The Hostage I Knew

The Atlantic

26-02-2025

Oded Lifshitz came home to Israel, 503 days after his abduction to Gaza, in a coffin.
His return does not bring closure. For many of us in Israel, rather, it is the occasion of anguish and fury. And it is a call for us to contemplate the demand on the living made by the dead.
Oded's coffin entered Israel on Thursday with three others. Two contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Kfir, who was 9 months old when he was kidnapped by terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, and his brother, Ariel, who was 4. A fourth coffin held the body of a woman who was supposed to be Shiri Bibas, their mother, but turned out not to be. A day later, the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades, the small terrorist group that had apparently held her, delivered the correct corpse, and Hamas sent it to Israel.
The initial delivery of the wrong body may have been a mistake, or one more means of inflicting pain on the enemy—the latest in a long chain that began with the kidnappings.
The Bibas children were the youngest of the Israeli hostages. Oded, 83 years old when he was shot in the hand and taken to Gaza, was among the oldest. His wife, Yocheved, two years older than him, frail and in need of oxygen, was released alive two and a half weeks into the war, in a rare humanitarian concession.
If one must establish a scale of brutality, kidnapping small children would rank as even worse than taking the elderly Lifshitzes. But the distinction is not large. Both actions presume that in the name of the Palestinian cause, every Israeli, from newborn to ancient, is equally a combatant, deserving not just death but suffering before death. Put differently, the kidnappings presuppose a collective enemy without individual faces or humanity. I don't share a language in which to argue with those who can justify this view.
I begin with Oded because he was the hostage I knew. During the marathon broadcast of the return of the bodies, I opened my laptop and pulled up a black-and-white photo that I'd once scanned in his living room. It showed Oded at age 31, in the winter of 1972, with lamb-chop sideburns and a dark mustache. The backdrop was sand, a patch of wild grass, and scattered trees—the harsh landscape of the northern Sinai, then still occupied by Israel. At the center of the frame, a Bedouin stood with a camel, near the broken concrete pieces of a house that Israeli troops had demolished under the command of General Ariel Sharon.
In 2004, I made the two-hour drive from Jerusalem to Nir Oz to hear the story behind that picture. The drive to the kibbutz—in the southwestern corner of Israel, just a mile and a half from the Gaza border—took me past orchards and wheat fields, nourished by Israel's extensive irrigation works.
Oded came to Nir Oz in 1957, when he was 17, as one of its founders. He belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, a movement most easily defined by the credo on the masthead of the now-defunct daily newspaper of Mapam, the left-wing political party to which it was linked: 'For Zionism. For socialism. For the brotherhood of peoples.'
During the telecast of the returning bodies, I turned off the anchor's voice and listened instead to the recording I'd made of Oded during that visit. Uncannily alive, he spoke to me in a gravelly baritone, a matter-of-fact voice of restrained passion.
In the winter of 1972, he said, 'rumors started reaching us that thousands of Bedouin had been expelled.' The stories came from members of left-wing kibbutzim, including Nir Oz, who had served their army reserve duty in the Sinai. 'Families were being expelled … their houses destroyed, their wells and orchards—in short, really brutal actions,' he recalled. A huge area was being fenced off for Jewish settlement.
Kibbutz members, Oded among them, went to the Sinai and corroborated the reports. They sent a mimeographed call to action to other kibbutzim in the south. Two hundred fifty people packed the communal dining hall at Nir Oz—the start of a campaign against the expulsion of the Bedouin and the Israeli settlement in the Sinai and Gaza. Newspapers began covering the expulsions, and apparently for the first time since Israel's 1967 conquests, Israeli settlement in occupied territory became the subject of continuing public opposition.
The Bedouin, with the help of Mapam, appealed to Israel's supreme court to reverse their expulsion. The government responded with an affidavit, supposedly from a prominent general, saying that the land had to be cleared and fenced off for military reasons, to prevent terror attacks. The court ruled in favor of the government.
Many years later, I gained access to the army's internal investigation of the expulsions, which made clear that the affidavit, signed but not written by the general, was false: The land had been cleared in order to facilitate Israeli settlement. In 2016, I published an article I'd co-written about the case in a legal journal.
I heard from Oded shortly after. He pointed out something I had omitted: that terror attacks had indeed taken place in the area cleared in the Sinai. They were carried out not by the Bedouin residents against Israelis, however, but by Palestinian organizations against the Bedouin, whom they saw as collaborators with Israel.
As that incident indicated, Oded was not naive about Palestinian terrorism. In his view, the Israeli right was half-asleep to the danger. In a 2019 article in Haaretz, he criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both for allowing cash transfers from Qatar to Hamas, as part of his strategy for dividing the Palestinians, and for ignoring the 'deepening humanitarian crisis' in Gaza. 'When Gazans have nothing to lose, we lose big,' Oded wrote. At the same time, he refused to see Palestinians as a faceless, hostile mass. In his later years, he and Yocheved volunteered to drive Gazans to medical appointments in Israel or East Jerusalem.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters and the mob that followed them overran Kibbutz Nir Oz. The Israeli government had failed the community at every level: in its misguided encouragement of Hamas rule in Gaza, in its intelligence agencies' ignorance that the attack was coming, and in the army's slow response. More than a fourth of Nir Oz's nearly 400 members were killed or taken captive.
The last person to report seeing Oded alive was a hostage released on the 53rd day of the war. She'd seen him lying on the floor in a Gaza warehouse, wearing a white robe drenched in blood.
The report came just as the first prisoner exchange and cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas unraveled. Israel insisted that the deal required Hamas to release women hostages before moving to the next category, elderly men. Hamas claimed that it could not locate the remaining women hostages. Israel's position made sense given the real risk of sexual violence. But if the government had shown more flexibility, perhaps Oded would have returned alive.
In the months that followed, the Netanyahu government seemed committed above all to continuing the war. Far-right parties in the ruling coalition were firmly opposed to a cease-fire that might have freed the hostages. In particular, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party called repeatedly for renewing Israeli settlement in Gaza—for resurrecting an enterprise that Oded had rightly denounced from its inception as a disaster for Israel.
Only this January did the government reluctantly agree to a new hostage deal. The expected return of four more bodies this week will mark its conclusion, but this will not bring closure. Fifty-nine hostages will still remain in Gaza—some dead, some whose hopes of returning alive will rapidly fade if the negotiations falter in their next stage.
Out of respect for the hostages' families, the telecast I watched the day Oded's body came home did not show Hamas's grotesque ceremony upon releasing the corpses. It was a rare effort to soften Israeli trauma. Yet our media have also shown too little of the destruction in Gaza. As so often happens in war, the enemy remains faceless, its deaths a mere body count.
I can't imagine what Oded was thinking in his last days, if he could think of anything beyond pain. If he felt abandoned by his country or by the Palestinians he'd helped, no one could blame him. But the Oded I met, if he had remained free and alive, would likely have told me to look unflinchingly at what we in Israel have suffered, at the mistaken policies of the years before October 7—and at the deaths of Palestinians. He would have looked as resolutely at the ruins of Gaza as he looked at the bulldozed Bedouin houses in Sinai. He would say that the enemy always has faces, and that the way out of the labyrinth depends on seeing them.