For the first time, I heard Maayan Snapir's speech in early 2024 erstwhile I was a volunteer in kibbutzes at hazard of bankruptcy due to failure of employees after the October 7 attack.
Maayan, the granddaughter of 2 hostages, is simply a relentless advocate of their release and a comprehensive agreement ending the war. He speaks with awesome clarity and insight. Even in the face of her tragedy, she remained strong, hopeful, and faithful to her principles. In this interview – the introduction of which is the transcription of her speech, delivered at the Forum of Hostages and Lost Families – we talk about the concept of peace in the planet after 7 October, the request for tiny and individual changes, the way the government handles the issue of hostages, and how October horror can change Israeli society.
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My grandparents, Oded Lifshitz and Yoheved Lifshitz, lived in Nir Oz, a kibbutz in the south of Israel, close the Gaza Strip. On October 7, a 4th of its residents were murdered or kidnapped.
October 7 began simply, the first rocket dropped at 6:29. Just due to the fact that rockets fired from Gaza are part of the lives of people surviving in kibbutzes located in the south. It is so average that my grandparents do not even have a peculiar safe area – this function is performed by their bedroom.
When we contacted the grandparents, they said there was nothing to worry about. However, there were more and more disturbing signs and finally, at 8:30, we called them for the last time. Grandpa answered and said: I think I hear Arabic. Then they stopped picking up. erstwhile the surveillance footage from those areas went online, we looked for any signs that they were alive. We watched like militants Hamas They kill our family's friends.
Terrorists walked on the kibbutz for 9 hours. At that time only 1 IDF tank arrived – erstwhile the soldiers realized how many fighters there were, they immediately turned around. Later, erstwhile I arrived in Nir Oz, I saw a grotesque painting: Hamas made himself a station in my grandfather's cactus garden, erstwhile a wonderful place, now completely destroyed, with chairs placed in the mediate and a table full of snacks. The day after the attack on the kibbutz of those who remained and survived, they were evacuated to Ejlat. They all stayed at the same hotel and tried to gather information about who saw what. No 1 knew anything about my grandparents, so they were legally granted missing status.
We became certain that my grandma was kidnapped erstwhile my brother read the Al-Jazeera study that said Hamas He wanted to free her and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper, but the Israeli government refused – we did not know how to interpret it. 3 days later, we received a call from the authorities confirming that Grandma was alive and would shortly be released.
My household was transported from Eilat by military helicopter, and I immediately went to Tel Aviv. I remember moving to the infirmary crying and trying to explain to a confused caregiver who I was. erstwhile I yet saw my grandmother, she was in a wheelchair, although she had never utilized it before. She seemed frightened and confused. Her eyes were wandering, and while everyone was leaning toward her, she had no eyes on anyone. Then I realized that there were no glasses – she did not see.
After a while, she started describing everything from the beginning. She said that after our last call, the terrorists tried to break through the door to their house, but Grandpa kept them. Then they started shooting. Bullets came through the door and his hands. erstwhile they went inside, they beat him with a gun. The first thing they did after taking over the home was, surprisingly, to effort on my grandmother's shoes – many years ago she was injured, so she has special, very comfortable couples. The last time she saw her grandfather, they pulled him out the door, and he fell to the ground. She's dead," she said.
Then they put her on a motorcycle. They ran through the fields all the way to Gaza. They drove her around the city as a reward – the crowd shouted and threw hard objects at her, wounding her forehead and breaking ribs.
They went down the stairs to the tunnels, marched for a long time. My grandma was barefoot all this time, so she was going to hurt her feet. She was just wearing a nightgown. After any time they arrived, there they separated the hostages – 5 people per room. They were fed pistachios and cucumbers, water was served.
About a week after the kidnapping of Yahya Sinwar [since 2017 Hamas leader in Gaza—ed.] came to visit the prisoners and asked how they felt. He told them not to worry. Grandma replied, “How dare you ask me how I feel after what you did to me?” He didn't answer. 1 day she was just pulled out of there – the guards abruptly began to behave very kindly and attentively. any time later there was another release of the hostages. 1 of the women who made it back told us that she was being held in the attic in Gaza with my grandfather. She claimed he was injured, sick, and very worried about his wife. Then the militants took him somewhere, allegedly to a doctor, but never returned. It gave us hope that he might inactive be alive, but we inactive don't know much.
As for communication with the government, for the first 2 weeks there was none. Then there were regular meetings erstwhile a week, but we never knew more than the public. Grandma's better. She goes to the moon and speaks in public whenever she can. Upon returning from captivity, it was very hard for her – she learned that all her possessions had been burned. She lived in a tiny old home close Ramat Gan, along with another released hostages.
Now I would describe myself as individual who acts in the name of peace. I believe in peace and everything I do is motivated by this faith. Importantly, my grandparents were besides his advocates – as part of their volunteering as drivers they helped the Gazans scope wellness care in Israel. Grandma, despite everything she's been through, inactive believes in peace.
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Casper Max Lubiewski: erstwhile I talk to people, including my friends, there seems to be a consensus that on 7 October he changed us all. He shook all Israeli and all hebrew to the depths, proved to be a political and ideological earthquake. How did this event change who you are?
Maayan Snapir: Before October 7, of course, I cared about the conflict, felt sorry for his victims, and longed for a change. But erstwhile he hit me so personally, I felt that I could not only be a part of tragedy but besides progress. My views and values have not changed in the least, but now I talk them up, I meet people from all over the world, I perceive to them.
Personally – and you won't hear it from many people – I don't even care if you see yourself as more right-wing or left-wing. Ultimately, we all have the same desires, the request for safety and dignity. More crucial than political views is what you do with these values. In staying so hopeful and calm, it helped me to remember that as I do not feel represented by my government and my spokespersons, people in Gaza are in a akin situation.
Sure, many Palestinians decide to be part of a policy I disagree with, but There are no specified ones here either.. A large part of our societies are silenced and scared, and I don't think it's fair to ignore it. Moreover, I think there are quite a few things we must do in our own country before we effort to change others – until you accomplish peace inside, it is impossible to bring peace outside.
What do you mean, interior peace?
Can anyone outside look at Israel and honestly say that there is peace in our country? The situation of haredim, arabian Israelis, ongoing protests – these are just a fewer of the issues that I would draw attention to, and which clearly show that we are in a state of crisis.
But it is besides worth highlighting how we treat each another in everyday life. Unless there is simply a crisis situation, social ties barely exist. We're not dating, we're very alienated and indifferent. In this region, we live in constant force and are rather tolerant of death and injustice. We request to get free of these habits from the inside so we can truly decision forward.
As Jews, we are accustomed to being hurt, and we are reunited with our past of oppression. In a sense, judaic past is simply a communicative of repetitions—continuous wars and constant clashes in which opponents change, but we, allegedly, stay the same. present people remember the lives they had before October 7 and say how peaceful they were then, but that's not true.
There is an anecdote that Daniel Bar Tal, an Israeli social psychologist, tells us that Netanyahu, after being guided after Auschwitz, concluded that the top threat to the judaic people would be, paradoxically, peace. He fears that there are fewer things that could bring the Jews together as effectively as fear of losing Israel. What do you think?
That's definitely the communicative we're telling each other, but possibly it's time to tell another story? What a tragic and disappointing message that the only thing that unites Jews is our conflict for existence and war, which is simply a low common denominator for a nation with specified a long and fascinating history. Of course, erstwhile you ran and hit a tree, your first instinct is to get out of the car. Then you wonder how it happened – but we seldom think about why we were driving so fast. We hit a tree on October 7th. Unfortunately, our stories in Israel are both limited and restrictive.
While in advanced school, I went to Poland for a school journey to see erstwhile concentration camps. But it was only in adulthood that I learned the Polish communicative about planet War II. Although I knew earlier that many Poles risked their lives to save Jews, I had no thought that at the same time they were going through their own genocide. You seldom hear specified things in Israel.
Another time a female came to the Hostage and Missing Families Forum and told us how she became friends with a Palestinian household from Gaza. They laughed together, but erstwhile she wanted to take a image together, the household refused, saying that even if Hamas knew that the Gazans were being treated in Israel, they would never accept a image of happy Palestinians alongside happy Jews. We must begin writing an alternate communicative for the judaic people, more optimistic and future-oriented.
The government said from the very beginning that there was no time to think about these large questions, to look for work or to hazard sharing even more. Do you agree that we should wait until this war and even this conflict is over to build this alternate communicative to last in the short term? Or are you already imagining it?
I think the first thing we should do is look at ourselves, our families and the communities in which we live, and ask ourselves: what I tolerate and what in fact is unbearable? How did we all get here and then what? I know my grandfather, and I know he's utilizing his time in the tunnels to think about the answers to these questions. surviving here, we became very apathetic. I call on everyone to search innate care and empathy. We must remember that indifference allows for more indifference and abruptly we are in a conflict as long as ours.
How do you think the government has dealt with the hostage issue so far? This can be seen from many different perspectives, but it cannot be denied that at best power is simply ineffective. And in the context of this conflict, ineffectiveness means risking people's lives.
Did the power even deal with it? If bringing the hostages in was her priority, it would have happened immediately, at least a week later. The fact that it took so long, and that so fewer were saved through military operations, does not adhere to anything we know about our army and about how our governments usually operate. This is highly suspicious to me.
I'm not even certain that after what the current government did, I could call it my own. I don't want to give him any authority to act on my behalf. The fundamental social agreement between a citizen and the government was broken on 7 October. erstwhile I wonder why we are putting up with this war and this conflict, I think it's due to the fact that we're built on trauma, we experience it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even worse is that we have nowhere to turn and distance ourselves towards her – unless we effort to get deeper into it and break through it.
Although at first the return of hostages by everyone was seen as a priority, at 1 point more and more politicians began to wonder about the demolition of Hamas even at the expense of the kidnapped. I am certain that any have done so due to their selfish madness and political interest, but others have expressed legitimate concerns: do we not prolong the conflict by letting Hamas go distant and make more people die in the future? Many pointed to the actions, present considered incorrect, in the Gilad Shalit case [Salit is an Israeli soldier who was captured by Palestinian militants in 2006 and was held prisoner for 5 years. In 2011, an agreement was reached between Israel and Hamas whereby Shalit was released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, of whom 280 served life sentences for planning and/or conducting terrorist attacks on Israelis. 1 of the released prisoners was Yahya Sinwar – cars.]
I don't share that point of view. Hamas is more than an organization. It's an thought that can't just be destroyed. The right question would be, how do you get his roots out? Besides, haven't we already paid the highest price we could have paid? In my opinion, yes, even before any fighting in Gaza began. I think of all those people who lost their loved ones, and even the fact that at this point in Gaza more soldiers were killed than the people they were fighting for were kidnapped. I realize those who fear that freed Palestinian convicts will become Hamas terrorists in the future and endanger us again. But even if we destruct Hamas, how can we be certain that it will not be reborn shortly in another form?
Moreover, Israel has been indirectly financing Hamas for years, so we should ask: will Hamas be a threat to us due to the fact that we have financed them for so long or due to the fact that we will free any of the members of this group? Not to mention that our government's ministers should be in prison, and alternatively they preach that individual else must be locked up. This issue is not as black and white as many present it and, of course, in everything we do, we request to consider our future. The thing is, we just can't afford not to take the hostages back.
When listening to the Israeli left, it seems that the solution to this conflict is yet up to Israel. But don't you think we can overestimate our strength? That possibly we're not as powerful as we think we are, and yet we depend on what the Palestinians will do? Is the communicative of the left in Israel shallow and besides general? I think it is frequently more about expressing certain sentiments than making political proposals.
You don't gotta heal the world. You just gotta heal your own world. It is not us who gotta solve the problems of Palestinian society, although I am certain there are many of them and I do not think we should wait for them to do something. Instead, we gotta ask ourselves: How can we inspire Palestinians? Looking at us now, they see a nation of divided, frustrated and heartless people.
Perhaps erstwhile they see that we are rising and approaching each other, they will do the same. Remember – most in Gaza stay silent and observe our actions. As to what message the left is sending, there is surely a question of group reasoning and the very circumstantial protests that the left is organising, but I see a possible advantage in spreading specified narrative. It allows to attract more people and provides an argument for a more inclusive and wide movement.
I would like to decision on to more general questions about Israel. What is Zionism to you?
I think you'd gotta give me your definition of Zionism, but even then that would be a very hard question. Our anthem mentions the longing for the land of Israel and Jerusalem, but we have already achieved that. We have a country, and I'm not certain where the Zionist thought is right now. Look around – there is so much to do in Israel, not just at political level. Modern Zionism would gotta trust on making the country affordable and accessible to everyone, maintaining the infrastructure and mostly making it a better and more comfortable place to live.
With your memory back to school days, do you think you were brainwashed to make you feel and think about Israel's conflict and past in a certain way?
Aren't we all brainwashed? Yes, so do I, but isn't that what schools all over the planet do? It is rather average that the national education strategy presents a collective communicative about historical events. I don't think it's inherently manipulative just due to the fact that it's seen from the position of 1 nation. I don't know what I don't know. I learned everything from the Israeli perspective, so I'm not even certain I would have the instinct to ask any questions.
How divided is Israeli society? Has it reached a point from which there is no return or not yet? Daniel Bar Tal, whom I mentioned earlier, besides has a fascinating thought that events and emotions that take place in our lives mean nothing in themselves – this narrative, which follows them, helps us realize what just happened.
We are profoundly divided, but on October 7, it showed that we yet care for each other. A social initiative was immediately taken to aid victims. They all joined the way they could.
Let me repeat: I personally believe that if people talk to each another long enough, they will most likely discover that they have the same values, and only disagree in the way they want to implement them. October 7 should mean for Israelis to check the situation in the country. How can we heal from the bottom up? Yeah, we're sick and hurt, but how can we usage this impulse we've received to cure much deeper trauma?
We live in a time of large potential. We gotta ask ourselves: do we want to get up and do something about it? Do we like to forget and decision on? I think Israel can inspire not only the Palestinians but besides the world, if we do the right thing. I stay an optimist – I think God, the Universe or anyone else must believe in us, due to the fact that how else would we be able to last all this?
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Casper Max Lubiewski – author of the publication Smolanim – Leftists. Voices of the Israeli Left in a post-October 7th world (you can buy it for “every grace”, writing to the author
), climate and peace activist, past and sociology student at Humboldt University.
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Patrycja Wieczorkiewicz translated from English.
