At 75, Lt. Col. (res.) Yishai Katziri sat in the dining hall of Kibbutz Hatzor on Monday and watched as IDF soldier Edan Alexander was released after 584 days in Hamas captivity.
When the words "Edan is in IDF hands" appeared on the screen, Katziri struggled to hold back tears. “I never imagined that 52 years after my friends welcomed me back from Egyptian captivity — right here in this very dining hall — I’d be sitting in the same place to welcome back the adopted son of our kibbutz. It’s overwhelming joy,” he said.
Katziri’s plane was shot down near the Suez Canal on the first day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Wounded, he parachuted into Egyptian territory and was taken captive. “I feel a deep sense of shared fate with Edan. I can understand what he’s feeling, though I make no comparison,” he said.
“Throughout this time, I kept thinking about what he must be going through. I was a prisoner of a state. I knew there would be a swap and I was brought home after a month and a half. I feel ashamed that Edan returned only after so long — and that 58 hostages are still suffering unbearably in Gaza.”
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“Back then we had only one TV channel,” Katziri recalled of his homecoming. “There were no social media platforms. The joy was enormous when I returned — right here, to this same hall where we’re now watching Edan’s release.”
Edan Alexander, a soldier in the Golani Brigade’s 51st Battalion, is part of a group of young Americans who made aliyah to Israel to serve in the IDF. He and 16 others were adopted by Kibbutz Hatzor. As a lone soldier, he left his family behind in the U.S. and was taken in by a host family on the kibbutz.
“To us, Edan is one of our own returning home,” said Katziri. “It moves me deeply. But on the other hand — why do we need [Donald] Trump? Don’t we have a government? Don’t we have an army? Why aren’t we the ones taking initiative? There was just a heroic operation where, after 43 years, they brought back a missing soldier’s body. Are we now creating the next operations that’ll take 40 more years?"