The images of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas were jarring. The bright-eyed baby smiled sweetly from hostage posters, as did his adorable older brother Ariel, 4. There were many, many hostage posters on buildings and poles around the world, but the children, the embodiment of innocence, stood out.
“Bring them home” — it was a demand, a plea, a prayer as the children, their mother Shiri and too many others young and old remained in the clutches of the Hamas terrorists who kidnapped them on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel.
Last year the World Economic Forum at Davos featured a showing of the Israel military’s gathering of footage of the Oct. 7 atrocities. As Time reported, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL commented, “People walked out of the room in silence simply crying or shell shocked.”
But surely, Kfir and Ariel would be spared. It was a silent, steady hope.
The bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas along with 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz were released by Hamas this week.
In a particularly grotesque twist, the coffin carrying Shiri was marked with the words, “Arrested on October 7,” Israeli media reported. The crime? Being Jewish.
Oct. 7 uncorked a fresh flood of antisemitism, both here and abroad, though it had been on the rise in recent years. To our horror, college students marched and camped and harassed Jews on campus. College leaders were in lockstep and denial that anything was wrong.
While the Bibas family and other hostages were kept in tunnels or God knows where, their posters where shamelessly ripped down by people calling them “propaganda.”
Earlier this month the sight of three Israeli male hostages (Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi) looking gaunt and frail evoked memories of the Holocaust.
Aron Krell, a 97-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and other camps who was liberated nearly 80 years ago at 18, told the New York Post “When I saw their pictures coming out of captivity, they looked so emaciated and so sick,” he said. “And the world doesn’t care. I can’t understand — where is the outrage?”
The outrage was too often drowned out by chants of “from the river to the sea.”
There has been some progress, though some born of lawsuits. Harvard University, whose former president Claudine Gay infamously framed calls for Jewish genocide as “depending on the context,” this month pledged to reaffirm that antisemitism will not be tolerated at least annually, prepare a public annual report covering its response to alleged complaints, and invest in additional academic resources to study antisemitism.
It’s a start.
As is the Massachusetts Teachers Association finally removing links to sites containing “antisemitic, offensive” images. These optional educational resources about the Israel-Hamas war included posters that glorify violence against Israelis, depict Israelis as snakes, and show a Star of David made out of dollar bills. The materials also feature a children’s workbook that calls Zionists “bullies.”
No kudos to the MTA here — those images shouldn’t have gone up in the first place.
The last hostages, or their remains, will come home. It will mark a turning point in just one war against the Jews. And not every one is fought with an army.
“Never Again” is every day. “Never Again” is everywhere.
