Democracy Now! Audio - Pt 2 Former Israeli Hostage Liat Beinin Atzili Holding Liat Director Brandon Kramer

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Extended conversation with Liat Beinin Atzili, an Israeli American high school teacher who was held hostage in Gaza for 54 days after being seized on October 7, 2023. Her story is the focus of the new documentary Holding Liat, directed by Brandon Kramer.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. As we bring you part two of our conversation about a film shortlisted for the 26 Oscars in the best documentary feature category, it's called Holding Liat. In part one, we played the trailer. It's about what happened on October 7, 2023 during Hamas' attack on Israel. and the taking of the Israeli-American, Liyat Benin-Ezzili, taken hostage along with 250 others, at least 12 of them, U.S. citizens. Holding Liat is an intimate look into the heart-wrenching fight to free her. The film follows her parents, Yehuda and Chaya Bainin, as they cope with the fear and uncertainty of their daughter's captivity while witnessing Israel's war on Gaza unfold in real time.

In this clip, we hear from Liyat herself, who was released by Hamas 54 days after she was taken. It was November 2023 as part of a temporary truce with Israel. My thoughts about Israel's response and what's happening in Gaza are complex. It's horrible, truly horrible. It's really horrible. And I'm sure. And I'm hearing, and we're not to hear, and, you know, People are saying we shouldn't let humanitarian aid into Gaza, and it's horrifying to hear.

I don't care that it allows Hamas to keep fighting. People shouldn't starve to death, no matter who they are. But by the same token, it's not okay to go into people's houses and take them hostage either. That's Liat Benin Etzili, high school history teacher and the subject of the film Holding Liot. Again, she was held hostage for 54 days. We are joined by Liot herself, as well as Brandon Kramer, the director of holding Liot. We welcome you both to Democracy Now as we continue this conversation. Tell us about that day that you were released, Liat.

Did you know you were held for 54 days, what, 52 of them by basically two men, you and another woman hostage. Did you know the hostage, the other woman, before? She was also from my kibbutz. So I knew who she was, but I hadn't spoken to her except to say hello ever before. But obviously, we became very, very close, very quickly. Before we talk about that day of release, the first two days you describe in part one of our conversation, of being held by the mother and sister of the man who abducted you,

the Hamas person who had abducted you. What were your conversations like on those two days? I mean, obviously you were, to say the least, traumatized. They didn't speak very much English, so there weren't a lot of conversations, but they were very concerned that I had everything that I needed. I kept asking to contact my children and my family because I knew that they'd be very, very worried

and I wanted them to know that I was okay, that I was alive. You have two boys and a girl in their 20s? Yeah. And they kept telling me that in a few days, I'll be able to contact my family. That never happened, obviously. But my impression was that they were trying to reassure me. They didn't want me to be, they didn't want me to be scared.

They didn't want me to be anxious. They really were concerned that I ate, that I showered, that I had clean clothes. And I think they really tried to make me feel as okay as possible. And then the 52 days where you spent them mainly with two men holding you. They were also very concerned about my well-being. They wanted me to be as healthy and as calm as I could be. They knew that I didn't know what had happened to my husband and my children. Did they know?

No, they had no idea. One of them was also isolated from his family who lived in, in Rafiak. Which is where? It's in the south of the Gaza Strip. And I was held in Chan Yunus, which is in the middle. And we spoke a lot about the feeling of not knowing what's happened, what's happened to your family, what's happening. You could communicate with them.

Yeah, they spoke English. And I think they realized that I could help them improve their English. And so we spoke a lot about many, many things also about everyday things about my life, about their life, about the war, about what was happening and also a lot about their politics,

about my politics. I asked them why they were members of Hamas. We spoke about a possible future for the region what we both would have wanted. And how were you able to follow, since you were so isolated, what was happening outside? And did you have any sense of when you would be released? We watched TV a little bit, so we could follow what was happening.

And we knew that there was a lot of discussion about a hostage deal, so we followed that. It seemed that it was taking forever. I think the people in Gaza were surprised at how long it was taking, and we were obviously surprised as well, that this wasn't happening faster. Were you scared of being bombed? Not really. It was before the Israeli army had entered. Han Yunus, so I knew that we weren't in that much danger from the Israeli army.

But I knew that once the Israeli army would enter Han Yunus and would come close to where I was being held, I would probably be killed if they came too close. So we knew that there was a hostage deal happening, and the people who were holding us, prepared us for what that They told us that we'd be taken to a different place. They told us who would take us there, and that's exactly what happened. Describe that day. How did you learn on the day, the 54th day, that you were going to be released, along with the other woman hostage you were held? Yeah. We didn't know it.

We didn't know in advance. It was just they told us what would happen was that this person would come in the middle of the night and then say that it was time for us to go, and that's exactly what happened. We were very, very upset before because we knew that the hostage deal was coming to an end, and we were afraid that we wouldn't be released. But then it happened that night. And then I spent a few days in a hospital in Chan Yunus waiting to be transferred to the Red Cross. And the woman, who was the other woman hostage, she ended up being released a day after me.

Where did you reunite with your children and your parents? at a hospital in Israel. Can you describe that for us? It's in the film. I knew that my kids were okay. I knew that my parents were okay. I spoke to them on the phone before seeing them. So it's a very, very emotional moment.

I felt very, very guilty for all the grief and the hardship that they'd gone through not knowing what had happened to me. Your sister there, too, tell? My sister was there too, yeah. But I knew that she helped take care of my kids. But that very, very quickly, that turned into concern for my husband. When did you learn that your husband had died immediately? Less than 24 hours after being released.

but that first night there was still some hope. My family already knew that he was probably not alive, but I was sort of saved that information until it was official. So there was a lot of concern about that as well. Do you know how he died? He left our house on the Saturday morning of us. October 7th and he was on the first response team of the Kibbutz, which is a small military force that is supposed to protect the settlements, the Kibbutz team in the area until the

army can arrive with more soldiers. And the Israeli army didn't arrive. in my kibbutz until late afternoon. So it was like four or five people fighting against or trying to fight off the attack, the whole attack. So he was killed fighting. And so there were, what, 80 hostages from Neroz, your kibbutz? There were around 80 people taken. Some managed to run away, and some were killed on the way.

I think in the end there were 76. hostages from my kibbutz. Many fewer than Be'erri, the other kibbutz, because the Israeli military had arrived earlier there. Yeah, yeah. And so more died with the Israeli military fighting there. I don't know if that's the reason, but Berri is also a much larger kibbutz. so more people were killed there than on near oz

and more people from near oz were taken hostage and and you're an Israeli-American family and we interviewed a few months ago but when the film had come out your uncle Joel Bainan well-known Stanford professor specialist on the Middle East. And like your sister, Tal, they live in now retired Portland, Oregon. And I wanted to go back to a clip of Holding Leatt, the film that's been nominated for the Oscar.

This is Stanford Professor Emeritus Joel, your uncle, and your father, Yehuda's brother, speaking on a panel in Portland. Actually, Brendan, who sponsored this panel? I don't remember the name of the group, but Joel is regularly giving talks and lectures in Portland and all across the country. This is what he had to say. Next up, we have Professor of Middle East history, Joel Bainan. Thank you, Julia. It's a little bit more difficult than usual for me to speak today. I think most of you know that my niece,

Liyat, that Sili was taken hostage. But I think we all understand that the history of Israel-Palestine didn't begin on October 7th. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the state of Israel was established, while 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled in fear or were forcibly expelled from their lands and their homes, and Palestinian society was destroyed.

This is what Palestinians, called the Nakba or the catastrophe. There is no way to understand what happened in Israel, Palestine, on October 7, 2023, without understanding the Nakba. Acknowledging the Nakba does not mean a genocide of the Jewish people of Israel or driving Jews into the sea, or even necessarily the end of Jewish statehood. It is an acknowledgement of a historic wrong. I want to insist here that telling a history that isn't like the one that you are familiar with doesn't dehumanize Israelis. So that's Joel Beinan. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University, speaking in Portland, Oregon. And Joel is the uncle of Liat, the Israeli hostage who was held for 54 days.

As you listen to your uncle, your thoughts. I agree with him. I don't think that acknowledging somebody else's history undermines mine in any way. I teach this. This is in the Israeli high school history program. We teach about the Nakhba. Sometimes we don't call it that, but we do teach that Palestinian society was destroyed by the Israeli war. for independence. In fact, you were a tour guide at Yad Vashem at the Holocaust Memorial in Israel. And at the end of the film,

maybe, Brandon, you can talk about this scene that you included in the film with the history teacher, with Yad Vashem, I guess you could say, informal scholar, taking kids there. Yeah, I mean, when we filmed that scene, it was remarkable. It was profound. I mean, to have, when we made a film like this, no idea if Liat and Aviv were going to come out of captivity, let alone if they did come out, how they would be processing this trauma. So let's step back when you decided to do this film. And in part one, you talked about you being a distant relative of the Bainan family.

Yeah, I mean, look, our relatives were, you know, thrown into, you know, the epicenter of a geopolitical crisis that the whole world was looking to and trying to make sense of. And, you know, here's Liat's father, you know, in a moment where tens of thousands of people, Palestinians, are being killed. Israeli hostages are being held. You know, a lot of lives are being lost in retribution and in response to the victims of that day. Here we have our family going through this tragedy and documenting how they feel. And Liot's father is very adamant within days that this is the opposite. What's happening is the opposite of what he wanted. He wanted, you know, this to be a moment to change the trajectory of this conflict,

like to call for peace, to call for reconciliation. And instead, his family's pain and trauma were being used to justify, you know, extraordinary acts of violence. And so we felt this responsibility to film this story. When Leot came out, it was an extraordinary thing. I mean, here's somebody who was held for 54 days, who lost her husband, who for 54 days thought her children might be killed. And one of the first things that she did was she,

wrote an op-ed in the New York Times and said, I do not want my pain to be used to justify any Palestinian to be killed. And so one of the scenes, the ending of this film is a profound moment where we filmed Liat is a Holocaust educator. She specializes in that part of history. And she's giving a tour of the, a tour of the, of the Holocaust Museum and talking about the indifference to suffering that Polish and German people felt toward Jews inside the ghetto and then reflects on the indifference to suffering that's happening on the other side of the fence. And for me as a storyteller to bear witness to somebody who has suffered a tremendous tragedy who has channeled their pain toward empathy and toward a call for peace and actually a concern

and care for people on the other side of the fence, that is something that is so rare and so beautiful and so needed in today's world. Thank you. Talk about what it means to teach kids and the moment when the children ask you questions, I mean, you yourself have become this well-known figure as a woman hostage who was released.

The kids don't know that I'm a well-known figure, some of them at least. Well, it's gone through a sort of an evolution at first, like, two years ago when I came back and when I went back to teaching, I think my students, who most of them come from Kibbutzim in the Negev that were all very affected by the October 7th attack. they wanted to talk about themselves and everything that I brought into the classroom that had to do with anything from history they sort of made the connection to their story

and to their pain and I think that and we all me and my colleagues and I we always say that history is only relevant if it's if it resonates resonates within our students everyday lives. And I think that through studying history,

they found an outlet for their emotions and for their thoughts about what was happening. And as time has gone by, it's gone back to being sort of more academic and more contained. And kids today in Israel, I think, are capable of studying history for what it is. And also, I find that I mean, there's nothing. No person is objective when they're talking about their own history, but I think that it's much easier today than it was two years ago for students to be again open to hearing different stories

and different narratives of history. I wanted to ask you about you being an active member of the Israeli-Palestinian bereaved families for peace, speaking publicly with bereaved Palestinian women, mothers. You are a mother of three, also called the Parents Circle. Tell us about that. It's a very small organization that was founded by parents today. There are members who were not just parents of people who were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's a group of people. It's a group of people. with people who believe in dialogue and who believe that pain and suffering, that every human

being who suffers a loss feels the same pain and the same suffering. And that the only way to move forward as individuals and as societies is to acknowledge the pain on both sides and to continue, have continuing. dialogue about peace and about ending the conflict. And you had started doing this before you were taken hostage? No, no. This is after. It was only after I became a bereaved family.

Can you tell us about one of the Palestinian mothers? About a year ago, I participated in a dialogue group, and there was a woman there who had lost her son after he died from as a result of something that had happened to him in an Israeli prison and her younger son was at the time of the meeting of this group he was also held in an Israeli prison and she wasn't able to see him to go and visit him and that was a very eye-opening experience for me to meet this woman. And not that I didn't know what the reality of Palestinians' lives was like in the West Bank,

but just to meet other women like me that we could laugh and share our experiences and talk, and talk about politics and argue. But to know that there is, that as human beings, there's no real difference between us, but that there's such a huge and fundamental difference in our everyday lives in the way that, that me, that I live as an Israeli citizen and in the way that they live as Palestinians in the West Bank.

And that was very painful for me. Your feelings about the mass protests of Israelis against Prime Minister Netanyahu, so many of them expressing that he is keeping the war going to save his own political life as he is in the midst of a corruption trial and sacrificing so many lives. Your response to those voices? I was part of the protest. I was part of, to me, it was obvious that the war wasn't, from a certain point. It was not a war to return, to bring it wasn't a war that was that was needed to bring the return of the hostages it wasn't a war that was achieving anything and I think I think that a war of this scale has to make a change in

in the region has to make has to change the way we think about the conflict and I think that what happened is just it's the manifestation. of the failure of Netanyahu's policy for the past two decades. And the conflict within your father, as he fought for your release and not knowing what had happened to Aviv, your husband, feeling that he was being used, what Brandon referred to, here he was a hostage's father, and not wanting to perpetuate the conflict, how he was able to negotiate this. I think he managed to stay very true to himself.

I mean, he doesn't take nonsense from anybody. And I think he was very brave and very vocal about his feelings. And I'm very proud of what my parents did, of what he did and my mother as well, and my whole family, my sister, my kids. Well, let me ask Brendan, how has this film been received in Israel? You know, we had the film premiered at Daka V, which is the largest documentary festival in Israel. I was very nervous.

Didn't know how it was going to be received. It was ironic that it's also the name of your husband. I know. It was at the Tel Aviv Opera House. It was a sold-out audience of 1,500 people. and here we are. Were you there? Leah?

Yeah, I was there. The whole family was there. And the audience was applauding throughout the film. So not just at the end when Yehuda goes up to some of these politicians,

different lobbyists, activists, and shares his frustration with the direction that the Israeli government is moving. The entire audience, 1,500 people, rapturous,

throughout the body of the film. And so it was truly the most extraordinary screening of a film I've ever felt, and people kept coming up to me saying that this film represents the anger and frustration and that Leatt's family, that this film and Leatt's family, seeing it on the big screen just felt like a catharsis. So we're talking on the day that your film is being released in New York at the Film Forum. And the other film that's being released, that we're also had on today's show, was the voice of Hindra Shah, the little girl five, six years old, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. She pled with the Palestinian Red Crescent, please bring someone, she said, I am afraid.

And it ends up that the ambulance drivers who finally got the okay to come to her car where her whole family lay dead around her, they too were killed by the Israeli assault. So it is a remarkable film, the voice of Hindra Jav, your film Holding Liat, also remarkable. And you're both premiering in theater, one theater tonight. And I'm wondering about the significance of this. I wanted to ask both of you, because Liat was just sitting here watching Calther Ben Hania talk about her film. I mean, I've been telling every audience that sees our film to go see the voice of Henry Jab. It's an extraordinary film.

It's one of the most heartbreaking stories I've ever seen, but such an important to sit with Hinn's experience, to have to really listen to her voice and go through that, I think, is such a meaningful and important cinematic experience that she's brought to two audiences. And I think, you know, when I think about, you know, these two films and this moment, and I, and I'm talking about our screening in Israel, I think about, you know, I'm sitting with Liat and she's sharing with me her reflections around not wanting her pain to be used to perpetuate violence and anger and retribution. And I left my experience with Liat and I went to Masafariata. And I met with Aouda. and Hanadi Hathaline, who are activists who live there. And Hanadi turned to me and said, you know, I'm not, I don't tell my children who is perpetuating the daily acts of violence that's happening against my community. I don't tell them who's, you know, bulldozing our schools. I don't tell them who's, you know, killing our neighbors.

And then a few months later, I leave and I found out that her husband, Aouda, who is sitting there with us was murdered. And she has become a member of the parent circle along with Liyadh. And so, you know, these stories of, of, you know, taking tragedy killed by an Israeli settled or murdered, holding their son documenting with just a cell phone documenting the horrific injustice that is occurring in their community every single day. And no other land won the Oscar last year, which is based on that struggle. Yeah, and Outo is one of the filmmakers that worked on that film. And so just seeing, you know, I think of that experience in being with her and just the fact

that she went through that kind of tragedy and is showing up and being part of this group that is jointly calling for peace, the fact that Leot has been through the horrific tragedy that she's gone through and immediately is channeling that for peace. It's such a gift to me as a filmmaker to be shepherding that kind of story into the world. And I hope, I think it's really needed in this moment. And the title, why you chose Holding Liat? Titling this film was so hard. It was such a difficult experience.

Like, how do you encapsulate something so complex into words? And I think to me, the title has many different meanings. I think it's, you know, the film ends with Liat the beautiful reflection that you share about how you're processing this, this, and channeling that toward empathy. And so I see it as, you know, literally your family is holding you in multiple scenes in the film and your mom says the words in the film. So your mom gets full credit for the, for the title. But to me, it's also a way like, sort of asking the audience, how can you hold Liat?

How can you, you know, walk with her through her experience, and how can you hold the words that she's sharing at the end of the film? I think, you know, for some audiences, those reflections that she shares at the end of the film are really hard for people to sit with. And I sort of put that call and challenge to audiences that if Liat can go through the experience that she's been through, then I would hope that audience members could be open to that kind of empathy as well.

Well, let's end with Leatt's words. The message you have, you come to a country, the United States, the most powerful in the world, the major arms supplier to Israel. Your film is being shown all over. You are educating an American audience. Your message not only to them, but people around the world. Be willing to listen. I think that a lot of people are missing an opportunity to learn and to hear stories of complex situations and complex conflicts.

And I think that there's a lot of shallowness in a lot of people's. And in the way a lot of people relate to different issues in the world, I mean, not just in Israel, Palestine. And I think that being able to relate and to be empathetic to one person's story doesn't necessarily mean that you can't relate to a different person's story, even if it's a conflicting one. And I'd like people to take the time to understand more in-depth, difficult situations. And I think that that's the most important thing in achieving a better world, a more peaceful world. And I think that we really need that right now. Well, I'll be moderating a discussion with you tonight after the film premieres at Film Forum. With you, Liat Benin Azili and with you, Brandon Kramer, the audience will experience the film holding Liat.

And I want to tell our audience, you can go to part one to see the first part of our discussion with Liat Bainin Azzili, held a hostage in Gaza by Hamas for 54 days and then released. Her husband died on October 7, 2023. Brendan Kramer, resistant relative of the Bainans, is the director of holding Liat. And that film is shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.