibas was the only one of his family to return alive, before they were forced to reveal every detail of Alon’s condition in order to make clear to those who needed to hear it that he must be released—now.
On Monday, Kobi and Idit sat before the media and presented a plan for treating their kidnapped son. At the heart of the plan is evacuating Alon to a hospital in a neighboring Arab country so he can receive medical treatment.
Listening to the plan, I was beside myself with shame. How did we get to a situation where this modest and gentle family presents an alternative in the negotiations with Hamas just to treat—not even to bring back—their kidnapped and wounded son, when the government left him for 560 days in Hamas captivity in Gaza?
This period is among the holiest in the Israeli calendar, with Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day. Yet it has been a period of immense shame. The grandparents of Bar Kupershtein traveled all the way to Auschwitz to deliver the message of the chain of generations, from grandfather Michael who survived the Holocaust a baby, to the grandson surviving in Gaza. The parents of Carmel, Hersh, Almog, Alex, Ori and Eden—whose children were kidnapped from the Nova music festival and murdered in a Gaza tunnel after hundreds of days in captivity—are organizing a “nonpolitical” prayer for the release of the hostages. Edan Alexander’s grandmother, Vered Ben Baruch, an observant religious woman, has to emphasize her faith in every interview to get public attention for her grandson.
A few months ago, hostage mother Yael Adar declared on one of the radio shows that she knew that her son, Tamir, who was killed on October 7, 2023 when he went out to defend Kibbutz Nir Oz and whose body was taken to Gaza, would be brought to proper rest by Memorial Day. I heard her while driving, and Memorial Day felt so far away then, and her request—her demand—seemed so disconnected. Why aren’t you crying out that it must be now, immediately? Well, Memorial Day has come, and Tamir is not with us.
A year and seven months after October 7, it’s almost impossible to think about the hostages without feeling on the back of your neck the breath of the right-wing television network Channel 14’s propaganda, which claims that emotion, compassion, longing, and the demand to bring them back are all “enemy propaganda.” That may be its greatest success—Israelis now disavowing their own countrymen so as not to fall into “enemy traps.”
And the families of the hostages? They are left with almost no influence. They tried protests. They tried shouting. They tried blocking roads. They tried petitions. They tried prayers. They tried lobbying. They tried Trump. They tried threats. They tried the International Criminal Court. They tried campaigns, spokespeople, songs, videos. They tried crying and screaming—in every language, in every place, in every form, with everyone. They tried everything.
During this, the holiest week in the national Israeli calendar, I want to ask the families whose loved ones are still in Gaza for forgiveness. Forgive us that they are not yet here. Forgive us that you have to perform all these pyrotechnics just to get attention. Forgive us for the discord. Forgive us that we weren’t, that I wasn’t, there for you as a buffer from politics.
And forgive us that this Memorial Day and Independence Day, your daughters and sons are not with you.
