Redeeming Hostages as part of the ethos of Contemporary Israel

Hostages (שבווים), by Duki Dror and Itay Landsberg, which premiered at the DocAviv festival last week, is a 6-part documentary series, made for TV broadcast.  It will be broadcast beginning the end of August, on consecutive weeks, on KAN television, which is Israel’s public broadcasting station.

I saw Episode 2 which was about the story of eight Nahal soldiers who were captured during the early years of the Lebanon War. Six were held by the PLO and two were held by Ahmad Jabril. The film told the story of the negotiations over how to get a sign of life, how many Palestinians were to be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for the Israeli soldiers, and the dilemmas in making the decisions.  

This episode highlighted the behind-the-scenes contribution of Princess Dina, who had been married to King Hussein of Jordan.  After their divorce, she married Salah Tamari, who was a leader of the PLO, and later became a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.  During the War in Lebanon, he was captured at Sidon, and Dina became an important go-between in the negotiations.  As part of this, she obtained visits with her husband and he was brought to see her in Israel.  On one occasion, he asked to meet a Holocaust survivor and they took him to meet Abba Kovner, the iconic partisan from WWII.  When Salah Tamari was released at the end of the episode, he said, basically what he learned from Abba Kovner, that we should have peace and the fighting must come to an end. 

The episode of this new series was extremely well-done, with superb artwork. It unfolded like a thriller. I felt that it was very striking to see how history can be so relevant to what we are experiencing today. 

After the screening, the filmmaker, Duki Dror, talked about the fact that he had been working on this series for two years, even before October 7^th.  This is not a new subject for Israel. He talked about an important dichotomy – the value of human life and mutual responsibility versus the ethos of sacrifice during a time of conflict and the need to win the war.  He defined the former as the essence of what we are about.  This was for me the central point of how different the hostage negotiations were in those days versus how they are handled today. 

Today, even with more than 125 hostages still remaining in Gaza, the current government’s representatives are not interested in meeting with the families and have abandoned the value of mutual responsibility.  It is tragic to see that this value is vanishing among the so-called leaders of Israel today. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating every Saturday night, and nearly every day now, to keep this value alive in contemporary Israeli society.