The Sacrifice of the Bibas

On parenthood in times of terror

If everyone should be able to feel horror when faced with the images and sounds of the Slaughter of Gaza, it is only parents who can feel the terror. Parenthood is a strange land. It stands at the border of the most profound of joys afforded to man and the deepest of fears. Only a parent knows with certainty and stripped of all metaphor and poetry that there is a fear greater than the one for one’s own life. The images from Gaza, seem to have been concocted from the repository of my most darkest nightmares and atrocious of my fears. Uninterrupted for fifteen months, I have seen the convulsion of pain, the grimace of fear, the howl of anguish in the hands of children, in their finger reaching for the comfort that dead parents can no longer offer.

Those nightmares were mine and the terrors that spawned from them assailed me with such a refined knowledge of my fears that it was often difficult to distinguish which mournings were my own and which ones were not. Many nights I cried and shivered not able to tell whose keening this was and whose deaths those were. I saw my children in every picture and the familiarity of gestures, of voices, of tears that I knew so well made it often a labour of herculean tenacity to trace the distance between Berlin and Gaza that kept my children safe in their beds.

The first expressions of this madness, however, did not sprout in Gaza. It was two or three days after the attacks in Nir Oz, when I saw the pictures of Shiri Bibas holding her two children, Ariel and Kfir, in her arms for the first time. I still find it almost impossible to look at the picture where Shiri´s face carries my own grimace of the terror born in the certainty that her arms, my arms, are not enough to shelter her children, my children. I see my wife, I see my sons. I see a future shattered into which I hope not to have made it.

Ariel and Kfir were the same age as my children. Ariel was born only a few days after my first son and in the video of their kidnapping, he carries in his mouth his dummy like my child did then. His eyes looked up in search of assurance and his stunned silence seems to plead with his mother and those men around to repair the disjointed reality that is making his world fall apart in front of him. The small red head of Kfir pokes from the baby carrier wrapped around Shiri. I can almost feel the embrace of the fabric around my own body. I know it well. I know the proximity of Kfir. Of course, it is the body of my son that I remember against my chest and not Kfir but eventually all this terror, all this desperation, cannot tell them apart. I think I can feel the traces of his warm forehead and the softness of his hair next to my lips. I look at myself and know myself engulfed in terror, her terror.

Tophet

At the end of October of 2023, about a month before the Bibas were killed in what Hamas has claimed was an Israeli bombing, Yahya Sinwar issued the following statement: "We are ready to immediately conclude a prisoner exchange deal that involves releasing all our prisoners held in your prisons in exchange for freeing all captives held by the resistance." Israel dismissed the offer with all the usual accusations attached.

What price would have been too high to save Ariel, Kfir and Shiri? Would the release of 3,327 Palestinian prisoners, 700 of them children as young as 12, many held without charge, had been too much? The paternal glance that sees the suffering of children with terror is an unconditional glance. For those of us who cannot escape the summon of Ariel and Kfir, the please of Hind Rajab or the silence of Sila and Tila Hamdan crashed to death by Israel in Khan Younis, no price would have been too big to save those lives like no price would be too big to save our own children. If the utilitarian calculation seems abominable, it is because the idea that there could be a sufficient reward for allowing the death of our own children is indeed abominable. And yet, that is exactly what Israel did in cavalierly turning down the opportunity to save Ariel, Kfir and their mother.

A well-known Israeli civil rights activist pointed out in conversations that—in his view—not only did Israeli authorities have no interest in the return of the Bibas family but that public support for the war required their deaths. It is not merely a dreadful accusation, it is in and of itself an assessment of the way in which many who have seen Israel wreck ceasefire agreement and lie about it views the abandonment and subsequent use of the hostages. For them Ariel, Kfir, and Shiri were not only abandoned but sacrificed. Their fate, sealed by a calculus of war, was neither incidental nor unfortunate but instrumental.

There is a name for this. The ancient judaism that Israeli leaders embrace has a name for the practice of seeking favour from the fury of war by offering it the lives of children. It is called Tophet. In the biblical valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, the children of Israel are said to have cast their sons and daughters into the fire. It was an abomination then. It is an abomination now. In the various official and public voices that have repeatedly given reasons why the hostages ought not a priority, reason for these sacrifices are offered as political currency. The conjure of security is allowed to dictates the ritual oblation and then the flames of destruction serve to sanctifies the horror.

The bodies of children and their mother are not only the casualties of war, they are its currency. They buy time, they allow vengeance and subtend the political alchemy that turns grief into justification. They become, through their destruction, the fuel of war itself. The Israeli government looks on and measures the worth of their lives in strategic value and military objectives. But for those of us who have held our children close, who have felt the weight of their heads against our chests, there is no abstraction that can render this acceptable. There is no war, no doctrine, no cause that can cleanse the stain of their slaughter. Those of us who mourn Ariel, Kfir, Hind, Tila, Sila, Mohammed, Zina cannot and will not forgive the killers, the high priests and raving crowd.

The Mourning

The political circus around the return of the bodies of Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel Bibas showed perhaps the depth of the perversity of the Israeli government and its communication machine. The thin veil of mournful genuflexions could not disguise the joyous political use of the catastrophe pushed as an ideological spectacle of moral pornography. Israel and its institutions do not find the extermination of 6 million Jews holly, certainly a mother with two young children were no match for their political ambitions.

Netanyahu’s public disclosure of the graphic details surrounding their alleged murders against the explicit wishes of the grieving family underscores the sheer perversity and highlighted the willingness of Jerusalem to exploit the grief of a family for the sake of sustaining its public relations campaign. It was Netanyahu and his beasts of political burden who stripped away the sanctity of grief under the pretense of national interest.

This was the final act of perversion that Ariel and Kfir were made to endure. Not by their captors in Gaza, not by the impassivity of history with its slaughter benches and its fullers but by the Israeli government. Now dead and mute they were delivered to the voice of the victor. Their names desecrated, their memory reduced to the trivial currency of political transactions and the mourning of their family bastardised by the men who first abandoned them and then refused to save them when the opportunity was offered. The same men who possibly killed them in the rage and thirst that in search of vengeance and conquest recognised “no innocent civilian in Gaza.”

Yarden Bibas

I think of Yarden often but I recoil from the face and the name and from the world that he has inherited in the wake of the Slaughter of Gaza. I read the eulogy offered to Shiri, Ariel and Kfir. He addressed them directly and by name. He apologised for not having been able to protect them. I cried loudly and convulsively.

I am not sure how to account for the world of Yarden and the thousands like Yarden in Gaza who are left when all that they loved is gone. I can only get a glimpse of the desolation, of the vastness of the silence, of the depth of the emptiness when I look at my day, at my house, at my kitchen, at my street and I subtract from them all that makes them mine, all that makes them good, all that makes them precious. When I do that, I am faced with a hell that extends into perpetuity, I am left with a blinding darkness in which horror engulfs me and becomes my daily bread.

Of course, nothing can I offer myself or the others like me who watched from the distance other than my deferential, mournful and humble silence, the one that I must hold when I think of Yarden Bibas. If justice for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir comes, perhaps, it will come in the righteous brevity and stridence of the words of Ofri Bibas, the sister of Yarden and the aunt of Ariel and Kfir, who in a social media post after Netanyahu had gleefully tried to cash-in political credit by reciting the supplice of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, ordered the prime minister to “just shut up.”