The Meaning of Kfir Bibas

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

 

If Hamas’s statement is true, this week will bring a tragic, though not unexpected, close to a painful episode: the fate of the rest of the Bibas family.

 

Yarden Bibas was released this month by Hamas after nearly 500 days in captivity, and the terror group is claiming it will soon deliver the bodies of his wife, Shiri, and two sons, Ariel and Kfir. Ariel was four when he was taken on Oct. 7, 2023, and Kfir was nine months old.

 

To be Jewish has meant experiencing a crushing disappointment in the world since the Hamas attacks that started this war. A stray line in one of the many articles about the Bibas family today unintentionally offers a crystal clear explanation for that disappointment. “For many Israelis,” the New York Times writes, “the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

 

That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

 

In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.

 

The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. Yes, we should be ashamed of our fellow Americans, who not only won’t mention the Bibas family but won’t even learn the name of a single American hostage held in Gaza throughout the war.

 

At last year’s Oscars, a line of “pro-Palestine” stars—Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Ava DuVernay and others—wore a pin of a red right hand that is meant to valorize the murderers of Jews. In a just world, all these celebrities would instead be using their time on the red carpet to do anything, anything at all, other than express public sympathy for the Bibas children’s kidnappers.

 

It shouldn’t be only Jews who see Kfir Bibas’s smiling face and bright red hair when they close their eyes. In that famous picture of baby Bibas, he is holding a small pink stuffed elephant. Kfir’s relatives spent over a year searching the rubble of Nir Oz, where the family lived, for that pink elephant. It turned up, finally, in January, in what his aunt hoped would be a “good sign.”

 

As the “pro-Palestinian” mobs filled the streets of every major city to celebrate Hamas’s slaughter, Jews around the world looked at them dumbfounded; they kidnapped a baby. How much does one have to hate Jews to side with the monsters who kidnap babies? A lot, is the answer—an unpleasant realization Jews came to over the past 16 months.

 

Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed. Members of Congress giddily attended tentifada demonstrations that were no longer simply “pro-Palestine” or “anticolonial”; they were about defending those who stole Kfir from his home and dragged him to Gaza where, according to Hamas, he died. And it is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer the people who kidnapped a baby.

 

Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence. Kfir is the dividing line. In a better world, there’d be no one standing on the wrong side of it.