For the past two years, Israelis have been walking around with the feeling that some unknown muscle is tightly and involuntarily clenched. This is evident in the set lines on the faces of passersby, in the way people hunch their shoulders as if against the cold, in brittle and combustible interactions at the supermarket or gas station. The feeling intensifies when the war news is particularly awful, like the day last summer when a hostage I knew, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was murdered by his Palestinian captors with five other Israelis in a tunnel under Rafah.
But even on “quiet” days, the ones when we don’t have to rush our children to the safe room because of a missile alert, or steer them away from the news, it doesn’t go away.
It’s a sensation so protracted that many of us stopped noticing—until the moment, this weekend, when the muscle relaxed.
On Saturday night, more than 100,000 people rallied for the hostages in Tel Aviv and across the country. The vigils are a weekly occurrence, part of a grim routine that has become familiar since Palestinian gunmen seized 251 Israelis and foreign nationals during the massacres of October 7, 2023. As of Sunday, 20 live hostages are thought to remain in Gaza, along with the bodies of 28 others. For two years, the faces of hostages have looked out at us from walls, bus stops, and highway overpasses. Rallies large and small, and yellow hostage ribbons, flags, and pins, have become part of the Israeli landscape to such an extent that our kids think the country has always been like this.
