For months, Ronen Tzur had a mission to bring the hostages home. The drumbeat of their fate was in his head at night when he went to sleep and was with him when he opened his eyes the next day.
“I woke up every morning knowing that 134 people depend on me,” he said. Tzur, 54, a veteran media consultant who owns and runs Tzur Communications, was among the thousands of Israeli volunteers drafted into action in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas-led attack in which over 1,200 Israelis were killed and 253 were taken hostage.
A former Labor Party parliamentarian, he was catapulted by accident onto the public stage by a member of his staff with family members who were missing in the aftermath of the attack and who wanted him to run a press conference.
That one act placed him at the head of the highly visible Hostage and Missing Families Forum. It was a position he resigned from in February amid a public discourse charging him with politicizing an otherwise consensus campaign for the return of the captives.
Following his departure, high-profile publicists Haim Rubinstein and Asaf Pozniak resigned. His replacement, Daniel Kogan, has also left.
Tzur said he fears that the very thing he tried to avoid, which was the politicization of the campaign, has now occurred, weakening the voices of the hostages’ relatives even as talks in Qatar for the release of the remaining 134 captives have heated up.
The tall, gray-haired publicist spoke with The Jerusalem Post this week from his office in Bnei Brak. He recalls being asked to help out pro bono on October 8 to organize a media event for a few families of missing Israelis who wanted to speak with the media.
“I came [to the event], and there were dozens of families. I didn’t know where they came from. We didn’t invite them.” Word had spread that this was the place to come to, he explained.
“They wanted to speak to the press. They wanted to know where their children were,” he recalled. “There were dozens of reporters, and everyone was crying,” he added.
When it was over, the families in the room asked Tzur if he could continue to be involved.He said yes, not understanding what he was signing up for, but suggested they meet at his office in the morning.
When he arrived at 8:30, 30 people were already waiting for him. At that point, the largest problem was missing people because the bodies had been, in many cases, burned, mutilated, and dismembered. The identification process, in some cases, took weeks.
At first, they thought they were just an information hotline. As the needs mounted that week, they created an informal team that would deal with the media, communicate with the families, handle contacts with the government, provide social services to the families, and collect data on who was missing and possibly taken captive.
They drew up a list of 3,000 names, which eventually narrowed down to the 253 hostages. To better understand the hostage issue, they created a team of experts, including diplomats, former security officials, and those involved particularly in efforts to secure the release of hostages in the past.
What emerged was the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, led by Tzur and operating around the clock. It drew thousands of volunteers and included international overtures, including Qatar.
“Psychologists, doctors, attorneys, businesspeople, everyone wanted to help,” Tzur explained. Tzur said his phone became unusable because of the many messages and calls it received.
Tzur said that for each missing person, there were dozens of relatives and friends, all seeking information. They worked in those days amid the shock that gripped the country, in an atmosphere where it felt as if the government and the army had stopped functioning and that the only way for people to move the bar forward was to step up to the plate and take charge.
Simultaneous to their efforts and unknown to them in those first days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had almost immediately after October 7, personally called Brig.-Gen. (res) Gal Hirsch to organize governmental efforts on issues relating to the missing Israelis and hostages. Hirsch’s formal appointment, however, would come more than a month later.
Hirsch was on the job from the start, working 24/7, just like the campaign, with the same task list, as he moved through uncharted territory to create formal governmental structures to handle large-scale events with missing people.
When the forum and officials from Hirsch’s team first contacted each other ten days after October 7, communication did not go smoothly.
According to Tzur, he was initially comforted by the weight of experience Hirsch brought to the position. Still, that reverence quickly evaporated as his office treated them as “the enemy.”
Hirsch’s office responded that this claim “had no truth to it,” citing several meetings between Hirsch and Tzur during the following October 7 and claiming that Hirsch’s office maintained “a continuous relationship.”
The enmity displayed itself in absurd ways, Tzur said, as the process of releasing the hostages became increasingly protracted, and the families pushed for meetings with the prime minister and security cabinet ministers.
Tzur’s issues with Hirsch’s office, however, paled in comparison to the interplay of his political past with that of the larger hostage drama as it has played out historically in Israel and specifically concerning October 7.
There is a long-held belief among families of past hostage situations that a successful public campaign is needed to pressure the government to take the steps necessary to free captives, given that the price has been the release of terrorists guilty of killing Israelis.
Freeing hostages amid a military campaign has only increased that price as Hamas has demanded nothing less than ending the war and the withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza.
The public campaign of the relatives of these hostages, as in past campaigns, has rested on national unity that cuts across partisan politics.
“The hostages are not a matter of Right or Left, but one of the entire nation of Israel,” Tzur said. “It is the one place in consensus.”
But past governments and this one as well have argued that public campaigns only play into the hands of the terrorists, as the appearance of political disunity makes them feel that they can increase, not lessen, their demands, believing that Israeli leaders are under public pressure to pay any price.
It is a situation that often pits the families against the government, precisely in a period when unity is most needed in the hostage drama.
Here, Tzur’s past and his visible presence as the head of the forum also made him a target for political attacks.
Over the years, Tzur advised and campaigned on behalf of a wide array of large corporations, companies, and individuals, some of them controversial, including former president Moshe Katzav, who was eventually convicted of rape.
In 2023, he was also a visible and active figure in the campaign against judicial reform, taking the stage at demonstrations in some cases, comparing the government to that of Nazi Germany.
Tzur said he did everything possible to keep politics out of the campaign and to be as neutral as possible.
He advised the families not to involve politics in their speeches and insisted that rallies be held at Hostage Square and not on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, the site of anti-government protests during 2023.
It was the government, Tzur charged, that ran a campaign against the forum to paint it as a political body bent on removing Netanyahu, even though some of those standing at the stage in demonstrations were Netanyahu supporters, he said.
The government did this because it viewed the families as a threat and a nuisance, as any hostage deal would involve paying heavy prices and could hurt Netanyahu politically, Tzur said.
At no point did the forum intervene in the hostage negotiations themselves, but was not willing to accept foot-dragging. This was not about the content of the deal but about its urgency, and that was not a political message, Tzur argued.
“Is calling to free the hostages a political act? If so, then the forum was political. Is demanding from the prime minister not to wait for Hamas but to initiate [considered] a political act?
Did anyone call in our actions to replace the government? Did anyone call to remove the prime minister? Did anyone call to change the makeup of the cabinet?” Tzur said.“The ones who made this political was the government – a bunch of idiots who, just like they did not know what they were doing before October 7, do not know what they are doing now,” Tzur said.
The situation reached a fever pitch in February during a Zoom meeting with family representatives. They told him that they were receiving threats from ministers and Knesset members that if they did not replace him as the head of the forum, the politicians would stop helping them.Some even said they had received messages that if they did not lower the public pressure, their loved ones might not be on the lists of released hostages in the future, he charged.
"Criminal tactics" that are like placing a loaded gun directed at the hostages' families
These are “criminal tactics,” Tzur exclaimed, adding that it is like placing a loaded gun at these families. The prime minister’s bureau and Hirsch’s office denied that any such messaging had come from them.
“This is an unfounded and false claim. None of the members of the Prime Minister’s bureau, the Prime Minister’s Office, or the team in charge of the hostages and missing persons and the coordinator of [office of hostages and missing persons] have ever acted against the forum of the families,” the Prime Minister’s Office told the Post in response to a query.
“The opposite is true. Throughout, including now, that office, in cooperation with the relevant parties in the Prime Minister’s Office, has made all efforts to maintain cooperation and to ensure the well-being of the families of the hostages in their most difficult time,” the PMO added.
Tzur, however, said that the messaging from the families was consistent and hit its mark.“I could not go to sleep at night thinking that someone’s child had not come home because me and my friends in the forum, who have volunteered for five months, are disturbing Netanyahu,” he said.
But his departure did not help. What Tzur said he prevented was now happening, which is that the families are now more alone. For the first time, on Saturday night, March 16, the rally at Hostages Square was empty because all of the protesters had moved to Kaplan Street, he said.
Tzur is an experienced political analyst. On a broader scale, he argued that the past few years in Israeli politics have been characterized by a clash between the “conservative elite” and the “liberal elite.”
The conservative elite, which included the Likud, the religious Zionists, and Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), had a demographic advantage. Still, the liberal elite controlled the institutions that kept the country afloat – the economy, media, technology, and more.
Both elites have tried to defeat the other. When the liberal elite led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid were in power, the conservative elite did not enable it to rule. When the conservative elite led by Netanyahu was in power, the liberal elite did the same.
The Hamas massacre of October 7 was an example of the catastrophes brought about by the clash between these two elites, Tzur argued, and the conservative elite mistreated the Hostages and Missing Families Forum because it believed, mistakenly, that the forum belonged to the liberal elite.
If the two elites continue to try to destroy the other, Israel should continue to expect catastrophes, Tzur said.
Tzur added that joining politics himself was an option.“I do not rule out the possibility of running as part of a list that will lead to a change of discourse and a connection between the conservative and liberal publics, which, instead of fighting each other, will lead to a connection that will prevent national destruction,” Tzur said.
But his work with the campaign, he said, had remained neutral.“We have never been involved in the negotiations. We never said to them, ‘take this offer or deny that,’” he said.
He was certain, he said, that the first hostage deal at the end of November, which saw the release of 105 captives, mostly women and children, came about from their efforts.
Throughout, there was only one message: that there is only one mission: to save lives by bringing them home now. " This is the strategy,” Tzur said.