The writing was on the wall for Israel's deprioritizing of saving hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, Tzur Goldin told Tamar Uriel-Beeri on The Jerusalem Post Podcast.
Goldin is the brother of Hadar Goldin, an IDF soldier who was killed by Hamas in 2014 and whose body has been held hostage in Gaza for over a decade.
Since Hadar was killed, the Goldin family has criticized the Israeli government for abandoning him. They warned that abandoning soldiers in the field, even those who were dead, would lead to a corrosion of Israel's moral fabric.
And the events of the October 7 massacre, as far as Goldin is concerned, confirmed these warnings.
"The writing was on the wall. When society or leadership chooses to emphasize on interests rather than values, the core values of the Jewish people and Israel, then such events can happen, and unfortunately, that happened," Goldin said. "We always said that everyone who abandons the fallen will soon find themselves abandoning the injured and deserting the living."
When hostages are treated as collateral damage in the strategic policies over Gaza
Following the events of October 7, Goldin, who was on his his way to reserve duty when the attack began, urged his family to stand by the other hostage families as more and more people were taken captive.
"We understood that there are hundreds of families that were attempting to reach us, the family that led the public effort to bring hostages [home] until then," he recounted, adding how his family sought to help support everyone and to work together on how to address the Israeli authorities. Very quickly, a huge effort was formed to fight for calls to save the hostages.
"Within two hours, 20,000 volunteers came into improvised offices that we made, and over 600 families were listed in our listings of the hostages. About two weeks later, we passed over all the concentrated data and the platform we provided in the past 10 years to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and to the government," he said.
Goldin further commented on the sense of abandonment he and his family felt since 2014, and how they are now standing by others in similar if not identical situations.
"For nine and a half years, we were battling a very strange reality where hostages were treated as collateral damage," in respect to the strategic approach and policies towards Gaza and Hamas, he said, referring to an approach that seemed to prefer keeping quiet along the Gaza border and letting Hamas have funds and supplies and power in order to keep the Palestinians divided between them and the Palestinian Authority.
These, he said, "created a situation where hostages were collateral damages."
He continued, "We were challenged by a mountain that we could not move," he said. "The strategic values lay elsewhere."
Up until October 7, the Goldins fought tooth and nail against this perceived mountain, he explained, as they felt abandoned by a state that preferred placating Hamas rather than families grieving for sons lost fighting Hamas in the first place.
"This is the story of my family, the Goldin family, trying to move mountains, trying to mobilize public opinion, trying to bring back together the strategic values that we always fight for each other and never leave anyone behind."
Despite this, even now, many Israelis and Israeli politicians are less focused on saving the rest of the hostages.
For Goldin, this lack of enthusiasim is unsurprising.
"This disturbing [trend] of putting bringing the hostages home aside and making them the problem... it's always, in the political point of view, the easier path," he said. "The hardest issue to tackle would be to actually bring hostages home. The easier thing is... to silence them."