Looking away from the news just enough to pick up my phone, I texted my dad.

“Do you think Shiri is maybe still alive? I know they weren’t actually taken by Hamas but by a different terrorist group, like Arbel was.”

Swiping out of my texts to open X, I saw many people sharing the same sentiment. There was no real way around the devastation of it all. Even if Shiri was alive, it would mean she endured the barbaric deaths of her sons — a grief that would surely have been impossible to process as a hostage of terrorists. But at least Yarden would get his wife back. At least she would be able to come home to her sister and beloved sister-in-law who advocated so fiercely for her release.

Of course, we know how the story ended. The resolution of the body mix up was not that Shiri was alive, it was simply that they’d sent back the wrong corpse. Shiri had been murdered just the same as her young children. It almost feels inappropriate to call them children when they weren’t kids at all, but still babies, in every meaningful sense of the word. Like many others watching the hostage crisis from a world away, I had begun to feel some level of anticipatory grief as the release of the live hostages began to wind down, and Yarden was returned alone. When the 18th came, with an announcement from Hamas that they’d begin returning bodies, I started to lose sleep over all the hypotheticals that weren’t really hypotheticals at all anymore. 

I look back at that horrid week in February now as a sort of personal Rubicon crossing in my allyship to the Jewish people. Of course, at that point, I had been following the crisis for a considerable amount of time. I had been shocked and grieved by the horror of October 7th since I first opened social media to the footage of it that fateful morning. 

But even still, at the center of my personal praxis on the whole matter, was some amount of grace. Especially here in the states, we are inundated by misinformation, and this misinformation has trickled down into all forms of our media. From October 8th, major players in both social media and the news media began to express that there was a morally upstanding way, and an immoral way to view a geopolitical crisis. The moral way being to desecrate the humanity of Israeli Jews, and the immoral way being to challenge that desecration. 

For a long time, I struggled to blame every person who had absorbed such a warped version of the crisis. Of course there were exceptions to this, in people like those who defaced Ariel and Kfir’s hostage posters with swastikas. But outside of the most cruel, I convinced myself that many people were simply repeating what they had been told to believe in order to be seen as a morally good person. I even wondered if some of them did not truly believe the most extreme things they said, and that they were simply filtering their real opinions through the language their peers demanded.

After February 20th, I stopped making excuses.

There’s a James Baldwin quote that circulates frequently in human rights activism circles. The quote reads, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

Most often, it is used by Western activists in discussions around Palestinian children. An equivalence that I don’t entirely disagree with. Like everyone else with a social media account these last few years, I have seen deeply upsetting, graphic footage of the suffering of children in Gaza. I have kept up with one Gazan child on social media in particular, who was able to evacuate to the Netherlands when her sister was accepted to college there — and my heart broke for the fact that she had to leave her parents behind. One post in particular detailed her flight to the Netherlands being her first time on a plane and thinking about the innocence of my own “first plane ride” as a child in comparison to hers made my chest ache.

What I don’t understand, is how the same activists who espouse this quote can make exceptions to “every single one of them” in the way they made an exception for Ariel and Kfir. The words “every single one of them”, to me seem quite clear. Regarding my own personal values, it means that the life of the Bibas babies matters just as much to me as the life of children like the young Gazan refugee I follow. The week of February 20th, I watched people at “best” stay silent, and at worst defend the abduction, murder and casket release festival of Jewish children. One of the most common outcries, even as news began to come out that they were murdered, was that it was all Israel’s fault for allegedly bombing their location. Putting aside the fact that we know now this isn’t true, it’s a logical fallacy that was shocking to see so many people fall into.

In any society, abducting a person from their home and placing them in a situation where they are likely to die does not become excusable simply because a third-party caused their death. If you kidnapped someone and threw them onto a busy highway, you would not be absolved because a car, rather than your own hands, delivered the fatal blow. You would still be held responsible for the abduction itself, and for creating the conditions that made their death foreseeable.

Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, the premise that Israel’s military actions contributed to the deaths of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, that does not erase the responsibility of those who took them, held them, and used them as leverage. That this appeared to be lost on people by the thousands was something I struggled to wrap my head around.

To these individuals, it did not matter that Ariel and Kfir didn’t choose their birthplace. It did not matter that they were taken from their home. It did not matter that the circumstances of their deaths were, at minimum, inseparable from the decision to abduct them in the first place. For many people, the only question that seemed to matter was whether responsibility could be redirected away from the perpetrators and towards the Bibas family’s own people. At the crux of the James Baldwin quote is that the innocence of children is meant to overcome any perceived inconvenience put forth by geopolitics. That a child is a child, is a child. And yet, the same activists who otherwise laud this quote appeared unwilling to bind themselves to the values they claimed to hold. 

“The children are always ours, every single one of them” cannot mean “every single one of them, except the Israeli ones.” It cannot mean “every single one of them, except the Jewish ones.” It cannot mean “every single one of them, unless my friends would chide me for saying we shouldn’t rip down their hostage posters.”

When I look at photos of Shiri and the sweet, innocent faces of her babies, the thought at the forefront of my mind is that there are some things I will just never understand. 

It seems that over time, having courage in one’s convictions has become a lost art. Looking back over the past year and the nearly three years since October 7, I find myself coming to the unbearable conclusion that the Bibas family’s fate was not inevitable. That their story could have ended differently, if only courage in the belief that the children are always ours hadn’t been in such short supply.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)