Hostage
46 pages • 1-hour read
Eli SharabiHostage
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of kidnapping, captivity, physical deprivation, psychological abuse, violence, death, antisemitic hatred, and war.
Historical Context: Hamas and the Ongoing Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Hamas is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, a Palestinian Sunni political and military organization that was elected to govern the Gaza Strip in 2006. They formed in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood during the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising), and their charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in the historic region of Palestine, which extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That demand was amended in 2017 to establish an interim Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, which include present-day Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Despite Hamas’s willingness to negotiate, they still do not recognize Israel’s legitimacy (“What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza,” BBC World News, 14 October 2025).
Hamas provides social welfare for the people of Gaza, but its militancy designates it as a terrorist organization in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Israel, and dozens of other countries (Kali, Robinson. “What is Hamas? What to know about its origins, leaders and funding,” PBS World News, 13 October 2023). It is largely funded by Iran and has political backing from Turkey. Its rival party, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), rules the West Bank. The PLO does not condone violence, but internal corruption lost them popular support. They have an ongoing rift with Hamas.
The State of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, on the territory of formerly British-controlled Palestine. This led to the Arab-Israeli War, during which over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. The region has been in dispute ever since. Hamas claims they are not against Jews or Judaism but Zionism, the belief that Jews have a natural right to live in historic Palestine. This historical background is implicit in Hostage rather than explicit, as the author writes about his immediate experiences rather than the conflict’s broader history.
Political Context: The October 7, 2023, Hamas Attack on Israel
Hostage is rooted in the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a coordinated, large-scale assault on southern Israel. Fighters breached the Gaza border, attacking military installations and civilian communities, including kibbutzim and a music festival near Re’im. About 1,200 people were killed, thousands wounded, and about 250 individuals were taken hostage and transported into Gaza. The attack marked one of the deadliest days in Israel’s history and triggered an extensive Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
Understanding this context is essential to appreciating Hostage, which unfolds during the prolonged aftermath of the attack rather than focusing on the initial violence alone. Sharabi’s captivity occurs against a backdrop of active warfare, hostage negotiations, intermittent ceasefires, and shifting regional dynamics involving Hezbollah, Iran, and international actors such as the United States and Qatar. News of these developments filter unevenly into captivity, shaping the emotional rhythms of Sharabi’s experience as hope and despair rise and fall in response to partial information.
The hostage crisis also becomes a global political issue, with intense international scrutiny directed at Israel, Hamas, and humanitarian organizations. Public debates over military strategy—including accusations of genocide and engineered famine, allegations of aid obstruction, reports of civilian casualties, and disputes over the prioritization of hostage recovery—inform the atmosphere in which Sharabi’s experience is later received and interpreted. The staged release ceremonies described in the memoir reflect Hamas’s use of hostages for propaganda, a tactic with historical precedent in asymmetric conflicts.
By situating Sharabi’s personal account within this broader historical moment, the author contextualizes the pressures shaping his captivity and release. The memoir does not attempt to narrate the full scope of the war; instead, it offers a ground-level perspective on how global conflict manifests in individual lives, underscoring the human cost embedded within geopolitical events.
Genre Context: Testimony and Survival Memoir
Hostage belongs to the tradition of testimony and survival memoirs, a genre shaped by first-person accounts of extreme confinement, violence, and political persecution. These works favor immediacy over retrospective interpretation, relying on internal monologues, sensory descriptions, depictions of daily life, and relationships between survivors. Rather than offering narrative closure or moral resolution, testimony literature seeks to record what happened as faithfully as possible, preserving the texture of events that fall outside of ordinary experience.
Foundational examples of the genre include Holocaust memoirs by writers such as Primo Levi, author of Survival in Auschwitz (1947), and Elie Wiesel, author of Night (1956), as well as later captivity narratives by prisoners of war, political detainees, and kidnapping survivors. In fiction, autobiographical narratives like Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), based on his eight-year captivity in a Soviet labor camp, capture the reality of prolonged imprisonment while allowing the author to create a cohesive story that real-life events often lack.
Across these works, survival is rarely presented as triumph. Instead, testimony emphasizes how prisoners adapt: learning to endure hunger, fear, and uncertainty while maintaining moral clarity and attention to others. The genre is marked by an ethical commitment to narrative restraint—allowing events to speak for themselves rather than shaping them into symbolic arcs or ideological arguments.
Hostage extends this tradition into a contemporary context in which media saturation and real-time political instrumentalization can overshadow the human cost of global conflicts. Sharabi writes with acute awareness that his testimony circulates amid propaganda, misinformation, and competing narratives. Read through this lens, Sharabi’s clipped prose, repetition, and avoidance of speculation appear not as stylistic limitations but as deliberate formal choices rooted in a long-standing ethical tradition of bearing witness to highly politicized events that remain unresolved
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