One Israeli Hostage’s Unusual Experience in Gaza

In Hamas’s October 7 attack, more than 200 hostages were taken into Gaza. In the months since, a little over 100 have been released. When they arrive back in Israel, they have to endure intense public interest about their experience. I’ve met some of them as they come through Washington, D.C., to meet with political leaders. They tell their own story, advocate for hostages still being held in Gaza, plead for help. But for some, as with our guest this week, Liat Beinin Atzili, their story leads them to unexpected opinions. In fact, her 52 days of being held in Gazan homes forced her to directly reckon, for the first time in her life, with the humanity of people living on the other side of the fence.

Sometimes the hostages are invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a reason to keep the war going. Recently some hostages and their relatives have protested against that logic, instead advocating for a cease-fire so the remaining hostages can return safely. In Atzili’s case, her experience in Gaza adds another layer to her desire for the war to end. We spoke with her in Washington, where she traveled to talk with President Joe Biden, about grief and about the war.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin [narrating]: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Over these last few months, I’ve met quite a few former Israeli hostages who come through D.C. They come to town to tell their stories, and usually to remind people that there are more of them still in captivity and we should do everything possible to help get them out.

They and their relatives have become a separate community, maybe even a movement.

Lately, I’ve noticed something different about the community. They seem more mobilized, less like advocates and more like activists. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to town the other week, six hostage relatives protesting were arrested. They’re angry that he invokes their experience to keep the war going. They wore bright-yellow T-shirts that say seal the deal now.

It seems like they’ve found their voice in a real way. Last month, just before Netanyahu’s visit, I heard that one former hostage was coming through town and wanted to talk.

Rosin: Okay.

Liat Atzili: Am I sitting close enough? So this is okay?

Staff: That’s great. Yes.

Atzili: Okay.

Rosin[narrating]: She was meeting with President Joe Biden. This was a sign to me that she was far enough along in her healing for a conversation because it’s hard to stay composed for something like that if the experience is still raw.

Rosin: Do you have anything in your head or any questions before we just go, like anything that’s weighing on you today?

Atzili: No, no, no. I’m good today.

Rosin: You’re good today?

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay. Okay, good. Can you tell me your name?

Atzili: My name is Liat Atzili. I used to be Beinin.

And then when I returned from captivity, I found out that my husband had been killed on October 7, and his name was Atzili, so I had to get new ID. So I just decided on the spur of the moment that I’m ditching Beinin and becoming Atzili.

Rosin: That’s interesting. It’s funny how these things that might not mean something in another time—like a name or the order of a name, or it’s something you might have, like, a funny argument about—is suddenly so heavy.

Atzili: Yeah. Yeah, it’s weird.

Rosin[narrating]: Liat was one of many Israelis to lose a loved one on October 7—her husband, Aviv.

And she was one of over 200 hostages taken back behind the fence around Gaza. She wasn’t held in the tunnels but in a Gazan home. She was there for almost two months, which was enough time to get to know her captors and have real conversations with them.

[Pause]

Rosin: I want to go back to even before the day. I’m curious what—I mean, Nir Oz, for Americans, it’s barely a mile and a half from Gaza.

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: I mean, just so that everybody listening understands how close it is: Like, this fence keeping Gazans in, the same one the Hamas terrorists breached on October 7, is very close to the kibbutz.

Atzili: Yeah, it’s like a mile and a half from the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Rosin: Which is very, very, very close. So I’m curious: What, before October 7—because you’ve lived there for years and years—was your experience of Gaza or Gazans?

Atzili: I had no experience. I came to live on the kibbutz when I was in the army, during my army service. After I was discharged from the army, Aviv and I spent a few years traveling, and we came back in, like, I think, 2000, and that was just when the Second Intifada started. So, intifada means “uprising.”

Rosin: Palestinian uprising.

Atzili: Palestinian. Yeah, it’s in Arabic. So at the time, there were workers from Gaza working on Nir Oz. And the first thing that I remember is a discussion of the whole kibbutz: if the kibbutz should continue employing these workers from Gaza, and it was decided that no, that it felt unsafe. So that’s, like, the first encounter that I had with Gazans and what it meant to live on the Gaza border.

[Music]

Atzili: I grew up on a kibbutz in the north of Israel in an area where there are a lot of Arab Israeli or Israeli Palestinian villages. So it’s a different relationship because these people are Israeli citizens. And there are issues, but they’re Israeli citizens, and the people who live in the Gaza Strip aren’t Israeli citizens.

They were under military rule. There were many people on the kibbutz who were peace activists and were involved in all sorts of initiatives to help people from the Gaza Strip. People from Gaza would come to Israeli hospitals to be treated for all sorts of things that were impossible to treat there. So there was this whole organization that was in charge of coordinating rides for people coming from Gaza into Israel. So there were a lot of people on Nir Oz involved in that.

Rosin: I just wonder what you knew about Gaza before you were, you know—you didn’t choose to go there. But I’m just curious, did you have an image of Gaza or anything like that?

Atzili: I did. I did. I sort of imagined it, like, you know, a very poor third-world country. And I knew that the supply of water and electricity wasn’t 100 percent, that there were long periods of time that they didn’t have running water or electricity. I was really, really curious about how you live like that.

You know, I’m a teacher. I’m a history teacher. I’m a Holocaust educator. A huge issue that we discuss with students when teaching about the Holocaust is how something like the Holocaust can happen and why people don’t do anything about it. And to me, you know, there was a fence there, and I felt obligated to be interested in what happens on the other side of the fence.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I’ve always been curious about that but I think too nervous to ask someone who lived in Nir Oz or somewhere down there, like, what did you—there’s a fence there. Like that’s just an odd situation to be in. You know, there’s the new Holocaust movie The Zone of Interest. You know, that whole movie is about people living inside a fence, sort of trying to ignore what’s on the other side of the fence.

And I mean, it’s such a terrible question I’m asking, but I have always been curious, like, what was the process of ignoring—? You know, what was people’s interactions with the fence before they’d ever been there? Or thinking, Why is the fence there? or, What’s our relationship to that fence? or anything like that. Is that a terrible question?

Atzili: It’s not a terrible question. I think it’s a really important question. I think it’s the question. And I think that, really, you can sort of very roughly divide people into people who cared what happened on the other side of the fence and people who didn’t.

I think now it’s become very, very sensitive and very difficult, and people who I knew to be, you know, very left-wing, peace-driven are realigning their feelings and their thoughts and their beliefs. But I think that’s the most important question, whether you can relate to the fact that on the other side of the fence live human beings, and that there is a reason for what’s been happening in the past.

I mean, it’s not since October 7. It’s the past. I mean, we can take it back, but let’s not go way too far back. I’ll just say there’s a reason for what’s been happening in the past 15 years, and October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum, and there are reasons for why it happened.

A word that’s difficult—it’s difficult to use it, but there’s a context to what happened. And you can’t forget that—can’t forget that these people have been living in, I think, terrible circumstances. Also, I think Hamas rule has not—Hamas does not care very much about how the ordinary Palestinian in the Gaza Strip lives, what kind of life they have. And I think Israel has a huge part in enabling Hamas to have such a strong hold on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, that it’s impossible to ignore all these things. It’s impossible to ignore that people are living in this place with very, very little hope to have a normal life, or what I consider a normal life.

And I actually spoke about this quite a bit with my captors.

Rosin: Well, let’s go there. You have had an experience that you’ve never had before of crossing the border, and I imagine that would change a person.

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: We have a lot of, like, vicious and gruesome images from October 7 of kidnapping, people being taken, killed. Your story is a little bit different from that and quite unusual. Can you talk about what you remember?

Atzili: Well, Aviv had left the house very shortly after the attack began because he was on the first-response team. And the last I heard from him was at, like, 8:30 in the morning.

So I was by myself in the safe room in our house. My two sons were on the kibbutz, but they don’t live at home anymore. And my daughter wasn’t on the kibbutz, which I’m so, so thankful for. So I was alone.

And when people came and entered my house and came to kidnap me, to take me hostage—I don’t, I don’t even know what word to use—it was already pretty late in the day. It was around 11.

And I think, by that point, they realized that the Israeli army wasn’t coming, that there was going to be no battle in Nir Oz, so they were very relaxed, I think. And also, I think it was just luck, the people that happened to enter my house and to take me. Because the very first thing they said—I mean, they came into the safe room. They were armed. They were wearing uniforms. But the very first thing they said was, You’re going to come with us now. But don’t worry; we’re not going to hurt you. We’re going to protect you. And you’re going to be safe with us.

I mean, I was in pajamas. They told me, you know, Get dressed. I asked if I could go get something from a different room in the house, and they said, Fine. Go.

Rosin: Wow.

Atzili: Yeah, yeah. And they asked me if there was something that I needed that I couldn’t get. I had no idea how long I was going for, so—

Rosin: That is so confusing.

Atzili: Yeah, it’s really confusing.

I was terrified. I mean, I didn’t have any coherent thoughts. I kept thinking, you know, Get a gripping on yourself. I mean, you have some control in this situation. I couldn’t—I mean, this is the worst thing that I could imagine. It’s happening now, but it’s not that terrible.

But now, like, I think what I could have done: I could have taken a toothbrush. I could have taken clothes. I could have taken a book. I could have texted my kids and said, you know, I’m being kidnapped, but don’t worry. I’m okay.

Rosin: What did you do? What did you take?

Atzili: Nothing. Nothing.

Rosin: You mean you just, like, put a pair of pants in a bag?

Atzili: I put a pair of pants on and, like, the guy gave me a shirt and said, Here. Wear this. Wear this, gave me a blanket. Yeah.

Rosin: Did they say where you were going?

Atzili: They said that they were taking me to the Gaza Strip. And I was taken into Khan Younis by car.

Rosin: Did you have any sense of the landscape of Gaza as you’re driving through? Like, you crossed the border—

Atzili: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although I didn’t have glasses. I looked for them. I couldn’t find them. And then when I came home, they were in the exact place that I knew that they should have been. But for almost two months I couldn’t see. Okay, I mean, there wasn’t that much to see.

[Music]

Atzili: I ended up spending, like, the first 36 hours in—the guy who took me from my house, in his house. He brought me to his family’s home. And his mother and his sister just took really, really good care of me. I mean, they realized that I was in shock and that I was terribly upset.

Rosin: What do you mean they took good care of you?

Atzili: They washed my clothes. They gave me a change of clothes. They, you know, told me, Go take a shower. They fed me, said, You need to eat. You need to rest. They understood that I was going through something terrible, that I was worried about my children. I didn’t know what had happened to my children or to Aviv.

Rosin: But that is so complicated that in a hostage situation, where you’ve just been kidnapped, you have an immediate heavy dose of believable, natural human empathy. Like, sometimes it’s manipulative—you hear all kinds of stories, but this sounds like an easy, believable, female dose of empathy.

Atzili: Yeah, it’s really confusing. But you know, I was able to, like, organize my thoughts and, like, wrap my head around that these are people. I mean, what I thought all along: that on the other side of the fence live people just like me, and that I can communicate, and that I’d be okay if I managed to make a connection.

And I’m really glad that my theories lived up to reality. And that was very, very reassuring to spend the first hours like that with women, with children. There were two kids. And the next day I was transferred to a different house, and I met a woman from Nir Oz, and we ended up spending the whole time together. And there were two guys who were guarding us.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Atzili: Unarmed. One of them was a lawyer; one was a teacher, educated. They spoke English. They were active in Hamas. They were very, very religious, but they also—they made a huge, huge, huge effort to make us feel safe and to communicate with us. Obviously, it’s not an easy thing to go through.

We had no idea what was happening in Israel. I didn’t know if my sons were alive. I didn’t know if Aviv was alive. I knew that they didn’t know what was going on with me.

Except for the situation being horrible, everything was—I mean, it wasn’t as horrible as it could be. And I know that I was incredibly lucky.

Rosin: I was going to say, there’s some part of you that feels—

Atzili: Guilty.

Rosin: Yeah, something, something conflicted in some way about this.

Atzili: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Music]

Atzili: Well, the first few days I was very, very scared. But then I got the feeling that these people were genuinely interested in really protecting us, that they weren’t going to hurt us, that they believed that what Hamas wanted to achieve was a deal, a hostage—that they’d taken hostages to have political prisoners released.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And did you know, at that point, that Israelis had been killed?

Atzili: Yeah, yeah. I knew the numbers. I didn’t know how many people from Nir Oz had been killed. I didn’t know, but I knew the numbers. I knew how many hostages there were.

Rosin: And knowing that, how did you get through the hours of the day? What was your typical day-to-day like with them?

Atzili: So during the day, I mean, there was a lot of noise and people coming and going. But in the evenings, when things started to quiet down—so it was really important to our captors that we be quiet, and they were afraid that people in the street would find out that we were being held there.

Rosin: Because they couldn’t control—they didn’t know the people on the street, and they couldn’t control how they would react to seeing Israelis.

Atzili: Yeah, yeah.

Rosin: Because Israelis were the cause of their misery at that moment.

Atzili: Yeah, they were afraid that we would be attacked.

Rosin: Which is also strange because then they’re in a position of being your—they’re protective.

Atzili: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing that frightened me the most was that there would be a bombing or a missile attack, and that they would die, and I’d be left alone.

Rosin: Left alone with a crowd and without them to protect you?

Atzili: Yeah, yeah.

Rosin: That’s weird because that is a form of bond.

Atzili: Yeah, yeah.

Rosin: Like, I actually really need you.

Atzili: Mm-hmm. No, 100 percent dependency on them. They kept saying, you know, Our job is to protect you and keep you safe and healthy until you’re released in a deal. I mean, they kept saying that from day one.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[Music]

Atzili: So we’d go to sleep really early, like seven. And then I’d wake up in the middle of the night at, like, 1 or 2 a.m. And, you know, funnily enough, those hours that everybody was sleeping and that I was, like, left alone with my thoughts were kind of peaceful hours. Like, I thought a lot about my children and about Aviv and about a million things, like what I’m going to do when I get back, like imagining what my kids were doing and, like, trying to send them vibes that I’m alive, and you know, I’m okay. I’m okay. They’d get up to pray at, like, between four and five in the morning.

So like, I kept waiting for the—to hear the muezzin calling everybody to prayer. So that was like the beginning of the day. Our days were filled with, you know, tiny tasks, a lot of waiting, and, like, the waiting was a thing in itself.

Rosin: Waiting for what?

Atzili: Waiting for our meal. Waiting until the time when it got dark and we turned the lights on. That was, like, a big thing every day. So, like, we’d turn the lights on at, like, 5 o’clock, and we called that “noor time.” Noor is light in Arabic. And, like, from 3 o’clock we’d say, Okay, in two hours we’re going to turn the lights on. I mean, stuff like that.

Rosin: And did you learn anything about them?

Atzili: Yeah, yeah. We spoke very freely. They told us about their families and about their lives, their regular lives. We spoke a lot about politics. I asked them why they had joined Hamas and not one of the other organizations, what they thought would happen in the near future, how they thought that the war needed to end, if it needed to end. I spoke a lot about history. They know a lot about Israel.

Rosin: And what was the version of Israel that got reflected back to you? Because you probably don’t often hear a Gazan’s vision of you and your country in such fullness.

Atzili: Never.

Rosin: So what was the mirror? Like, what did you see?

Atzili: Well, a very, very religious, fundamentalist, messianic worldview. They kept saying that from the river to the sea, it should all be a Palestinian state, and that all the Jews should leave.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Atzili: And there was a difference between the two of them. One of them was, I think, more religious, was less willing to compromise. And one said, you know, Well, yeah, maybe a two-state solution has to be a solution, at least temporarily, until we conquer the world and everybody converts to Islam.

Rosin: So this is interesting because you no longer have a sense of like, “Gazans” as a monolith. I mean, that’s, I think, a breaking point when you start to see people as varied.

Atzili: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Rosin: And how far did your conversations go? Like, did you have enough courage to ask them these kinds of questions? Like, why would you kill someone?

Atzili: Yeah. Yeah, we spoke about it very freely. They either were incredible actors or they really, really didn’t know what had happened. Because, like, when we told them that there had been looters in Nir Oz—the woman that I was with, her jewelry had been stolen from her and been taken off of her when she’d arrived in Gaza—they were shocked. And they were like, This should never have happened.

Like, they kept saying, We don’t understand why you were taken hostage. You’re women. We don’t fight women. Women shouldn’t be involved in war. At some point, pictures of all the hostages were released, and one of them said, I’m shocked at the number of children, at the number of elderly people, at the number of women. I didn’t think it was like that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. What about the killing? Like, did they consider that a necessary part of the messianic vision? Like, That’s just war, as long as it’s men?

Atzili: Yeah, they said men are—

Rosin: Fair game.

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: Did you learn anything that surprised you in these conversations?

Atzili: Not really.

Rosin: Do you think they learned anything that surprised them?

Atzili: I think so.

Rosin: Like what?

Atzili: I think they didn’t understand, or they didn’t know, how Jewish Israelis saw our connection to Israel. I think that they sort of felt that, to us, we could go anywhere, and what many Israelis say about the Palestinians: Oh, they have so many countries. Why don’t they go somewhere else? And no, I mean, they don’t want to be Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians. They’re Palestinians from here.

And I think they sort of had the same—they related to Jewish Israelis in the same way, and: Why don’t you—they kept asking me—why don’t you go back to America? Why did your parents ever come to Israel? Why do you feel that this place belongs to you? Which was very, very strange.

Rosin: But it’s the fundamental thing. Like, if everyone could realize there are two people and both those people aren’t going anywhere. Like, if everyone just accepted that fact.

Atzili: Yeah, then things would be easier.

Rosin: Things would be easier.

Atzili: So there was a lot of discussion about that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Atzili: They asked me about the Holocaust.

Rosin: What did they think? Oh, well, that’s a good question for you.

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: What ideas did they have about the Holocaust?

Atzili: They didn’t really know. They knew, like—they’d heard about Hitler. They knew that there had been ghettos. But they didn’t really know what had happened. So they asked. I explained, and they said, It’s terrible. I think, Yeah, it’s pretty terrible.

Rosin: This is so interesting because you, essentially, are now faced with these interesting and rich conversations with people who are your captors, who turn out to be very educated and speak English. There’s lots of sort of protective, feminine energy. Just—it’s so complicated.

Atzili: It is. It’s mind-blowing how complicated it is and how difficult it is to sort of try to organize this experience and deal with it.

I didn’t really know what I was coming back to. And also that’s been very difficult, to deal with the consequences of what had happened while I was gone.

[Music]

Atzili: I was overjoyed when I was told that I was going home, but we said goodbye. You know, I said, Thank you for taking such good care of me, for protecting me. You know, for over 50 days, there were two guards, and we said goodbye to one of them.

Only one of them took us to the car that was taking us to the next place that we— they took us to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. And from there we were released—I was released. The woman that was with me, she was released the next day. But so, like, when we were leaving the apartment, it was a little bit chaotic, and we didn’t say goodbye to one of them.

And the other one walked us down into the street. And for over 50 days, I mean, they—he made such a conscious effort to not touch us at all, not even mistakenly. I mean, he wouldn’t hand me a cup of tea or a plate or anything. He’d put it down. I mean, no contact—no physical contact whatsoever.

And, you know, when I said goodbye to him and thank you, he went like this: He patted me on the shoulder and said, you know, Good luck. And I hope that your family is safe, and I hope that everything will be okay with you. And you know, it was moving. It was a moment with this person who really, I mean, could have done anything.

He didn’t have to—I mean, he had a job to keep me alive and sort of relatively in good condition. But, I mean, he could have done anything. He didn’t have to be nice to me. He didn’t have to talk to me. He didn’t have to, I mean—a million little gestures that just made it bearable.

[Music]

Rosin[narrating]: After a lot of lobbying by her family and the help of the U.S. government, Liat got out. In Gaza, meanwhile, the situation only got worse. Israelis bombed Khan Younis and the Nasser Hospital until it wasn’t functioning. In Israel, Liat returned to her own new terrible reality.

Atzili: After I was released, we were notified that Aviv had been killed. It wasn’t known until then. And, I mean, that sort of became the main issue.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Atzili: Instead of dealing with the whole, you know, being-held-hostage issue, you know, I’ve been—

Rosin: Grieving. Yeah.

Atzili: Grieving widow.

Rosin: Yeah.

Atzili: And I think it’s difficult for some people to understand. I mean, there’s been so much death, and we’ve just lost so many people that it’s so hard to grasp the loss. I mean, there’s so many difficult experiences that you just have to choose what to focus on, because you can’t deal with everything.

So for me, it’s been—I mean, the main thing that I’ve been dealing with is losing Aviv, who was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person.

Rosin: He looks like it from the photographs.

Atzili: Yeah.

Rosin: You guys have a “We were made for each other” vibe in the photographs I’ve seen of you.

Atzili: Yeah. We’ve known each other—I mean, we knew each other from a very young age. I mean, we’d been together for many years, even though we’re still young. I’m still young. He’ll always be young.

I think he’s—he had a very important role in the community. And I think so many people miss him, and so many people loved him that, in many ways, it’s comforting and reassuring. And it feels really good to know that he’s so missed by so many people, but it’s just—

Rosin: Right. He’s still not here. He’s still not here.

Atzili: And the president actually said—it was interesting—he said, But you talk to him all the time, right? And, you know, You communicate with him, and he’s here with you. And that’s so true.

Rosin: Wow. I’m—that’s amazing. That’s what the president said.

I was going to say, one of the odd things must have been that you came back from the most unexpected, unusual experience of your life and could not share it with him, like, could not share the details of it or what happened or process it. It must have been the first enormous thing in your life that you had to process on your own as an adult, you know? Which is hard. I’m glad you have friends.

Atzili: Yeah. I have wonderful friends and a wonderful family. Yeah.

[Music]

Rosin[narrating]: After the break, more about that visit with President Biden, who is famously wonderful at talking to people deep in grief.

Liat was looking for something in that meeting, something she was not getting from Israeli political leaders.

[Music]

Rosin: So you are here in Washington and not in Israel. Why?

Atzili: Well, a lot of my family members, including my parents, were very, very active in—I don’t know how I would describe it, exactly—the campaign, struggle to bring me back home. So this is mostly a trip here to thank all the people who were involved in bringing me back home.

And I didn’t really know what to expect, but one thing that’s been on my mind a lot these past few days is the personal connection. I think he showed a huge amount of responsibility towards me and my well-being and my family, and that’s something that’s very, very different to Israeli politics and the way that government officials relate to the citizens in Israel.

Rosin: Interesting. So do you mean in tone, like the words he said, or do you mean something you felt from him?

Atzili: He knew my story. And I think that he felt a connection, or made me feel that we have a connection, in both of us losing our spouses. He spoke a lot about his first wife and about the children that he lost. And he gave me advice.

Rosin: What was the advice?

Atzili: He said, you know, A day will come when you speak about your husband that you’ll smile before you cry.

Rosin: Aww.

Atzili: Yeah.

[Music]

Rosin: It’s interesting that you contrast it with constituents’ relationship with their leadership in Israel because I do often think, at least historically, of Israeli leaders sort of coming to funerals. Or, you know, there is a style of sort of showing up for people who have sacrificed for Israel.

I mean, maybe it’s different in this current situation, but I do think of that as being a tradition for Israeli leaders.

Atzili: Not now. Not in these times. There has been a shirking of responsibility.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Atzili: The Israeli government, I think Netanyahu and others—not everyone—have been very, very actively trying to place blame for what happened on the military and the intelligence. It’s strange that for a lot of people, October 7 became everything.

And we’ve sort of forgotten that there’s a very long history before that. Israel was in a very, very difficult place for a long time before October 7. I mean, I live in the western Negev, what’s known as the Gaza Envelope; I don’t like to use that phrase. But for the last 20 years, we’ve been living in a reality of neglect by the government. I mean, we’ve been—my kibbutz has been hit by missiles and rockets for years, and with no real solution to that. And, I mean, I think that the solution is an agreement that everybody can live with, Israelis and Palestinians.

I don’t think that the solution is war or some sort of armed conflict that can resolve this issue. I think it can only be resolved by discussions. And the government that was elected, it’s been very right-wing. Most of the people that live in kibbutzim in my area disagreed with the government’s policies and were very active in the protests against the government the past few years, and I think that that’s reflected on how the government’s related to the fact that the settlements of the western Negev were the ones that were hit the hardest by this attack.

Rosin: I mean, that’s different than, I think, the way an American political situation would unfold. Like, it does seem unusual that there wouldn’t be, you know, a personal kind of reach out or connection.

Atzili: No personal reach out. I mean, there are people who have reached out.

Rosin: But you’re saying you have not gotten any call or any equivalent of what you just had with Biden.

Atzili: No.

Rosin: Now, the president called you a survivor. Does that feel like the right word to you? Like, does that sit well with you? Like, I’m a survivor. Does that feel correct?

Atzili: It doesn’t—it feels strange. I don’t like to think of myself as a victim or a survivor. But I think that, I mean, I am a victim, and I am a survivor. And I think that if before October 7, peace was an option, now there’s no choice. This cannot be the way we live in the Middle East.

Rosin: I mean, you had firsthand experience of personal suffering. I wonder if on the other side you saw suffering. I mean, it sounds like you were in a relatively comfortable place, but was there?

Atzili: The last couple of days I was in Nasser Hospital, and there were thousands of refugees and, you know, I could see the conditions that they were living in, and it was terrible, terrible.

Rosin: And in your head, did you think of that as something that Israelis had caused?

Atzili: Of course.

Rosin: I mean, I will tell you, I have spoken—I speak to Israelis. And because I live in the U.S., and sort of, like, we have our social media—we see, you know, pictures of Gaza, Gaza, Gaza all the time or protests, and there are generational differences and all that. A lot of Israelis don’t see the pictures. Like, well into the war, people would tell me, Oh, we don’t—it’s not on the TV, and we don’t see it in the newspapers.

Atzili: It’s not. It’s not. But, I mean, I saw this with my own non-seeing eyes because I didn’t have glasses, but I do read Al Jazeera—before October 7 also. I do read not-Israeli newspapers. I do try to get as wide a picture as I can of things that interest me. And, obviously, Hamas is responsible for this war as much as Israel is. But, I mean, when I saw these images—this was two months into the war—to me it was obvious that it could have ended before.

And, of course, now the situation is even worse. And there is absolutely no reason, in my opinion, for this war to have been going on for so long. I mean, I think a ceasefire—a permanent ceasefire that would have ensured the return of the hostages—the rebuilding of Gaza, the rebuilding of the kibbutzim in Israel, and talks to reach a lasting agreement should have happened months ago.

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Rosin: What do you have to work out in your private life? Like, what are the things that you have to work out for yourself?

Atzili: When it’ll be possible, I would like to go back to live on Nir Oz. Nir Oz was destroyed, really. My house burned down, so I don’t have anywhere to live there now, or I would like to go back to the Negev.

But I’m not sure that that’s what I want to do. It’s a thought. Like—I went back to work, and I finished the school year with my students. And that was really good, and it had, like, a huge healing effect. But I don’t think that I have to decide if I want to go back to teaching full-time or not.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Because you need time to figure out what just happened to you.

Atzili: Yeah, and sort of some things that seemed really, really important or were easy, like connecting with students, connecting with parents, now seem like a huge effort, like even something that I’m not capable of doing right now. So it’s a lot to figure out. I’m involved in the planning of how Nir Oz will be rebuilt.

Rosin: Oh.

Atzili: That’s something that I was never interested in. And now it’s like, I took and was given the responsibility to think about Nir Oz’s story, about the narrative, about how we want to remember what happened, how we want—so it’s incredibly interesting.

Rosin: I’m glad it’s you because, reading about Nir Oz, I was a little worried that it would just become a kind of site that people would visit, like a Holocaust-memorial site, and it would never have a rebirth. It felt like it could go in that direction, but it sounds like it might go in a different direction.

Atzili: If I have anything to do with it, and I will, it will not go in that direction.

Rosin: Good. Good. I mean, I hate to trivialize anything. And I never go in the direction of a happy ending at all, and this is not a happy ending. But it is, like, shoots of rebirth, a lot of different things happening, and that’s, I think, unexpected.

Atzili: It’s a hopeful ending.

I have been thinking, maybe I should relocate to—maybe I should come back to the states.

Rosin: Seriously? No. You’re just saying that.

Atzili: It’s tempting, but—

Rosin: For safety reasons?

Atzili: Yeah, yeah. Israel is probably one of the most complicated places in the world to live. And it’s exhausting. And it was before October 7. But I think that we’re so rooted in the place.

And really, I think it’s a little bit of a cliché, but it’s very difficult for me to give up on the place that Aviv lost his life to protect, so—

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t imagine.

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Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin, and thank you for listening.