A year ago, on Oct. 13, my brother-in-law, Omri Miran, returned to Israel after 738 days as a hostage of Hamas.
For my family, that day’s significance is clear. My sister Lishay got her husband back, and their daughters, Roni and Alma, got their father back. Parents, spouses, siblings, family and friends recovered someone whose absence had dictated nearly every aspect of their lives for two years.
A year later, I find myself asking not only what Omri’s return means to us, but what the return of the hostages means to Israel: what it has repaired in our society, what it could not repair and what obligations remain now that the struggle to bring them home is over.
For two years after Oct. 7, the hostages were the most painful expression of a violation of the duties owed by the Israeli state to its citizens. States exist, at the most elemental level, to protect the people who entrust them with power. Israel failed catastrophically in that obligation on Oct. 7, when Omri was taken from his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz in front of his wife and their young daughters.
Bringing him and the others home therefore became about more than rescuing individuals. It became a test of whether they could repair that covenant.
Jewish tradition has an old phrase for the obligation beneath that covenant: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—“All Israel are responsible for one another.”
For two years, Israelis disagreed fiercely about what that responsibility required. Some believed military pressure alone was essential to securing the hostages’ release. Others believed the war itself endangered them or that military pressure had to serve a diplomatic outcome, and ultimately, a negotiated deal.
Families marched against their government, soldiers entered Gaza believing they were fighting for those same families, negotiators moved between capitals, and volunteers who had never met a hostage reorganized their lives around people whose photographs they had learned by heart.
The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
The arguments were bitter precisely because the underlying obligation was so deeply shared. Whatever else Israelis disagreed about, the country could not simply move on while its people remained captive underground.
As a member of a hostage family, I saw that mobilization from close range. For much of those two years, I served as an international envoy for the hostage families, advocating alongside family members, captivity survivors and extraordinary volunteers in governments, diplomatic missions and international organizations. All those meetings were underpinned by a simple demand: See these people, and don’t let the world or our own government forget them.
In the final year of that effort, we also found extraordinary engagement from the Trump administration. From the U.S. president on down, senior officials listened to the families closely, met with us repeatedly, allowed us into rooms where decisions were being shaped and treated the hostage crisis not as an abstract foreign-policy problem, but as an urgent human one.
They did not give up on finding a solution, and they stayed engaged until the mission was complete and every hostage, living or deceased, had been brought home. Our family will always carry profound gratitude for that.
When Omri and the other living hostages returned, followed in the months after by the bodies of those who had been killed, until Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, the last hostage, was brought home on Jan. 26, something fundamental was restored. The state had failed to prevent their abduction, and nothing about their return can erase that failure. Yet Israeli society had also refused to make peace with their absence—and that refusal mattered.
That is also why I hesitate to describe Oct. 13 as closure.
A husband returned to his wife and a father to daughters who had grown while he was gone. But the dead remained dead; the failures that produced Oct. 7 remained unresolved; and trust in institutions did not magically reappear when the hostages crossed back into Israel.
The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Hamas, other Palestinian terrorists and those who assisted it are guilty of abducting Omri and holding him captive. But the end of the hostage crisis does not release Israeli institutions from examining how Oct. 7 happened or Israeli society from asking what two years of trauma did to us.
At Passover this year, I wrote in an article that the Israelites left Egypt quickly, but learning to live as free people took far longer. The same is true of societies emerging from trauma. Israel brought its hostages home, but it has not yet fully answered what kind of country they came home to.
That requires an independent national commission of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7. It requires rebuilding trust between citizens and those entrusted with their security. It requires a political culture in which disagreement does not automatically become betrayal and in which national solidarity is not rediscovered only in moments of catastrophe.
National resilience is measured not only by the ability to survive war, but also by the ability to preserve a shared civic life afterward. The return of the hostages proved that the covenant had not disappeared. Israelis could still argue, protest, fight, negotiate and disagree while remaining bound by the conviction that their fellow citizens could not be abandoned.
A year later, the question is whether we can preserve that sense of responsibility now that no hostages remain to force us to remember it.
Omri came home. What Israel builds from that return is now up to us.
