If Bodies of Babies Cant Make the World Care Nothing Can
I thought I had felt all the disappointment there was to feel since October 7. That the indifference of strangers to Jewish lives could no longer surprise me. That well-meaning people choosing to highlight Palestinian suffering and ignore Israelis’ followed a predictable path that I had got used to.
But of course, I was wrong.
Yesterday, the image of Shiri Bibas clutching her two young children as terrorists tore them from their home was joined in our hearts by another horrifying sight. Confronted with the sight of four coffins, two of which contained the bodies of Kfir and Ariel paraded on a Hamas stage in Gaza surrounded by masked terrorists, some of whom had even bought their children, I thought to myself, this has to be the moment where people wake up.
I watched in complete horror as this spectacle was being televised to the world, and the only people talking about it online were Jewish.
I don’t know any Jew since October 7, who has not felt paralysed with grief and rage about how little Jewish lives matter, particularly in the spaces of people who claim to care about injustice.
I looked online for the response from normally extremely vocal human rights charities. There was nothing from Save the Children UK about the boastful parading of dead Jewish babies, zero from UNICEF UK about the spectacle of evil. Amnesty International could not even trouble themselves to focus on the direct and deliberate targeting of Jewish children without invoking false equivalence and both-sidesing on a day that we mourned two babies whose only crime was being Jewish.
No one, bar us, marches for our right to life. No one chants for our freedom, not even when our children are forcibly removed from their homes by murderous rapists and held underground for over a year. No campuses are taken over by spoilt students on our behalf, refusing to study, so devoted to our lived experience that they can't bring themselves to eat. No one takes part in collective mourning, not even for the murder of our babies.
I’m talking about the people who have shared information about the desperate plight of children in Gaza, interspersed with holiday pictures. I do not know what conversations happen internally if at all. I know most of them will have no idea what it feels like to see your community degraded and dehumanised online and in the streets every week by thousands of people across the globe who claim to be moral and decent.
It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the decision to be silent about this, but not about the suffering of others. It is deliberate, it is considered. The same people who were convinced Elon Musk is a raving Nazi and were so keen to educate their 201 followers about why his salute was antisemitic, have nothing to say about Hamas kidnapping and murdering Jewish children in cold blood.
More silence when the depravity goes further and forensic testing on the corpses returned by Hamas revealed they were covered in propaganda material and that Shiri is not even the fourth body returned. And nothing when it was revealed that the boys were killed in captivity.
But then If the image of a mother and her children in coffins while the monsters responsible for their death towered over them is not enough to shake the souls of ordinary people into saying something, then what is?
