Thursday was the 300th day of the Israel-Hamas war and the 300th day of captivity for over 100 hostages still held by Hamas. For Leah Goldin, mother of Lt. Hadar Goldin, who was slain and whose body was taken hostage by Hamas in Operation Protective Edge, Thursday was also the 3,650th day – the 10th year – of waiting for her son to be brought home.
The morning of October 7 was a turbulent one for Goldin, who remembers a mess of sirens. Her husband, Simha, turned on his phone and went to the other room to check what was going on before returning, white as a sheet, to update the family about the infiltration, the massacre, and the hostage taking.
Goldin’s son Tzur called them around 10 a.m. “He said, ‘I am going to the reserves. Your mission is to connect the families so that no family walks the road alone like we did for all those years.’”
By the afternoon, the Goldins had partnered with Psagot, a PTSD treatment organization, and by that night they went to the press. By Monday, 622 people had contacted them, and these people became the basis of what is today the Hostage and Missing Persons Family Forum.
The Goldin family handed the names they had collected over to the forum, ending their job as organizers and becoming “like one of the other families,” said Goldin.
But in the days and months following the 7th, the Goldin family was often treated as different or separate from the other families.
“They didn’t count us,” said Goldin, explaining that Hadar and the other hostages held from before October 7 – Oron Shaul, Hisham al-Sayed, and Avera Mengistu – were at first excluded from the IDF count of the hostages held by Hamas.
Goldin had to fight to get officials and the forum to include Hadar on posters and in the IDF’s official count of the hostages.
There was also sometimes an unwillingness to hear them, Goldin described. “They would tell us we were in a ‘different place’ than the other families,” she said, adding that she felt that maybe her family’s experience meant they could offer important perspective and experience.
For some of the families, maintaining this mental distinction may have been to protect themselves from the fear the Goldin family inspired.
To look at a family that has been fighting for 10 years to bring their son home from captivity when your own child has just been taken hostage is to look into the most frightening possibility come to life.
On October 7, in many ways the Goldins became the family that said “I told you so,” an awful position to be in, as Goldin described.
One of the family’s sayings for years now has been “whoever abandons the dead will abandon the injured, and eventually will abandon the living,” said Goldin.
This idea stems from the moral imperative of returning those killed for proper burial, a value in all religions and historically a vital tenet, said Goldin.
Historically speaking, “at the end of a war, the dead are returned – it is not up for negotiation,” she said.
Failing to meet this most basic moral tenet, of bringing back your dead for proper burial, is the first step in a slippery moral slope that will lead you to abandon the injured and then the living, said Goldin.
When looking at October 7, the abandonment becomes obvious, she added.
A long process of fighting for justice
The Goldin family formed connections with many residents of the Gaza border area when, in response to 2018 Gazan protests along the border fence in which coffins decorated with the pictures of Hadar as well as the other captives were hoisted, they began to gather weekly at the Black Arrow Monument near the border.
“Slowly, residents of the Gaza border communities started coming [to the gatherings] – from Ein Habesor and Sa’ad – religious, secular, right and left, people whom I would never have met without Hadar.”
Some of the residents of the South echoed the idea of the slippery slope to Goldin ־ “Hadar and Oron were sent to defend us, and they were abandoned; we will be abandoned,” they told her.
And that is exactly what happened, said Goldin.
Part of the abandonment of Hadar is exemplified in how Israel handles terrorism, said Goldin. The “abandonment, as far as I am concerned, starts at the point where we give up on our values and our soldiers, and at the same time keep giving the enemy everything it wants,” she said, saying that the policy for dealing with terrorism was meant to include reciprocity – humanitarian treatment in return for humanitarian treatment.
Practically speaking, although Israel does not use the words “agreement” or “deal,” agreements and deals have been made with Hamas for years, Goldin described.
In spite of Israel’s insistence that “terrorists with blood on their hands will not be set free,” practically speaking they are set free, she said.
Over the years, Israel has not made use of international law to demand Hadar and the other hostages back in return for agreements, she added.
It all comes down to the need for reciprocity in humanitarian treatment and for Israel to insist on this, said Goldin, “because we also have rights.”
Goldin gave an example of a revelation that intensified her feeling of abandonment. When meeting with Qatari officials in 2019, “I asked them, in return for all the money [sent to Hamas], can we ask for Hadar? They said, ‘Of course. No [officials have been] asking.’”
“That sentence killed me.”
Looking for international assistance
FEELING THAT Israel was not going to bring Hadar back, the Goldin family started trying to make changes in the international arena.
Goldin explained her family’s gut feeling about the responsibility of the international community: “Hadar was killed during a violation of a humanitarian ceasefire, and since the ceasefire was brokered by the US and UN [and] supported by the EU, they should be no less responsible for his return than they were for the ceasefire.”
The pursuit of solutions in the international arena eventually led the family to taking a critical part in bringing about UN Security Council Resolution 2474, on persons reported missing during armed conflict.
One of the meanings of the resolution is that when UN member states initiate agreements directly after a conflict, they should be responsible for the return of the dead, said Goldin, adding that despite this resolution and the shift in responsibility it creates, in practice it has not changed how things work in reality.
It is another moral slippery slope – one where the first step down is the international community accepting a standing violation of human rights as part of a ceasefire, in spite of its resolutions.
“If you don’t rectify the 2014 ceasefire by returning Hadar, then you institutionalize a new format of a ceasefire when you allow terrorists to kidnap and kill our soldiers,” she said, adding that this is exactly what happened on October 7.
“What is the meaning of a ceasefire if you violate it?” Goldin asked. If you accept that in a ceasefire or following agreements with Hamas they will continue holding hostages, what does a ceasefire mean?
This isn’t a foregone conclusion, said Goldin, adding that many countries have the ability to pressure Hamas by leveraging international aid.
AGREEMENTS WITH Hamas, whether they consist of providing aid or business agreements, are still agreements, said Goldin, expressing the frustration of watching these happen while her humanitarian needs are left unanswered.
Goldin said she has asked Israel’s political and military leadership over the years where their relationship with Gazan officials leaves her?
“You have made an alliance with Yahya Sinwar, so where does that leave me? Am I the enemy?
“They got very mad at me when I said that,” she said, adding that today the hostage families are openly accused of being the enemy by Israelis.
They are accused of being against Israel or its leadership, but “they are not against; they just want their parents and family back from terrorists.”
Goldin described a difficult situation watching hostage families suffer the same disappointments she herself remembers so clearly from the first years of Hadar’s captivity.
“They are all dressed up and ready to meet their loved ones,” she said, saying it hurts to see them let down each time.
The loss of values the family has been talking about for years, the failure to bring the dead home for proper burial and the subsequent slide into abandonment of the injured and the living, described by Goldin, has previously seemed abstract, and not understood by many as practical advice.
It’s another painful instance of “we told you so” for the family.
“We told you so, but when we told you, it sounded like it was coming from [an altitude of] 40,000 feet,” she said, explaining the difficulty in seeing the family’s talk of values as more than high-level ideology.
“But it isn’t abstract, it is reality.”