I first met Tal Gilboa in July 2023. Little could we have imagined during our upbeat encounter that a mere three months later, her beloved nephew, Guy—the 22-year-old son of her sister, Meirav, and brother-in-law, Ilan—would be hauled off violently to Gaza by Hamas terrorists. That he is still there today, a full 11 months later, is even more unfathomable.
Tal is on her second stint as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s adviser on animal rights. She served in that role during his previous government—the one that was replaced by the rotation coalition headed by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett.
When Bibi returned to the helm in December 2022, he hired her again. An endeavor dear to both was promoting cultured meat and lowering its cost through the use of Artificial Intelligence.
I’d been familiar with her appearances on political panels on TV, and knew that she was the winner of the Israeli version of the reality show “Big Brother” in 2014. My interest was really piqued, however, when she became a target of left-wing attacks for her refusal to toe the intersectional line of her self-described yet anything but liberal peers.
When I went to work for a brief period at the Prime Minister’s Office, I introduced myself to her by revealing that I’d written an op-ed a year and a half earlier about the hypocrisy of her critics.
Given the way she’s been treated since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre—despite her nephew’s abduction from the Nova Music Festival—I felt it was time for another piece defending her against the slander to which she has grown so unfairly accustomed. But I opted, instead, to let her speak for herself.
The following are excerpts from our interview, though full disclosure requires that it be described as a conversation between two friends who share similar perspectives.
Q: How did you react to the press conference that Prime Minister Netanyahu held in Hebrew on Sept. 3?
A: I felt that it wasn’t aimed at people like me, who are very involved politically. I’ve been active since high school, when I demonstrated against the Oslo Accords, and after the army, as a young mother, when I protested the expulsion from Gush Katif [the 2005 disengagement from Gaza]. By the way, everything we warned against back then came true.
The point is that I am well aware of the significance of the Philadelphi Corridor, so I didn’t need Netanyahu’s explanation. No, the press conference was for people like my sister, Meirav, Guy’s mother, who is not only sick with worry about her son being held captive by Hamas in Gaza, but who recently underwent open-heart surgery.
After the operation, the whole family spent time with her in the hospital talking about the situation. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum—a misnomer, since the group doesn’t represent all the families—has been driving her and the rest of the hostages’ relatives completely crazy. All they do is assert that Netanyahu is torpedoing every possible deal with Hamas by focusing on the Philadelphi Corridor, and doing everything to ensure that the hostages don’t return. Never mind that he already returned 140 hostages.
I explained to my sister that the Philadelphi Corridor is Hamas’s oxygen tank, and that today the only person standing firmly on behalf of Guy—and doing so alone—is Netanyahu.
I also acknowledged that if I were the aunt of a hostage slated to be released in the first phase of a deal, if there were such a deal, I might be saying something different. But I’m Guy’s aunt. And if the Philadelphi Corridor is given as a gift to Hamas in the first phase of a deal, I won’t see him returning home, because ceding it removes any leverage left on Hamas. It also means that hostages could be smuggled out of Gaza to other countries, even Iran, and that Hamas would be able to re-arm itself.
Hamas only agreed to a deal [in November] before the entry into Gaza of humanitarian-aid trucks, and while the Israel Defense Forces were in the midst of a serious ground invasion in the Strip. Hamas saw that it was running out of “oxygen” and therefore had no choice but to make a deal.
Unfortunately—and on this I’m ambivalent, because ultimately a bit of the food from those trucks reaches the hostages—due to the aid entering Gaza, the only thing left for Israel to do is continue exerting military pressure and not to concede.
Again, as I reiterated to my sister, the one figure managing to remain firm on this is Netanyahu. I also pointed out that this has nothing to do with politics. Even if it were Lapid or Bennett behaving this way—though I’m certain they wouldn’t be—I would support them. I stressed that we, the families of the young men being held in Gaza, have to be thankful that Netanyahu is prime minister, because he is working to ensure their return.
Q: Unlike many Israelis, then, you don’t believe that Israel should make a deal at all cost in exchange for the hostages, because all of them were abandoned on Oct. 7 by the military and the government?
A: My nephew was among all those victims abandoned on Oct. 7. He went to an IDF-approved party adjacent to the Gaza border fence, though there was hardly any military presence there on that Simchat Torah holiday. And there were 5,000 in attendance at the event!
More than that. At noon on Oct. 7, when Hamas published a video of Guy being kidnapped with Eviatar David and two other friends of theirs, Ron Zarfati and Idan Hermati (a few days later, we learned that Ron and Idan had been murdered), I drove down to the Ofakim police station to pick up Gal, Guy’s older brother, who had gone down there to keep an eye on Guy, since it was his first music festival. I drove there like a crazy person, 200 kph (124 mph). It was total chaos.
It was horrible and traumatic for everybody. Still, there’s one thing I miss about the immediate aftermath of the massacre: the way in which we Israelis had a sense of unity. We knew our enemy was Hamas, not Netanyahu. But the protest movement that was active before the massacre—all the organizations that opposed Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition and demonstrated in the streets against the judicial reforms that his government wanted to pass—took over the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
That happened very quickly. A mere two weeks after the massacre, I went to Hostage Square in Tel Aviv and there were already banners and signs calling on Netanyahu to resign. People were already equipped with T-shirts, stickers, posters and tents from the Kaplan Street [anybody-but-Bibi and anti-judicial-reform] demonstrations. I understood right then that the hostages would cease being a consensus issue.
Sadly, I was right. Though there isn’t a single person in Israel who doesn’t want the hostages back, some of the public doesn’t want to be identified with the protesters and stopped wearing the yellow ribbon and dog tags with the Hebrew slogan, “Bring them home now!” Instead, they want the message to be aimed abroad, in English, to read: “Release them. Set them free.”
But when I urged people at Hostage Square not to turn this into a political event, I was treated like an agitator. One woman screamed that Oct. 7 was “because of you and your Bibi!” Someone else asked, “Did Bibi send you here?” I answered, “No, Hamas sent me here.” Suddenly, I wasn’t someone with a close family member held hostage in Gaza. I was on the wrong political side.
When I was among the hostage families attending a meeting with Netanyahu, the heads of the protest movement wrote awful things about me on social media, including questioning what I was doing there in the first place, and accusing me of kissing up to the prime minister. It didn’t help when others came to my defense, pointing out that my nephew is a hostage.
What they see is that I work at the Prime Minister’s Office, and that’s enough to make me fair game for attack. Some commenters on X have even said they’re sorry that my daughters weren’t kidnapped by Hamas.
What they don’t see is how they are inadvertently helping Hamas. When the head of the Histadrut labor federation, Arnon Ben-David, tried to shut down the economy last week, I wrote to him that he was showing Hamas not only that it didn’t have to pay a price for executing six hostages in cold blood, but conveying the message that it’s worth the terrorists’ while to do so. And my nephew is there! Who do these people think they are that they have the right to do that?
Q: Are the hostage families who’ve been protesting against Netanyahu and demanding a deal at all costs in the minority or the majority?
A: It’s important to understand that most of the families aren’t heard from at all. You don’t know who they are. You hear the same four families on one side of the debate and the same four on the other side of the debate. So two supposedly opposing sides were created.
It’s not that I don’t understand those calling for a deal “now, now, now” at all costs. This situation ruins your life. We can’t sleep, seeing the picture of Guy’s terrified eyes as he’s being taken into captivity. We’re in a constant state of anxiety. But I have trouble grasping why the parents of the young men are pushing so hard, when a deal of the kind that we’re hearing about goes against their interests.
Q: How do you explain the defense establishment’s opposition to Netanyahu’s strategy?
A: My loss of faith in the IDF—not in the soldiers—is very serious; and it’s not only mine. Many Israelis no longer trust what the military establishment says. The military has undergone a worrisome process over the years. When I was in the army, I totally admired the commanders. They were clear about the enemy and about safeguarding the public. Today, it’s no longer clear. The army got confused. You can see that from Oct. 7. The top brass pushes aside commanders who demand victory over the enemy, even though that’s supposed to be their role.
Q: Is there something that Netanyahu could be doing better under the circumstances?
A: Netanyahu has to speak more to the public. The people don’t understand. And I’m not sure there is a more articulate person than he to explain clearly why he’s doing what he’s doing. I attend all the meetings with the families of the hostages, and each time, I’m reminded of how lucky it is that he’s in charge. He doesn’t bullshit anybody; he tells us the tough truth to our faces.
When he’s asked how he would react if his own child were in Gaza, he says, “If my son were there, I’d step down. I wouldn’t be able to make clear-headed decisions. I admit it.”
When he’s told by the families that he can’t understand what they’re going through because he’s not in their shoes, he says, “It’s true that I’m not in your shoes. But you’re not in my shoes either. I’m the prime minister of Israel, with all that entails, especially now.”
As I constantly remind my sister: It’s incredible how much strength it takes on his part to stand in front of the devastated families and to tell them that they’re not in his shoes. But he also always assures us that he’s committed to returning all the hostages.
I believe him. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t stay in my office for another second. From the beginning, nobody there lied to me. A month after the beginning of the war, for example, when the government was engaged in talks for the deal to return women and children hostages, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer asked me to come into his office. I had expressed worry about that deal, because it was clear that Guy wouldn’t be included in it. With tears in his eyes, Dermer said, “Tal, we’ll return anybody we can alive. We’re not dealing here with some country; it’s a murderous terrorist organization.” He prepared me for the fact that there was going to be a deal for the release of women and children—without Guy.
He then said that Israel would “pay a heavy price for the hostages.” Netanyahu has reiterated this over and over again, as well. I’m certain about the government’s honesty in relation to returning the hostages, and equally sure that the strategy of the Families Forum has been wrong from the outset.
Q: Have you been able to persuade your sister of this?
A: My sister, who’s absolutely broken, has responded, “You have no idea how much you’re reassuring me.”
I try to keep her from sinking into despair. One way is by reminding her that Guy, though a gentle soul, is going to be strong. He’s going to survive.
