Two Days in February

February 17, 2025

Message to Israel from Hamas:

“We will emerge from the earth to continue fighting until liberation. We are Toufan Al-Aqsa and we are the day after – we are the perpetrators of the attack on October 7th and we are the day after.”

Five hundred days ago, an 8 ½ month old infant, Kfir, and his two-year-old brother, Ariel, two little red-haired babies, were taken into captivity by the people who wrote those words. Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, the Bibas family was wrenched from its home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. The parents, father, Yarden, and mother, Shira, were seized separately from one another. Shira and the children were taken to some still unknown location in Gaza. Yarden was taken to another.

On February 1, 2025, Yarden was released from the hell of Gaza, not knowing if Shira, Kfir, now two years old and Ariel, now five years old, were living or dead. Although home in Israel, Yarden remains imprisoned in the inescapable hell of still not knowing the fate of those he loves most. And we, all who know and care about this family, also share a portion of Yarden’s torment.

On October 7, 2023, I taped a large Israeli flag to our front door. Perhaps we, my husband and I, will remove it when the hostages come home. We subsequently added lawn signs we picked up at pro-Israel rallies. The first reads, “We Stand With Humanity; We Stand With Israel.” The second sign has photos of the hostages on each side, including baby Kfir Bibas and Omer Neutra, a young man from Plainview, a nearby town. The caption reads, “Bring Them Home; Never Again is NOW.”

Apart from maybe three or four families, most of our neighbors are not Jewish. In any case, I had no idea how anyone would feel about these very noticeable items in the front of our house. One day, as I was out walking my dog, one of my neighbors stopped his car beside me and rolled his window down. “I just want you to know,” he said, and choked up. When he was able to continue, he said, “I see your flag and those signs. I want you to know we support you. We support Israel.”  Through my own tears, I managed to thank him and tell him, “That means so much to us.” “Us,” meaning the Jewish people, as he clearly understood, who are suffering along with Israel.

On another day, I was outside weeding when another neighbor came up to me. “Have you seen Newsday?” I shook my head, wondering why he’d asked. “I’m sorry to be the one to break this news,” and then he told me Omer Neutra, the kid from Plainview, was dead. And he had tears in his eyes.

There were others. Good people, kind, caring people…

So, before Christmas, a third sign went up. It was decorated with painted snowflakes and holly boughs. We had it printed in green and red lettering. “Dear Neighbors, thank you for your support. Wishing everyone peace on earth and good will to men. Happy Holidays, Judy & Mort.”

On this 500^th day, i24 News, a station broadcasting from Israel, interviewed a Bibas family spokesman, Yosi Shnaider, a cousin. Shnaider cried out on behalf of this young family, peering directly into the cameras to ask, where are the world leaders, where is the U.N., where is the Red Cross whose workers visit Israeli jails regularly to ensure that terrorists- who have raped, tortured and murdered Israeli citizens-are receiving adequate food, medical care and attention to all basic human needs but somehow have never managed to see a single hostage in Gaza…Where is the world?

And I ask, where are the Jews of the world? Because some of them, writers, lots of rabbis, Hollywooders, and other “influencers,” have taken a full-page ad in the NY Times. Above their names, it reads, in protest of Trump’s call to remove the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!”

I say, “Me too!” I’m Jewish and I say NO to ethnic cleansing. But couldn’t you also take out a full-page ad demanding world leaders pressure Hamas to stop killing Israelis, surrender its weapons and release the hostages?

And what about this? According to the ad’s website, the group is trying to “raise $10 million  ‘…to build safety, dignity, and self-determination in Palestine’ as well as pro-Palestinian organizing in the United States.”

Huh? Maybe they don’t know that Israel is on the balls of its ass, as we say in English, or al ha p’nim, on its face, as they say in Hebrew. There are whole territories in northern and southern Israel that are uninhabitable, where homes, farms and schools have been destroyed by missiles. The soldiers and reservists fighting for Israel’s survival are absent from their jobs with dire effects on the economy and their families who are struggling to survive without them. There are thousands of injured Israelis, civilians as well as soldiers, who need extensive rehabilitation services.

And then there is pervasive psychological trauma. One of my Israeli cousins sent me a video of her three-year old playing his obsessive game. He runs under the table, covering little his head with his hands to “protect my body,” emerging when the “sirens” stop and then immediately repeating the whole routine again. You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand what’s going on, how many times his father awakened him and ran down the stairs and outside to the shelter with this child in his arms. And there are older people who relive their own war time experiences, whose PTSD is activated whenever they hear the sirens or planes flying overhead.

I sure hope the signers of that ad are donating some of their $10 million for helping Israelis.

Our people have a long history of defending others, often if not to our own detriment, to our own self-neglect. Say “social action” to a liberal Jew, and their first impulse is to seek out   someone who isn’t Jewish to become the object of their concerns.

Like “tikkun olam” (repairing the world), Hillel’s words have become a cliché but one worth repeating: If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? Perhaps this is also true of the Jewish injunction, “All Jews are responsible for one another.”  Yet, we do need to be reminded. How else would we have survived as a people for thousands of years were it not for that collective concern?

February 18, 2025

Message to Israel from Hamas:

“We have decided to deliver on Thursday the bodies of four hostages, including the bodies of the Bibas family, in preparation for the second phase of the negotiations on the agreement. We will release the bodies of the Bibas family on condition that the occupation releases on Saturday those of our prisoners it has agreed to let go.”

Thus, Hamas continues to use a dead mother and her babies as an instrument of torture, shredding the hearts of the remaining Bibas family and Jews around the world.

I don’t want to give $10 million to these murderers.