Tension. Anxiety. Relief. These are the words Noam Shalit uses to describe his feelings at the moment of reunion with his Israeli soldier son, held captive by Hamas for more than five years. "But more than anything, we just wanted to see him, to touch him, to feel him, to see that he was OK. It's difficult to recall those moments, to re-live it again, to retrieve these feelings. There was a release of the tension of many years. And of course a great feeling of victory."
This is the real-life version of a wrenching scene in Prisoners of War (Hatufim), a 10-part Israeli television drama that begins airing in the UK tonight and which was the basis for the just-concluded US series, Homeland. The story of two captured Israeli soldiers who return home following a prisoner exchange deal, Hatufim depicts what happens after the "happy ending" of the triumphant homecoming: the struggle to rebuild lives, the difficulties of readjustment, the psychological scars of isolation.
When it was broadcast in Israel, in the midst of the Shalit family's relentless campaign to secure their son's freedom, it got record ratings. Noam Shalit only watched a couple of episodes. "I was too occupied in reality to watch fiction," he says. But thousands of Israeli families who send their sons and daughters to serve in the country's conscript army were riveted by the drama that spoke to their visceral fears.
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