Will this time be different?

As Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas are laid to rest, the entire Jewish people mourns for them.  We mourn for their family, and we feel like they are part of our family.  However, there has been something bothering me over the past terrible week about our reaction to this tragedy, which I’d like to explore in this article.

The cruelty of these murders seems like a new level.  To kidnap an entire family, torture the father for over a year, murder the mother and children, keep their fate a secret, trade their bodies for live terrorists, make a humiliating ceremony and then return a fake body, every detail is more shocking than the last.  We hear the news and feel that surely this time, things will change.  The world will finally wake up to our plight and our suffering.  Israel will finally draw a line in the sand.  This is the end of the two-state solution.  This time, Hamas went too far.

While this terrible story did seem like a new level of cruelty from our enemies, I think what bothers me is that I worry this time will not be different.  We have had so many moments where we felt like the pain was too much to bear, that something will have to change.  But did anything change in 1974 after the Maalot massacre, when Palestinian terrorists took 115 hostages, mostly children, and killed 25?  Did anything change in 2001 when a sniper deliberately targeted and killed 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass in her stroller?  Did anything change in 2003 after Nava Applebaum was killed by a suicide bomber the night before her wedding, and we all watched her fiance placed the wedding ring on her grave the next day?  Did anything change on April 7, 2023, exactly six months before October 7, when a terrorist opened fire on the Dee family’s car and killed a mother and her two daughters?

One more thing has been bothering me.  The adoption of the color orange to evoke the Bibas family can’t help but remind us of the same color used to protest the disengagement from Gaza 20 years ago.  I don’t know if this was intentional or not, and I’d like to avoid the political discussions of both then and now.  But I can’t help thinking that if more people wore orange back then, and protested enough to prevent the disengagement, that the Bibas family would be alive and well.  The family lived in Nir Oz, in the area known as the Gaza Envelope.  I never heard that phrase before the disengagement; we talked about the cost of protecting the Jewish communities inside Gaza, but the threat remained inside the strip.  It was only after the disengagement that the rockets started flying on a regular basis, and the planning and construction that led to October 7th began.  I return to that terrible sight of Jewish soldiers dragging Jews out of their homes, and then bulldozing those homes, with the hope that it would bring peace.  Have we learned any lesson from the experiment of the disengagement?  Have we learned anything from October 7th?  Will we take a different approach going forward?

I wish I believed that things will change after the Bibases are laid to rest.  I wish it were the case that we would finally say, enough is enough, and take the steps necessary to prevent events like this from ever happening again.  But I fear it will not.  We will go back to negotiating with terrorists, while fighting amongst ourselves.  We’ll trade hundreds of live terrorists for a few dead Jews, ever lowering the price of Jewish blood.  We’ll withdraw back to the sacred 1949 armistice lines, to ensure that there are no permanent consequences to starting a war with Israel and losing.  We’ll build more bomb shelters and Iron Dome missiles, to better allow us to tolerate rocket fire on our towns and cities.  We’ll send money and supplies to our enemies so they can regroup and rearm.  We’ll bemoan how bad our hasbara is, as if a really good meme or ad campaign or speech at the UN would convince our mortal enemies to give up.  

We like to console ourselves after a terrorist attack by saying that they did not die in vain, and that their death was a kiddush Hashem.  But if these terrible tragedies keep happening, and we don’t do anything different, then I fear that their deaths were in fact in vain.  I don’t know how to solve these intractable problems, but I know that whatever we’ve been doing isn’t working.  What we experienced starting on October 7th should be an opportunity to change things permanently, for the better, and Israel now has the support of the United States in making historical changes to our approach.  I pray that we will learn these lessons, but I fear that we will not.  Please God, let the memories of all those we’ve lost in this war be a revolution.