When They Came Home
Ariela Moel, co-chair of the Hillel International Student Cabinet, shares her personal reflection on what it meant to witness the recent hostage release and ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
I have the privilege of representing Jewish students around the world — students who, last week, shared a single heartbeat. When news broke of a deal to release the hostages held in Gaza, time itself seemed to pause. Across continents and campuses, from dorm rooms to Hillel lounges, we waited together.
No time zones mattered, as we all stayed up to watch them come home: students from Los Angeles to New York unable to sleep, parents in the South and Midwestern United States whispering prayers, and in Israel, an entire nation holding its breath. When the hostages walked off those planes, after more than 700 days in captivity, nationhood stopped being an abstract concept and became a feeling. Geography disappeared. We were all in the same place, watching the same screens, feeling the same impossible thing finally happen.
For two years, my optimism waned as the hostages remained trapped in Gaza, day after day. But my fellow students and I hoped anyway. Those yellow ribbons that appeared everywhere were scrappy, defiant declarations that we refused to let go, even when every probability screamed at us to be “realistic.” Hope is what you cling to when optimism runs out. Hope is what made us stay up through every time zone. And hope, sometimes, is just enough to beat the odds.
This week was not October 6, 2023. We don’t get to go back to before, to pretend the trauma never happened, to return to the privilege of innocence. It’s October 8 — still the day after the day that changed everything. When you woke up and realized the world was different now. That you’re different too. And somehow, you have to figure out how to move forward anyway.
The hostage release proves hope was worth holding onto. It was a moment of immense relief amid continued challenge and heartbreak, when those yellow ribbons — symbols of stubborn, clear-eyed hope — finally meant what we’d been aching for them to mean all along.
Ariela Moel is a fourth-year pre-law student at USC and the co-chair of the Hillel International Student Cabinet.