An Absent State and Missing Questions

By a strange twist of fate, one of my daughters is called after Hadar Goldin, the captured Israeli soldier whose body was recently returned by Hamas from Gaza after eleven years.

In 2005, I was living in Cambridge, UK, commuting to the City of London where I worked in commercial law. My son was a year and a half, and I was heavily pregnant with twins, sex unknown. I never knew the sex of any of my babies before they arrived.

Unable to waddle to the Cambridge student synagogue on the Jewish sabbath, I would eagerly await any community news my husband would bring on his return. That sabbath, I believe it was in the early summer of 2005, he returned with news of a family Goldin. The father was an academic, and they had twin boys enrolled in Chesterton Community College. He explained that they were a very quiet family, very modest, very unassuming. We wondered how the boys would handle the school, which was known to be rather boisterous.

But the most remarkable thing for me was learning that one of the Goldin twin boys was called Hadar. Before then, I had thought that Hadar could only be a girl’s name. In that instant, I decided that irrespective of the sex of the second child that I was carrying, it would be called Hadar.

And so she was. My daughter is called after Hadar Goldin. And I have always thought of her in this way.

Although personal circumstances have prevented me from taking a front role in clamoring for Hadar Goldin’s release, I have followed this small, quiet, unassuming and modest family in the media, watched their struggles and despaired that a family with such a private nature should have been forced to travel the world, three times over, in order to raise awareness of the plight of their dead son. Why did the State not take a more active role in returning Hadar to his family?

Because I live in Karmiel, coming to the Goldin shiva in the center of the country was a bit of a hike. I combined this visit with another event – the memorial for Dr. Professor Nurit Ya’ari, the Tel Aviv University academic and world authority on Israeli and world theatre, who had (also) gone missing for eight days (!), before eventually being found, under a roadway embankment, but who had then ultimately succumbed to her ordeal and died a short time later.

Nurit was my lecturer exactly thirty years ago. I was a new immigrant, and I had to tape-record all my lectures and listen carefully afterward to fully grasp all the concepts.

But there was one lecture that Professor Yaari refused to let me record and I mentioned this at the memorial event, held in the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv, accessed via the artists’ entrance. To a room full of actors, writers, and other theatre professionals, I explained the life-changing experience this former Bnei Akiva activist received on the Sunday morning directly after the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin.

Nurit came into a packed auditorium, and the silence was heavy as lead. She requested that no recordings be made of the lecture. She proceeded to recount how the Greeks would honor their dead. Her voice shook as she painted the picture of fatigued soldiers sitting in circles, huddled over flames, telling stories about their dead heroes.

I subsequently checked the reference. Historically, it is unlikely that the Greeks would light candles to honor their dead. More likely oil lamps or torches. But on the morning after the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, Professor Nurit Yaari was not really talking about the Greeks, their dead heroes and their snuffed out ambitions. Without mentioning Rabin, she was talking about us.

She was talking about the theater of war, the theater of death, and the way in which the “little people” can only move forward and keep their hopes alive, by persisting in telling their stories. I believe this is what has kept the Goldin family going, these eleven years — telling the story of their dead son.

But, what is the State’s role in telling the Goldins’ story?
What is the State’s responsibility when a 78-year-old with severe dementia goes missing for eight days?
Where is the State in the narrative of the little citizen?

I looked at a report on police data on missing citizens since the State’s inception, delivered in a February 2025 report to the Knesset National Security Committee, chaired by MK Boaz Bismut. We learn from this report that the systematic registration of missing persons’ cases only began around 2000. We learn from this report that it is at the discretion of a single police commander to close a file on a missing person after only five years. We learn from this report that a missing person’s file whose subject was not identified may be destroyed after 70 years from the date of the absence.

In parallel to this report, I reviewed the current regulations governing access to the Israel State Archives, including extended restricted access periods of up to 90 years for certain security and intelligence files.

What emerges from the comparison between the report and the Israel State Archives legislation is a picture of a State striving to maintain a narrative that is completely out of synch with the narrative of its individual citizens. The State is not part of the narrative of its individual citizens. And the citizen does not feel that s/he belongs. The State’s responsibility for a missing 78-year-old with dementia is limited. So too for a missing soldier.

Our stories no longer align. Did they ever? And do we have the strength to ask these questions?

Perhaps one day, if my daughter, named for Hadar, asks what her country stands for, I hope by then we’ll have developed the necessary trust to allow the stories of the State and the stories of its citizens to sit within the same narrative space.