Is Shiri Bibas alive? Maybe she’s alive? She better be alive!!
These were my thoughts when with one final twist of the knife, Hamas “mixed-up” their corpses, and with one final ghoulish trick, didn’t send Shiri back.
That sick macabre “ceremony” brings Hannah Arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” to real life. A parade and pageantry of evil, of Palestinian Gazans coming with their children and babies, as though watching the exchange of little murdered Jewish babies and children and their mother were nothing more than a Broadway show — entertainment, to be filmed on their smart phones . . . or as though on a casual family outing to the local amusement park . . . only instead it was a parade to a festival of bloodshed and murder of children and their heroic mother, who will forevermore embody the image of the consummate lioness protecting her precious cubs from predators of the wild. (Parenthetically, where did those smartphones come from? Many in the global media had painted a narrative of starved, helpless, refugees.)
A lioness and her cubs, who became engraved on a nation’s collective heart. Not a famous inanimate Käthe Kollwitz museum art piece imbued with deep emotion of a mother’s horror, not the art of Munch’s “The Scream,” but a real life Ema, Jewish Israeli mother, desperately wrapping her children in a blanket, as her son digs his nails into her — her panic stricken face, petrified, as she is surrounded by savage monsters.
As orchestrated by Hamas in Gaza, along with the Red Cross, there was the anticipatory chatter of Palestinian Arab children, and not even a hint of a somber note from the purportedly adult civilian. It could have been families in line for a baseball game or a community picnic. Grotesquely, it was energetic children running to get a peak of a stage crafted by savages, of their adult parents calmly standing in the crowd under umbrellas, waiting for this ghoulish “show” to begin.
Indeed, banality of evil, has infected the Gazan people.
For their sociopathic “leaders,” it was all by design. First, release Yarden Bibas from his long captivity, the surviving dad and husband, so as to inflict maximum pain and agony on him. Then, give him a few more days of anguish, of psychological torment, of living betwixt and between, not certain of the final outcome of his beloved wife and beloved children, leaving just enough ray of hope so that the plummeting descent into grief and sorrow will throb with agony, that much more.
These Palestinian terrorists have never stopped at slaughtering children or babies. There are sadly too many examples of real life terrorist incidents to invoke, but just take the case of the Fogel family, massacred in their home. In their beds. Down to their three-month-old infant in her crib. A bloodbath of children. In 2011.
Yet, against all odds and logic, within healthy non-cruel people who can’t imagine the incomprehensible, hope stubbornly persists.
Despite it being so unlikely that Shiri and her precious toddler Ariel and baby Kfir — her copper crowned cherubs whom we all fell in love with — were alive, nonetheless the news of their death came as a hammer blow. Gutting. Crushing.
This is the Bibas family’s personal tragedy. Personal Holocaust. Yet, we the Jewish people the world over came to feel so connected to this sweet family. Its pain became our pain.
The Bibas family came to be a symbol of the hostage families, a symbol of the depraved depths of the evil of Hamas, who would kidnap and keep the purest of humans as leverage in their blackmail exchange, aka, “ceasefire agreement.”
On the morning of Feb. 26, together with probably tens of thousands of fellow Israelis, I lined the road where Shiri and her boys will take their final ride in their home of Israel, to their graves. Buried by their surviving nearest and dearest. We too come to part from them, and say our goodbyes. More importantly, we come to stand shoulder to shoulder with Yarden Bibas in his incomprehensible grief.
The day the coffins came to Israel was a complex one. Until now, there was the joy and relief of greeting live hostages. That dark day, however, was different. An unrelenting sadness blanketed the country and our people. It was over. They were dead. Yet, they were home, to be buried, but with the dignity of a Jewish burial, their loved ones at their side.
A conversation from decades back, with the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, comes to mind. She chose to have only two children, so that if she would have to escape for her life with her children, she could carry one in each arm.
By so many accounts — real friends bearing witness —Shiri was the loveliest of women. Apparently, aside from her essence as an empathic and emotionally sensitive person, she was a private woman. More shy than gregarious, she was not on any social media. She wasn’t one to flaunt, go public with anything or seek any attention. Just the opposite.
Yet history, mystically, ever so painfully, has destined Shiri to be transformed into a symbol of the Jewish mother who valiantly protects her young.
In the historic Lachish reliefs that depict Assyrian Sennacherib’s cataclysmic exiling of the Jews, reliefs that today stand in the British Museum, among the sequence of the siege and battle is a heartbreaking scene of Jewish captives being led away. A young mother holding her two children close, is one of the engraved images.
Who was this Jewish mother? Who were her precious toddler and baby?
We will never know.
They’re identity is history’s secret.
But their pain is felt and reverberates across Jewish history.
We know it now from our generation’s Jewish mother and two children, Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, their names and visages forevermore engraved on our nation’s collective heart.
Ultimately, in time, we prevailed over Sennacherib. Today he is a part of the long gone past from the ancient world, literally, a relic in a museum. Nothing more.
But the cost. Oh, the cost.
In our time, we not only know the faces, the names. We know the stories. We have seen footage of the hostages in happier times. We see and hear the anguish of families of the hostages. We learn of the brutality that the hostages endure.
Even after WW II there was not this level of intimate, graphic knowledge of the atrocities. But with or without it, we come back.
In antiquity, Sennecherib referenced the plight of the reigning Jewish king Hezekiah, locked in Jerusalem by Sennacherib’s powerful military siege, as that of a “caged bird.”
However, Hezekiah continued to reign as king. Sennacherib returned to his palace in Ninveh (today in Iraq), and was ultimately murdered by his own two sons.
But we have come back. Gratefully, with all the devastating pain, we are blessed to live in times of sovereignty for the Jewish people.
Ultimately, Hezekiah was not a caged bird, and today we certainly are not.
Our wings indeed feel bruised and even broken right now.
But the song of our people as an uncaged bird is strong.
Here we are 2,000 years later.
We have always been persecuted — but overcome.
It seems that part of our destiny is continued persecution, including intentional, cold, premeditated murder of little Jewish babies.
But we have come back. As we always have, we will somehow pick ourselves up from the pain.
Today we do know the names. We do know the souls. We do know the steepest of costs that have been exacted.
For that, we don’t forgive.
For them we grieve.
Today, the song of an uncaged bird is paused.
In silent tears.
© IJN 2025
