Simcha Goldin: Oct. 7 could have been averted had Israel taken Hadar’s fate seriously
Both PM and his opponents, when they were in power, failed the family over the 11 years that the slain soldier’s body was held in Gaza, says father: ‘A change will come from below’
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Simcha Goldin said the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, was the result of successive governments’ refusal to heed his family’s calls to pressure the terror group to return his son Hadar, whose remains were finally returned by Hamas last month, 11 years after he was killed fighting in Gaza.
“A lot of the resistance to what we said stemmed from cowardice,” Goldin said in an interview published Saturday on the Ynet news site. “I feel that I could have stopped the catastrophe if they had listened to me.”
Very few government members, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have visited the family since Hadar’s return, said Goldin: “Probably their conscience doesn’t allow it.”
During the interview, Goldin accused both Netanyahu’s right-wing governments and former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s 2021-2022 anti-Netanyahu coalition of dismissing the Goldin family’s concerns.
“Netanyahu — he just doesn’t know what to do with Hamas… We saw that he is very wary of conflict,” said Goldin. “It was the same story for nine-and-a-half years, including in Bennett’s year.”
Goldin also blamed the failure to return his son on the four IDF chiefs who served from when his son was kidnapped to the October 7 attack.
These include Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both currently opposition politicians, as well as Herzi Halevi, who took up the post nine months before the Hamas invasion, and Halevi’s predecessor, Aviv Kohavi, who was head of the Military Intelligence Directorate when Hadar was killed.
Goldin accused Kohavi of having “disappeared” both Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, whose body was also snatched after he was killed in the 2014 Gaza war and was retrieved by Israel in January.
“The sin started with Kohavi as MID chief and continued with Kohavi as IDF chief. Our most difficult time was Kohavi’s tenure,” said Simcha Goldin.
On the other hand, Goldin praised current IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, who “was in contact with us through all the years” and who, a week after entering the post in March, convened a meeting with all the families of slain captive soldiers — something Halevi would have taken months to do, according to Goldin.
“In the future I’ll write about it in depth,” said Goldin, a professor of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University. He stressed that the guilt did not lie entirely with the military echelon: “All these IDF chiefs acted under the direction from above of the State of Israel and of the head of the pyramid.”
Change will only come from the grassroots, said Goldin.
“That’s how it works in history — you don’t get it until you take a massive blow,” he said. “The moment the October 7 catastrophe happened, the leadership kept doing its thing, but there were forces that were let loose from below. That’s my hope.”
“I’m also speaking on behalf of Hadar and his generation,” he added. “I see that this whole political story of group against group doesn’t suit them at all. So let’s devote all our energy to people who want to unify us, and a change will come from below.”
Goldin noted that some of the victims of October 7, including slain hostage Elad Katzir and the five members of the Kutz family, were regulars at the Goldin family’s weekly rally at the Black Arrow Memorial in the Gaza border community of Mefalsim.
“Do you know how many times I’ve said that no wall in history has stopped a determined army?” said Goldin, whose research touches on military history. “I also said that on Friday, the eve of Simchat Torah, October 6, 2023. Shaar HaNegev council head Ofir Libstein was standing next to me. We said goodbye to him at 1 p.m., and at 7 a.m. the next day, he was murdered.”
The Goldin family has held 398 weekly rallies at the Black Arrow monument, which commemorates Israeli troops killed in a botched 1955 operation whose comrades risked their own lives to bring back their bodies, Goldin said.
“We hope to wrap it up at 400,” said Goldin. “It depends if the last slain hostage, Ran Gvili, is returned by then, because in the meantime everyone is disavowing him.”
Hadar Goldin was the last hostage to be held in Gaza from before October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the Gaza war. His body was returned to Israel in November as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.
“Hadar is not a private incident. The Goldin family is not a private family,” said Simcha Goldin. “What came to pass is that we brought about a kind of conduct… of a family that doesn’t give up and reminds Israeli society of its values.”
The Times of Israel Community.