American Jews are mobilizing to free Israeli hostages — will it make a difference?
People gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of a Shabbat table set for the hostages being held in Gaza. The Jewish community has poured significant energy into freeing the hostages, although some experts say these efforts don’t always have a strategic focus. Photo by Matt Litman/Special to the Forward
By Arno Rosenfeld October 27, 2023
WASHINGTON — More than two weeks after Hamas abducted their loved ones amid a brutal massacre in southern Israel, the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza have embarked on an international tour.
They’re criss-crossing Europe and the United States speaking with the media and making pained appeals in public meetings with politicians: “Bring them home now.”
It is part of a broader series of campaigns involving dog tags, Shabbat tables, billboards, missing posters and a lobbying blitz meant to keep the estimated 220 hostages front of mind for Americans.
That was the message from Rudy Chen, whose son Itay, 19, is believed to be a captive in Gaza, when he placed one of the dog tags around the neck of U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, at a press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday.
“Remember, every day, every second, who our kids are and that they’re missing,” Chen said. “Wear this with you in Congress, your next meeting, the meeting afterward and tomorrow.”
The cause of the hostages has resonated across the political spectrum, drawing emotional support from both Democrats and Republicans in a bitterly divided Congress. Jewish advocacy groups that disagree over almost everything else stand united in their forceful demand for their release.
Julie Rayman, policy director for the American Jewish Committee, said that there is more energy in the Jewish community around the hostage campaign than on any issue since the movement for Soviet Jewry in the 1980s.
“There is a cemented will to get this done,” Rayman said. “If the will can create the reality, we’re halfway there.”
But amid all of the impassioned appeals is a nagging question: Will any of it make a difference?
Experts agree there are some things public pressure can achieve — such as encouraging foreign governments to press Hamas — but say that not everything being done is strategic. Sometimes, they add, the goal is simply to build community around distraught families.
Sheila Katz, who runs the National Council of Jewish Women, said she was heartened that so many groups want to work on the hostage crisis. Yet she has become frustrated by the lack of a shared action plan.
“Hostage release is a very delicate situation that requires more coordination,” said Katz, whose organization launched its own appeal two weeks ago. “We don’t need 20 campaigns.”
Families front and center
At an empty Shabbat table in front of the Lincoln Memorial Friday, more than 100 empty chairs representing the missing hostages lined up at an empty white table set with blue glasses. Around 300 people milled about. Many held Israeli flags and others carried the banners of other nations — Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Poland, among others — whose citizens were kidnapped. It’s part of the effort to make the hostage crisis an international — rather than an Israeli or American — cause.
Gil Preuss, head of the local Jewish federation, said events like the empty Shabbat tables are meant as much an opportunity for the community to keep the stories of the hostages alive as to achieve any specific policy goals. “Hamas obviously doesn’t care about this,” he said.
Many in the crowd seemed eager to lend such moral support. The importance of comforting one another, and lending moral support to Israeli families of the hostages, seemed to resonate with many. Some wore black T-shirts passed out by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an Israeli group. Others wore wrist bands in white or red. One woman was selling challah covers to raise money to support hostage families.
“I’m Jewish and sorrowful and wanting the hostages to come home,” said Vicki Robinson, an attorney who lives in the city. “I want the families to know that they’re heard and seen and that they have an American family along with their Israeli one.”
As with most of these events, families of the hostages were prominently featured. Orna and Ronen Neutra kicked the event off with an appeal to Hamas.
“We saw you are taking care of some,” Ronen said. “Show us our children, show us our parents, show us that you still have human feelings.”
Israel believes Hamas has held 229 hostages in Gaza since Oct. 7, when it launched the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history, killing 1,400 people and destroying a number of towns along the border. Israel’s military response has killed at least 6,000 Palestinians, according to officials in Gaza.
Hamas, which has both an armed and political wing, has sent conflicting messages about the attack’s goals and its intentions for the hostages. Abu Hamid, a Hamas official, reportedly said Friday that Hamas planned to release all the civilian hostages if Israel agreed to a cease-fire. He also said that Hamas needed time to locate all the hostages, which include a mix of civilians and Israeli soldiers, because they are being held by multiple armed factions in Gaza.
“We need time to find them in the Gaza Strip and then release them,” Abu Hamid said.
Israel has pledged a ground invasion to destroy Hamas, although pressure is mounting for it to delay the operation in order to allow more time for rescuing the hostages.
The American campaigns around the hostages are typically silent on questions of whether the Israeli military can move into Gaza and still protect the hostages, or whether Israel, the U.S. or other countries should be willing to offer concessions to Hamas in exchange for their freedom. In the past, Hamas has demanded the release of its members held in Israeli prisons.
“We have one objective, one objective only: bring the hostages back home,” said Chen, the father of a captive 19-year-old Israeli soldier. “All the other stuff can wait for another day.”
Where American groups have more specific positions on how the U.S. or Israel should go about convincing Hamas to release the hostages, they are often reluctant to delve into those details.
“The Conference of Presidents is not going to negotiate through the Forward,” William Daroff, who leads the umbrella Israel advocacy group, said when asked if he supported making concessions to Hamas.
Many organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, say they are taking cues from the family members and trying to reflect their views on military action and negotiations with Hamas.
But many family members themselves acknowledge that they don’t know how to resolve a crisis of this scale and complexity.
Abbey Greenberg Onn had five relatives captured by Hamas, two of whom were reportedly killed after being taken captive. Onn said in an interview that she appreciated the outpouring of support. But expecting hundreds of family members to make strategic decisions about publicity and diplomacy was unrealistic.
“It’s a bit above my pay grade,” she said.
Broad solidarity — fewer specifics
To avoid these difficult questions, perhaps, some of the hostage appeals don’t come with any concrete demands at all. The Jewish federations network is calling for people to wear a blue ribbon to show “the people of Israel that they are not alone and good people across the globe are with them and their families during this dark time.”
More than 183 synagogues and advocacy groups from across the country have since joined the campaign and at least 200,000 ribbons have been ordered, according to the Jewish Federations of North America.
Blue Ribbons for Israel is reminiscent of one of the last major hostage crises that captivated the American public: the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held hostage for more than a year at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. At the suggestion of Penne Laingen, whose diplomat husband was one of the captives, Americans began tying yellow ribbons around trees — it became a symbol of national unity without specific demands attached.
A counter of the number of days the Americans had been held in Tehran became a nightly fixture on national newscasts.
“There was this kind of outcry by the nation,” said David Farber, who wrote a book about the crisis. “It was a kind of incredible sadness and an attempt by people to show their feelings of solidarity.”
That sentiment overlaps with the motivation behind some of the current efforts, including “kidnapped” posters that have been plastered across New York City and Capitol Hill with names and photos of the hostages in Gaza.
Andy Hochberg, a federation network board member who has helped coordinate the ribbon campaign, said some — including a group at a kibbutz in southern Israel — have started wrapping blue ribbons around trees as in the yellow ribbon campaign.
The goal, he said, was to increase public awareness of the hostages and to help people, including major donors, feel like they had a tangible way to make a difference. That is a similar logic behind the dog tags like the one gifted to Hoyer on Capitol Hill, which are being distributed by an Israeli group and engraved with the message: “Bring them back now.”
“Keeping the hostage plight front and center is a necessary condition to solving the overall problem,” Hochberg said. “It may not be a sufficient condition.”
Limit to the unity
Another difference between the current crisis and 1979 is that not everyone in the country is united behind the hostages. For one, only an estimated 12 of the remaining hostages are American, according to Israeli officials. Two dual American-Israeli citizens were released last week.
And while some on the American left initially cheered the Iranian revolution, that support dried up after conservative Islamic clerics seized power, said Farber, a history professor at the University of Kentucky. Outside of small gatherings by Iranian college students in the U.S., there were no public demonstrations of support for Iran after the hostages were taken.
But the context of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict has made it harder to achieve a narrow focus on freeing the hostages in Gaza. On the fringes, some activists have suggested that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets for violence. Missing posters for the hostages have been torn down and in at least one case someone taped over the top of them with an epithet: “occupier.”
That kind of aggressive response is rare, and many left-wing organizations that have responded to the crisis have condemned the murder of civilians and called for hostages to be released. Events organized by IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, part of the small number of progressive Jewish groups calling for an immediate cease-fire in Israel and Gaza, have emphasized the need to negotiate for the release of hostages — though this often comes after calls for an end to Israeli airstrikes and humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
Many pro-Palestinian Americans outside the Jewish community have said little or nothing about the hostages as they focus on the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of women and children killed in Israeli airstrikes and a lack of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies caused by a blockade that Israeli officials say is meant to punish Hamas.
Strategic questions remain
But among mainstream political groups and top officials in the White House and Congress, freeing the hostages is a top priority. President Joe Biden met on Zoom with families of the hostages and the White House has won praise from almost everyone involved in efforts to resource the captives. Both Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senate majority leader, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, have worn the blue ribbons.
“We will not stop pushing alongside you for the return of these innocent human beings,” Rep. Haley Stevens, a Michigan Democrat and co-chair of the House hostage task force, said at the press conference Thursday.
Katz, the NCJW leader, said that it seemed as though the goal of sharing personal stories about the hostages had successfully elevated their cause among elected officials. Now she wants to see the various Jewish hostage campaigns come together around more specific and strategic goals.
“We are now entering a phase — after 20 days — where we have to be synched up,” Katz said. “We can ask more now.”
What those demands should actually look like remains unclear.
Diane Foley, whose son James was kidnapped in Syria and executed by the Islamic State in 2014, now runs a hostage advocacy foundation and has been advising Israeli families of the captives. She said that the U.S. has adopted the right strategy of seeking to negotiate the release of its citizens held by Hamas, a shift from its previous policy of refusing to deal with terrorist organizations.
“The U.S. government is working so hard to find a way to negotiate with Hamas, and working hard to get the Israeli government to do the same,” said Foley, president of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation.
Some of these negotiations are being conducted through Qatar, a close American ally in the Middle East that has close ties to Hamas leadership, as does Turkey.
Foley said that in addition to pressuring Congress and the White House to make saving the hostages a priority, advocacy groups also needed to give the American government confidence that it will have public support if it makes concessions to Hamas. She pointed to the September release of five Americans who were being held in Iran, an exchange in which the U.S. traded five Iranian prisoners and $6 billion. Some critics said these kinds of trades embolden American enemies and should be avoided.
There are also questions about how much to publicize the plight of Israeli hostages. Convincing Hamas that they are valuable not only to Israel but also to many Americans could increase the terrorist organization’s bargaining power.
But Rayman, with the American Jewish Committee, said there was little that could be done about that. “As one of the family members of the hostage said, ‘They’re holding all the cards — they’re holding my daughter, they’re holding all the cards,’” she said. “Pretending that isn’t the case doesn’t necessarily help the families.”
Given that dynamic, I asked Rayman whether she was confident that there was anything American Jews could do to ensure the release of the Israeli hostages.
Rayman paused.
“My heart won’t let my head say anything except that I’m completely confident,” she said.
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