People gather in memory of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin in Jerusalem, September 1, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It has been 11 months since death arrived on our doorstep — first as an unwanted guest and now, it seems, as a permanent squatter who refuses to leave. Its presence is so intimate yet ethereal. The number of Palestinians that Israel has killed in its Holocaust in Gaza makes it difficult to digest the depth of the horror. How many images of dead Palestinian children can a person see before they all morph into one intangible expanse of darkness?

This feeling of numbness also applies to the Israeli victims, and especially the hostages. Perhaps for this reason, almost every Israeli, including those without a personal connection to them, has a particular hostage whose fate presses most painfully on their heart. Maybe it was Noa Argamani, the recently freed 26-year-old woman, whose kidnapping was watched on video around the world; or maybe it is the Bibas babies, whose orange hair has become a symbol of those held captive.

Or perhaps, like me, it was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the 23-year-old young man who lost an arm during his kidnapping on October 7, and who, in April, we saw speaking to us from captivity in a video released by Hamas. His family home in Jerusalem is not far from mine. We liked the same soccer team. He was the same age as my eldest daughter, and they would frequent the same places in the city.

Although I never knew him personally, from the moment we received news on Saturday evening that the army had recovered the lifeless bodies of six more hostages, I couldn’t help but pray: “Please, just don’t let Hersh be one of them.” I woke up the next morning to discover my prayer hadn’t been answered.

When I walked to the bus stop near my home and saw the poster bearing Hersh’s face, I felt like someone was driving a stake through my heart. For nearly a year, he has been smiling at the passersby in our neighborhood. We’ve ridden the bus with Hersh, gone shopping with Hersh, and drunk coffee with Hersh. Now, Hersh is gone.

Rachel Goldberg, mother of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, speaks during a rally for hostages marking 100 days since October 7, outside the Jerusalem Municipality, January 14, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

His parents, Rachel and John, spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago just two weeks ago, pleading with anyone who would listen to push for a deal that would bring him home alive. When they stood there on the stage, their son was still alive.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu watched on, knowing that it was all in vain. While Hersh’s crushed parents knocked on every door, and Hersh was fighting for his life in captivity, Netanyahu had no intention of reaching a deal that would return the hostages to their families’ arms alive rather than in a coffin — choosing instead to cling on to power and continue spilling rivers of blood in Gaza. How did we agree to entrust our lives to the rule of this angel of death?

On the bus to the Jerusalem train station on Sunday morning, I scrolled through pictures of Gaza’s dead on my feed: the latest victims who have names, and many more whose names I will never know. I think of those in Israel who passionately supported this extermination spree — the same ones who tried to silence us when we screamed from day one that this madness would set us all on fire.

It is the most tragic case of “we told you so” imaginable, but the thought of how inevitable and foreseeable this all was is maddening. When Israel defined its vague war aims as “eliminating Hamas and returning the hostages,” too few of us — including in the West, which continues to enable this apocalypse — warned that this war was a futile quest for revenge that would endanger the lives of the captives and achieve nothing but destruction and blood, sealing both the Palestinians’ fate and our own. The Israeli public did not want to hear us, and the Israeli media cheered on the army to push forward until “total victory.”

Where are those “total victory” champions now? Has their victory been achieved? Has anyone told that to Hersh’s parents?

Thousands attend the funeral of slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin at Har Hamenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem, September 1, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

They say that the most wretched dealer is the one who is addicted to his own drugs. Israel has become addicted to the drug of death, which it has been forcefully injecting into Palestinians for years, and now is injecting itself unconsciously. The next dose will fix us for sure, just wait.

At the train station, an elderly couple asks me in broken Hebrew how to get to their platform. They’ve been in the country for 35 years, and it’s their first time taking the train, the woman tells me with an embarrassed giggle. I accompany them to the platform, and I feel the rock of rage and pain inside me slowly dissolving in front of their grateful smiles.

Maybe that’s all we have left right now: to smile at a little girl on the platform, to bring food to a homeless young man curled up in a sleeping bag in the station’s main plaza, to help an elderly couple find their way. To collect every shred of humanity and hold on to it, hoard it, besiege it within us, before everything is destroyed.

Maybe then there will be some foundation from which to start rebuilding a more humane society, which does not sacrifice its neighbors and its children on the altar of revenge. Maybe that will help us store the seeds of humanity, so that there will be something to plant on the day when we can breathe here again.

Orly Noy