I stood in Hostages’ Square and watched Israel begin to come home

A passerby would struggle to understand the scene. Teenagers and grandparents jump together. Strangers lift one another on their shoulders. Someone pops a bottle of champagne on the library steps. The tears are different tonight. They are not for memorials or speeches. They are for the feeling, long forgotten, of a complete victory that is not measured by points, judges, or the words of politicians.

Former hostage Emily Damari arrives in a backward baseball cap and starts singing “Od Avinu Chai.” She hugs others who, like her, came back from Gaza. It is a fellowship none of them asked for, but tonight they are simply happy together, celebrating brothers and sisters who are finally on their way home.

I find Omer Shem Tov smiling. We have seen him smile before, but this one is different. It is an exhale shaped like joy, the optimism of hope. He was held for 505 days. Part of him still seems to be there, with the others, but now they allow themselves to believe they are truly coming home. “Until you hug your mother, it is not real,” he tells me, like a soccer fan who refuses to celebrate before the goal. Despite the hour, he does not look tired.

Nearby, Eliya Cohen looks as if something inside him has unclenched. “This holiday we will dance with Alon, with Elkana, and with all our brothers,” he says. Ziv Abud, herself a Nova survivor and Cohen’s partner, grins and says: “I just want to pull the plug on that remote counting the days.”

The square fills with familiar faces: former hostages, parents of captives, bereaved families, and ordinary Israelis who came to mark a historic night in the most Israeli place there is. When Einav Zangauker steps to the microphones, everything goes quiet. Almost every channel gives her time to speak about the anticipation of reuniting with her son, Matan Zangauker. People look at her like an unappointed leader. She never won an election. She is a mother whose son was snatched from his bed in pajamas. Her two-year personal war has turned her into the moral voice of a nation.

Zangauker asks to finish the mission: not only to bring her child home, but to make sure every hostage comes home, to the last of the fallen, and that every soldier returns to his mother, his father, his country. When that happens, she promises, she will go home and simply be a mother again to her son and daughters. She has earned that quiet. Matan deserves his mother after two years. I cannot help thinking what a loss it will be to be without her voice while some of the same people who failed Matan for two years resume responsibility for everyone’s security.

There will be time to ask why it took two years. There will be time to investigate how it happened. There will be time to argue about credit. Tonight is not for politics. The people who tried to divide Israelis these two years do not get to shape a night of reunion and hope.

From my spot in the crowd I can see the microcosm that has gathered here for months: Tel Avivians beside residents of Ofakim and Sderot, kibbutz members beside city families. In Hostages’ Square, identities blur. There is no right and left, no identity politics, only shared pain that, for one hour, becomes a single, enormous hope. Reporters hold out microphones and wipe their eyes. Studio anchors choke up. So do people watching at home.

We start naming names out loud, as if saying them might hasten the reunions. We want to see Elkana reunited with his wife, Eitan with his brother, Gali and Ziv walking into a derby at Bloomfield Stadium, Yosef back to dance, Alon at the piano, David and Ariel back on the kibbutz paths, friends Guy and Evyatar, Nimrod, Rom, and the two Matans. Arguments can wait. Tonight, we are moved together. Even Noni the dog, someone laughs through tears, will be back with his owner soon. How could anyone not rejoice.

For two years this was a sad plaza, but never a despairing one. Even at its worst, it was filled with people who believed the hostages could be brought home and the country repaired. Tonight, the sad plaza turns joyful. “Yesh li yom yom chag” plays from a speaker. Some families open more champagne. The hope pouring from here must remain even after Hostages’ Square is officially renamed Returnees’ Square.

On Channel 13, Mir Yona sums it up in one sentence: “Finally there are tears of joy, of happiness, instead of cries of pain.” By 5 a.m., the coverage grows repetitive. There is nothing left to add, yet the public keeps streaming in. Yaara Avraham interviews a woman named Edna who brought cookies from Kiryat Shmona. As Avraham signs off, Anna Pines from Kan 11 begins to interview the same woman. “The square looks different today,” Avraham says, then adds a line only Israelis will understand after these last two years: “The yellow looks more optimistic.”

It feels, in this moment, that not only the hostages have begun the journey home. Perhaps for the first time in two years, many Israelis allow themselves to feel a clean kind of hope, the kind that makes strangers hug in the street and reconnects parts of the country we forgot could meet. The hostages are not physically here yet, but the air feels as if a nation has finally found the path back to itself. It will not be easy. Some do not want to see the day after. But Israelis are a stubborn, special people. No one will be allowed to sabotage the return of the hostages now. They are on their way home, and so are we.