Tunnel Vision

“In these moments, as I’m being led past the kibbutz fence, under the blazing sun, engulfed by the smell of smoldering ruins, a headband strapped over my eyes, dragged by terrorists gripping both my hands, totally aware that I am being abducted into Gaza but knowing at least that Lianne and the girls were left behind, I focus and concentrate on one mission: surviving to return home.”

This long, gasping sentence appears in the first pages of Hostage, Eli Sharabi’s powerful account of his captivity under Hamas in Gaza. From its opening lines, the book swiftly draws the reader into Sharabi’s shattered world, starting with the spectacular violence Hamas visited on Be’eri—the kibbutz in the Gaza Envelope where Sharabi lived with his family—continuing with his kidnapping into Gaza, and then pulling the reader down into the dark tunnels where Sharabi was forced to suffer 491 days as a hostage of Hamas.

I read Hostage in two intense sittings—and would have done it in one, if my teenage daughter had not picked up the book and became mesmerized when I had to take a short break. The Book Publishers Association of Israel recently announced that Hostage was the fastest-selling book in the history of Hebrew literature, selling twenty thousand copies in just five days. (When I went to buy a copy from my local Israeli bookstore, it was in a diminishing pile at the checkout counter rather than with the other new books.) Hostage has now been published in English, and more translations are in the works.

Ironically, the success of Hostage is made more remarkable by the ubiquity of the hostages and their cause. Since October 7, 2023, when 251 people were abducted by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, friends, family members, and concerned citizens have rallied at highway junctions and in city squares across Israel and around the world. The hostages’ faces look out at passersby from graffiti, stickers, posters, and billboards that seem to be everywhere. Former hostages regularly post on Instagram, write op-eds in newspapers, give speeches at rallies, and grant interviews to reporters in their efforts to gain the release of the remaining captives. Nevertheless, as the second anniversary of the Hamas attacks nears, Israelis are thoroughly fatigued by nearly two years of war on multiple fronts and the apparent intractability of the hostage crisis. Hostage,the remarkable memoir of a seemingly unremarkable man, has somehow managed to break through our war weariness and strike a chord.

Until October 7, 2023, Eli Sharabi lived a quiet, fulfilling life. Born in Tel Aviv to a Moroccan mother and Yemenite father, as a high schooler Sharabi was drawn to the kibbutz, “its community life, its wide-open fields, its pioneering spirit,” and he moved to Be’eri on his own when he was just sixteen. Sharabi met Lianne, who had come from England to volunteer on the kibbutz, in the local pub. They fell in love and got married, twice:

One [wedding] over there in England, a low-key event for the formality, and one back here in Israel, on the kibbutz, next to the pool, a big, noisy party with so many people . . . and at the end—tradition is tradition on the kibbutz, after all—we all jumped into the pool and screamed our lungs out with love and joy.

The Sharabis loved Be’eri: “despite the difficult years of sirens and rocket fire from Gaza, I knew—we knew—that the girls were growing in paradise, with everything they could possibly need and beyond.”

On October 7, Eli Sharabi’s good life went up in smoke with the blare of sirens and frantic updates on the kibbutz WhatsApp alerting kibbutz members of Hamas’s infiltration. Huddled with his family in their safe room, Sharabi glanced at the clock and realized that “at this time on a normal Shabbat morning, we’d be sitting down for a family meal. One week we might eat jachnun; other times, Lianne cooks shakshuka.” Yet, on that Shabbat and Simchat Torah morning, the Sharabis’ house was broken into by Hamas terrorists, who took the family out of the safe room, told Lianne to get dressed, and, after first allowing Eli to retrieve the British passports of his wife and daughters (which Eli hoped would ensure their safety), dragged Eli into captivity.

Sharabi wrote Hostage in just two months while undergoing rehab for the physical and mental trauma he endured over almost five hundred days in Gaza. The book is the first such account by an October 7 hostage, but it is also an extraordinary literary and moral achievement. For once, it is not a cliché to refer to a book as a triumph, since the publication of Hostage testifies to Sharabi’s survival and return to the world of the living, against long odds.

Unfortunately, the uncredited translator seems to have misread Sharabi’s clear Hebrew prose as colloquial, giving us cell phones that are “beeping like crazy,” people who “freak out,” and mobs that “clock” someone’s identity. Nonetheless, Sharabi’s distinct voice, calm and precise, still comes through. 

Memoirs tend to look back from the present, but from the moment Sharabi is taken into Gaza, the reader of Hostage knows only what he knew at that moment. Like him, we are sucked into the dark tunnel vision of captivity. In Hamas’s infamous tunnels, which can descend fifty meters below ground, Sharabi is not aware of the full extent of the attacks, of the war with Hezbollah, of the missiles sent by the Houthis and the Iranians, and of the remarkable volunteerism that swept across Israel in the days and weeks after October 7. When after nearly two months of captivity he meets fellow hostages Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Sharabi doesn’t know that Hersh has become a household name in Israel, thanks to the tireless advocacy of his parents, family, and friends and his Jerusalem soccer club. (Nor does the book foreshadow Hersh’s, Almog’s, and Ori’s infuriating deaths in August 2024 at the hands of their captors.)

Sharabi is initially incarcerated with a Thai worker named Khunin the home of a well-to-do Gazan family, but Hostage quickly takes us with Sharabi into a series of tunnels in which, for much of the time, he is held with the Israeli hostages Or Levy, Alon Ohel, and Eliya Cohen. When Sharabi is first led to a tunnel, accessed through a trapdoor hidden in a Gazan mosque, he begs his captors not to force him to climb down the long shaft. Hostage conveys the profound eeriness of those tunnels, which have lurked in Israelis’ worst nightmares at least since Gilad Shalit’s capture in 2006. In Sharabi’s vivid account, we learn that the tunnels possess their own peculiar air, weird acoustics, dim light, long shadows, and shockingly subhuman conditions. Sharabi’s restrained prose is also well suited for describing the subterranean claustrophobia, the gnaw of hunger, the cruelty of the captors, and the occasional conflicts that break out among captives, who must learn to survive together as a group.

Having occupied managerial positions on the kibbutz and in his professional life, Sharabi turns out to be a skilled leader of his fellow hostages. When tensions grow, he is able to defuse them. Occasionally and understandably, some of the captives take too much of the meager food for themselves, and Sharabi chides the “selfish” ones while encouraging the timid to insist on their portion. In time, the group establishes a daily ritual of sharing something positive that happened over the course of the day. In the tunnels, this could be finding an extra scrap of bread or avoiding a particularly abusive guard.

The hostages also turn to mantras to help them endure. Within the stark confines of tunnel life, these self-helpisms aren’t corny but critical for survival, and meaningful too: It is OK to cry, but it is dangerous to wallow; there is always a choice, even if the range of decision is incredibly narrow. At one point, the group discusses a teaching of Victor Frankl:

Everyone is struggling. On our second day here, someone sighs, and Ori looks at him and says to Hersh, “Hersh, tell them the sentence you kept telling me back at the house.”

“What sentence?” we ask.

“Tell them,” says Ori.

Hersh looks at us. “He who has a why can bear any how,” he says.

I mull it over. The saying feels like a gift.

In the harshness of captivity, simple things take on heightened significance. When being moved to a new tunnel, the group manages to find and pilfer a bottle of Fanta from the terrorists, using an ingenious ruse to deflect the blame. In the wake of their bravery, the fizzy drink tastes astoundingly sweet. At one point, the group becomes obsessed with Shadow and Bone, a young adult fantasy novel that somehow made it down into the tunnel. Eliya Cohen uses the book to learn English, and they all read it obsessively, as if it contains a special message intended just for them.

Although Sharabi and his fellow captives are not conventionally observant, they are drawn to Jewish tradition in the tunnels. On Friday night, they make Kiddushon water. On Saturday night, they improvise Havdalah. Sharabi recounts:

One day, as we eat our pitas, Ori Danino tells us about his family. He comes from an ultra-Orthodox, religiously observant home. He tells us about his father, a rabbinical scholar, and his own choice to lead a different life. At the end of the meal, I ask if he still remembers Birkat Hamazon, the Jewish Grace After Meals, by heart. “Of course,” he says. I ask him to recite it for us. “The whole thing? Out loud?” he asks. I nod. We all nod and gather around him.

Ori closes his eyes and . . . recites the whole blessing, to the end. He incants, we listen quietly, and those words, unfamiliar to most of us, dissipate through the sealed tunnel, dozens of feet beneath Gaza.

As they endlessly await a hostage deal, the captives talk to each other about almost everything: their lives, loves, disappointments, and dreams. Yet Hostage contains hardly a hint of political discord in the dialogue between the captives or in Sharabi’s own reflections. This is remarkable, not least because the October 7 attacks followed the most fractious period in Israel’s history, when the Netanyahu government tried to push through a wildly unpopular judicial overhaul. Despite calls for unity in the aftermath of the attacks, it has been painful to watch the cause of the hostages become a divisive issue, fueled by some right-wing news outlets and members of the ruling coalition who portray Israelis rallying for the captives as political adversaries.

Since his release, Sharabi has been campaigning for the remaining hostages, and it is reasonable to assume that the publication of Hostage, whose book jacket sports a yellow ribbon, is part of an effort to push the Netanyahu government to a final hostage deal, which they may be avoiding to stave off a postwar political reckoning. By toning down criticism of the government, Sharabi seems to have gone out of his way to reach Israelis who have set aside the hostages’ plight in a quest for “total victory.” And yet, I do not think that the absence of right and left politics in Hostage is merely a strategic decision. Instead, it corresponds to the book’s circumscribed perspective, as Sharabi struggles to survive in the blackness of the tunnels, far from the raging debates above ground in Israel.

Indeed, the few times Israeli politicians appear in the book, it is because their mention directly impacts the hostages, such as when the terrorists demand criticism of Netanyahu in a propaganda video or when the captors inform the captives that they will receive only one meal a day, since Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, limited the daily rations given to Palestinian prisoners.

Hostage’s avoidance of politics also allows Sharabi to seriously and even empathetically contemplate his captors. Take for instance this scene in a Gazan house with a captor whom the hostages have nicknamed the “Cleaner”:

I’m always hot and like fresh air, so he invites me to stand with him by the large open window, to feel the sea breeze. We both enjoy the wind blowing over us. It’s a rare moment of quiet, outside and inside. We stand like friends. Like brothers. Like something that can’t be defined. As if we’re not captor and captive. Hostage taker and hostage. As if I’m not far away from home and my loved ones. As if we’ve just met by chance while traveling in a cold and distant land. As if he’s not a religious extremist. As if he doesn’t hate my people. As if he no longer sees me as a bitter enemy.

Curiously, the book contains extensive discussion of the many monickers that the captives assign to the captors, which range from the acerbic (“Trash”) to the benign (“Square”) to the upbeat (“Smiley”). These names are part of an attempt to understand the captors, to figure out how to push their buttons and improve the captives’ conditions. But they also reflect Sharabi’s genuine interest in meeting the terrorists on a human plane. As Sharabi explains:

This might be hard to comprehend from the outside, especially after everything that happened and the savage atrocities that they and their comrades performed in the name of their horrible organization, which they wholeheartedly support. But clichéd as it might sound, they are still human beings. And here we are, human beings coming face-to-face with other human beings. Meeting each other amid fear, anger, terror, and mutual suspicion, but also laughter, pain, depth, familiarity, and commonality.

But Sharabi isn’t naive. He insists that what he is describing “isn’t Stockholm Syndrome. I don’t identify with them. I don’t pity them. I’m not confused about who they are or what they really want.” He never forgets the elemental injustice of his captivity, and at one point, he makes sure his captors remember it as well:

Every once in a while, one of our captors tells us, “We’re just like you. We’re also having a tough time. We’re also hungry.” Usually, we nod and bite our tongues, stifling our laughter and swallowing our bitterness deep inside, but once, I snap . . . “Just like us? . . . Do you eat like us? Are you cut off from your families like us? You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. You can call your wives, your kids, whenever you want.

Sharabi also regularly recalls the seething Gazan mob that attacked him as he was brought into Gaza on October 7, and he highlights the monstrosity of Hamas and their unbending belief that all the Jews must leave Palestine. Crucially, he knows that the terrorists, even the “nice” ones like the Cleaner and Smiley, would not hesitate to kill him in cold blood should they receive the order to do so. For his part, Sharabi admits that “if I thought that snatching their guns and killing them would get me home, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

In the end, Sharabi is a humanist, one who would likely agree with Anne Frank’s belief that “people are really good at heart.” He is also a captivity-hardened realist, for whom the “in spite of everything” at the beginning of Frank’s famous quote looms large. That “everything” includes the captors’ shocking ignorance, their terrible life decisions—again, for Sharabi, there is always some choice that can be made—and their profound cruelty.

And so, Sharabi’s uncanny ability to perceive the soul buried deep within the monster is inspiring, even if it mainly leads to moments of exasperation rather than transcendence:

Cleaner opens up to me about his family. “My home is in Khan Younis,” he says. . . . “My whole family is from there. We have land there. With olive trees. Soon the olives will ripen, and we’ll harvest them and press them for oil.” I nod and smile at him. He looks at me. “It’s a shame not everyone in Israel is like you,” he says.

“Like me?”

“Like you,” he repeats. “Like you who believes in freedom. That everyone should do what’s good for themselves.”

I look at him. How little he knows about Israelis! How much hate he’s heard about us his whole life! “Most Israelis are like me,” I tell him.

He says nothing. The setting sun, orange and gold, shines on us both. Darkness falls, and I return downstairs to my flimsy mattress under the stairs.

Throughout the narrative, it is Sharabi’s dream of reuniting with his wife and daughters that keeps him going. At the same time, Hostage opens with a dedication page memorializing Yossi, Eli’s brother, who was killed in captivity, and Lianne and Noiya and Yahel—the Sharabi girls—and so all along we are aware that their survival was, for Eli, not a certitude but a useful, and ultimately illusory, hope.

Tragically, Hostage ends where we knew it would, with Sharabi standing at the graves of Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel:

The peaceful fields around us glisten, a taut blue sky overhead. Birds chirp. I break down crying. . . . Everything’s blurry. The sky. The view. The other headstones. . . . Everything fades away. . . .

I signal to everyone: It’s over, finis. I pick myself up and start walking slowly toward the exit of the cemetery. This here is rock bottom. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. Now, life.