On the morning of 8 October 2023, Sharone Lifschitz woke up at her London home and thought, “That’s it. I’m gonna die. This is not possible.” The previous morning she had been on a train to York with her husband and their 12-year-old son when she checked her phone and read reports that Hamas militants had broken through the barrier surrounding Gaza and were attacking nearby communities in southern Israel.
In a panic, she called her parents, who lived in Nir Oz, a kibbutz 1.7 miles from the Gaza border. No one answered. “Then I called my brother, and my brother answered with the kind of voice I’ve never heard before,” she told me. “He said it was as bad as can be.” Lifschitz’s 85-year-old mother and 83-year-old father were among the 251 hostages Hamas had taken to Gaza that day.
With the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) absent throughout most of the Hamas attack, and official information in those first few hours sparse, people inside and outside of Israel turned to social media for real-time updates. When Lifschitz tuned into Al Jazeera, she saw footage of her parents’ house on the kibbutz, as well as of her parents’ friend being taken to the Strip on a golf cart. “I saw it unfolding with everybody else, but with the exception that quite a few of the people were people I knew all my life.”
Seventeen days after the attack, her mother, Yocheved, was freed, along with another hostage. Footage of the release shows her being guided by workers from the International Committee for the Red Cross, before she stops and turns back to squeeze the hand of one of the Hamas militants who had held her captive. “My mum came back as herself, and we’re truly grateful for it,” Lifschitz told me, when we met on a rainy morning in London nearly a year later. “She came back with the same opinions. I remember a moment within a week of coming back, where she turned to me and said something to the effect of, ‘We made peace with the Germans, Sharone. We will make peace with the Palestinians, too.’”
For a year now, as Israel’s war on Gaza has ground on and the conflict has widened in Lebanon, Lifschitz has lobbied the Israeli government to do more to secure the release of the remaining hostages – not least her father, Oded. For Lifschitz, watching the fighting escalate over the past year – and in particular the past few weeks – has been harrowing. “I think that each of us must, at every turn, look back and say, ‘How does it feel for the hostages?’”
When she heard people celebrating the attacks on Hezbollah in mid-September, in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Iran-backed militant group exploded, she was dismayed by how completely the hostages had been removed from the conversation. “How does that look from a tunnel in Gaza?” If you’re a hostage, “does it make you feel you have a chance of surviving?”
Sharone Lifschitz was born in Israel in 1971 and grew up in Nir Oz, the kibbutz her parents had helped found in 1956. The second youngest of four, she is the family’s only girl. Her parents were peace activists and socialists. Her father worked as a journalist for a “small, left newspaper”, and covered the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in 1982, in which as many as 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese refugees were slaughtered by an Israel-backed Christian militia. An Arabic speaker, Oded was also heavily involved with the Peace Now movement, which advocated for a two-state solution. “For him, Zionism was not about land or the whole land, or which part of the land,” she said. “It was about a safe home for the Jews.”
Some of her earliest memories are of attending peace demonstrations with her father. “I would sit on his shoulders. And I had absolutely no interest in politics, but I did like the ice cream at the end and having some private time with my father,” she said. In 1979, “Israel made peace with Egypt, and that was incredibly exciting. I remember experiencing it as a child and seeing the incredible happiness from my parents and in the people around me.”
Lifschitz moved to London in 1992 to study architecture and art. She later became a film-maker, and travelled to Israel to visit her family on the kibbutz often. Over the years, through the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the successive terms of Benjamin Netanyahu governments in Israel, the prospect of a two-state solution seemed further away than ever. Oded and Yocheved spent the decade before their abduction volunteering for a charity that helped Palestinians access medical treatment outside the Strip. Lifschitz said her parents’ belief that peace was not only achievable but inevitable never wavered.
For Lifschitz, that belief is among one of the more haunting aspects of her father’s ordeal. “On 7 October, so many bridges were torn down, and these are bridges my parents, for example, built over a lifetime,” she said. “It’s the moment at which he saw his life’s work going up in flames.” Lifschitz has had no official updates on her father’s status or whereabouts in many months. She hasn’t given up hope, but, she told me, “It’s hard to imagine how he would survive the chaos there.”
It is difficult for Lifschitz to fathom that a year has gone by since 7 October. “I remember my mum coming back, and we thought it [was] crazy that she was there for 17 days,” she said. Yet after 12 months of war, 97 of the hostages are still not free, and Israel is no more safe.
Lifschitz views Hamas with anger and disgust, but takes a similar view of Israel’s prime minister. In the initial days after the 7 October attacks, many in Israel were furious that Netanyahu had allowed such a catastrophic breach to take place. When Israel launched its retaliatory attack on Gaza, many of the hostage families felt that his stated goal of eradicating Hamas eclipsed his efforts to free the captives.
“Netanyahu, for 15 years, has built up Hamas in order to prevent the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] and the Palestinian Authority from becoming strong enough, because if they were strong enough, then there [would] be no obstacle to a two-state solution,” she said. “I think that the government of Israel, from the beginning, saw [7 October] as an opportunity. I believe that his aim was to stay in power. And so far, he succeeded in that.”
Lifschitz has little time for talk of reshaping the regional order or the zero-sum approach of those on either side. She loathes the way some treat the war like sport – a winner-takes-all proposition. “There are people from Lebanon and Israel and Palestine that want something different,” she said. “I am petrified because a lot of good intention in the Middle East gets hijacked by the fanatics. It doesn’t take a lot for the fanatics to blow up years of work. And so [one] of myquestions now is: how do we make it impossible for the fanatics?”
Sharone Lifschitz has other questions. Is her father alive? Will the hostages be rescued before it’s too late? When will the suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and beyond be over? “In the end, there will be a ceasefire,” she told me. “The question is, how many people will lose their life before that?”
[See also: The Middle East on the brink]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history