If you haven’t seen author and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s October 7 documentary, Screams Before Silence, you should check it out. But be warned: It’s not an easy watch. The barbarism stays with you, as do the haunting questions, like: When terrorists use rape as a weapon of war, where are the progressive voices speaking up against such depravity?
I looked at the film through webbed fingers on YouTube. But this week, in Maple Glen, an audience gathered to pay witness, collectively. “It’s different when you see it in community,” activist Liz Hirsh Naftali — the screening’s featured speaker — shared with me when I caught up with her Wednesday. “People were shocked. You can’t prepare for something like that. It’s a movie that’s about a horrific subject.”
Naftali is a real estate investor, philanthropist and Democratic donor-turned-bipartisan Hostage Release Advocate and Humanitarian Ambassador. She’s also an inspiring citizen. You may remember news stories of her four-year-old great-niece, Abigail Edan, who was abducted by Hamas on that fateful day and released during the brief ceasefire last year. On October 7, Abigail’s father had been running from the terrorists with her in his arms. When he was slain by a cascade of bullets from behind, he fell on her, and she somehow made it to a neighbor’s house — one of the many “angels” in Hirsh Naftali’s telling — before Abigail, and the neighbor, were captured.
From that day on, Hirsh Naftali’s life took on a singular focus: To get her niece, and all the hostages, back. She’s been in the room where it happens with Biden and Netanyahu, and has stalked the halls of Congress. (Her podcast, The Capitol Coffee Connection, is a laudable effort to humanize our leaders; until I listened to her episode in conversation with Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, I’d never known that, at 12, he’d dress up in Uncle Sam regalia and ride his bike through his Louisiana town trying to get adults to show up at the polls and vote).
Through it all, Hirsh Naftali has remained nonpartisan, and centers the plight of all the innocent Palestinians in all of her commentary. “If Hamas freed all the hostages they stole on October 7 tomorrow, the fighting would stop, and the Palestinian people in Gaza, who suffer gravely under Hamas, would also be free,” she says. It bears noting that about 115 hostages remain in captivity, including five Americans. Hirsh Naftali hasn’t forgotten them, and her story and single-mindedness serve as a model for all of us to never forget. Because I can’t relay her story with the emotional power she imparts, here’s a slightly edited audio recording of our conversation.
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