The Bibas Family’s Tragedy Is A Test—And We Are Failing

A society that excuses the horrors committed against the Bibas family will not protect your family either.

When the news broke the Bibas children were coming home—not in the arms of their parents, but to be buried—something inside me shattered.

We don’t yet know how they died. And in truth it doesn’t really matter.

On October 7, 2023, Kfir Bibas was nine months old. His brother, Ariel, was four. Their mother, Shiri, tried to shield them with her body. Their father, Yarden, was taken with them—only to be released to a world where his wife and sons were gone. I don’t know how a person survives that kind of grief.

I am a father of two young boys, almost exactly the same ages as Ariel and Kfir. I know what it’s like to scoop up my son when he cries in the night. I know the weight of my son’s body when he clambers into my lap, tucking his head into my chest, trusting that I will keep him safe. I know how they smell after a bath, how sweaty their heads get when they sleep, how their laughter echoes through my home.

I also know the terrifying weight of the responsibility that comes with loving them. Because the truth is, no matter how strong I think I am, no matter how fiercely I would fight for them, I can’t actually protect them from everything. No parent can. The Bibas family was just like mine. Just like yours. They put their boys to bed at night believing, like all of us do, that there were limits to how much suffering the world could inflict on the innocent. We were wrong.

That is why this moment matters. That is why we cannot look away.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the slaughter of a baby would have been a moment of universal mourning. A red line, beyond debate. But in the moral confusion of our era, we no longer live in that world.

When the footage of the Bibas family’s abduction first surfaced, I thought, “This will change everything.” Surely, even those who rail against the Jewish State would recoil in horror at the sight of a screaming infant being dragged from his home by armed men. Surely, this would remind people that there are some acts so evil they can never be justified.

But the world quickly moved on. It moved on when Hamas took them. It moved on when they released a propaganda video psychologically torturing their poor father. And now it will move on again, because we have entered an era where there is no longer a shared moral reality.

I have spent the last eight months watching people contort themselves into grotesque justifications for the unjustifiable. I have listened to academics, activists, and journalists explain why the slaughter of Israeli families is “complicated.” I have watched as mobs march through the streets of Western capitals, chanting slogans that call for our people’s destruction. I have seen the people I once considered allies, who have spent years telling me they stand against injustice, turn away.

If they could not mourn these children, they will mourn nothing.

There is something happening to us—something deeper than antisemitism, deeper than political ideology. It is a moral collapse, a deadening of the human instinct to care. What happened to the Bibas family should have been a breaking point. Instead, it has become just another data point in an endless cycle of rationalization.

This is not just about the Jews. A society that cannot see the murder of a baby as an unambiguous evil is a society that has lost its way. Today, that apathy is directed at us. Tomorrow, it will be directed at someone else.

How did we get here? How did we reach a point where even the murder of children is excused or ignored?

I believe it is because we have allowed ideology to replace morality. We have convinced ourselves that the world is nothing but power struggles, that history is nothing but cycles of oppression and resistance. In this framework, there is no space for simple right and wrong. There is only who is stronger, who is weaker, who is labeled as the oppressed and who is cast as the oppressor.

In that moral vacuum, babies become symbols rather than human beings. Their deaths are not tragedies—they are rhetorical devices. The people who might have mourned them instead ask, “But what about…?” filling in whatever historical grievance or political argument makes them feel better about looking away.

There is no greater indictment of our time than the fact that a baby was taken hostage and half the world shrugged.

I think about this as I hold my own children at night, as I whisper prayers over them while they sleep. I think about how lucky I am to have been born in a time and place where I can still believe, even if only for now, that I can keep them safe.

But the Bibas family thought that, too. Every Israeli parent thought that before October 7th. They put their children to sleep that Friday night believing that there were limits, that there were rules, that there were things the world simply would not allow.

They know better now. So should we.

If you think this story doesn’t affect you, you’re wrong. If you think this is just about Israel, you’re wrong. If you think a world that can justify this kind of horror is a world that will still protect your children, you are lying to yourself.

Because this is how it starts. The moment a society decides that some lives are expendable, that some victims are unworthy of grief, that some crimes are too inconvenient to condemn—it has already begun its decline.

What happened to Kfir and Ariel Bibas is a test. Not for Hamas. We already know what they are. This is a test for us—for the West, for our leaders, for the journalists and professors and activists who claim to stand for justice. It is a test of whether we are still capable of drawing a line and saying: This is evil. No further.

I fear we are failing that test. I fear that the world has already moved on. That tomorrow there will be another march, another slogan, another op-ed explaining why Israel is to blame for its own grief. And I fear that when my own children are older, I will have to tell them that I saw it happen, that I watched the world collapse in on itself, and that I could do nothing to stop it.

But I will not lie to them. I will not tell them that this is normal, that this is the way things have to be. I will tell them the truth.

I will tell them that I mourned. That I spoke. That I did not look away.

Because if the deaths of Kfir and Ariel Bibas do not break us—if we do not stop, right now, and say enough—then we are already lost.