Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were buried yesterday, Wednesday, February 26, 2025. What hope did the Bibas family represent? What was at stake in the act of tearing down the posters showing the faces of the hostages in the public space? As pain mingles with rage at the discovery of the murder of the Bibas children and their mother, Bruno Karsenti examines their fate in the context of the persistence of Jewish life, and the struggle that it entails.
It was on the very day of October 7 that the return of the bodies of the murdered Bibas children and their mother brought us back: on that day when the voices of those who were to be killed desperately called for help by telephone and radio, while the army was unable to come to their rescue; on that day of rapes, massacres, executions and kidnappings committed by the Hamas killers, the very same ones who are parading these days before our revolted eyes, shouting victory and playing the grotesque comedy of the accuser full of humanity; on that day when the captives were taken away, shackled and offered up to the brute violence of their jailers, that is to say, to the arbitrariness of torture and murder.
For the captives’ fate is of this kind: for the Jews, it concerns the fringe of their people who suddenly find themselves overexposed to a violence whose eruption is always possible in the eyes of everyone, as long as everyone – including the part of the people integrated into the Israeli nation, the population of a State devoted to its protection on its territory – shares the condition of exile, which by definition remains subject to this eventuality.
Thus, the fate of the hostages reflects, as if in a magnifying mirror, a dimension of Jewish survival in Galut. And when children are the victims, when we are confronted with their murder, a point of collapse is reached. We were unable to save them. This is what all Jews tell themselves, first and foremost in Israel, but also, through this sharing of the experience of exile that forges the unity of the people, all Jews in the diaspora. We were unable to save those who, in this case, bore the greatest burden of our survival. Those through whom, since they were children, the extension of our existence is ultimately at stake; those through whom the survival of the entire people is expressed, in lives taken at the edge of their curve and entirely turned towards the future.
The persistence of the Jews, their survival in exile and beyond its vicissitudes, that is what is odious, unbearable to the antisemites of yesterday and today. The crime against Jewish children is the acme in the expression of antisemitic hatred. The Hamas killers have hardly innovated in this respect. They have shown barbarism – but barbarism is no less endowed with the intentional meaning that it deserves. They have joined the macabre cohort of consistent exterminators. That they seek to exonerate themselves by blaming the Israeli army and its bombings, and that they find a sympathetic ear among all those to whom this exoneration matters, is no more surprising. After all, the denialist logic, like the exterminationist one, has its correlate. The sequence is astonishing in its cruelty and cowardice, but it is once again repeating a familiar pattern.
More recent, however, was the gesture that immediately followed the crimes of October 7, like a strange echo, in these regions supposedly opposed to antisemitism, that is to say our liberal democracies, which are usually full of compassion. A very particular kind of violence was invented at that moment, and it spread like wildfire in Europe and the United States. Its success was remarkable, to the point that it became a kind of signature of militant anti-Zionism. Clearly, it met a pressing need, so pressing that it had to be satisfied without waiting for the war to develop. It involved tearing down photos of hostages that had been posted in various public places, so that people would remember them and continue to care about their fate.
What emotion, what passion must be unleashed to accomplish this precise gesture, undoubtedly furious, but methodical, which consists of tearing up the image of a face that we know to be that of a hostage, what is more that of a child hostage? To understand it, we need to see the nature of the target we have chosen. A hostage is above all someone who is expected to still be alive. Until the end, this thought persists, however much it is suspended in doubt and uncertainty. And the hope remains that, beyond his or her captivity, the hostage will return to live among their own people – that they will come “home” as the mobilizations in Israel have been chanting for more than fifteen months.
For Jews, the word takes on this exact meaning: in each return to safety, in each unique life saved, it is about the rebirth of the people to itself. A hostage is a life that persists at the height of danger, whose survival depends solely on the fight that is waged or the negotiations that are undertaken for it, relentlessly, driven only – but unwaveringly – by hope. Therefore, tearing these images from faces was an explicit statement: You will not survive, Jewish life will not persist. Stop hoping. The tearing of images of hostages had no other reason: among declared anti-Zionists, it expressed the need to show opposition to the continued existence of Jews. Antisemitism was “acted out” there, through the intuitively grasped relevance that this was what had to be done: erasing not simply the sign of Jewish life, but even more so that of Jewish survival, which is its profound meaning.
In Jewish history, the rescue of captives is a traditional motif of the utmost importance according to rabbinic authorities. After the Shoah, and with the creation of the State of Israel, it acquired a meaning that did not make it more imperative – it already was absolutely so – but which modulated it. For the Shoah made the spectre of disappearance a reality with which one counts differently than before. Of course, it has always been taken into account – otherwise the persistence would be reduced to the pure continuation of life, and not, as is the case for Jews, to the tension of survival. But with the extermination, disappearance became part of the collective consciousness as something that, for entire communities and for the majority of European Jews, was not prevented.
Israel, whatever one may think, was the most striking Jewish response to this: its creation was the practical expression of the conviction that, in view of what could happen again, one cannot simply rely on foreign powers, however benevolent, democratic and civilized they may be. On the contrary, the common political theme of self-determination and state-national independence must be used to acquire the right to take care of oneself – that is to say, in this case, of our conditions of survival. If we really want to look for “instrumentalization”, it is there that it is to be found, and nowhere else. Moreover, there is nothing hidden about it. By creating the Jewish state, Jews turned the modern form of the state – democratic and secular – into the instrument, one might even say the artifice, that justifies their own parade, non-religious and independent of any other earthly power, to the antisemitism of modern states, which, as we have seen, could indeed culminate in extermination.
The central role of hostages in that war rekindled this conviction. It is not that the Shoah was “exploited by Israel”, as anti-Zionists never tire of saying, but that its memory resurfaced through October 7 as that which, in the history of the Jews, makes clear the essential function, as well as the justification, of a state for the Jews. In this way, the Israeli use of the state form has been put back on the spot, reminded of its vocation by the double negative ordeal of the antisemitic mass crime that the state was unable to prevent within its own borders, and of the hostages it was unable to save.
With regard to the latter, their fate inevitably draws attention to the State’s self-image and the significance with which it is invested. This was demonstrated by the fact that the rift between society and government in Israel became particularly pronounced on this point, and acted as an echo chamber for a crisis of Zionism that preceded the war and would certainly follow it. It is quite wrong to have made the divide an opposition between weak and strong, between those most inclined to give in to the enemy, and the camp of the most inflexible. The “strong” collapse in on themselves if the fate of the hostages, in which Jewish survival is refracted, is set aside. And the “weak” are not weak at all when they appeal to the right to consolidate a State for the Jews, endorsed by the constant struggle for the survival of those currently most at risk, in whom the destiny of the entire people is concentrated.
But for this to happen, the fight must continue against all the forces that are converging to erase the historically sensible political meaning of the persistence of the Jews. If these forces are embodied primarily by the still active Hamas killers, who proudly show off with guns in their hands and gloat over the ruins of Gaza – in defiance of the deaths of their own people, to whom they feel no real solidarity – they are also embodied in the Western world by the many actors whose stated intention is to ensure that the hostages’ faces do not appear anywhere. Just as the fact that Jews, by themselves, can still keep themselves alive, that is to say, ensure their survival, must not appear anywhere.
In these days of February when the bodies of the Bibas children, followed by that of their mother – once the ultimate perversity of the interchanged bodies had been committed and overcome – were returned, we must remember the exact significance of the crimes of which they were the victims. Just as we must continue to probe what lies behind the great antisemitic march that was, in its own way, favorable to these crimes, through the very specific hatred of which it was the unbridled expression, throughout the period following October 7. A hatred that clearly now accompanies the Jews of the diaspora, at the heart of the States where exile has placed them.
Bruno Karsenti
