When Hamas attacked southern Israeli communities on 7 October 2023, unleashing a devastating retaliation against Gaza that is still under way nearly two years later, those few who still hoped for peaceful coexistence were among the first to die.
The hardest-hit kibbutz, Nir Oz, has nearly 70 year-old roots in the Jewish socialist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, which advocated for equal rights for Jews and Arabs in a binational state. Before the attack, volunteers from the kibbutz transported critically ill Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for treatment.
Liat and Aviv Atzili were staunch liberals, a history teacher and an artist-mechanic, progressive parents to their three children. When Liat, a US-Israeli dual national, would complain about some difficulty in life on the kibbutz, Aviv would remind her of the plight of 2.3 million Palestinians living a couple of kilometres away, walled up in the tiny Gaza Strip.
The last time Liat saw her husband was on the morning of the attack, when Aviv, part of the Nir Oz first response team, ventured out of their house to find out what was happening. Their children, who were away from home at the time, all survived, but Liat was found and taken hostage by Hamas gunmen who took her back to Gaza. Of Nir Oz’s 427 residents, 47 were killed and 76 taken hostage.
The documentary, Holding Liat, records her family’s efforts to get her back, but the hostage drama is only part of its story. It is also an intimate portrait of a liberal Jewish family, beset with grief and fear, struggling to come to terms with the horrific violence of the Hamas attack, killing 1,200 Israelis, and the Israeli military response carried out in the name of the Atzilis and other victims. That campaign has killed at least 64,000 Palestinians over 23 months, probably far more, and has shown no signs of abating despite charges of genocide against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The central protagonist is Liat’s father, Yehuda Beinin, a US-born veteran of the Hashomer Hatzair movement who has remained loyal to its progressive ideals. He is desperate to do anything possible to secure his daughter’s freedom but chafes against the political constraints of campaigning for the hostages’ release.
The unease becomes intolerable when he joins a group of families on a lobbying trip to Washington, and finds himself in the midst of a flag-festooned rally on the National Mall celebrating Trump’s Maga movement and Israeli militarism, in which the hostage families are being used as ammunition.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. This is bullshit,” Beinin fumes.
He clashes with the trip organisers and his other daughter, Liat’s sister, Tal, who want him to focus solely on the human dimension of the family’s plight, rather than make it a political campaign. It is a study in loneliness of a man whose life is being crushed between two fanatical, murderous parties, Hamas and the Israeli coalition, both of whom he despises.
“We are being led by crazy people on both sides,” he complains, reserving his particular contempt for Netanyahu, whom he believes to be using the suffering to extend his political life.
The scenes in Washington with Tal and with Liat’s traumatised son, Netta, played out in hotel rooms and the backs of cars, are exquisitely painful. Back in Israel, the strain also tears at Beinin’s bond with his wife, Chaya, and he snaps at her gentle questioning of his approach. The camera watches at close quarters, unflinching, and it is this intimacy that gives Holding Liat its power.
The secret is the film-makers’ relationship with the family. Brandon Kramer (the director) and his brother Lance (one of the producers) are distant US-based relatives of the Beinin and Atzili families, and knew them well from previous visits to Israel.
Speaking about the film on a video call, Brandon Kramer says: “When we found out Liat and Aviv were missing, we reached out to her parents, Yehuda and Chaya, to check on them, not at all thinking we were going to make a film.”
“The idea came up that it might be important to document some of what they’re going through. We thought that it might be a few days, and we would put something short together.”
The Kramer brothers arrived just as Yehuda was about to leave for Washington, their home town, where they record the encounters which would be at the dramatic heart of the film.
Kramer says: “It’s really that scene in DC, within days of Liat and Aviv going missing, and Yehuda is telling his grandson and his daughter that he feels a need to advocate for peace and reconciliation, and Tal saying, with a lot of anger this is not the moment to focus on politics, with Netta just days from surviving the attack himself. Right in front of our camera were three generations of one family, who we had this deep connection to, navigating an unimaginable crisis, but in very different ways.”
“We felt what we were seeing was so different from the narrative of the hostage families being presented on the media and social media. We felt a need to lean in and start filming.”
Two-thirds of the way through the film, there is finally relief and joy for the family. Liat Atzili is released after 54 days of captivity, as part of a short-lived ceasefire agreement which involves an exchange of some of the 251 Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. But at the same time came the confirmation that Aviv was dead, killed in the Hamas attack and his body dragged back into Gaza.
Atzili’s homecoming is captured by the Lees’ unblinking camera, the moment of reunion with her parents, and the news of her husband’s violent death. Later, she gets to see how her family dealt in their different ways with her abduction. Very much her father’s daughter, Atzili says he was right to insist on framing the campaign for her release as part of a broader struggle against endless war and Netanyahu’s opportunism, and for an enduring political settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
“[My father] conducts himself in a way to honour me, to respect me, and I’m just so, so proud of him,” she says. “Treating it just as a human interest issue, and making it non-political, is a huge mistake.
Atzili is speaking from the family’s rebuilt home in Nir Oz. Many of her fellow kibbutzniks have balked at returning to the scene of such bloodshed and trauma, but Atzili did not hesitate.
“The places that have the most meaning for us are the places that he lived, and worked and created, where we have wonderful memories of him,” she says. “The exact spot where he died has absolutely no meaning for us.”
Her experience differed from most of the other hostages, many of whom suffered brutal treatment. Atzili’s captor brought her back to his family home, where she was treated respectfully, especially by his female relatives.
“They chose to see me as a human being, and to me, it’s impossible to not do the same,” she says. Her experience combined with her upbringing and her training as a history teacher, to leave her with a trait that is now vanishingly rare in that part of the world – empathy with the other side. Even before 7 October, that had been whittled down to a trace element in Israeli politics. Palestinian suffering, even under starvation imposed by the Israeli government, is not a burning issue.
“I think a minority of people would say that they want peace because of the part that the Holocaust plays in the Israeli psyche.
“I think victim consciousness in Israel is so overpowering that the idea that we’re going to make a political agreement with people who hate us is very difficult for people to grasp.”
Even though she had lived by the Gaza fence for much of her life, Atzili, like most Israelis, had stopped thinking about the human beings on the other side.
“We paid a price for not acknowledging what was happening politically in Gaza. It’s unspeakable what was happening … but also there was a monster growing there,” she says.
“I think that the people in Gaza at the moment are in such a terrible situation that I don’t expect them to have any empathy for me. But I think that a lot of Israelis would say I lost the ability to have empathy towards anybody who lives in Gaza,” she said.
“But I don’t care if the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hate me, as long as we manage to maintain some sort of agreement that enables us to hold our differences without violence.”
There has inevitably been a rightwing backlash in Israel to Holding Liat and the views of its subjects, though Liat herself has blanked it out by staying away from social media and focusing on real conversations.
“We don’t like messy things, but I think that the important thing the film has been able to do is to enable a real conversation with disagreements and difficult questions,” she said. “I think that one of the most important things that we can do is to bring complexity back into our lives.”
