Every fragment of information amid an unrelenting cloud of uncertainty spanning nearly 16 months spreads like wildfire. Rumors about signs of life from hostages, or alternatively, speculations about their bitter fate, have spread within milliseconds across the digital sphere, leading the hostage families – who have endured a continuous nightmare for over a year and never wanted the spotlight thrust upon them – to make a modest request: remove the word "bodies" from the lexicon and replace it with "fallen."
The word "fallen" is deeply familiar to Israelis. It's the term that accompanies every war in our small, pain-filled nation's history. It's how we refer to soldiers killed while defending us with body and soul, with indescribable courage, throughout years of endless, bloody conflict. But this Hebrew word – and I am often amazed by the amount of thought invested in many Hebrew words – carries a precise, deep meaning at the core of Israeli and Jewish existence.
"Halal". The meaning of "halal" in Hebrew is "void." In other words, the fallen leave voids within us with their departure. They leave an emptiness that takes hold in the heart, churns in the stomach, and validates what the mind cannot grasp. This void is torn open by such a painful memory that nothing can fill it.
And it is always there. Some days we feel it a bit more and others a bit less. But the day a new void forms is the most terrible. And today, the earth shook when our last shred of hope regarding the fate of the remaining Bibas family members – mother Shiri Bibas and her pure, young children Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas – vanished, and a new void we refused to believe existed officially opened.
The small, pure, sweet faces of the red-headed babies are forever seared in our memory. The mother, the very definition of a lioness, with no hand extended to pull her from the hell she found herself in completely alone, stands before our guilt-filled eyes. Israeli society feels this void acutely, shocked by the unimaginable fate of those who became symbols of Hamas' inhuman evil. As one woman watching the convoy of coffins entering Israel asked – "What did they do to us?" And I ask, "Where was the world when they did this to us?"
The voids left by Shiri, Ariel, Kfir, and one of Kibbutz Nir Oz's pillars, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, should not be unique to Israel's borders but belong to all humanity. The magnitude of such an enormous void, of such great horror, must reverberate – so that every person in every corner of the world carries this emptiness, that fills their eyes with tears mid-day, unannounced, reminding them that more could and should have been done. That it was possible to speak up, to do good. That it was possible to see through well-marketed narratives, to see humans as merely humans, and children as the emblem of purity, innocence, and light.
The world cannot continue spinning as before. In the Middle East – often dismissed by global citizens as a conflict zone "somewhere far away," as playwright Bertolt Brecht liked to write, but in reality, directly affects the world – there is no place for twisted evil, indigestible, nauseating, and anger-inducing beyond bounds, in the form of terrorists who kidnap a mother and children, an elderly grandfather, and sell it to the world as an act of "liberation."
The Middle East, however distant it may seem to you, is a place with human beings, families, and shattered dreams of living in peace, and as global citizens, you have an obligation – no less – to carry the burden of these voids. You have an obligation to force your eyes open to witness the evil that blockbuster horror films couldn't imagine. You have an obligation to scream at the top of your lungs, just like every Israeli, Jew, and their allies who scream about the incomprehensible reality masked by your social pressure and daily trivialities.
Without "but," and without "what about." No well-prepared speech, discussion, or attempt at explanation changes anything. Children were taken captive and returned in coffins. The world did nothing. Hatred for their Jewish identity was greater than doing what was right. Sit with that. Dwell in it. From now on, this void will be in us forever.
