This month marks the third anniversary of an experiment, involving me, an Israeli and a lot of minutes clocked up on Zoom. Each week since January 2021, Yonit Levi — the anchor of the nightly news on Israel’s Channel 12 and the country’s most-watched journalist — and I have faced each other on a computer screen, recorded our voices and those of our interviewees and turned it into a podcast called Unholy.
The aim was to do something that we believed was happening nowhere else, carving out a space for a genuine, two-way dialogue between Israel and the diaspora. Little did we know that, three years on and for the most unwanted reasons, that dialogue would come to feel essential. The conversation we had just last week is a case in point.
Now, we’ve been fortunate enough to have had some star names on the podcast — Yuval Noah Harari, Dame Helen Mirren, Ehud Barak, Malcolm Gladwell, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann, New Yorker editor David Remnick, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, theatre legend Nick Hytner, writers Anne Applebaum and Nicole Krauss and many others — but last week we spoke with someone whose name was entirely unknown three months ago.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin is the mother of Hersh, aged 23, who has been held hostage by Hamas ever since he was taken at the Nova music festival on October 7. Since then, she has become one of the most prominent advocates for the hostage families. She has spoken at the United Nations, she has met Joe Biden and the Pope, she has been on TV all over the world.
She told me and Yonit about Hersh, his love of soccer, his urge to travel, the trip he was meant to take to India. She told us about her daily ritual, how each morning she puts a sticker on her clothes, indicating how many days her son has been a prisoner of Hamas, how seeing that number makes people, especially outside Israel, feel “very uncomfortable, which is good. You should feel uncomfortable that there are human beings still being held hostage.”
She told us how she starts each day with a prayer and says tehillim, psalms, often. She has not lost her faith, she said, but is instead having “a conversation in anger with God”. The psalms she picks are not those that praise the almighty, but rather those which ask the heavens, “How long are you going to make me suffer? How long is this despair going to go on?”
She said that while she appears high-functioning, she is, in reality, only pretending to be human. “My heart and soul were torn out and stolen to Gaza on October 7. So I look a lot like a person, and I still know how to kind of fake it and behave like a person, but I am in existential angst and despair at all times.”
We talked too of her joy at seeing some hostages released and reunited with their families in November, but how the testimony of those who returned, detailing the conditions in which they had been held and the cruelty of their Hamas captors, meant that the pain she was in — which was already excruciating — “just went skyrocketing, breaking through every ceiling”, leaving her in a state of “complete panic and anxiety.” We talked of her frustrations with an Israeli government that, she fears, is putting 100 percent of its efforts into the military goal of defeating Hamas, leaving next to no resources for the supposedly equal objective of bringing the hostages back home.
But we also spoke of something else — of the pain and suffering of those on the other side of the Gaza boundary. In a speech at the United Nations, she had said: “When you only get outraged when one side’s babies are killed, then your moral compass is broken and your humanity is broken.”
At the UN she read out a poem she had written, imagining a mother in Gaza:
And I know that way over there/there’s another woman/who looks just like me/because we are all so very similar/and she has also been crying./All those tears, a sea of tears/they all taste the same.
I suspect this partly explains why Rachel Goldberg-Polin has become the global face of the hostage families. Raised in Chicago, she is an eloquent speaker in English – but she is bilingual in a deeper sense too. She can address Israelis, obviously, but she can also speak in the idiom of the wider world, understanding the assumptions and first instincts of people watching this terrible war from afar. When she describes her “tremendous pain and anguish seeing those images of innocent children in rubble” in Gaza, she instantly connects with an international audience who feel the same way. Straight away, their ears, and hearts, are open.
Listening to her, I realised how much of a rarity she is these days: an Israeli able to connect not only with her fellow Israelis and Jews, but also with the world beyond. She does that chiefly by being honest about the human suffering that Israel has caused, albeit in a war that she fully accepts is one of necessary self-defence.
Plenty of Israelis – and diaspora Jews, for that matter – struggle to make the same move. They cannot face the death and destruction wrought by IDF bombs in Gaza. Some can’t bear to look; others try to explain away the images and the horrific numbers, retreating into debating points. Still caught up in the trauma of 7 October, reliving it over and over, it’s all just too hard. As one retired IDF general put it to me, “there is no room for the other side’s pain.”
And yet here is a woman whose agony is the deepest imaginable, a woman who would be forgiven for having no room in her heart for the suffering of another human being, who nevertheless has space for a grieving mother in Gaza – a mother who looks just like her.
There is a paradox here. Those Israelis who connect most effectively with the outside world are not the bullish, hard-edged spokespersons on the news channels, with their slick rebuttals of every charge. No, the Israelis who manage to change minds are the ones who show they see and feel the pain of “the other side,” those who articulate the desperate desire for a better future for both peoples. It’s why the likes of Amos Oz and David Grossman were always better advocates for their country than a thousand tough-talking ambassadors. Rachel Goldberg-Polin is in that same tradition. We should listen to her voice.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. Unholy is available on all podcast platforms every Friday
