For the second successive Saturday, members of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum planned to merge the more sedate protest it has held weekly at Hostages Square with the vociferously anti-government protests located a few blocks away at Tel Aviv’s Begin Road.
The decision to merge the rallies last week was something of a watershed moment for the Forum, which says it has taken pains to stay apolitical throughout the last 11 months.
The crowd that massed last Saturday night to protest for a hostage deal and a new government was the largest yet in nearly a year of weekly demonstrations demanding freedom for those kidnapped on October 7.
With a current of anger and despair surging through Israeli society following the discovery of six hostages shot dead by their Hamas captors in a Gaza tunnel days earlier, many Israelis who may have previously avoided any of the rallies and protests of the previous months joined the throngs at Begin Road.
Alongside them were members of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the more vehement Begin Road demonstrators yelling, blowing whistles, drumming, waving flags and signs, setting bonfires and roadblocks, and even clashing with the police.
“We’re angrier,” said Gil Dickmann, the cousin of Carmel Gat, one of the six slain hostages whose bodies were found by the IDF on August 31 and brought back for burial. He pointed to what he described as the government’s decision to prioritize leaving the IDF in Gaza’s Philadelphi Corridor over a hostage deal last month as the point where his family turned against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Dickmann’s sister, Shay Dickmann, was one of the speakers at the merged Saturday rally, telling the crowd that “military pressure brought about [Carmel’s] death,” in direct pushback against the government’s claim that ongoing IDF pressure is an essential component in getting the hostages out.
“My sister was sort of a symbol for hope, and she was trying to hold this hope for a very long time, but that’s when she broke, and people got that,” Dickmann told The Times of Israel earlier this week. “Half a million people felt the same way.”
Dickmann and the other speakers stood on a podium erected at Begin Road as the Hostages Families Forum brought its familiar, more formal demonstration trappings from Hostages Square to the new location.
But some families of hostages, particularly from the hawkish Tikva Forum group, are deeply unhappy about the merged protests, accusing the Hostage Families Forum of unifying with the Begin protesters who openly blame the government for October 7. They claim these protesters are harming the war effort and the chances of freeing the hostages by pressing Netanyahu rather than Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
“The rallies play to the hands of Hamas,” said Nadav Miran, an active Tikva member whose brother Omri Miran was taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz.
“It’s like Sinwar is standing [approvingly] right there,” he told The Times of Israel, accusing all the protesters — the Begin protesters and the hostage-deal demonstrators — of serving Hamas by creating chaotic rifts in Israeli society. “The blood of my brother will be on your hands.”
Evolution of the protests
According to Ruby Chen, one of six hostage family representatives on the Forum’s steering committee, the decision to merge the Forum’s weekly Saturday night rally with the so-called Begin protesters, who have held parallel demonstrations outside Defense Ministry headquarters for many months, was aimed at widening their reach as far as possible.
“We at the Forum headquarters and the Begin folks had a very long conversation about how it could all play out,” said Chen, whose son Itay Chen was killed on October 7, with his remains held hostage in Gaza since. “As much as possible, we wanted to have as many people as possible to support us; that’s why we moved it there.”
Chen, a dual US citizen, has been an active voice in the Hostages Forum since October 7 when he first heard about the abduction of Itay, a soldier. He only learned in March that his son had been killed during the initial onslaught.
The Forum came together quickly in the days following the attack and is today a massive non-profit, run by the families and professional management, that has effectively become the official voice meant to represent the array of families of the 251 people taken hostage on October 7. (Ninety-seven of them remain captive, as well as four others held by Hamas for around a decade.)
The Forum fundraises to send hostage families on foreign delegations, for housing and financial support for the families who stopped working in order to rally for their loved ones, and to pay the professional staff.
It also provides a variety of services for the hostage families and volunteers, including mental health support, holistic treatments, and three meals a day, donated by a roster of tech companies and various Israeli communities, that are served in the cafeteria of its Tel Aviv headquarters. There’s also financial help offered through the Forum to the families, particularly the second and third tiers of the family, who could be partners, cousins or grandchildren and are not eligible for government help but have been fully involved in the struggle to free their family members.
Close to $2 million has been granted by the Hostage Forum financial committee to the hostage family members since October 7 — money raised first by UJA New York and then by other donors, offering primarily one-time grants to help with needs from childcare and transportation to new clothing for families who were evacuated from their homes. “Families get what they ask for, regardless of what they think of the Forum,” said a Forum staff member. “And they do take advantage of it,” she added, referring to all the hostage families, including those who are more aligned with the Tikva Forum.
Each hostage family is a member of the Forum and can vote on decisions made by the organization. Members of the forum declined to say if there was any dissent on the decision to join up with the Begin protests.
“There’s a need to unite,” said Chen, who added that the range of families whose loved ones were taken hostage means the group has to make room for a wide spectrum of political views while being careful not to endorse any specific ideology.
“The only way to keep us afloat and unified at the headquarters is that we do not do politics; that isn’t the intention,” he said.
The Forum first began putting on rallies in the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attack, situating them at the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, now renamed Hostages Square.
Meanwhile, large anti-government protests against plans to overhaul the judiciary that had become a regular feature for months on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street — at an intersection near the front gate of the Defense Ministry compound — were halted, with activists instead pouring their energy into helping those affected by the attack and ensuing war.
Almost immediately, some families of hostages began protesting and holding a vigil on Kaplan Street in front of the Defense Ministry’s gates nearest Hostages Square, seeing it as a more immediate location to voice their anguish and campaign for action to free their loved ones.
Around the same time, the Hostages Forum set up its headquarters in an office building in the same neighborhood, between Kaplan Street, the Defense Ministry compound and Hostages Square. The offices were lent to the forum by tech company Checkpoint.
Avichai Brodutch, whose wife and three children were taken hostage from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, sat vigil with his dog in front of the Defense Ministry, as did Hadas Calderon, who begged for the release of two of her children, Sahar, 17, and Erez, 12.
The Brodutchs and younger Calderon siblings were released during a November truce — Ofer Calderon, Hadas’s ex-husband, is still held hostage in Gaza — and other families of hostages took their places.
Those families were replaced by other hostage families, who moved their station around the corner to Begin Road and the official entrance to the Defense Ministry. In the months since, there have been daily protests, with both anti-government activists and like-minded relatives of hostages demanding a deal and angrily calling for the ouster of Netanyahu and his hawkish government for, they say, “abandoning” their loved ones on October 7 and ever since.
It’s a confusing, raucous mix of demonstrations and messaging.
As hostage families have moved in and out of view of the media according to their circumstances, certain family members have taken center stage at Begin, including Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan Zangauker was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7.
Zangauker, a single mother from Ofakim and a former Netanyahu voter, was mostly silent for the first months of her son’s captivity. By the winter, however, she had joined the then-small group at Begin, standing in the cold and rain, stopping traffic, making it clear that as a former Netanyahu voter, she no longer had any trust in the prime minister and considered that he had failed as the country’s leader.
As the months passed, the numbers at Begin grew, and anger and frustration mounted.
A watershed
When the six hostages were killed, many of the remaining hostage families grew still more fearful that their loved ones could suffer the same fate, said Yotam Cohen, who is active at Begin in support of his brother, Nimrod Cohen, a soldier who was taken hostage.
The rest of the Israeli public realized the same, said Cohen, who is often at Begin with his father, Yehuda Cohen.
“So now there’s more shouting and it’s less polite than Hostages Square, and it’s what the Begin families have felt from the start,” he said. “It’s the same battle; it’s a kind of unity.”
Cohen said some of the initial protesters at Begin were part of the anti-judicial overhaul crowd, and were using the location to continue their anti-government movement. As the war and hostage situation wore on, the number of protesters, supporting the call for a ceasefire and hostage deal, has grown, said Cohen.
However, some see the new decision to merge the Hostage Families Forum rallies with Begin Street protests as proof that the group has joined hands with the activists who led massive demonstrations against the judicial overhaul centered around the corner on Kaplan Street.
The Forum ‘became Kaplan’
The Hostages Forum “became Kaplan,” said Tzivka Mor, who co-founded the Tikva Forum, made up of families who prefer Israel not strike a deal with Hamas, believing that the only way to save the hostages is via continued IDF pressure on the terror group.
“Those running the Forum are those who ran Kaplan,” said Mor, naming political strategist Lior Chorev, and Dr. Haggai Levine, head of the Forum’s medical team. “It’s the politicization of the issue of the hostages.” He accused the forum of hiding its political agenda to avoid losing support.
Professionals from the Forum have repeatedly stated that it includes people from all backgrounds and walks of life, with the singular goal of bringing the hostages home, and will never have a political agenda.
Father-of-eight Mor, an ADHD therapist, lives with his family in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Hebron in the West Bank. He contends that the anti-government rallies endanger the lives of the hostages, including his eldest son Eitan, a security guard taken hostage from the Nova festival after helping save partygoers on the afternoon of October 7.
Like other relatives of hostages, Mor isn’t happy with Netanyahu, commenting that the prime minister isn’t doing enough to solve the ongoing war and hostage situation, but advocating a more bellicose position than many others.
“I don’t know why,” said Mor of Netanyahu. “It could be he’s scared. He’s acting like Hamas is a Western country. Israel has to be Western when it comes to our economy and education and industry and infrastructure, but when it comes to terror, we have to be as barbaric and cruel as they are, to save [Israeli] lives.”
And he still belongs to the larger Hostages Forum, because he wants to stay in touch with the rest of the families.
“It’s for my son, too,” he said.
Nadav Miran said there are about 30 families with representatives in the Tikva group, though his father Dani Miran, who supports a deal and spoke at a merged Hostages Forum protest in Jerusalem on Saturday night, is not among them. Some professional staff at the Hostages Family Forum said they counted only about six hostage families in the Tikva group.
“It’s not difficult for us because we honor one another’s opinion,” said Nadav Miran of himself and his father. “It’s completely different from what’s happening here in Israel. We accept that we can each believe something else and we have the same goal, to bring Omri and the others home. Honestly, if the government decided to go my father’s way, I’d accept it.”
Some of the hostage families have remained quiet throughout the last 11 months, unable to find the words to speak with the media, preferring to pray and keep their anguished thoughts to themselves.
One of those families is the Daninos. Ori Danino, an off-duty paratrooper, was taken hostage at the Nova festival and killed by his captors with the five other hostages in late August.
Danino’s father, Rabbi Elhanan Danino, became the center of media attention this week after a tape was broadcast of him castigating Netanyahu when the prime minister paid a shiva call at their Jerusalem home.
On Tuesday, Danino appeared at an apolitical rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square. Appealing for unity, he said that the fringes of society must not be allowed to divide the “mostly connected, loving, and united” public.
“All of Israel are brothers. We may wear different clothes, but we all came from the same father and the same mother,” he said. “Let us not allow anyone to divide us.”
