We need to talk about what we witnessed in Gaza today. The sick ceremonial handover of the bodies of slain Israelis was a new low, even for Hamas. This was the theatre of death, a public spectacle of Jewish agony for the delectation of voyeuristic anti-Semites. If the world fails to speak out against this racist, morbid stunt, then we are in even bigger moral trouble than I thought.
The bodies of four hostages were returned. Oded Lifschitz, an 84-year-old peace activist, and the three late members of the Bibas family. Mum Shiri and her two tiny sons: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old. The images of the Bibas’s being dragged from their home by an Islamist mob on 7 October 2023, a terror-stricken Shiri clutching Ariel and Kfir to her chest, are among the grimmest we have seen in the 21st century so far.
That a baby could be taken hostage feels almost incomprehensible. It is an act of incalculable evil to turn a mother and her infant children into ‘prisoners’. It was a testament to the anti-Semitism that pulses through the ranks of Hamas that they viewed even a Jewish baby as their enemy. That to them, even this helpless tot, by virtue of his Jewishness, was a legitimate target. The seizing of the Bibas’s was an unconscionable crime.
And the crime continued today. With staggering cruelty, Hamas denied the Bibas family dignity even in death. Instead it hauled their black coffins, and the coffin of Oded Lifschitz, onto a specially erected stage. It displayed them to a baying crowd of men waving flags and taking photos with their phones. It made a circus of their demise. Not content with robbing a mother and her children of their liberty and their lives, now it was robbing them of the grace every person deserves when they pass.
It turned the handover of their bodies into a political stunt. Worse, an anti-Semitic stunt. Behind the coffins there hung a vast banner showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu with vampire-like teeth. Blood dripped from his teeth and pooled around an image of the Bibas family and Mr Lifschitz. Hamas claims the hostages were killed in an Israeli airstrike – Netanyahu’s ‘Nazi army’ killed them with his ‘Zionist warplanes’, said the banner behind the coffins.
Try to take in the bigotry, the sheer inhumanity of this stunt. The Jew as vampiric blood-drinker is a classic anti-Semitic trope. Calling the Jews ‘Nazis’ is anti-Semitic too. It’s a vile taunt designed to wound Jews with their own historic suffering. And both of these things were emblazoned on that banner behind the coffins. Hamas engaged in brazen Jew hatred right next to the coffins of four Jews it kidnapped and condemned to death. If this doesn’t wake our ‘progressives’ to the wickedness of Hamas, nothing will.
Will those leftists who say ‘Black Lives Matter’ now say ‘Jewish Lives Matter’? Will the people who think even scuffing a page of the Koran is an act of ‘Islamophobia’ call out the despicable race hatred of mocking the Jewish people next to the coffins of slain Jews? Will the activist class that sees ‘fascism’ everywhere – in every vote for Brexit, in every criticism of mass immigration – see the true fascism in Hamas’s garish demonisation of the Jews as it hands back four of the Jews it stole from their homes?
I won’t hold my breath. For the sad, unsettling truth is that far from offering solidarity to the Bibas family, some activists in the West conspired in their demonisation. Posters of the Bibas family were torn down in our cities during that orgy of deranged hatred for Israel that followed Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October. Even posters of baby Kfir were defaced and destroyed. Some were ‘ripped in half’.
We can, and should, reel at the horror of the kidnapping of a nine-month-old baby from Israel. But we must also reckon with the violent assaults on images of that baby right here in the West. Just as Hamas’s kidnapping of a Jewish mother and her children confirmed its savage rejection of civilisation, so the dearth of Western solidarity for that family spoke to our own crisis of civilisation. We live among people who responded to the kidnapping of a baby Jew by destroying likenesses of the baby Jew – that must never be forgotten.
Today’s racist stunt in Gaza shows just how unreasonable, if not outright lunatic it is to expect Israel to live next door to Hamas. No nation, including the Jewish nation, should accept neighbours who invade its land, rape its women, kidnap its children, and heap racist invective on its citizens even in death. Whatever the future for the Middle East, this monstrous movement that makes a pantomime of Jewish pain must have no part in it.
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