A call for accountability

I don’t want to remember Kfir and Ariel and Shiri Bibas as symbols.

I don’t feel I can honor their lives and deaths by thinking of them as representing others or comparing them (even to Anne Frank). Parallels suggest themselves between the Nazis’ brutality, the Holocaust, Hamas, and October 7. However, the comparison blurs crucial distinctions.

It took a long time, far too long, for the brutal crimes of the Nazis to be widely publicized, known and acknowledged, and for the hideous details of the final solution to capture world attention.

The goals of Hamas, the democratically elected leadership of Gaza, have been public for years. Their intention to annihilate Jews at large and Israel specifically, is declared explicitly in the Hamas Charter (1988).

Their attack was at daybreak— not under cover of darkness. And they came equipped with cameras to broadcast their terror in real time. It was their intention to make their brutality and cruelty public, like Daish’s filmed spectacles of gruesome beheadings and the burning of people alive. Their horrors were meant to be seen, and the images of pain, suffering, cruelty and terror they inflicted were meant to be remembered. The citizens who stood with Israeli flags all along miles upon miles of the way, to accompany Yarden Bibas, family members, and the bodies of Shiri and their children to their burial remembered. They remembered Shiri as the mother of Kfir and Ariel, Yarden’s beloved wife, and the two, darling red-headed young sons, the delight of their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends.

Hamas took care to film the public abduction of these two beautiful children and their mother, dragged off to Gaza.

There was relief yesterday: the body returned to Israel the second time was identified as Shiri’s and could finally be brought to burial.  Some consider that closure. And there was the sad comfort that she would be buried with the children in one coffin as though holding the bodies of her murdered little ones warm and near. As if they were finally safe.

But we also remember that the IDF was not there, immediately, right then.  We cannot forget that our forces did not follow the perpetrators, just cross the fields, into Gaza.  No one came to rescue Shiri, Kfir and Ariel, and those many others we saw being carted off as trophy hostages. They should have been located long before they were hidden away in tunnels and apartments. There was time in those early hours and immediately following days to discover the vehicles used by the perpetrators of this mass abduction, to find and bring Shiri and her little ones and hundreds of others home.

Blame?

I don’t blame the IDF for what happened.

I don’t blame Islam for the decisions made by its most radical, violent, and vicious adherents.

Individuals and organizations are responsible for their choices and for choosing violence and bestiality as a way to demonstrate, preserve and enhance their power and wealth. Hamas has done this without regard for the lives of their own people let alone ours. And’ inexplicably, irresponsibly, and culpably, the majority of Muslims worldwide and too many others have acquiesced in silence or actively and enthusiastically supported and defended Hamas. Yes. J’accuse.

No words are adequate to express the human sorrow evoked by the murders, the pain we feel whether or not we watched the funerals of Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas and listened to the eulogies, memorializations and lamentations.

I’m remembering the first Friday night, before our daughter Deborah Shachar’s body had been identified, when I lit a memorial candle for her and another for her husband, our son-in-law, Shlomi David. I heard a long loud wail erupt from the depths of my soul. A wail could express my feelings now, but it would not suffice.

No words or sounds can speak the anger that increasingly accompanies my grief.

I do blame Hamas for its choices, for choosing, from all the verses of the Koran, to teach and glorify and insist on those that call for murdering Jews.

I blame our government, not for what happened, because the reasons for that have not yet been determined. I blame the government for avoiding and denying its responsibility. We would not absolve parents who failed to protect their children, burned to death while playing with fire, or run over by a truck because they were allowed to wander into traffic. How can we accept or excuse our government’s unwillingness to convene an independent commission of inquiry to assess responsibility for this terrible failure?

The questions are not rhetorical.  We need to know.  Where were the cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister before and after 6:29 that morning? How is it that no one was guarding our borders on that day to prevent Hamas from slaughtering my daughter and son-in -law along with their neighbors, and hundreds of other citizens? Why wasn’t there an immediate order to send in the army to bring home Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas and all those others, wounded, traumatized, but alive, while there was still time? These crimes were committed in broad day light, not under cover of night, deliberately in full view, and fully documented.

The capture and murder of Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas do not primarily remind me of the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. They do not remind me of Anne Frank hidden in an attic, or of suffering, terror and extermination in camps where evil was hidden.

They remind me that more than 500 days after October 7, Hamas and its supporters applaud their own barbarity, and the government of Israel still refuses to take responsibility. It has been unwilling to discuss let alone convene a public commission of inquiry to investigate what happened. It has made every effort to minimize, mitigate, deny responsibility for the failure to prevent these unspeakable crimes committed against its citizens in full view. It sanitizes and distances itself from the locus of tragedy and failure.

Sad tributes are mouthed to the poor murdered Bibas children by officials, as though they could represent all the others, as though now that they have been buried we can come to some kind of national closure, put the matter to rest, and get on with our lives.

????!!איכה