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HOW A HOSTAGE FAMILY LEADER BECAME ONE OF THE LOUDEST ANTI-WAR VOICES
IN ISRAEL  
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Edo Konrad and Oren Ziv
December 6, 2024
+972 Magazine
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_ After Ayala Metzger's relatives were kidnapped from Nir Oz and
abandoned by the government, she had no choice but to become an
‘anti-regime dissident’ — and insist on a shared
Israeli-Palestinian future. _

Ayala Metzger stands in front of the home of her in-laws, Tamar and
Yoram Metzger, who were kidnapped to Gaza from Nir Oz on October 7th.
Tamir was returned in a hostage-prisoner exchange last November, while
Yoram was killed while in captivity earlier , this year. (Photo Nov.
8, 2024 by Oren Ziv / +972 Magazine)

 

When Ayala Metzger walks among the ghosts of Nir Oz, it almost feels
like she isn’t quite sure whose story she wants to tell first. For
the better part of the last year, she has been regularly leading tours
along the dusty paths between the kibbutz’s gutted low-rise homes,
located just four kilometers from the Gaza Strip. To anyone who will
listen, she recounts what happened here on the morning of October 7 in
vivid detail, like a forensic scientist reconstructing a crime scene.

Forty-one members of Nir Oz and 11 Thai workers were killed in the
kibbutz that day, while 71 residents and five more workers were
kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. But Metzger doesn’t view herself
as simply the groundskeeper of a plaque-less memorial; as the
daughter-in-law of Yoram Metzger, whose body was brought back to
Israel in a military operation after he was killed in Hamas’
captivity in February, and of Tamar Metzger, who returned alive in
November last year in the hitherto only hostage deal, she knows time
is not on the side of the remaining hostages.

Perhaps that is why she so fiercely oscillates between the personal
and the political. Walking with her through what remains of her former
community allows for scarcely a moment to absorb the horrors, but
Metzger’s thoughts seem to be racing far ahead.

She moves through the ruins of Bracha Levinson’s home — where her
killers allegedly live-streamed her murder on Facebook, and where
traces of a life cut short, including a personal diary left open on a
couch, remain littered among the wreckage. There is barely time to
take it all in before Metzger breaks the silence, recounting the
minute details of the residents’ evacuation to the southern city of
Eilat the day after the carnage. Gazing at the toys scattered outside
the Bibas family’s home, whose red-haired children have become the
most recognizable faces of the hostages in Gaza, Metzger weaves
between her daughter’s survival story and reflections on her own
metamorphosis into an activist.

But Metzger is not merely a relative who occasionally joins protests
in support of a hostage deal. Within several months of the war
breaking out, she had come to believe that Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu is the “main obstacle” to bringing back the hostages,
choosing to prolong Israel’s onslaught on Gaza
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expense. Today, she is one of the most prominent voices among the
hostage families, demanding an immediate end to a war that has killed
over 44,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 100,000 others —
transforming her, as she puts it, into an “anti-regime dissident.”
 

Ayala Metzger sits in a cage to symbolize the Israeli hostages’
captivity in Gaza during a protest in central Tel Aviv, March 27,
2024.  (Photo: Oren Ziv / +972 Magazine)
RECOUNTING A MASSACRE

On paper, Metzger appears to be anything but a dissident. She grew up
in an Ashkenazi, Zionist-left home in Pardes Hanna-Karkur, a sleepy
middle-class town in central Israel known today for its anti-vaxxers
and hippie communes. She was raised on the lore of her grandparents,
veterans of the 1948 War who “fought to establish the state and
creating something meaningful.”

She and her husband Ran, who was born and raised in Nir Oz, moved to
the kibbutz in the early ‘90s and left in 2005, the year Israel
evacuated its settlements from the Gaza Strip. Although she always
thought of herself as a leftist and against the occupation, she was
more of a passive onlooker with some half-formed views, rather than a
full-time activist. It was October 7 and its aftermath that would
irrevocably change her into the latter.

On that day, like many other Israelis, Metzger woke up to the sound of
sirens in her moshav, not far from the southern city of Ashkelon.
Shortly thereafter, she started receiving text messages from her
youngest daughter, who had spent the night with Metzger’s
brother-in-law in Nir Oz. As the hours passed, the messages became
more frantic and indiscernible, which Metzger later learned was due to
the presence of Hamas gunmen outside the family’s home.

Militants broke into and set homes on fire, kidnapping and killing
their occupants, after which hundreds of Palestinian civilians came
streaming into the kibbutz through an opening in the fence that
encages Gaza. “They sat in our kitchens, they took our tractors and
our bicycles out for a spin,” Metzger recounts. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli army was nowhere to be found
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Metzger’s voice almost falters when describing how less than a dozen
kibbutz members — some of whom were killed or kidnapped — were
left to defend 400 residents. Soldiers finally arrived long after
multiple waves of Gazans militants and civilians had returned to Gaza.
“We live in a society built on the understanding that the Israeli
army exists,” she says. “That in the moment of truth, it will show
up — whether it takes 15 minutes or an hour, they will be here. But
they weren’t here.” 

Metzger’s daughter survived, but by the time it was over, a quarter
of the kibbutz, including Yoram and Tamar, was gone — either dead or
taken hostage. Israeli forces spent the next days sifting through the
wreckage, trying to identify bodies (some had been charred so far
beyond recognition that they could only be recognized by their teeth)
including in the fields between Gaza and Nir Oz. Since then, the army
has boarded up many of the homes.

 
The charred inside of one of the homes in Nir Oz, October 19, 2023.
 (Photo: Oren Ziv / +972 Magazine)
Today, only a handful of kibbutz members and Thai workers live in the
kibbutz, while the vast majority were eventually absorbed into a
compound in the nearby city of Kiryat Gat. Earlier this month, over a
year after the massacre, the Israeli government finally announced it
would start rebuilding the kibbutz. But Netanyahu has not once visited
the community that has become a symbol of government dereliction for
many Israelis. And on Dec. 4, the Israeli army released the results of
an internal probe that found that Yoram Metzger had been executed
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his captors together with five other hostages — as a result, whether
direct or indirect, of the Israeli military pounding the area where
they were being held.

‘WE STOPPED ASKING FOR PERMISSION’

Metzger and Ran spent the first weeks after October 7 in triage mode,
going between her parents’ home in Pardes Hanna, where she worked on
building lists of those who disappeared that day, and Eilat, where she
supported the displaced of Nir Oz. But she quickly realized that she
needed to broaden her efforts, and headed to Jerusalem to try and
speak to members of Knesset about a hostage deal. There, she
discovered that a hostage family had erected a protest tent in front
of the Prime Minister’s Residence, demanding that Netanyahu do
everything in his power to bring their loved ones home.

After two weeks in Jerusalem, she decided to focus all of her energy
on working with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum — the
central hub advocating for the hostages’ return, composed of
activists from across the political spectrum. The Forum established
“Hostages Square” in central Tel Aviv, where it holds weekly
ceremonial vigils replete with somber speeches, songs, and
performances.

Since its inception, says Metzger, the Forum has had to perform a
“delicate tango” to keep its various factions unified under one
banner, and to try to appeal to a broad spectrum of Israelis. While
some members, like Metzger, have been openly critical of the
government, others have pushed the Forum to take a conciliatory and
cooperative approach with Netanyahu — a position that, over the past
six months, has become increasingly untenable. 

A meeting with the prime minister and his wife Sara last December
ended with little more than what Metzger calls the “royal
couple’s” braggadocio: Netanyahu implored the hostage families to
tell the world about their plight but to avoid doing so in the local
media; Sara regaled them with tales of how she wrote to women’s
organizations around the world.

“The Forum members were afraid to say that the government was
responsible [for returning the hostages], to hold them accountable and
point the finger at them,” Metzger explains. “Members of the Forum
knew how to set up tents, provide facilities, and bring sound
equipment. But I needed our message to be refined.”

 
Visitors at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. December 5, 2024.  (Photo:
Miriam Alster/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine)
Meanwhile, Metzger began noticing the growing influence of the Tikva
Forum [[link removed]], a far-right alternative to
the Hostages and Missing Families Forum that supports the
government’s “total victory” approach
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for whom unrelenting military destruction in Gaza is seen as the only
way to force Hamas to surrender, even at the expense
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hostages. “My first lesson in politics came when I understood who
the Tikva Forum was,” Metzger says, noting that their vision of
“sacrificing our children to become martyrs” aligned all too well
with that of the government.

The vigils at Hostages Square, meanwhile, were too reminiscent of the
solemnity associated with Israel’s annual Memorial Day ceremonies.
“We went to the square about four times, and at some point I just
couldn’t [be there] anymore,” Metzger explains. “So I started
looking for other ways that didn’t involve standing there and
singing.”

Metzger knew she would need to stake out a more radical position in
order to exert real pressure on the government. And so in January,
along with a small group of hostage family members, she began blocking
main thoroughfares, including the Ayalon Highway. “We decided to
simply start taking action, action, action. This draws the media to
you, and that way you can deliver your messaging [to the public]. We
stopped asking for permission.”

The Forum quickly distanced itself from the cadre, while
Netanyahu-aligned media outlets and social media personalities —
often dubbed the “poison machine” — launched a campaign of
incitement against them. By February, they were openly speaking to the
media, both local and international (Metzger herself gave an interview
to Al Jazeera, which the Israeli government banned for its alleged
support for terrorism), and confronting
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police head on with protests that often ended in arrests or injuries;
Metzger was wounded in June when she was trampled
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officer on horseback.

 
Israelis attend a rally calling for the release of hostages held in
Gaza outside the Defense Ministry Headquarters in Tel Aviv, June 1,
2024.  (Photo: Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine)
During the tour of Nir Oz, two middle-aged women excitedly recognize
Metzger (“We watch you hypnotized during every protest!”), urging
her to enter politics (“We need new blood, someone we can vote
for!”). Metzger speaks to them less like a revered public figure and
more like the leader of a militant underground movement: “You must
be careful everywhere now. Just by virtue of being against the
government, you are already seen as a political dissident. That is why
we need to ensure we have access to weapons — I’m serious.”

It was certainly not the first inflammatory remark Metzger has made
over the last year; in June, during a protest outside Netanyahu’s
home in Caesarea, Metzger delivered a blistering speech
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the deafening blare of police sirens, in which she declared that if
the hostages are not returned, “We will be waiting with a noose.”

THE SACRIFICIAL ALTAR OF ‘TOTAL VICTORY’

The penny dropped sometime in early May. Announcing that it had agreed
to an Egyptian-Qatari proposal for a ceasefire and hostage deal, Hamas
took the Israeli public — and the government — by surprise.
Netanyahu quickly made his position clear: there would be no
ceasefire, and Israeli ground troops would proceed into Rafah
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Israelis said
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been concocted by the prime minister to thwart a deal with Hamas and
keep the war going.

Polls show that Metzger’s views are today in line with the vast
majority of the Jewish-Israeli public, which has shifted over the last
year from wall-to-wall support
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the war to an overwhelming majority
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negotiated deal to end it and return the hostages in exchange for
Palestinian prisoners. She came to the conclusion “early on” that
the war had to end, and like many others, she couldn’t comprehend
how every soi-disant military “victory” — from the invasion of
Rafah to the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh
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Sinwar [[link removed]],
and Hassan Nasrallah
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wasn’t bringing the release of the hostages any closer. 

“I initially supported the war,” she says. “I told myself,
‘Put pressure on [Hamas], fine. We need to fight.’ But as time
went on, I began to see how every point of leverage was deliberately
tossed away, and how, every time there is a real opportunity on the
table, right before an agreement is signed, suddenly [Israel]
assassinates some senior [Palestinian] figure. It has become
systematic. How many more soldiers and hostages are we going to
sacrifice for this?”  

 
Ayala Metzger (bottom left), Tamar Metzger (top center), and other
family and friends attend the funeral service of Yoram Metzger at the
cemetery in Kibbutz Nir Oz, on August 22, 2024.  (Photo: Flash90  //
 +972 Magazine)
Since October 7, a total of 78 Israeli hostages — including
Metzger’s mother-in-law — were freed in a deal with Hamas last
November, while eight others were rescued alive in military
operations. Hamas also released four women for “humanitarian
reasons,” as well as 27 foreign and dual nationals outside of the
initial deal.

The Israeli army itself killed three hostages in December, mistaking
them for Gazans
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Another was killed in a botched rescue operation
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Around 30 have been recovered by the military in body bags, some of
whom were killed on October 7 and some of whom died in captivity. At
least 36 of the remaining 96 hostages are presumed dead, and Hamas
claims that Israeli attacks have killed several others.

Metzger is convinced that Netanyahu’s doctrine of “total
victory” is a euphemism for abandoning the remaining abductees.
“It was clear to me from the start that Netanyahu wasn’t seriously
considering anything but the military route,” she says. “We knew
already in February that Yoram was killed in captivity; the deaths of
the hostages is a result of that very same military pressure.”

Despite the respectable showings at the weekly protests in support of
the hostage families, Metzger feels the activists have been left with
little recourse. But there is one act she believes could force the
government to end the war and cut a deal: conscientious objection,
a phenomenon that gained popularity
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last year’s protests against the government’s judicial overhaul,
but became a near-treasonous position following the Hamas attacks.

“People must refuse to be part of an army that continues to corrupt
itself,” she says. “Why are we surprised when Palestinians, who we
have harmed, turn around and commit pogroms against us when we invade
their homes?” 

 
The inside of one of the homes that was gutted by Palestinian gunmen
in Nir Oz on October 7, November 8, 2024.  (Photo: Oren Ziv/+972
Magazine)
Metzger’s call for refusal is as personal as it is political — her
daughter was conscripted into the army after October 7, and her son is
a few years away from enlisting — and she displays no compunction
about urging her children to refuse to serve. “If the army argues
with my daughter about wearing a pin for the hostages because it’s
not officially approved but allows other soldiers to wear a messianic
patch that says that killing Palestinians is okay, then this isn’t a
defense force — this is an army of vengeance fighting in the name of
God,” she says, her voice rising with exasperation.

Her words hang in the air, cut off only by the purring of stray cats
that now constitute the majority of Nir Oz’s population. The only
other audible sounds are an army drone buzzing in the distance, and
gunfire cutting through the wind from the direction of Khan Younis —
just a few miles beyond the fence that was supposed to protect one
community and imprison another in perpetuity. Even here, among the
ruins of the kibbutz, Gaza forces its way back into the Israeli
consciousness.

WAGING A DIFFERENT STRUGGLE

In mid-October, Metzger took part in a conference in south Tel Aviv to
mark the one-year anniversary of October 7 and the war on Gaza
(Hebrew-language site Local Call [[link removed]] was
one of the sponsors of the event). Speaking alongside Palestinian
journalists and activists, Jewish radical leftists, and community
organizers, Metzger told her story. Speaking after Gazan
journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha
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pre-recorded testimony described how Israel’s genocidal assault has
killed dozens of his family members — she took the opportunity to
address what the vast majority of Israelis prefer to ignore.

“I grew up learning not to make generalizations, certainly not about
3-year-old children,” she told the packed auditorium. “Yes, the
3-year-old might attend a Hamas kindergarten, but he is not to blame
for what he’s being taught. I see it in Ashkelon too, where there is
a similar kind of education, just from the opposite side of the
political spectrum. So he is not to blame, and he certainly doesn’t
deserve a bullet to the head just because he was in a Hamas
kindergarten or because his mother was part of Hamas. I’m not
willing to be part of that, and I’m not okay with things like that
being done in my name.”

“The longer this war drags on,” Metzger continued, “the more the
hatred grows. My mission today is, first and foremost, to stop this
cycle. I want to address the Palestinian side, as they too bear
responsibility in this story and must engage in self-reflection,
demand more, and take greater action — despite the immense
difficulties. Even as we face a fascist-leaning reality on our side
and are in a position of relative strength [vis-a-vis Palestinians],
there is a need for introspection on their part.”

 
Ayala Metzger assesses the destruction in one of the buildings in Nir
Oz that was destroyed during the Hamas attacks on October 7, November
8, 2024.  (Photo: Oren Ziv/+972 Magazine)
Standing in Nir Oz’s communal dining room, where long tables have
been set up with places laid for each kibbutz member still held
captive in Gaza, Metzger certainly has no love lost for those who
pillaged the kibbutz. And yet she knows that the violence of October 7
did not occur in a vacuum.

“What’s happening in the occupied territories — I cannot stand
behind this,” she says. “Do we really think that there won’t be
a boomerang effect [to this]? Those who speak the language of bullying
and force should expect the same in return. It’s a terrible loop
that’s incredibly hard to break out of. You have to be brave to step
out of it.”

Despite everything she and her community have endured, Metzger knows
there is no choice but to try and imagine a shared future between
Israelis and Palestinians. “The other option is to leave en masse
and tell the Kahanists to build their Holy Temple
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blood-soaked ground,” she says. “Now the question is: what will
our camp decide to do? Flee? Will we abandon the fight or stay and
wage a different kind of struggle?”

The question lingers in the air as the sun creeps westward toward Khan
Younis. Metzger knows the answers will surface eventually, but for now
she is confronting a reality in which the hostage families have become
emblematic of Jewish-Israeli society’s deepening fractures — a
stark contrast to the unifying force they represented in the immediate
aftermath of October 7.

“We’ve entered a new phase, but it’s unclear where we go from
here.” she says. “The government has escalated its violence on all
fronts,

_[EDO KONRAD is the former editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine._

_OREN ZIV is a photojournalist, reporter for Local Call, and a
founding member of the Activestills photography collective.]_

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_OUR TEAM HAS BEEN DEVASTATED BY THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF THIS LATEST
WAR. THE WORLD IS REELING FROM ISRAEL’S UNPRECEDENTED ONSLAUGHT ON
GAZA, INFLICTING MASS DEVASTATION AND DEATH UPON BESIEGED
PALESTINIANS, AS WELL AS THE ATROCIOUS ATTACK AND KIDNAPPINGS BY HAMAS
IN ISRAEL ON OCTOBER 7. OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ALL THE PEOPLE AND
COMMUNITIES FACING THIS VIOLENCE. _

_We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies._

_This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza._

_We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives._

_CAN WE COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT ? +972 MAGAZINE IS A LEADING MEDIA
VOICE OF THIS MOVEMENT, A DESPERATELY NEEDED PLATFORM WHERE
PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI JOURNALISTS, ACTIVISTS, AND THINKERS CAN
REPORT ON AND ANALYZE WHAT IS HAPPENING, GUIDED BY HUMANISM, EQUALITY,
AND JUSTICE. JOIN US. [[link removed]]_

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