Meet the Israeli anarchist taking Hamas hostage fight to Netanyahu

Yahoo

14-02-2025

With his trademark paramilitary-style black bomber jacket emblazoned with a highly provocative Star of David, Danny Elgarat is a hard man to miss.
Certainly, the members of the Knesset's foreign affairs and security committee know him well.
As he strides with slow purpose into the committee's Thursday afternoon meeting, their discomfort is palpable.
Some of the politicians give him a wary nod of greeting; others stare down at their phones.
At the entrance, security guards gather, eyeing him closely. As well they might: they have had to drag him out in the past.
A former bomb squad police chief who is now a history teacher, Mr Elgarat is the man behind the militant side of Israel's hostage return movement.
It only took him a few weeks after his brother Itzik, 69, was abducted on Oct 7 to decide that, in his view, the non-partisan, vigil-style gatherings organised by the mainstream Hostage and Missing Families Forum, which have claimed most international attention, were giving Benjamin Netanyahu a free pass.
He and a group of supporters decided on a more direct course of action. The blocked roads and lit bonfires and smoke bombs in the streets, and the police responded with stun grenades, water cannons and cavalry charges.
'I haven't been arrested,' Mr Elgarat tells The Telegraph. 'But they've attacked me more than once.'
He chuckles. 'Look, when I was a policeman, I was a policeman. Now, they call us anarchists, so I guess I'm an anarchist.'
Alongside coordinating nightly disruptions in Tel Aviv, the 65-year-old makes a twice-weekly pilgrimage to the Knesset in Jerusalem, addressing whichever fringe committee will grant him a few minutes to speak.
This time, he takes particular aim at Mr Netanyahu's warm reception of Donald Trump's 'Middle East Riviera' vision, saying it would be built 'on the bones of the kidnapped, on the bodies of the kidnapped'.
He castigates the Israeli prime minister's reluctance to begin negotiations for phase two of the deal as evidence that he wants to 'sabotage' the agreement.
'The sacrificing to the death of dozens of Jews by the leaders of the Jewish state is unprecedented,' he informs them. 'No such thing has happened in Jewish history.'
For good measure, he asks Knesset members who would rather not hear his message to leave, rather than 'playing with your phones'.
There has never been a more important time to change to a more aggressive method of protest, he believes, citing this week's near-derailment of the hostage deal as proof.
As for hundreds of families, it all started for Mr Elgarat with a phone call in the early morning of Oct 7 2023.
His brother Itzik, a Danish-Israeli handyman and all-round bon vivant of Kibbutz Nir Oz, who liked nothing better than chatting in the bar, had been shot through the hand while struggling to keep the door of a safe room locked.
Mr Elgarat was in the process of telling him how to fix a tourniquet when he heard loud shouts in Arabic, at which point Itzik cried: 'Danny, this is the end.'
A signal from his phone was located in Gaza half an hour later.
A sign of life was received in January last year, but in March, Hamas published a video in which they claimed Itzik was dead.
Although the terrorist group has not provided visual proof of this, Mr Elgarat says the IDF has informed him that 'his life is in big danger'.
Due to his age and having suffered a traumatic injury, the fact that Itzik was not on the initial hostage release list has been taken as an extremely bad sign.
Itzik, who was a talented football player and supporter of Maccabi Tel Aviv, has a son and a daughter in Denmark, where he lived for 10 years.
'We are very, very worried,' Mr Elgarat says softly. 'We hope that he is alive, but if he is not alive we hope that we can get him back and bury him with all the honour we can.'
As a police officer in the first and second intifadas, Mr Elgarat has seen his share of violence.
Initially, he bought into the softer tone of protest adopted by the forum and its consistent presence in what is now referred to as Hostages Square in central Tel Aviv, adjacent to the IDF's headquarters.
But he added: 'It was when I was in the United States and I heard the prime minister's speech in the UN where he said the only way the hostages come out is when Hamas surrenders – when I heard that I thought we need to be more aggressive, because he doesn't have any intention of bringing them out because of his coalition with [Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich [Mr Netanyahu's hard-Right coalition partners].'
Along with his supporters, he feels that the past two weeks have proved them right: that the glacial and tenuous progress of hostage releases shows they are not the priority.
His decision to wear a Holocaust-style yellow Star of David, modified to include the date of Oct 7, is, to put it mildly, highly controversial in the Jewish world.
But he believes that the emaciated state of the three hostages released last week is ample vindication.
'When they saw those three come out on Saturday, a lot of people got in touch with me and said: 'Danny, you're right.''
Mr Elgarat feels nothing but love for the other affected families – he just disagrees with their methods.
'They're singing in the square, they're speaking, they're doing yoga… This will not convince Netanyahu to bring them all home. He needs to see that public opinion is against him. He needs to see people on the street.'
The result of this thinking is the Begin Bridge group, named after the walkway across one of Tel Aviv's main thoroughfares under which Mr Elgarat and like-minded hostage families protest on most nights.
It's a noisy, disruptive affair: drums, whistles, loudhailers and accusatory placards in abundance, in stark contrast to the tone in Hostages Square, a couple of streets away.
On Thursday, Mr Elgarat was having a rare night off from the protest to take part in a school event.
This did not stop protesters invading the dual carriageway and bringing traffic to a halt no fewer than three times in 90 minutes.
'Show us your support,' they yelled at the vehicles through loudspeakers.
It prompts a taxi driver in the front rank of stationary vehicles to get out and enthusiastically usher one of the protest's main voices, Mali Darvish, onto his roof, whereupon she recites the names of all the missing hostages, and between each one, the crowd shouts 'ach'shav', the Hebrew for 'now'.
An irate commuter berates a nearby policeman for not taking any action to prevent the blockage.
They give him short shrift, knowing that the blockage will probably only last a few minutes.
On the weekend, however, it is a different story. Thousands of protesters gather, rather than the hundred-odd on Thursday, and the Tel Aviv police are often replaced with the quasi-military border police. They are more aggressive and probably come from communities less sympathetic to the hostages' cause.
Among the crowd at Thursday's protest was 86-year-old Yocheved Lipschitz, the first hostage to be released in October 2023, who famously shook the hand of her Hamas captive and said 'shalom' as she was handed over.
A lifelong peace activist, she clearly thought her time was better spent blocking the Begin road rather than chanting in Hostages Square, although she is involved with both groups.
'This is life now,' she said. 'They [the hostages] are there, and we are here. We have a voice and they have no voice. Until they return, I will be here.'
Her British daughter, Dr Sharone Lifschitz, was in attendance, supporting her mother.
For them, it is not only about showing solidarity with the other families. Yocheved's husband, Oded, is still a captive of Hamas.
'Some people feel you can negotiate with the government and others feel that it's very straightforward: that until they come back we have to pressure the government,' she said.
The placards are as provocative as they come, with messages including 'crime minister', 'you're responsible' and 'Netanyahu is a sponsor of Hamas.'
Among the protesters there are mordant suggestions that families of the forum adopt a more peaceful tone amid fear the government will discriminate against their loved ones when it comes to hostage release, a controversial claim that the government refutes.
In one sense, the irate driver is exactly the person that Mr Elgarat and his comrades are targeting – less religious, mainstream Israelis who were not directly affected by Oct 7.
While polls consistently show overwhelming support for a hostage release deal, the protest leader is convinced that Mr Netanyahu will not act until he sees it manifested on the streets.
'People continue to live like nothing has happened,' he said, 'watching reality TV and arguing over which song to choose for Eurovision.'
'We need an uprising. We need to stay here until Netanyahu does the deal.'
It is a big call from someone on his 125th day of hunger strike, allowing himself only water during the day and a bowl of soup at night, and visibly tired.
It is impossible to know which protest group Itzik would join.
Given his easy-going nature – 'you could speak to him for five minutes and feel you've known him all your life,' says his brother – perhaps he would be tempted by the more peaceful tone of Hostages Square.
But he is not free. So, for now, it is up to his brother, a tough man with a big heart, to lead the fight as he sees fit.
Danny Elgarat is going to carry on doing things his way.