I’ve developed a strange obsession of late. Each weekend, when Hamas’s hostages have been released back to Israel, I sit on social media watching family reunion videos. Again and again and again.
It began with the first group. Seeing Emily Damari back with her mother Mandy, who campaigned so relentlessly on her behalf. Making a “rock on” sign with her mangled, shot up hand, turning her injury into a symbol of defiance.
Even more affecting for me was watching Emily’s many friends celebrate her release, lifting the television reporter onto their shoulders in ecstatic joy. That one made me cry.
In fact I well up as a matter of course watching these videos. Ofer Kalderon, jumping out of his jeep to greet and blow kisses to his cycling group, who were escorting him in a guard of honour on his way to the hospital. His family dancing an euphoric Am Yisrael Chai to celebrate his release.
Sasha Troufanov reunited with his mother Yelena and girlfriend Sapir — both of them also former hostages, among the few people on earth who have a true sense of what he’d just experienced.
And on it goes. All of these people somehow feel like distant family to me, such are the bonds of Jewish peoplehood. Sometimes, though, there’s a slight personal connection and I feel even more overwhelmed. When Tal Shoham came out a couple of weeks ago, I thought back to interviewing his father Gilad Korngold, on the eve of the first ceasefire exchange.
Freed hostages (L-R) Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Daniella Gilboa and Karina Ariev watch at the Rabin Medical Center as their IDF surveillance soldier colleague Agam Berger is released from Hamas captivity in Gaza on January 30, 2025 (Israel Defense Forces)
Gilad was exhausted, trying not to hope too much, shielding himself from the distinct possibility that his son was coming home in a coffin. What would he do if he saw his son again, I asked. “We have a plan for when he comes out,” he told me. “We want to meet him, hug him, and then send him to be with his family. That is where he should be.”
Gilad cried as he imagined this moment. Even the thought of it was too much to bear. And yet suddenly there Tal was, hugging his family again, embracing his father once more.
Even amid the shuddering horror of Hostage Square, no, that’s not right, particularly amid the shuddering horror of Hostage Square, I felt jealous of a society that is tied together by such resolute bonds
Sometimes it feels like a guilty pleasure, watching these videos on repeat. I know that there are so many hostages who haven’t come home, and many who never will. I know that so many thousands of Palestinians have died in the war that followed October 7. I know that there is so much misery to go around, and yet it makes these videos somehow all the more precious. A flicker of unadulterated joy, seeing a sundered family reunited, feeling as though the Jewish people are somehow just that bit more whole again. That the world has been nudged back towards its proper state after the unnatural horror of their captivity.
Emily Damari in surgery for her injured left hand
The high doesn’t last long, of course. Other thoughts and anxieties crowd in. Which is probably why I keep going back to watch them again like an emotional junkie.
Beyond the tears and the hugs, I think what I’m really addicted to is seeing the depth of love on display. The adoration of life. The desperate yearning to be with those we love. Because there’s another, stranger and more surprising emotion I also feel while watching these videos: envy.
It’s the same strange, unexpected envy I felt in Hostage Square in January, reporting on the ceasefire deal as it came into being. Standing in a square with thousands of people in varying states of deep emotional distress, drained and exhausted after months of campaigning, crying and calling for their loved ones’ release. In a country that has been fighting a brutal war for 15 months. That has been fighting its entire eight decade history to exist and keep existing. And yet, somehow, I was the one feeling jealous.
What I envied was my fellow Jews’ sense of togetherness. The depth of their commitment to one another. The strength of their will to live, to be reunited, to fight for each other’s right to exist in peace and freedom. Even amid the shuddering horror of Hostage Square, no, that’s not right, particularly amid the shuddering horror of Hostage Square, I felt jealous of a society that is tied together by such resolute bonds. It’s not a feeling one often has in Britain today. One rarely feels such bonds in Britain today.
I’m not naive about Israel nor do I wish to fetishise its anguish. This is a country riven by toxic divisions that split orthodox and secular, Jew and Arab, right and left, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It faces existential threats from within as well as without. Its path is violent and uncertain. No doubt many Israelis envy the tranquility of my life in placid north London.
And yet when I returned home after that trip, back to a country tired and bored with itself, fractious and petty and adrift in trivial culture war battles, the sense of perverse envy stayed with me.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Israel, despite all the country’s travails, they have that why. But in Britain? I’m not so sure.
