Kfir and Ariel Bibas: In Memoriam

“Children are a gift from the Lord,” reads Psalm 127:3, “they are a reward from Him.” Whether religious or not, all people, it has been assumed, recognize the preciousness and vulnerability of children and feel obliged to care for them in a protective spirit of kindness and love.

The assumption, unfortunately, is not always true. The millions of Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust include over a million, and perhaps as many as a million-and-a-half, Jewish children. The names of those we know perished are on record at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and other research institutions elsewhere. To many people, though, they all now have one readily identifiable name: Anne Frank. In the popular mind, she serves as a stand-in for all the others. As Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi put it, “a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did. Perhaps it is necessary that it be so…[for] if we had to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”

Anne Frank perished in Bergen Belsen before she was yet 16. Thanks to her diary and the various dramatic and cinematic versions of it, she has come to symbolize for millions of people throughout the world the deaths of all those marked out by Hitler and his followers for mass slaughter.

Today, two young Israeli children—9-month-old Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother, Ariel—are rapidly emerging in similar terms, symbolizing the horrible fate of some 250 others abducted from southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and forcibly taken to Gaza. Why kidnap a toddler, his baby brother, and their terrified mother, Shiri Bibas? For ransom? If so, why, within a month of their abduction, murder them in the cruelest of ways? What threat did these three innocent Jews and numerous others like them pose to Hamas and their allies?

The answer is: none at all. Why, then, put an end to their lives?

The same question can be asked about Anne Frank.

Why did the Germans under Hitler find it necessary to mobilize the power of a whole state to make a fugitive of this young girl, then hunt her down in her place of hiding, ship her off to three concentration camps, and condemn her to an early death? What threat did Anne Frank pose to the Third Reich? The answer, once again, is: none whatsoever. What, then, accounts for Hitler’s savage war against the Jews, including the murder of a million or more Jewish children?

There are multiple answers, but one is this: in the Nazi world view, Jews were not just humanly inferior—“Untermenschen,” to use the then current term for them—but they represented a form of “life unworthy of life” (in Nazi Deutsch, lebensunwürdiges Leben”). In Nazi racial thinking, Jews were not just inferior but constituted an anti-race. As such, Jewish existence had no legitimacy and was not to be tolerated. Seen in these terms, Anne Frank, the youngest child of a Jewish family that had lived in Germany for at least seven generations, was an alien and hostile presence that needed to be snuffed out.

With thousands of other Jews, her remains lie today in a mass grave in Bergen Belsen. But her story, or at least the less gruesome part of it, lives on and is cherished by vast numbers of people throughout the world, who especially treasure what has become her signature line: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Starved and typhus-ridden in her last days in Belsen, it is doubtful that Anne Frank left this world with such words on her lips, but they are the ones most closely attached to her memory, an almost beatific one, to this day.

No such sentiment attaches to the fate of baby Kfir, his brother Ariel, and their distraught and anguished mother. All three of them were seized at their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and ruthlessly murdered by their captors in Gaza. Like Anne Frank and countless others, were they, too, regarded as specimens of “life unworthy of life?” Evidently, they were, as were some 1,200 other Jews slaughtered in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and close to 250 others kidnapped and carted off to the tunnels of Gaza, many never to return alive.

Here, though, a major difference needs to be noted about putting an end to Jewish life.

Among the Nazi motives for mass murder, a key one was based on bogus anthropological theories of racial hygiene. For superior types to thrive—Aryan Germans foremost among them—inferior types—“Untermenschen”—had to be eliminated. The latter category included those judged to be mentally ill or physically and cognitively disabled, hundreds of thousands of whom were put to death. A similar fate awaited a great many Slavs. The worst of those judged to be unworthy to continue living, though, were Jews, some six million of whom were slaughtered. To people the world over, Anne Frank has come to symbolize their fate.

Will the Bibas children, known and cherished for their sweet smiles and bright red hair, come to symbolize those hunted down, murdered, and abducted on October 7, 2023? They already have begun to play that role, for upon learning of their atrocious endings, cities throughout the world—New York, Beverly Hills, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Belgrade, even as far away as Yangon, Myanmar–were suddenly lit up in orange, the color associated with the gleaming hair of Kfir and Ariel. In Switzerland, orange balloons were sent aloft, some of them bearing the images of the Bibas boys, accompanied by the singing of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. The color displays were meant as an immediate way to memorialize the murdered Bibas children.

Why, though, were they murdered in the first place?

Not primarily for racial reasons, as was the case with Anne Frank and so many others like her, but primarily for religious reasons. The preamble to the 1988 Hamas Charter declares that “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Article 7 proclaims, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them” (quoted from a Muslim hadith and attributed to Mohammed).  The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement. “Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.” (Article 13). The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.” (Article 13).

As stated here and elsewhere, the aim of Hamas and its allies is to reorder the world under the rule of Islam. Here is its central creedal statement: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, and the Koran is its constitution: Jihad is the path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” (Article 9)

Most people in the West view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as basically political and territorial in nature. It is that, but only in part. To Hamas and other Islamist groups, it is essentially religious and is understood as a Muslim-Jewish conflict. At its heart of hearts there resides an annihilationist fantasy of killing Jews and bringing an end to the Jewish state. To its most ardent followers, the larger goal is a genocidal one.

Baby Kfir, his 4-year-old brother, Ariel, and their devoted mother, Shiri Bibas, fell victim to that goal. Their lives were nullified for the double sin of being Jews and living in Israel. What put them under a death sentence, in other words, was simply being who they were. It is a fate that awaits many others, in Israel and beyond, unless this latest version of annihilationist fury is fully and finally defeated.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld