Held Hostage.

Stories from Tel Aviv's Square. #1

Modern sky scrapers walled up and surrounded Hostage Square. They varied in height. Each one stood as a glassy-eyed witness. Tel Aviv’s depressed office workers high above in steel buildings could see the canvas, cream colored tent tops below. If they squinted they just could make out the long missing-from-the-Shabbat table and people milling about the disturbing displays. While waiting for the copy machine to finish, they sipped their coffee. What used to be a relaxing mid morning vista across a beautiful and modern Israeli metropolis, pre October 7th, now sucked their gaze downward and into the dark hopeless spiral of post-hostage life. There was no sound rising from below because the double glazing was too thick.

Pedestrians down at street level could see the Museum of Art, with its green patio palms. They acted as a leafy wall to one end of The Square. The Square’s other end had a coffee shop whose outside seating resembled more of a doctor’s office waiting room than a chatty drinks space. Exhausted patients who had gone into the family tents of the abducted, raped, and murdered ones - then stumbled through the claustrophobic mockup of a Hamas tunnel. They now sipped their drinks in silence. And they awaited for their healing but it was not to come. No caffeinated elixir could cure them after what they, the visitors to Hostage Square, had just seen. Their eyes and ears and hearts had been forever sickened with truth.

Hostage Square was a gathering place. But not a happy one. Sanctioned by the government but only after the people confiscated it, the location was for screaming and raging. It was also a war-time classroom to teach and to inform, a fleshing out of how democracies attempt to govern in impossible situations.

Artistic expression had never been so important but it had also never been so macabre. Hamas terrorists had stolen, violated, and killed their loved ones and now they were retelling to anyone and everyone who would listen. It was a way keep their memories and their abducted plight alive.

We listened.