Oded Lifshitz, the veteran Israeli peace activist, journalist and founder member of Kibbutz Nir Oz will finally be laid to rest today. He was kidnapped on 7 October and held hostage by Palestinian Islamic Jihad who invaded Israel alongside Hamas that day. After his body was returned to Israel last week, forensic evidence revealed he was murdered in captivity over a year ago.
I never met Oded and sadly never will. But I have had the privilege of meeting and working with his daughter Sharone who, amid the horror of the past 17 months, has been a beacon of eloquence, determination and tireless struggle for her mother Yocheved, who was also kidnapped but released after 17 days, for her father and for all the hostages. She has inspired so many inside and beyond the Jewish community.
I first met Sharone at a press conference I helped organise on 12 October 2023. The day before, the tenacious Israeli protest organiser I’d worked with prior to 7 October, Sharon Shochat, suggested we do a press conference for London based hostage family members. I agreed but asked if she knew any. She would find some, she said. She came back to me later that day with two names: Sharone Lifschitz and Noam Sagi.
I met both for the first time 15 minutes before they addressed a roomful of global media. It quickly became clear that both Sharone and Noam were not just good communicators: they were special. At a time of chaos, confusion and personal anguish, after Hamas had destroyed the kibbutz they grew up on, massacred their friends and the children of their friends and kidnapped their parents, they exuded a rare combination of strength and decency. The room was spellbound.
“I don’t accept butchery from Boko Haram, Islamic State or from our neighbours, Hamas,” said Sharone. “They have shown us that they have no mercy.”
Dr Sharone with her father Oded
It is astonishing that even now there are people surprised by the extent of Hamas’ depravity. We should be sickened when Hamas and other Palestinian factions paraded the coffins of baby Kfir and Ariel Bibas in front of Gazan children last week, when they switched the body of their mother Shiri and of course when we discover through forensic examination that they were murdered by terrorists with their bare hands. But no one any longer has a right to be surprised.
Sharone, a filmmaker and lecturer, has found the refusal of some to grasp the extent of Hamas’ evil exasperating. “Sometimes, I want to shout at the news on TV, to remind people that their indulgent engagement in hatred of one side is so futile, so self-congratulatory,” she wrote in Haaretz last year.
Sharone has managed to maintain both her solidarity with her community and her compassion for Palestinian civilians
Sharone’s mother, Yocheved, like Oded a lifelong peace activist, when in captivity told Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar that he should be “ashamed of himself”. As the lawyers, Adam Rose and Adam Wagner, who have provided pro bono legal representation to British linked hostage families, said last week, “Yocheved must be the only person to have met Sinwar, Netanyahu and the Pope, and given them all a piece of her mind.”
Sharone, meanwhile, never stopped campaigning relentlessly, for her father and all the hostages, while bringing empathy, humanity and moral clarity into every media appearance. Back and forth between Israel and the UK, she has instinctively and intelligently walked a tightrope between different and conflicting realities. On the one hand demonstrating on the streets of Israel for a hostage deal for which the Israeli government has often proved an obstacle. On the other, speaking to the British media knowing that too much of the discourse in the UK dehumanises Israelis while justifying or ignoring the evil of Hamas.
She has managed to maintain both her solidarity with her community and her compassion for Palestinian civilians. Like her parents, who have famously spent retirement driving sick Palestinian children for treatment in Israeli hospitals, Sharone’s voice is one of peace. “My father spent his life fighting for peace. We are all his children when we ask for peace,” she told the media the day I met her.
There are some who will insinuate that Oded Lifshitz was naive. In fact the opposite is true. He along with others founded Kibbutz Nir Oz to provide security on Israel’s border, while pursuing good relations with their Gazan neighbours. He was under no illusions about Hamas, living as he did on the frontline of their terror, and paying the ultimate price. But his vision was rooted in an understanding that peace and security are ultimately dependent on each other.
Is that more naïve than believing an unresolved conflict can be indefinitely “managed” without exploding uncontrollably? Is that more naïve than believing that a leader who so demonstrably failed to secure his country on October 7 is the only leader who can provide security today? Is that more naïve than believing the remaining hostages can be freed by military operations alone, without a deal?
Sharone has often made the point that eight Israeli hostages have been rescued though military operations while many more – 81 in November 2023 and 25 in recent weeks – have been returned alive through a deal.
I know that even as she processes her family’s loss she will continue campaigning to get every hostage home. Just last Saturday she told a demonstration in Israel that, “So much we have lost that can never be restored. But the hostages, both the living and the dead, can and must be returned. We cannot accept them not returning. As long as they remain there, we are not whole.”
And I know that as she campaigns, she will do so with strength and decency, because without both, we have neither. May the memory of Oded Lifshitz be a blessing, and may his daughter’s voice continue to be heard.
