Fate of hostages a crisis for the West

After the heartbreak comes a profound anger. The return from Gaza of the bodies of the murdered Israeli hostages, nine month-old Kfir and four year-old Ariel Bibas – after a grotesque Hamas propaganda stunt displaying their coffins and with the subsequent discovery that what was assumed to be the body of the children’s mother, Shiri, was in fact an unidentified corpse – has triggered in the already deeply traumatised Israeli people a bottomless grief and a demand for justice at long last.

Oded Lifshitz, aged 83, whose body was returned with the Bibas children and who had made it part of his routine living near the Gaza border to drive countless Arabs from Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel, had his kindness repaid when they burned down his home, took him and his wife hostage and then murdered him.

The fate of all the other individuals slaughtered, raped, tortured, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped into Gaza in the October 7 atrocities is no less shattering.

But the terrified face of Shiri Bibas cradling her children as they were dragged into Gaza will haunt many of us forever. The Bibas family will remain a symbol of the unspeakable evil visited upon Israel on that black day and which it continues to confront.

It is also a symbol of the West’s descent into inhumanity and its tacit endorsement of barbarism. In city after city, people whose faces were contorted with hatred and rage tore down posters of baby Kfir and other hostages from public places.

What kind of people feel such hatred and rage at pictures of babies, children, women and men who have been kidnapped by barbaric savages?

This was a mass outbreak of a collective pathology, illustrating the extent of the West’s crisis of civilisation, at the heart of which lies the attitude to Israel and the Jews.

The hostage posters were torn down because, for supporters of the Palestine cause, nothing can be allowed to challenge their narrative of hapless Palestinians and Israeli colonisers.

Every part of that narrative is, of course, a lie created not only to steal the homeland of the Jews from them but also to steal their own ancient history in the land, an essential element of Jewish national identity. Whatever supporters of this cause tell themselves, it’s therefore an attack on Judaism itself.

At the heart of this cause is the demonisation of the Jews as Jews, an evil with which generations of “Palestinian” Arabs have been indoctrinated.

Hamas led the onslaught on October 7, but Gaza’s civilians made up the majority of the barbarians who invaded Israel that day to slaughter and kidnap Jews. Yet Western liberals have howled for the past 16 months that these are innocent people being subjected to collective punishment.

The “Palestinian” cause, so thoroughly embedded in liberal Western culture, has knocked the West off its moral compass. The Palestinian narrative matters so much to those who tore the hostage posters down because this evil cause defines the “progressive” conscience.

This is the moral sickness of the West. As I write in my book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, this is the outcome of a culture whose intellectual elites have taken a hammer to its core values for decades, abolishing truth, conscience and reason itself.

The United States, no less than Britain and Europe, has become riddled by systematic indoctrination in anti-Western propaganda proclaiming its original sins of colonialism, racism and “white privilege” where conservatives have been literally and metaphorically strong-armed off campus.

It has for decades helped fund Palestinian indoctrination in murderous hatred of the Jews and perpetrated the illusion of a “two-state solution”, denying the genocidal jihadi nature of the Palestinian cause and bullying Israel into weakening its ability to defend itself – a process that led inexorably to the massacres in southern Israel on October 7.

America, Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia have all hosted rampant and brazen antisemitic attacks, with their mainstream media promulgating murderous lies about Israel week in, week out.

And across the West, its elites continue to deny and excuse Islamist extremism and Muslim Jew-hatred, while denouncing all who call this out as “Islamophobic”.

The people tearing down the hostage posters were tearing the Jews out of their sight, out of their conscience and out of their world.

This is why the fate of the Israeli hostages is a crisis for the West. Challenged by the October 7 atrocities to defend civilisation against barbarism, it did not defend civilisation.

Enough. The coffins of the Bibas children, coupled with the West’s collusion with the population that willed their extermination, tell us that the Jewish people must rediscover their historic calling of justice through strength and abandon their attempts to satisfy a West that no longer deserves to survive.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. A longer version of this piece previously appeared on JNS.org.