(Dobbs) “And then their executioner sat down and had a meal.”
War is something you can't take back.
I read yesterday about a family from Israel. The Bibas family. They were from a kibbutz named Nir Oz, now forever known as the ill-fated place where 38 people were murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th— more than a quarter of the population of the kibbutz— and 75 were kidnapped and forcibly dragged into Gaza.
All four of the Bibases— the mother Shiri, the father Yarden, and their two children, Ariel and Kfir— became hostages. Video taken by the kidnappers showed the horror on Shiri’s face as she was hauled away holding her two red-headed kids.
Ariel that day was four years old. Kfir was born only earlier this year. As his mother held him to her chest, he was still sucking on a pacifier. He is a baby. Or, was.
No one knows now whether Shiri and her children are alive or dead. Hamas yesterday said they’re dead, killed by an Israeli air strike. They don’t say when, but we know the Israelis haven’t attacked since the humanitarian pause started almost a week ago. The Hamas announcement might be, as Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz says, “psychological warfare.” But it might not. After close to two months as hostages— denied daylight in the spiderweb of the terrorists’ tunnels, reduced to whispers to protect their captors’ positions, forced to wait hours to use a toilet— after all that agony, they might have perished.
Terrorism is defined as an attack on non-combatants to achieve a social or political goal. If there are degrees of terrorism, kidnapping children like Ariel and Kfir is its most hideous kind.
The Bibas children weren’t the only ones Hamas dragged into their tunnels. The numbers are imprecise but out of more than 240 hostages, several dozen were children. Most have been released during the past week’s pause in the fighting, but an estimated nine are still underground. At least until yesterday, that included Ariel and Kfir.
What kind of human being kidnaps little kids, then subjects them to the deprivations of imprisonment?
Israel’s critics will turn that question around and ask, who would send bombs and missiles into a crowded city when civilian deaths, including children’s deaths, are inevitable? They will ask, aren’t the deaths of as many as 15,000 Palestinians since the war started disproportionate to the deaths on October 7th of roughly 1,200 Israelis?
The answers aren’t simple, they aren’t satisfying, and they don’t entirely absolve Israel, but there is a difference between causing massive harm when targeting terrorists who are sheltering amongst civilians, and deliberately targeting children. Tragic “collateral damage” has been the cost of every war. Kidnapping small children hadn’t been, until now. That’s the difference between Israel’s tactics, and Hamas’s. For what it’s worth, and admittedly it might not be much, the United States earlier this week told Israel that it has to ensure that its strikes are more surgical than they’ve been.
There’s another difference too.
When he testified a month ago before a Senate committee, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a gruesome story of what was found after October 7th in Kfar Aza, another kibbutz, to illustrate the kind of enemy Israel is up against. “A family of four. A young boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father, his eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
Blinken’s ending was fitting for the Middle Ages: “And then their executioner sat down and had a meal.”
War is something you can’t take back. In this one, many thousands have died, more than a million are hungry and homeless, and among the legions of Palestinian children who have lost what they loved, more terrorists might have been born. Israel’s ambitions for reconciliation with longtime Arab adversaries have been set back, and Palestinian ambitions for any gradual loosening of the restrictions against them have been shelved.
It is remarkable to consider the friendships that have formed between nations that once fought vicious wars. Friendships for example between the United States and Germany, between the United States and Japan, between the United States and Vietnam. But here’s the last difference today: there was neither visceral nor historical hatred between the two sides in those wars. We can’t say the same about this war between Israelis and Palestinians. They’ve never coexisted very long without conflict.
Now, no one can predict the outcome. Nor what follows. What we do know is that Israel cannot afford ever again to have cold-hearted terrorists living just down the road. What we also know is the scale of the loss. Including countless Palestinian children. And, whether they’re dead or alive, two little Israeli boys in a family named Bibas.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg. Thank you for so poignantly portraying the horrible ethical dilemma this war poses --- almost impossible choices that folks must make going forward.
Thank you Greg. Again well said.