One Israeli Hostage’s Unusual Experience in Gaza

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Speaker 3 I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.
Over these last few months, I've met quite a few former Israeli hostages who come through DC.

Speaker 3 They come to town to tell their stories. and usually to remind people that there are more of them still in captivity and we should do everything possible to help get them out.

Speaker 3 They and their relatives have become a separate community, maybe even even a movement. Lately, I've noticed something different about the community.

Speaker 3 They seem more mobilized, less like advocates and more like activists. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to town the other week, six hostage relatives protesting were arrested.

Speaker 3 They're angry that he invokes their experience to keep the war going. They wear bright yellow t-shirts that say, seal the deal now.

Speaker 3 It seems like they found their voice in a real way. Last month, just before Netanyahu's visit, I heard that one former hostage was coming through town and wanted to talk.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Am I sitting close enough?

Speaker 4 So this is okay. That's great.
Okay.

Speaker 3 She was meeting with President Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 This was a sign to me that she was far enough along in her healing for a conversation, because it's hard to stay composed for something like that if the experience is still raw.

Speaker 3 Do you have anything in your head or any questions before we just go? Like anything that's that's weighing on you today or

Speaker 4 I'm good today. You're good today.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay, good.

Speaker 3 Can you tell me your name?

Speaker 4 My name is Li'at Atzili.

Speaker 4 I used to be Benin.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then when I returned from captivity,

Speaker 4 found out that my husband had been killed on October 7th and his name was Atzili.

Speaker 4 So I had to get new ID. ID.
So

Speaker 4 I just decided on spur of the moment that I'm ditching Banan and becoming Atzili.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 It's funny how these things that might not mean something in another time, like the name or the order of a name or something you might have like a funny argument about is suddenly so bad.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know, it's weird.

Speaker 3 Liat was one of many Israelis to lose a loved one on October 7th, her husband, Aviv.

Speaker 3 And she was one of over 200 hostages taken back behind the fence around Gaza. She wasn't held in the tunnels, but in a Gazan home.

Speaker 3 She was there for almost two months, which was enough time to get to know her captors and have real conversations with them. I want to go back to even before

Speaker 3 the day.

Speaker 3 I'm curious what in, I mean, Niroz, just for Americans, is, it's like barely a mile and a half from Gaza. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's, I mean, just so that everybody listening understands how close it is, like this fence keeping Gazans in,

Speaker 3 the same one that the Hamas terrorists breached on October 7th, is very close to the Gibbs.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's like a mile and a half from the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 3 Which is very, very close.

Speaker 4 Very close. Very close.

Speaker 3 So I'm curious what before October 7th, because you've lived there for years and years, was your experience of Gaza or Gazans?

Speaker 4 I had no experience. I came to live on the kibbutz when I was in the army, during my army service.
After I was discharged from the army, Aviv and I spent a few years traveling.

Speaker 4 And we came back in, like, I think 2000. And that was just when the second Intifada started.

Speaker 4 So, Intifada means uprising.

Speaker 4 Palestinian uprising. Palestinian, yeah, it's in Arabic.

Speaker 4 So at the time, there were workers from Gaza working on Nir Oz.

Speaker 4 And the first thing that I remember is a discussion of the whole kibbutz if the kibbutz should continue employing these workers from Gaza. And it was decided that no, that it felt unsafe.

Speaker 4 So that's like the first the first encounter that I had with Gazans and what it meant to live on the Gaza border.

Speaker 4 I grew up on a kibbutz in the north of Israel in an area where there are a lot of Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian villages.

Speaker 4 So it's a different relationship because these people are Israeli citizens and there are issues, but they're Israeli citizens. And the people who live in the Gaza Strip aren't Israeli citizens.

Speaker 4 They were under military rule. There were many people on the kibbutz who were peace activists and were involved in all sorts of initiatives to help

Speaker 4 people from the Gaza Strip. People from Gaza would come to Israeli hospitals to be treated for all sorts of things that were impossible to treat there.

Speaker 4 So there was this whole organization that was in charge of coordinating rides for people coming from Gaza into Israel.

Speaker 4 So there were a lot of people on your was involved in that.

Speaker 3 I just wonder what in your like what you knew about Gaza before you were, you know, you didn't choose to go there, but I'm just curious, did you have an image of Gaza or anything like that?

Speaker 4 I did. I did.
I sort of imagined it like,

Speaker 4 you know, very poor third world country. I knew that there was

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 the supply of water and electricity wasn't 100%, that there were long periods of time that they didn't have running water or electricity. I was really, really curious about how you live like that.

Speaker 4 You know, I'm a teacher, I'm a history teacher, I'm a Holocaust educator. A huge issue that we discuss with students

Speaker 4 when teaching about the Holocaust is

Speaker 4 how something like the Holocaust can happen and why people don't do anything about it.

Speaker 4 And to me,

Speaker 4 you know, there was a fence there.

Speaker 4 And I felt obligated to be interested in what happens on the other side of the fence.

Speaker 3 I've always been curious about that, but I think too nervous to ask someone who lived in New Orleans or somewhere down there, like, what did you,

Speaker 3 there's a fence there. Like, you have to, like...

Speaker 3 There's just an odd situation to be in. Like, even in the new, you know, there's the new

Speaker 3 Holocaust movie, the Zone of Interest. It's like, you know, that whole movie is about people living inside a fence, sort of trying to ignore what's on the other side of the fence.

Speaker 3 And I mean, it's such a terrible question I'm asking, but I have always been curious: like, what was the process of ignoring, you know, what were people's interactions with the fence before they'd ever been there, or thinking, why is the fence there?

Speaker 3 Or what's our relationship to that fence or anything like that? Is that a terrible question?

Speaker 4 It's not a terrible question. I think it's a really important question.
I think

Speaker 4 it's the question

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 I think that really you can sort of very roughly divide people into people who cared what happened on the other side of the fence and people who didn't.

Speaker 4 I think now it's it's become very, very sensitive and very difficult.

Speaker 4 And people who

Speaker 4 I knew to be

Speaker 4 very left wing, peace driven, like are realigning their feelings and their thoughts and their beliefs.

Speaker 4 But I think that's the most important question, whether you can relate to the fact that on the other side of the fence

Speaker 4 live human beings and that there is a reason for

Speaker 4 what's been happening in the past. I mean, it's not since October 7th, it's the past.
I mean, we can take it back, but let's not go way too far back.

Speaker 4 I'll just say there's a reason for what's been happening in the past 15 years.

Speaker 4 And October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum. There are reasons for why it happened.
A word that's difficult. It's difficult to use it, but there's a context to what happened.

Speaker 4 And you can't forget that. You can't forget that these people

Speaker 4 have been living in, I think, terrible circumstances.

Speaker 4 Also, I think Hamas rule has not, Hamas

Speaker 4 does not care very much about how the ordinary Palestinian in the Gaza Strip lives, what kind of life they have.

Speaker 4 And I think Israel has a huge part in enabling Hamas to have such a strong hold on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And that it's impossible to ignore all these things.

Speaker 4 It's impossible to ignore that people are living in this place with very, very little hope to have a normal life or what I consider a normal life.

Speaker 4 And I actually spoke about this quite a bit with my captors.

Speaker 3 Well, let's go there. You've had an experience that you've never had before of crossing the border, and I imagine that would change a person.

Speaker 3 We have a lot of like vicious and gruesome images from October 7th of kidnapping, people being taken, killed. Your story is a little bit different from that and quite unusual.

Speaker 4 Can you talk about what you remember?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 Vivid left the house very shortly after the attack began because he was on the first response team and

Speaker 4 the last I heard from him was at like 8.30 in the morning. So I was by myself in the safe room in our house.
My two sons were on the kibbutz, but they don't live at home anymore.

Speaker 4 And my daughter wasn't on the kibbutz, which I'm so, so thankful for.

Speaker 4 So I was alone.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 when

Speaker 4 people came and entered my house and came to

Speaker 4 kidnap me, to take me hostage, I don't even know what word to use. It was already pretty late in the day.
It was around 11.

Speaker 4 And I think by that point they realized that the Israeli army wasn't coming to, that there was going to be no battle in Nir Oz.

Speaker 4 So they were very relaxed, I think.

Speaker 4 And also I think it was just luck, the people that happened to enter my house and

Speaker 4 to take me, because

Speaker 4 The very first thing they said, I mean, they came into the safe room, they were armed, they were wearing uniforms, but the the very first thing they said was you're going to come with us now but don't worry we're not going to hurt you we're going to protect you and you're going to be safe with us I mean I was in pajamas they told me you know get dressed I asked if I could go get something from a different room in the house and they said fine go wow yeah yeah

Speaker 4 and they asked me if there was something that I needed that I couldn't get I had no idea how long I was going for so

Speaker 3 That is so confusing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's really confusing. I was terrified.
I mean, I didn't have

Speaker 4 any coherent thoughts. I kept saying, you know, get a gripping on yourself.
I mean, you have some control in this situation. I couldn't.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is the worst thing that I could imagine.

Speaker 4 It's happening now, but it's not that terrible.

Speaker 4 But now, like, I think what I could have done, I could have taken a toothbrush.

Speaker 4 I could have taken clothes, I could have taken a book, I could have, like, texted my kids and said, you know, I'm being kidnapped, but don't worry, I'm okay.

Speaker 3 What did you do? What did you take?

Speaker 4 Nothing.

Speaker 3 You mean you just like put a pair of pants in a bag?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I put a pair of pants on, and like the guy gave me a shirt, said, Here, wear this, wear this, gave me a blanket. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Did they say where you were going?

Speaker 4 They said that they were taking me to

Speaker 4 the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 4 And I was taken

Speaker 4 into Khan Yunes by car.

Speaker 3 Did you have any sense of the landscape of Gaza as you're driving through? Like you crossed the border to the

Speaker 3 corner.

Speaker 4 Although I didn't have glasses, I looked for them, I couldn't find them. And then when I came home, they were in the exact place that I knew that they should have been.

Speaker 4 But for almost two months, I couldn't see.

Speaker 4 Okay, I mean, there wasn't that much to see.

Speaker 4 I ended up spending like the first 36 hours in the guy who took me from my house in his house.

Speaker 4 He brought me to his family's home and his mother and his sister just took really, really good care of me. I mean they realized that I was in shock and that I was

Speaker 4 terribly upset.

Speaker 3 What do you mean they took good care of you?

Speaker 4 They washed my clothes. They gave me a change of clothes.
They, you know, told me, go take a shower. They fed me, that you need to eat.
You need to rest.

Speaker 4 They understood that I was going through something. terrible, that I was worried about my children.
I didn't know

Speaker 4 what had happened to my children or to Aviv.

Speaker 3 But that is so complicated that in a hostage situation where you've just been kidnapped, you have an immediate heavy dose of believable natural human empathy. Like sometimes it's manipulative.

Speaker 3 You hear all kinds of stories, but this sounds like an easy, believable female dose of empathy. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's really confusing. But you know, I was able to like organize my thoughts and like wrap my

Speaker 4 head around that

Speaker 4 these are people.

Speaker 4 I mean, what I thought all along and that on the other side of the fence live people just like me and that I can communicate and that I'd be okay

Speaker 4 if I

Speaker 4 managed to make a connection.

Speaker 4 And I'm really glad that my theories lived up to reality.

Speaker 4 And it was very, very reassuring to spend the first hours like that with women, with children. There were two kids.

Speaker 4 And the next day I was transferred to a different house and I met a woman from near Oz.

Speaker 4 And we ended up spending the whole time together.

Speaker 4 And there were two

Speaker 4 guys who were guarding us.

Speaker 4 Unarmed. One of them was a lawyer, one was a teacher, educated, they spoke English,

Speaker 4 they were active in Hamas. They were very, very religious.

Speaker 4 But they also, they made a huge, huge, huge effort to make us feel safe

Speaker 4 and to communicate with us.

Speaker 4 Obviously, it's not an easy thing to go through.

Speaker 4 We had no idea what was happening in Israel.

Speaker 4 I didn't know if my sons were alive. I didn't know if Aviv was alive.

Speaker 4 I knew that they didn't know what was going on with me. Except for the situation being horrible.
Everything was, I mean, it wasn't as horrible as it could be. And I know that I was incredibly lucky.

Speaker 3 I was going to say there's some part of you that feels guilty. Yes, something, something conflicted in some way about this.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, the first few days I was very, very scared.

Speaker 4 But then I got the feeling that these people were genuinely interested in really protecting us, that they weren't going to hurt us, that they believed that what Hamas wanted to achieve was a deal, a hostage,

Speaker 4 that they'd taken hostages to have political prisoners released.

Speaker 3 And did you know at that point that Israelis had been killed? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 I knew the numbers. I didn't know how many people from Nios had been killed.
I didn't know, but

Speaker 4 I knew the numbers. I knew how many hostages there were.

Speaker 3 And how, knowing that, how did you get through the hours of the day? Like, what was your typical day-to-day like with them?

Speaker 4 So during the day, I mean, there was a lot of noise and people coming and going. But in the evenings, when things started to quiet down, so it was really important to our captors that we be quiet.

Speaker 4 And they were afraid that people in the street would find out that we were being held there.

Speaker 3 Because they couldn't control, they didn't know the people on the street and they couldn't control how they would react to seeing Israelis. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because Israelis were the cause of their misery at that moment.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they were afraid that we would be attacked.

Speaker 3 Which is also strange because then they're in a position of being their protective. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, the thing that frightened me the most was that there would be a bombing or a missile attack and that they would die and I'd be left alone.

Speaker 3 Left alone with a crowd and no one to protect.

Speaker 3 That's weird because that is a form of bond. Like, I actually really need you.

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 4 dependency on them.

Speaker 4 They kept saying, you know, our job is to protect you and keep you safe and healthy until you're released in a deal. I mean, they kept saying that from day one.

Speaker 4 So we'd go to sleep really early, like seven.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then

Speaker 4 I'd wake up in the middle of the night

Speaker 4 at like 1 or 2 a.m. And just, you know,

Speaker 4 funnily enough, those hours that everybody was sleeping and that I was like left alone with my thoughts were kind of peaceful hours.

Speaker 4 Like I thought a lot about my children and about Aviv and about a million things like

Speaker 4 what I'm going to do when I get back, like imagining what my kids were doing and like trying to send them vibes that I'm alive and, you know, I'm okay. I'm okay.

Speaker 4 They'd get up to pray at like between four and five in the morning. So like I kept waiting

Speaker 4 to hear the moisine

Speaker 4 calling everybody to prayer. So that was like the beginning of the day.

Speaker 4 Our days were like filled with, you know, tiny tasks, like a lot of waiting. And like the waiting was a thing in itself.

Speaker 3 Waiting for what?

Speaker 4 Waiting for our meal, waiting like until the time when it got dark and we turned the lights on that was like a big thing every day so like we'd turn the lights on at like five o'clock and we called that nur time nur is light in arabic and like from three o'clock we'd say okay in two hours we're gonna turn the lights on i mean stuff like that

Speaker 4 and did you learn anything about them yeah yeah i we

Speaker 4 we spoke very freely they told us about their families and about their lives their regular lives. We spoke a lot about politics.

Speaker 4 I asked them why they had joined Hamas and not one of the other organizations,

Speaker 4 what they thought would happen in the near future, how they thought that the war needed to end, if it needed to end. I spoke a lot about history.
They knew a lot about Israel.

Speaker 3 And what was the version of Israel that got reflected back to you? Because you probably don't often hear a Gazan's vision of you and your country in such

Speaker 3 fullness. So what was the mirror? Like, what did you see?

Speaker 4 Well, a very, very religious,

Speaker 4 fundamentalist, messianic worldview. They kept saying that from the river to the sea, it should all be a Palestinian state and that all the Jews should leave.

Speaker 4 And there was a difference between the two of them. One of them was, I think, was more religious, was less willing to compromise.

Speaker 4 And one said, you know, well, yeah, maybe a two-state solution has to be a solution,

Speaker 4 at least temporarily, until we conquer the world and everybody converts to Islam.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, so, wait, that seems important because you no longer have a sense of Gazans as this monolith. Like, I mean, I think it's a breaking point when you start to see people as varied yeah yeah

Speaker 3 for sure and how far did your conversations go like did you have enough courage to ask them these kinds of questions like why would you kill someone yeah yeah we spoke about it we spoke about it very freely

Speaker 4 they either were incredible actors or they really really didn't know what had happened

Speaker 4 um because like when we told them that there had been looters in Niroz, the woman that I was with, her jewelry had been stolen from her, had been taken off of her when she'd arrived in Gaza.

Speaker 4 They were shocked and they were like,

Speaker 4 this should never have happened. Like they kept saying,

Speaker 4 we don't understand why you were taken hostage. You're women.
We don't. fight women.
Women shouldn't be involved in

Speaker 4 war.

Speaker 4 At some point, pictures of all the hostages were released, and one of them said,

Speaker 4 I'm shocked at the number of children, at the number of elderly people, at the number of women. I didn't think it was like that.

Speaker 3 What about the killing? Like, did they did they consider that a necessary part of the messianic vision? Like, that's just war, as long as it's men.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they and they said men are fair game. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Did you learn anything anything that surprised you in these conversations?

Speaker 4 Not really.

Speaker 3 Do you think they learned anything that surprised them?

Speaker 4 I think so.

Speaker 3 Like what?

Speaker 4 I think they

Speaker 4 didn't understand

Speaker 4 or they didn't know how

Speaker 4 Jewish Israelis saw our connection to

Speaker 4 Israel.

Speaker 4 I think that they

Speaker 4 sort of

Speaker 4 felt that it was,

Speaker 4 that to us we could go anywhere and that it was, and what many Israelis say about the Palestinians, oh, they have so many countries, why don't they go somewhere else? And no,

Speaker 4 they don't want to be Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, they're Palestinians from

Speaker 3 here.

Speaker 4 And I think they sort of had the same, they related to Jewish Israelis in the same way. And why don't you, they kept asking you why don't you go back to America?

Speaker 4 Why did your parents ever come to Israel? Why do you feel that this place belongs to you?

Speaker 4 Which was very very strange.

Speaker 3 But it's the fundamental thing. Like if everyone could realize there are two people and both those people aren't going anywhere, like if everyone just accepted that fact.

Speaker 4 Yeah, then it things would be easier.

Speaker 3 Things would be easier. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So there was a lot of discussion about that.

Speaker 4 They asked me about the Holocaust.

Speaker 3 What did they think? Oh, well, that's a good question for you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 What ideas did they have about the Holocaust?

Speaker 4 They didn't really know. They knew, like, they'd heard about Hitler.
They knew that there had been ghettos.

Speaker 4 But they didn't really know what had happened. So they asked.
I explained.

Speaker 4 And they said, it's terrible. I said, yeah, it's pretty terrible.
Aaron Powell.

Speaker 3 This is so interesting because you essentially are now faced with these interesting and rich conversations with people who are your captors who turn out to be very educated and speak English.

Speaker 3 There's lots of sort of protective feminine energy. Just it's so complicated.
It is.

Speaker 4 It's mind-blowing how complicated it is and how difficult it is to sort of try to organize this experience and deal with it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I didn't really know

Speaker 4 what I was coming back to.

Speaker 4 And also that's been very difficult to deal with the consequences of what had happened

Speaker 4 while I was gone.

Speaker 4 I was overjoyed when I was told that I was going home.

Speaker 4 But we said goodbye. You know, I said thank you for taking such good care of me, for protecting me.

Speaker 4 You know, for over 50 days, there were two guards. And we said goodbye to one of them.
Only one of them took us to the car that was taking us to the next place that we,

Speaker 4 they took us to Nasser Hospital in Jamunis. And from there, we were released.
I was released. The woman that was with me, she was released the next day.
But

Speaker 4 so like when we were leaving the apartment, it was like a little bit chaotic and we didn't say goodbye to one of them.

Speaker 4 And the other one walked us down

Speaker 4 into the street. And

Speaker 4 for over 50 days, I mean, they

Speaker 4 he

Speaker 4 made such a conscious effort to, you know, not touch us. at all

Speaker 4 and not even mistakenly i mean he wouldn't hand me a cup of tea or a plate or anything. He just put it down.
I mean, no contact, no physical contact whatsoever.

Speaker 4 And, you know, when I said goodbye to him and thank you, and he like, he went like this. He patted me on the shoulder and said, you know, good luck.
And I hope that.

Speaker 4 I hope that your family is safe and I hope that everything will be okay with you. And I was,

Speaker 4 you know, it was moving.

Speaker 4 It was, it was a moment with this person who really, I mean, could have done anything. He didn't have to, I mean, he had a job to keep me alive and sort of relatively in good condition.

Speaker 4 But I mean, he could have done anything. He didn't have to be nice to me.
He didn't have to

Speaker 4 talk to me. He didn't have to.
I mean,

Speaker 4 a million little gestures that just

Speaker 4 made it

Speaker 4 bearable.

Speaker 3 After a lot of lobbying by her family and the help of the US government, Liat got out. In Gaza, meanwhile, the situation only got worse.

Speaker 3 Israelis bombed Han Yunus and Nasser Hospital until it wasn't functioning. In Israel, Liat returned to her own new terrible reality.

Speaker 4 After I was released, we were notified that Aviv had been killed. It wasn't known until then.

Speaker 4 And I mean that sort of became the main issue.

Speaker 4 Instead of dealing with the whole being held hostage issue, I've been grieving.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Grieving widow. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think it's it's difficult for some people to understand.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's been so much death and we've just lost so many people that it's

Speaker 4 it's somehow it's it's so hard to grasp the the loss

Speaker 4 I mean there's so many

Speaker 4 so many difficult experiences that

Speaker 4 they just have to choose what to focus on because you can't deal with everything right and so for me it's it's been

Speaker 4 I mean the main thing that I've been dealing with

Speaker 4 is losing of you

Speaker 4 who is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person.

Speaker 3 He looks like it from the photographs.

Speaker 3 You guys have a, we were made for each other, five, in the in the photographs I've seen of you, you know, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 4 known each other. I mean, we knew each other from a very young age.
I mean, we've been together for many years, even though

Speaker 4 we're still young. I'm still young.
He'll always be young.

Speaker 4 I think

Speaker 4 he had a very

Speaker 4 important role in the community, and I think so many people miss him, and so many people loved him

Speaker 4 that, in many ways,

Speaker 4 it's comforting and reassuring, and

Speaker 4 it feels really good to know that he's so missed by so many people, but

Speaker 4 it's just.

Speaker 3 Right. He's still not here.
He's still not here.

Speaker 4 And the president actually said,

Speaker 4 it was interesting. He said, but

Speaker 4 you talk to him all the time, right? And, you know, and

Speaker 4 you communicate with him, and he's here with you.

Speaker 4 And that's so true.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 3 And that's amazing. That's what the president said.

Speaker 3 I was going to say, one of the odd things must have been that you came back from the most unexpected, unusual experience of your life and could not share it with him.

Speaker 3 Like, could not share the details of it or what happened or process it. It must have been the first enormous thing in your life that you had to process on your own as an adult, you know?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Which is hard. I'm glad you have friends.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I have wonderful friends and a wonderful family. Yeah.

Speaker 3 After the break, more about that visit with President Biden, who is famously wonderful at talking to people deep in grief.

Speaker 3 Liat was looking for something in that meeting, something she was not getting from Israeli political leaders.

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Speaker 3 So you are here in Washington and not in Israel.

Speaker 4 Why?

Speaker 4 Well

Speaker 4 a lot of my family members, including my parents, were very, very active in, I don't know how I would describe it exactly, campaign, struggle to bring me back home.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 this is mostly a trip here to thank all the people who were involved in bringing bringing me back home. And I didn't really know what to expect.

Speaker 4 But one thing that's been on my mind a lot these past few days is the personal connection. I think he showed a huge amount of

Speaker 4 responsibility towards me and my well-being and my family. And that's something that's very, very different to Israeli politics and the way that government officials relate to the citizens in Israel.

Speaker 3 Interesting. So do you mean in tone, like the words he said, or do you mean mean something you felt from him

Speaker 4 he knew my story and

Speaker 4 I think that he felt a connection or made me feel that we have a connection and both of us losing our spouses he spoke a lot about his first wife and about the the children that he lost

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 he gave me advice

Speaker 4 what was the advice he said you know that a day will come when you speak about your husband that you'll smile before you cry.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's interesting that you contrast it with constituents relationship with their leadership in Israel, because I do often think at least historically of Israeli leaders sort of coming to funerals or, you know, there is a style of sort of showing up for people who have sacrificed for Israel.

Speaker 3 I mean, maybe it's different in this current situation, but I do think of that as being a tradition for Israeli leaders.

Speaker 4 Not now, not in these times.

Speaker 4 There has been a shirking of responsibility.

Speaker 4 The Israeli government, I think Netanyahu and others, not everyone, but have been very, very actively trying to place blame for what happened on the military and the intelligence.

Speaker 4 It's strange that for a lot of people, October 7th became everything.

Speaker 4 And we've sort of forgotten that there's a very

Speaker 4 long

Speaker 4 history before that. Israel was in a very, very difficult place for a long time before October 7th.
I mean, I... I live in the Western Negev, what's known as the Gaza envelope.

Speaker 4 I don't like to use that phrase. But for the last 20 years, we've been living in a reality of neglect by the government.
I mean, we've been, Mai Kibbutz has been hit by missiles and rockets for years

Speaker 4 and with no real solution to that. And I mean, I think that the solution is an agreement that everybody can live with.
Israelis and Palestinians.

Speaker 4 I don't think that the solution is war or some sort of armed conflict that can resolve this issue. I think it can only be resolved by discussions.

Speaker 4 And the government that was elected has been very right-wing. Most of the people that live in Kibutsim, in my area, disagreed with the government's policies and

Speaker 4 were very active in the protests against the government the past few years.

Speaker 4 And I think that that's reflected on how the government's related to the fact that the settlements of the Western Negev were the ones that were hit the hardest by this attack.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, it's different than, I think, the way an American political situation would unfold.

Speaker 3 Like it does seem unusual that there wouldn't be, you know, a personal kind of reach out or connection.

Speaker 4 No personal reach out. I mean, there are people who have reached out.

Speaker 3 But you're saying you have not gotten any call or any equivalent of what you just had with Biden. No.
Now, the president called you a survivor in his tweet. Does that feel like the right word to you?

Speaker 3 Like, does that sit well with you? Like, I'm a survivor? Does that feel correct?

Speaker 4 It doesn't.

Speaker 4 It feels strange.

Speaker 4 I don't like to think of myself as a victim or a survivor, but I think that

Speaker 4 I mean, I am a victim and I am a survivor. And I think that if

Speaker 4 before October 7th peace was an option, now there's no choice.

Speaker 4 This cannot be the way we live in the Middle East.

Speaker 3 I mean, you had first-hand experience of personal suffering. I wonder if on the other side you saw suffering.
I mean, it sounds like you were in a relatively comfortable place, but was there...

Speaker 4 Yeah, the last couple of days, I was in Nasser Hospital and there were thousands of refugees and

Speaker 4 I could see the conditions that they were living in. And it was terrible.

Speaker 4 Terrible.

Speaker 3 And in your head, did you think of that as something that Israelis had caused?

Speaker 4 Of course.

Speaker 3 I mean, I will tell you, I have spoken, I speak to Israelis, and because I live in the U.S.

Speaker 3 and sort of like we have our social media, we see pictures of Gaza, Gaza, Gaza all the time or protests and there are generational differences and all that.

Speaker 3 A lot of Israelis don't see the pictures. Like well into the war, people would tell me, oh, they just, we don't, it's not on the TV and we don't see them.

Speaker 4 It's not

Speaker 4 a problem. It's not.
But

Speaker 4 I saw this with my own

Speaker 4 non-seeing eyes because I didn't have glasses.

Speaker 4 But I do read Al Jazeera before October 7th also.

Speaker 4 I do read non-Israeli newspapers. I do try to get as wide a picture as I can of things that interest me.

Speaker 4 And obviously Hamas is responsible for this war as much as Israel is. But I mean, when I saw these images, this was two months into the war.

Speaker 4 To me, it was obvious that it could have ended

Speaker 4 before.

Speaker 4 And of course, now the situation is even worse. And there is absolutely no reason, in my opinion, for this war to have been going on for so long.

Speaker 4 I mean I think a ceasefire, a permanent ceasefire that would have ensured the return of the hostages, the rebuilding of Gaza, the rebuilding of the kibbutzim in Israel and talks to reach a lasting agreement should have happened months ago.

Speaker 3 What do you have to work out in your private life? Like, what are the things that you have to work out for yourself?

Speaker 4 When it'll be possible, I would like to go back to live on Nier Oz. Niros was destroyed, really.

Speaker 4 My house burned down, so I don't have where to live there now, or that I would like to go back to the negative.

Speaker 4 But I'm not sure that that's what I want to do. It's a thought.

Speaker 4 Like, I went back to work and I finished the school year with my students and that that was that was really good and it had like a huge healing effect. But

Speaker 4 but I don't think that I I have to decide if I want to go back to teaching full time or not.

Speaker 3 Because you need time to figure out what just happened to you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and sort of

Speaker 4 some things that seemed really, really important or were easy, like connecting with students, connecting with parents, now seem like a huge effort, like even

Speaker 4 something that I'm not capable of doing right now. So it's a lot to figure out.

Speaker 4 I'm involved in the planning of

Speaker 4 how NEROS will be rebuilt.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 4 That's something that I was never interested in.

Speaker 4 And now it's like I took and was given the responsibility to think about Near Oz's story, about the narrative, about how we want to remember what happened, how we wanted to

Speaker 3 you because reading about Nihoz, I was a little worried that it would just become a kind of site that people would visit like a Holocaust memorial site and it would never have a rebirth.

Speaker 3 It felt like it could go in that direction, but it sounds like it might go in a different direction.

Speaker 4 If I have anything to do with it, and I will, it will not go in that direction.

Speaker 4 Good, good.

Speaker 3 I mean, I hate to trivialize anything, and I never go in the direction of a happy ending at all.

Speaker 3 And this is not a happy ending, but it is like shoots of rebirth, a lot of different things happening, and that's, I think, unexpected.

Speaker 4 It's a hopeful ending. I have been thinking maybe I should relocate to

Speaker 4 maybe I should come back to the States. Seriously?

Speaker 3 No, you're just saying that.

Speaker 4 It's tempting.

Speaker 3 For safety reasons?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Israel is probably one of the most complicated places in the world to live.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's exhausting.

Speaker 4 And it was before October 7th. It's been.

Speaker 4 But I think that we're so rooted in the place. and

Speaker 4 really it's, I think it's a little bit of a cliché, but

Speaker 4 it's very difficult for me to give up on the place that Aviv lost his life to protect. So

Speaker 3 yeah, I can imagine.

Speaker 3 This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Bade. It was engineered by Rob Smirciak and fact-checked by Sarah Krulewski.

Speaker 3 Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hannah Rosen and thank you for listening.

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