Jacky Klein

Jacky Klein: Notes from a Storm

‘To look is an act of choice’
John Berger[1]

I’ve never experienced writer’s block before, but I find now there are things – many things – that I can’t bring myself to write about. I’m an art historian by trade: I study images, research artworks; conjur with words the stories that will help bring them to life, reanimate them, for others. Instead, I need now to anaesthetise, to extirpate the images I have seen, mostly on my phone – those that have stopped me dead in my tracks over the past year and a half. Stills from videos recorded by Hamas militants in Israel’s south on 7th October 2023, showing cowering families on kitchen floors, paths pooled with blood, homes burnt to the ground. Views of the road – mile after mile – from the Nova music festival in Re’im, littered with shot and burned-out cars. A teenager dragged by her hair from the back of a Jeep by a gun-wielding terrorist, barefoot and bruised, hands tied behind her back, seat of her grey sweatpants heavily bloodied. The terrified face of one of the women hostages, jostled amidst a swarm of masked gunmen, during one of the macabre release ‘ceremonies’ in early 2025. Photographs of young children kissing the posters of their missing parents.

These are black hole images: they have stolen from me hours, whole days, sucking me into their dark vortex, flipping me from a sense of forward motion – some work deadline or domestic errand – into despair and stasis. I thought, at this distance, I could write about them but the words are still in hiding, not yet ready to emerge.

What follows, then, are partial thoughts: notes written and snapshots taken on board ship, still in the eye of the storm. Forgive them their tattered, water-stained quality. The camera, not my natural medium, has become over these past 18 months a lifeline, giving me a proxy voice in pictures. It has helped me to record, notice, process: to find spaces for what can’t yet be said.

It’s a partial account, too, because this is a perspective – not surprisingly perhaps, given that I’m Jewish, British-born and a relative newcomer to this land of composite histories and identities – with an Israeli-Jewish bent. These are not the vantage points, I know, of Israeli Arabs or Palestinians. They are also responses that have emerged in – and been shaped by – Tel Aviv and its surroundings, not by the starkly different realities of Israel’s borderlands in the south and north, nor the battle-scarred landscapes of Gaza City or Rafah. Those images and stories are not mine to share – though our eyes and ears should be wide open to receiving them.

OCTOBER 2023

‘… we are back in a time it discredits the middle ages to call medieval’
Howard Jacobson[2]

It all starts with a small, insistent black shape made out in the dark against the white painted wall of my daughter’s bedroom. A juk – a cockroach! I spy it in the middle of the night as I go to check on her; freeze, my blood running cold. It’s the first days of October, 2023.

I have a horror of these creatures that can survive anything, even decapitation; that existed before the dinosaurs and will outlive us all. I stalk and catch it, throw it down the toilet, triumphant and disgusted. Spraying the wall with disinfectant, I furiously wash my hands, then stay in Dani’s room for the rest of the night, on guard. Each time my eyes open, they’re instinctively drawn to the same spot on the wall. The small sinister mass wafts in and out of my dreams, a kind of ebony warning.

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I have only two photographs on my phone from 7th October 2023. They’re of the four of us sitting on the stairs in Bat Yam, at my parents-in-law’s house, close to the bomb shelter. We’ve been living with them since we moved to Israel in February. It’s 6.53 am. Yoni and I each hold one of our young children. The colours are brown, off-white, pale pink, all washed with a sickly green light. We are in our pyjamas, bleary eyed. What you don’t see: the dog off-camera, whining and spooked. This is the second siren of the morning: its rising pitch first woke us abruptly from the edges of sleep twenty minutes earlier. Something unusual is clearly happening, but we have no idea what has started to unfold just 50 miles south of here.

I get Yoni to take these photographs – me with arm gripped securely around Dani’s waist, a forced jollity in my expression, and a grinning selfie of Yoni and Tal – for two reasons: as a distraction, a form of play, to calm the children (myself, too); and to mark this moment, which I sense is the start of something big.

As the day progresses, there are more azakot, more rushes downstairs to the greater safety of the internal, window-free staircase. We hear them through the windows from the neighbouring cities of Holon and Rishon-Le-Zion, too; sometimes it’s hard to know if the alarm is happening there or here. The atmosphere is intense, as if the air itself is holding its breath.

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The following week is probably the worst of my life. News trickles in in a steady, ever-more grim stream – the numbers of dead and wounded, the hostages taken, the fact – unbelievable after twofull days! – that battles are still waging on the ground in seven places in Israel’s south, and Hamas militants are still crossing the border into Israel. There are stories of cyber hacking; messages on my Whatsapp groups from south Tel Aviv and Jaffa about friends and relatives who’ve died or are missing. The massacres at the Nova music festival, at Kibbutz Be’eri, Nir Oz, Kfar Aza. It’s unimaginable, horrifying. We are told to stay home and prepare the safe room for a three-day stay: food, water, first aid kids, flashlights with batteries. Everything closes or, rather, doesn’t reopen (the long succession of religious holidays were due to end on the 8th): schools, public buildings, offices, non-essential shops. A state of emergency is announced; a new war begins.

The notes I make hastily on my phone in these first days are full of sensory overload and a bizarre new set of practical considerations:

• Constant hum of military aircraft. Walk to beach, see fighter planes and helicopters going down coastline, en route to the south. Gaza so close we can hear the bombing
• Windows… safer in event of missiles to pull plastic blinds across with or without the glass?
• New pre-sleep ritual: move kids’ toys to edge of rubber mat so sprint downstairs quicker
• Speed of baths and showers – soap one body part, rinse, soap one body part, rinse. Quick as poss – in case of missile attack
• Taste in my mouth – never before: Bitter? Sour? Sickly? Can’t place it. Not me but inside me, emanating from me. Smell of my sweat – strong, pungent, unfamiliar
• Nerves jangling – phrase makes sense for first time. Raw, on edge; constant diarrhea from waves of adrenaline, fear, lack of sleep
• Shock of UK news – not just pro-Palestinian but pro-Hamas demonstrations, Jewish schools forced to close, Muslim women tearing down posters of abducted children outside our local tube station, massive rise in anti-Jewish hate crime…
• A Holocausty feeling. Deep, elemental angst for one’s life – because we’re Jewish. Well-planned pogroms; Jew-hatred and violence I’ve only read about in history books, heard from my grandparents. Ancient instinct, to flee

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I can’t talk easily to family or friends on the phone, worried that Tal will overhear. The Israeli news blares non-stop from the TV downstairs, Yoni’s father glued to the screen; for once, I’m grateful that our son’s Hebrew has progressed so slowly in our first months here. Instead, I take photographs in these days immediately afterwards in a desperate bid to stay sane. Here are the children messing around together on the rooftop; watching the fish swimming in their tank; playing hiding games in our wardrobe. Tal is learning to ride his bike; Dani is continuing to befriend the local cats that roam free outside the house. I send the pictures to family, to say: Here we are, normal and playing! We are alive! The news is hideous, but we are OK. Mostly, though, they are made to reassure myself that the world, despite all appearances, is not falling apart. They are a hand extended out to myself, a buoy to keep me afloat. A mindfulness exercise challenging me to focus, even for a brief moment, on the here-and-now.

Whenever I can, when the children are distracted by watching TV, I search desperately for flights to London.

Getting Away

After a week of non-stop panic attacks, we leave on a UK repatriation flight. As the plane lifts off I look down over the brown and green mottled earth and suddenly feel a sharp, unexpected pang of homesickness. Despite having wanted nothing more than to get out, to turn away from the monstrous violence and get back to London, family and familiarity, I have waves of separation anxiety through the flight, a feeling of needing to get ‘home’ – to Israel.

The realisation starts to sink in, too, of what we’ve been witness to these past eight days: the harrowing news, the sirens, the shattered nerves. I read later what the Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan says about the profound shock Israelis felt on 7th October, when the world’s only Jewish state – established precisely to be a sanctuary for Jews after 2000 years of persecution and statelessness – failed to prevent the worst day of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. ‘At that moment,’ she said, ‘our Israeli identity felt so crushed. It felt like 75 years of sovereignty, of Israeliness, had — in a snap — disappeared. We used to be Israelis; now we are Jewish.’[3]

For me, 7th October has had exactly the reverse effect. I see the murderous ideological hatred of Israel’s enemies, and experience what it is to live directly under attack. I feel the proximity of the country’s borders. I used to be Jewish; now, I am also Israeli.

Coming Back

We fly back in the middle of the first ceasefire, late November 2023. I overcome the overwhelming resistance I feel to bring my children back into this. The skies are eerily quiet.

In early December, we stop in on the flat in Jaffa that we’d been due to move into on 8th October. Inside, we find a moment frozen in time. On the small sun terrace is the washing that I hung out two months ago, windswept and sand-dusted. On the sofa, a carefully balanced den of pillows made by Tal as he passed the time while I cleaned out cupboards. In the freezer, a silver-foil-wrapped package marked ‘Carrot cake, 6 October 23’, an uneaten housewarming treat.

And everywhere, everywhere: the faces of the hostages.

The Hostages

As soon as we arrive at the airport, there they are, hundreds of faces flashing before us, unavoidable on the screens of Ben Gurion’s passport machines. Old, young, children, babies – their posters line the famous arrivals ramp. (Later, each one will become a sort of living shrine, encrusted with notes and messages, stickers and paper flowers, personal effects, drawings and dog tags, left by family, friends and strangers.)

There they are again the next day, all over Bat Yam: on lampposts and in the windows of restaurants, on huge digital screens installed along the waterfront. Each poster includes a headshot, the hostage’s name (in Hebrew and English), their age in brackets below. Over the coming weeks, these bare facts get filled out into nearly 150 life stories, each remaining hostage turning into a fully rounded character in some macabre play. We learn of their families and hobbies, their favourite foods, funny incidents from their childhoods, what they were about to start studying, who they love. Across the country, they become celebrities; some, especially those with dual nationalities, become famous around the world, too.

Some days, I find it impossible to think about much else besides these intimate strangers: the dangers they must be facing, the inconceivable pain of their families and friends. An awareness sharpens: each hug with the children, each meal I prepare, each breath of air I take or view I catch from our kitchen window of the sunset over the sea is a luxury. At night, I’m woken by darkness, tunnels, blocked escape routes, breath-crushing claustrophobia. In one nightmare, I need urgently to tell my parents they have 10 minutes to pack their essentials before we need to flee – but I must somehow do it without worrying them, and struggle to know what to say. Another time, in the moments before being woken by what sounds like gunfire, I dream vividly that I am trying to pick up Tal from his old nursery, the noise a terrorist attack happening outside on our street.

I don’t know Hersh Goldberg-Polin or Carmel Gat, nor Agam Berger, Naama Levy, Liri Albag, Andrey Kozlov, Omri Miran, the twin brothers Ziv and Gali Berman – but their faces loom up at me from the night-time depths. Their names form an incessant mantra, tap-tap-tapping my brain during sleep.

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The war changes everything, including the country’s geography. In late October 2023, when I google from London our new apartment in Jaffa, I find the Tel Aviv map redrawn, street names overwritten with new signs showing where the public bomb shelters are located.

The simplest things involve a decision now, a balance of risks and probabilities. Do I take Tal to the shopping mall for new shoes, or avoid crowded places in case there’s a terrorist attack? Should we go to see friends north of the city this weekend, or is the risk of missiles while we’re on the road too high? If I’m at the acupuncturist, lying half-naked and studded with needles, how will I get to the bomb shelter in time?

The world contracts, our flat the centre of an ever-decreasing circle. When I’m home alone, I am aware of half-holding my breath until the four of us are back together in the late afternoon. My body, like the city, has recalibrated itself: constantly on high alert, poised, adrenalised. When the siren does come, there is barely a split second of recognition needed: I’m ready to run.

Bring Them Home Now

The phrase ‘Bring Them Home Now’ first shouts out its white, red and black demand from the hostage posters. Devised by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the volunteer-based organization set up less than 24 hours after the Hamas attacks began, the message soon appears on banners and hoardings. Some are placed at street level, in shop windows or on traffic-light poles, others printed at gargantuan scale on billboards or used to sticker skyscrapers.

It’s the freestyle, hand-drawn ones that touch me most. Graffitied onto doorways, walls and benches, they range from the spontaneous to the well planned. The chunky, wonky version along the old railway tracks in south Tel Aviv, made by not-for-profit Artists4Israel; Julia Shtengelov (aka Imaginary Duck)’s signature black-and-white Peter-Pan-collared girl, now teary-eyed, finger pointing at the plea above her head; the car I discover parked in our street one day, hubcaps customised in yellow, sides daubed energetically in urgent half-phrases: ‘Bring Back’ on one side and, in Hebrew, ‘tachziroo’, ‘Bring them’. A child-like version sprayed in black, yellow and red onto the centuries-old wall of a local mini-market, next to a yellow ribbon atop a bleeding heart.

The phraseology of ‘Bring Them Home Now’ strikes me early on for its odd, topsy-turvy quality; for where its linguistic finger points. Anywhere else in the world, if hostages were taken, the cry would be to the abductors: ‘Let Them Go!’, ‘Release Them!’ Here, though, the directive is made not to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad but to the Israeli government. The responsibility is yours to bring our family members, our parents, children, beloved friends, back from the hell of Gaza’s terror tunnels – home, to Israel.

For many of us not raised here, ‘Bring Them Home Now’ seems, at best, one side only of the coin. It demands nothing, puts no pressure whatsoever, on Hamas to act. In the international context, this has been a serious missed trick. That was the feeling, too, of American-Israeli entrepreneur James Oppenheim, who in spring 2024 launched a campaign for an alternative rallying cry, ‘Let Them Go Now’ – to place the onus squarely back on the perpetrators and, crucially, to try to bolster support from the world beyond Israel to exert maximum pressure on the terrorist organisation itself for the hostages’ release.

Despite the campaign’s effective graphic – white text against a blue background, the ‘o’ of ‘home’ a yellow ribbon inset with a heart – the catchphrase has remained very much a subsidiary one. ‘Bring Them Home Now’, whatever its limitations, is the Israeli maxim of the war. Perhaps that’s because it’s a call that isn’t new but in fact ancient, harking back to a commitment whose roots lie in the Talmud, Judaism’s core text, and the key source for its theology and religious law. This is where the concept of ‘pidyon shevuyim’ or ‘redemption of the captives’ was first spelled out: the absolute duty to bring about the release of a captured or unjustly imprisoned fellow Jew. Maimonides, the 12th-century Rabbinic philosopher, described this duty as a great mitzvah or good deed. Indeed, he wrote, ‘There is no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives, for the problems of the captive include being hungry, thirsty, unclothed, and they are in danger of their lives too.’[4]

The obligation to bring back every last hostage is one felt powerfully by Israelis. It’s part of the social contract instinctively understood from childhood, running especially deep for those who go through formative years in the army. The state will protect you, come what may. No-one will be left behind, no-one forgotten, whatever the circumstances and whatever measures may be needed. Everyone knows this in Israel – and if there were ever any inkling of doubt about how far the country would go to bring its citizens back, those uncertainties were roundly dispelled in 2011 when, after more than five years in Hamas captivity, IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was released – not in exchange for one, or 10, or even 100 Palestinian prisoners, but for 1047 of them.

Tragically, knowledge of all this is no secret to Israel’s enemies. A key part of Hamas’s strategy, in fact, under Yahya Sinwar (architect of the 7th October attacks and himself a long-time prisoner released in the Shalit deal) was the taking of huge numbers of hostages, precisely because he understood so well the profound value of a captive’s life to Israelis and Jews, the lengths they will go to in order to secure each individual’s release. Hostage-taking has been weaponised as one of Hamas’s central strategies, and the ubiquity of the demand to ‘Bring Them Home Now’ only proves its calamitous effectiveness.

Despite these terrible risks, the slogan expresses something intensely moral and humanistic, the essential mitzvah. ‘How can I leave him behind?’ asks Eli Sharabi, held hostage for 491 days, bound in chains throughout, of his fellow captive Alon Ohel, who still lingers, half-blind, in a tunnel deep underground in Gaza, now alone. One might imagine Sharabi’s keenness to start forgetting about the horrors down there, to turn his face away now that he has himself been freed. Instead, in his first interview just days after his release in February 2025, he described how: ‘We supported each other and were 24/7 together. I know everything about him. About his family, every date, every hobby of his sister, his brother, his parents, I know everything. How can I leave him behind?’[5]

Hostages Square

The focal point in the fight to bring the hostages home is a large public plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. This is the newly named ‘Hostages Square’, once home only to a Menashe Kadishman sculpture and a Henry Moore reclining figure that elegantly swept you towards the museum’s entrance. The sculptures are still there, but lost almost completely in the middle of an entirely new space. The square looks like the site of a rock concert or political rally; part-memorial, part-community hub. And it is indeed all of these things now. Here, speeches are given by visiting dignitaries; tearful, rageful rallies are held calling for the return of the hostages; talks, concerts and fundraisers are led by their families and friends; highly emotive artworks are erected; merchandise – badges, bracelets, ribbons, t-shirts, sweaters, baseball caps, books – is sold to support the forum’s work. Grief, desperation, anger, protest, commemoration, prayer, yearning – all the emotions and experiences of the war are compounded in this place.

I come by regularly, often on my way to visit the museum. Each time, the square wears a new face. Three months after the war begins, I first see the long Shabbat table laid out with a seat for each missing hostage, paper butterflies adorning the tabletop. The installation leads from the museum entrance to the main road, as if in dialogue – though for my part I am shocked by how quickly the power of what’s happening outside overwhelms anything the museum might show within. The gallery exhibits try their best to connect to the realities of the war, but it’s what’s going on in the square that grabs you by the throat: the spontaneous folk art quality of the artworks, the energy of it all, the noise, the intense emotion, the palpable sense of action, ceaseless ‘until the last hostage’. On a later visit in spring 2024, a replica Hamas tunnel has been installed, complete with ominous soundtrack of dripping water and dropping bombs, its walls a canvas for the messages and prayers of visitors. By late summer, the square looks ramshackle and tired, like the morning after a drunken demonstration. Signs are faded, barriers have been erected here and there. The table laid out for the hostages has been covered with a canopy and moved to run parallel to the street, more visible now to passing traffic.

Time is ceaselessly marked on the huge digital banner that overlooks the square, its red numbers counting each day, hour, minute and second that has passed since 7th October. It’s marked too, agonisingly, in each passing season: in spring, the table laid for the passover festival; in early summer, a cookbook printed in Kibbutz Be’eri to mark the shavuot holiday, its recipes the favourites of those either murdered or taken hostage. By the end of year, there are handmade candelabras – eight hands bound together in supplication; eight wax hearts, each encased in an arched cell – for chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights. Another, by the artist Eli Gross, has been created from missile fragments launched at Israel by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, a gnarled tribute to the power of survival.

Everything in the square is in flux, shifting as the heavy days pass… and pass… and pass.

War in Four Colours

Blue-and-white

Red has long been the blood of conflict, but this war has taken on other hues. First among them are blue-and-white, Israel’s national colours. Before the war, I remember being struck by how many Israeli flags I saw hung outside public buildings and offices, flapping from balconies, stretched on small pieces of fabric as car mirror protectors. Each spring before Independence Day, there’s a huge proliferation of blue-and-white designs for sale in ha’col be’shekel stores (dollar or pound shops) across Israel, available for purchase on every imaginable surface from sweet wrappers and plastic hooters to tablecloths and foam-spray canisters.

The flag is in many ways – at least for Jewish Israelis – far more straightforward in its messaging than, say, the UK’s Union Jack, which in recent times has stood for everything from national pride and British multiculturalism to an anti-European, anti-immigrant, pro-Brexit sentiment, even far-right sympathies. In Israel, the flag unashamedly celebrates the seemingly impossible: the dream of a Jewish homeland having become reality. Its design – white with a blue line at top and bottom encasing a blue hexagram star, the Magen David or Shield of David – originally referenced the Jewish tallit or prayer shawl, a tasselled white fabric with blue edges. In Jewish religious tradition, white is purity, peace and priestly radiance; blue the shining of the firmament, a colour that features prominently in Jewish mystical traditions and eschatology.

Since 7th October, blue-and-white have become more ubiquitous than ever. So, too, have two phrases, almost exclusively reproduced in the same tones. The first is ‘Am Israel Chai’, ‘The People of Israel Lives’. A Zionist slogan in the decades before the founding of Israel, it became a term of solidarity and defiance during the Second World War. Since 1948, it has resurfaced each time Israel has been under attack, serving as a rallying cry during times of war. Our enemies will not defeat us, it declares. We have survived; we will survive.

The second phrase is ‘Yachad Ne’natzayach’, ‘Together We Will Win’. Ostensibly a simpler expression of patriotism, it communicates the need to unite in the face of enemies who want to destroy us. Together, we will defend our country and, together, we will be victorious. It’s a message that few argued with in the early days of the war, in a moment of true crisis. But it has – among a significant tranche of the Israeli public – become after all these months a contemptuous motto when voiced by a government that was, long before the war, divisive rather than unifying. Huge public protests against Netanyahu’s attempted reforms of the judicial system ran from January 2023 until 7th October – reforms that intended, among other things, to grant the government complete control over the Supreme Court, to dismantle the Israel Bar Association, and to change the makeup of the judicial selection committee. ‘We Are One Israel’, as another banner proclaims, is now as much a cynical attempt to whitewash this ongoing constitutional crisis, to drown out Bibi’s opponents, as it is a heart-warming declaration of solidarity.

Yellow

Yellow, like blue-and-white, is nothing new in Israel, but its pervasiveness again marks a sea change. This is the colour of solidarity with the hostages and remembrance of their plight. Vibrant flashes of lemon, canary, dandelion, egg-yolk, daffodil, honey and gold accent the country and its people, from phone lanyards and specially designed jewellery to the plain yellow flags that line the highways and the empty yellow chairs that appear far and wide to remember those not sitting at the family table.

Yellow ribbons in particular have become universal. Harking back at least to the 19th century, these tokens were traditionally worn by women as reminders of their loved ones away at war, an association popularised in a 1917 song by American lyricist George Norton: ‘round her neck she wears a yeller ribbon / for her lover who is fur fur away’. The motif made its way definitively into popular culture in 1973 when the American group Tony Orlando and Dawn released their hit song ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, telling the story of a prisoner who’s done his time and is coming home: ‘… If you received my letter telling you I’d soon be free / Then you’ll know just what to do / If you still want me, if you still want me / Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the ole oak tree / It’s been three long years, do you still want me?…’ The record sold three million copies in just three weeks, tapping into a public yearning in the US to see troops and prisoners-of-war brought home from Vietnam. But in 1979, it took on a new significance, the song becoming an unofficial hostage anthem when the yellow ribbon emerged as the sign of support for American hostages besieged inside the US embassy in Tehran by a group of armed students, supporters of the Iranian Revolution.

In Israel, the yellow ribbon was most recently put into action in the summer of 2008, when thousands were tied to car mirrors in Israel’s Galilee region as a gesture of hope for the return of Gilad Shalit, born and raised in the northern village of Mitzpe Hila. Cars are bedecked with them again, now, and you can barely turn a corner without seeing one strung from a metal window grille or hanging from a stranger’s rucksack. These yellow ribbons speak of the longing and loyalty of those at home waiting for the return of their loved ones, while simultaneously sending a powerful message to those still in captivity: you are not forgotten; we are fighting to get you back. So central has the logo become that a new version of the national flag was produced in the spring of 2024, featuring a yellow ribbon looped around the top and through the centre of the Magen David. Designed by Reuven Yablonka whose son Hanan was murdered at the Nova festival, it expresses succinctly how the fate of the remaining hostages is entwined with that of the nation, how it’s been woven into the very fabric of the contemporary Israeli soul.

Orange

Orange is the tangy sweetness of the world-famous Jaffa fruit, grown and shipped from the orchards here for more than 150 years. It’s one of Israel’s iconic emblems, the fruit’s intense colour at one time even chosen to clothe the air stewards of El Al, the national airline. Bright orange was also, twenty years ago, the colour of resistance chosen by the Israeli settler communities of the southern Gaza Strip, in particular those of Gush Katif, who railed against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan (blue being the opposing hue of support for the handover of the land to Palestinians).

Now orange has become associated once more with Gaza, and indeed with sweetness, albeit of a very different sort. It is the colour of the ‘jinji’ or red-headed Bibas children, taken hostage with their mother Shiri from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz near the Gaza border. Apparently sold to the highest bidder – the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades – all three were murdered in captivity. Their faces had been splashed across global news networks more than those of any other hostages, for the grim fact that the Bibas boys, four-year-old Ariel (meaning ‘lion of God’) and nine-month-old Kfir (‘lion cub’), were the youngest hostages taken on 7th October, symbols of innocence stolen. They were also, after the week-long ceasefire in late November 2023 which saw 105 hostages returned to Israel, the last two children left in Gaza. Their father Yarden, captured separately from his wife and sons, was eventually released on 1st February 2025. The bodies of his wife and children were handed over and identified some three weeks later.

At their funeral on 26th February, amidst a sea of tangerine and salamander, the single shared coffin processed from Rishon-le-Zion in Israel’s centre to the Bibas’s final resting place in Tzohar, near the family’s home. Tens of thousands lined the 100km route, many wearing orange or holding flame-coloured flowers, balloons, banners and ribbons. The Israeli flag, pinned to the cars of the funeral cavalcade, took on a ginger tint. Across the country, communities released dozens of orange balloons into the air; the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labour) placed tributes with an orange background on the front pages of Israel’s major newspapers; the official Jerusalem residence of Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, gleamed under a projection of saffron light.

For nearly 17 months orange had come to symbolise the horror of the children’s abduction, caught on camera by their captors and shared with the world, like so much heinous footage that day. Few who have seen it will easily forget the look on Shiri’s petrified face, her brow knitted, lips parted in anguish, as she holds her two small children under a shawl, tight to her chest, and they are led away by a chaotic group of armed men. Some of the most moving artworks in Hostages Square have been those connected to the family: a painted version of that horrific film still; a ceramic bust of Shiri clasping her children; a sculpture of a red-headed child bound in a cage.

Orange was the colour of hope for the family’s safe return. Now instead it stands for a nation’s mourning. The artist Vincent Van Gogh famously described how ‘there is no blue without yellow and orange’. He was talking of course of the colour contrasts and balances in his vivid canvases. In Israel, blue is still the colour of the flag, yellow the hostages – but orange has tragically outlived its purpose.

War, War, Everywhere

Politically, economically, culturally, psychologically, the war is everywhere. But visually, too, there is no escaping it. Sometimes it hijacks you out of nowhere, in the most unexpected places: ‘Together we will win’ on bottles of shampoo at the local pharmacy; on the payment machine as I go to exit an underground carpark; as a heartfelt announcement flashing up on the cinema screen, sandwiched between trailers and a kids’ movie, offering strength to the soldiers, security services and those living close to the war zones, condolences to those murdered or killed in battle, well wishes to those recovering from injury. In a busy upmarket shopping mall in central Tel Aviv, children and a mother decorate a large poster together, colouring in pre-printed images of trees, doves, hearts, children holdings hands – but also of tanks, maps of Israel, flags, Stars of David, military aircraft, soldiers bearing rifles, and the phrases ‘Am Israel Chai’, ‘Beyachad Ne’natzayach’, ‘Shema Israel’, and ‘Bring Them Home Now’.

The relentlessness of this optical assault explains part of the (guilty) relief I feel on trips back to the UK. Of course it’s the lack of sirens and missiles, not having to foresee a terrorist attack every time I board a bus or train. But the constant awareness of the war, its visual language all around, briefly slackens, too. Here, instead, is a visual world of manifold subjects and concerns, diverse colours and designs, multifarious offers and opportunities. A tree is a tree again, not a place for a ribbon to be tied; an advertising billboard offers me a TV subscription, a holiday – not an entreaty to fight until the last hostage is home. Park benches are adorned with declarations of teenage love, not homemade stickers of fallen teenage soldiers and dead teenage party-goers.

But the privilege of being able to look away in the end only reinforces the necessity of turning my gaze back. There is an obligation we each have to keep our eyes open to the truth, however ugly it may be: to see it, and to respond. To look is an act of choice. Even those of us lucky enough to have somewhere else to be, another place we can call home – perhaps, in fact, we more than anyone – mustn’t look away.