Ten Long Years – The Fight for Lt. Hadar Goldin

Humanitarian Actions for Humanitarian Actions

It was Friday morning August 1, 2014 and I was at my desk in my office in Tel-Aviv.

I had the news on one screen while I worked on the other as I had done throughout the Tzuk Eitan war in Gaza.  I had one son, an infantry platoon commander in Gaza and another at home watching TV due to his broken ankle sustained during combat.  My third son was in medical school after spending three years as a special forces soldier and my daughter, although she had just finished her military service, in addition to worrying about her twin brother in Gaza , also  had a boyfriend (now husband) there.

There was a cease fire declared (sponsored by Obama and the UN) – not the first and we were sure not the last.  For each cease fire the press tried to tell us the end had finally come and we had won and would withdraw.  That we had destroyed all of the Hamas “offensive” tunnels into Israel and this 50 odd day war was close to an end.  But like all the previous cease fires this one was broken by Hamas.   On the news there were rumors of killed soldiers and one who was missing, possibly kidnapped.  I continued to work since these types of rumors were rather regular – and often false.

Then my wife called me and asked if I was sitting down.  She told me that the missing soldier was Lt. Hadar Goldin, the son of a neighbor and good friends, a boy we knew from his pre-school days.  He was a twin and was a year ahead of our twins.  I checked the train schedule, mumbled something to a colleague and went home.    By the time I was home the media and a crowd of well-wishers were in front of our house – we live in a building across from the Goldins. 

We were not sure what to do.   We live very close to our town’s military cemetery and we had been to many funerals there, but now it was not just physically close.  We decided to go upstairs offer our sympathy and see what we could do.  The family, as always, was busy.  They were working the phones, trying to make contact with whomever they knew who might know something.  They wanted to save their son and with a battle going on they were sure that the army would not leave him behind on the battlefield. 

Friday night came and the community organized a prayer service where many hundreds appeared.  I am not into emotional religious services per se, but you felt an entire community pleading with God to save their son – the community’s son.

Hadar was active in his youth movement, in his high school, in just about everything a young boy could be active in.  Music. Art.  Hiking.  Studying.  After high school a period of study in a yeshiva.   To the Givati brigade. Givati Recon unit.  Squad commander course.  Officer training course.  Active duty officer.  And the war.

On Saturday, Shabbat morning, our small synagogue was full.  It is an old building, from the 1940’s.  The ark is dedicated to the memory of a soldier killed in 1948 and the Ten Commandments and the two lions guarding it are etched in the same marble (or marble like stone) used in nearly all synagogues built then.  The furniture is new but the walls, roof, ark – everything else is old, but clean.   Back in 2014 there was a prayer said every Shabbat for the return of  missing soldiers – for Ron Arad, the famous pilot still missing and also many from the Lebanon War – mostly from the bloody battle of Sultan Yaakov.  Hadar’s brother said the prayer that morning to an unrecognizable silence. 

Saturday night for me was the most bittersweet of nights.  While there was a gathering outside our home in support of the Goldin family we drove our daughter down south to see her boyfriend who just got out of Gaza.   We heard that our son was also getting out of Gaza that night.   We followed everything on radio and were not surprised at the anger and shock of the Goldin family when they heard that the army was withdrawing without their son.  They received a visit from the IDF Chief Chaplain and other senior officers and were convinced that Hadar’s equipment that was found showed incontrovertible evidence that he was no longer alive.  They reluctantly accepted the news but they had no expectation that he would be left in Gaza.

Only years later did they learn that the IDF was at the gates of the hospital where they thought he was being held and the IDF Chief of Staff at the time, Benny Gantz, ordered the forces to stop and not enter the hospital.

For the last ten years the Goldin family has given one message to the Israeli government and the world – humanitarian for humanitarian.   The return of a soldier or any citizen for burial by their family in their home country forms the basis of all moral actions.   We know this from Homer and know this from the Bible and we know this as people and as families.   Hadar’s twin brother, Tzur, spoke last week at a memorial service for his brother and stated that the kidnapping of soldiers and civilians, including the snatching of bodies (is there a better name for this barbaric practice?) is done as an attack on the family – not just the family that is most effected but on families in general.   It is an attempt to destroy a family and with that, all families. 

The Goldin’s have for the past ten years withstood the pressure to keep quiet and withstood the pressure to demand that the country release terrorists in exchange for their son.  They have taken such a strong moral stand that the king of Israeli post-modern post-Zionism, Amos Schocken, the publisher of Ha’aretz, called them the most dangerous people in Israel.  They are dangerous to Shocken because they have never given up their belief in the country and in Zionism in their religion and in their people.  They have criticized all who needed to be criticized, from the Prime Minster to the Army brass from government ministers to opposition leaders.  They are dangerous to Schocken because they had the nerve to call for humanitarian aid to Hamas in Gaza (and this before October 7) to be dependent on the most basic of humanitarian acts one can do – allow families to bury their dead. 

Their first act as a family after October 7 was to organize free psychological care for families of the kidnapped as now they sadly were part of a larger group.  They predicted in fact that those who leave dead soldiers on the battlefield will then leave the wounded and finally anyone.  The Israeli government and security services, the media, legal and rabbinic establishment, the people themselves, failed the Goldin family and all families by ignoring a simple moral imperative. 

And here we are.