Keeping Hope Alive

On the evening of Friday, Oct. 6, 2023, my wife and I attended a concert with our daughter and future son-in-law.

I remember looking at my phone before going to bed —  after 11.30 p.m. Eastern time — and seeing a map with red circles indicating alerts throughout Israel. I thought it might be “just” another barrage of rockets fired from Gaza.

It was 6.30 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 7 in Israel.

I woke Saturday morning to news reports that seemed inconceivable. In addition to firing 3,000 rockets, Hamas-led terrorists had breached Israeli security fences and attacked kibbutzim, towns, and an outdoor music festival in the “Gaza envelope.”

In time, we would learn the now familiar numbers, of 1,200 men, women, and children slaughtered and 251 — living and dead — kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where their arrival was greeted by cheering and jeering crowds.

Within 72 hours we saw public reaction bend from sympathy for Israel to a global wave of anti-Israeli demonstrations, as the Israel Defense Forces launched air strikes, followed by a ground invasion of Gaza. As the Palestinian death toll grew and Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed, displacing an estimated 1.9 million people, the protests multiplied, often blurring the lines between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment.

Soon enough, I would watch a briefing by Israeli forensic scientists displaying photographs to illustrate the difficult task of identifying human remains burned beyond recognition and mutilated in ways that sickened. Israel belatedly rolled out, for select audiences, a 47-minute compilation of video and audio gathered from the body cameras and phones of Hamas fighters (who went about killing with evident pride), the phones of their victims, surveillance cameras, and social media.

In time, we read of intelligence, military, and political failures that resulted in the greatest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust (and not all of those murdered or kidnapped were Jewish). Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have massed publicly demanding accountability from the government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted formation of a commission of national inquiry, as was established after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Within days, I learned that three members of my extended family had been murdered at Kibbutz Be’eri and seven others kidnapped. Before Oct. 7, I did not know the names, their faces, or anything of their lives. That changed in the weeks and months that followed, as I made contact with about a dozen members of the family. In the worst possible circumstances, I filled in the branches on the family tree in my computer.

Of those kidnapped, six women and children were freed in a Nov. 25, 2023, exchange for jailed Palestinians. The seventh, a husband and father of two, suffered for 505 days, chained, beaten, and starved, before returning on Feb. 22, this year to his family.

I have written more than two dozen “From Where I Sit” columns about Oct. 7, the hostages, and the war in Gaza. A personal connection prompted many of those columns.

Bobby Harris spoke about his personal connection before the several hundred people who gathered Oct. 5 at Ahavath Achim Synagogue, to mark the second anniversary of the horror.

Harris, southeast regional adviser of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, wondered aloud how much a family could take — in this case that of his cousin, Omer Neutra, an American-Israeli serving in the IDF. Neutra, a tank platoon commander, was killed on Oct. 7, one month short of his 22nd birthday, battling terrorists who had invaded Kibbutz Nir Oz and took his body to Gaza.

“So many times world leaders indicated that a deal might be imminent and most of the time it was just a false alarm,” he said.

As news broke on Oct. 8 of a deal accepted by Israel and Hamas — brokered in large measure by the United States — my thoughts were not of the politicians taking victory laps, but for the families of the remaining 48 hostages.

On Oct. 13, after 738 days of captivity, 20 living hostages were freed, exchanged for some 2,000 jailed Palestinians, then choppered to Israel for reunions with their families.

Of the 28 dead hostages, 25 had been repatriated by Nov. 13, including American Israelis Omer Neutra and Itay Chen. That left three unaccounted for, two Israelis and a Thai citizen. The ceasefire required Hamas to release remains that it and other Palestinian factions held within the same time frame as the living, and to share information about those not returned. Israel contends that Hamas is not doing enough, while Hamas says that more time is needed.

At Ahavath Achim, Harris invoked words often attributed to Elie Wiesel, but which the Holocaust survivor and author may have adapted from the writings of French philosopher Albert Camus: “Where there is no hope, one must invent hope.”

In an email later, Harris pointed to a line from Wiesel’s book “A Jew Today,” in which he writes that, for Jews, “Even in the midst of despair, we attempt to justify hope.”

The hope maintained by the families of hostages who returned alive was rewarded with hugs and kisses, smiles and tears. The families of the dead, meanwhile, fight despair with hope that they will have the opportunity to properly bury their loved ones. For them, the clock remains stopped at 6.30 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023.