How to Save Jewish Babies

My son was born in April 2023, which makes him about the same age as Kfir Bibas. By the time my son was 6 months old, Kfir had been stolen from his crib in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, Israel, and taken into a dungeon in Gaza, clutched by his mother, Shiri, alongside his brother, the toddler Ariel.

The day plainclothes Gazans snatched Kfir from his home—what was supposed to be a festive holiday—our rabbi stopped services to announce that he didn’t know what was happening in Israel, but it was something awful. Many people were killed and hostages were taken. We stopped services and begged God to intervene: “Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need,” we read aloud from Psalm 142. “Rescue me from my pursuers, for they have overtaken me.”

“Set me free from this prison, that I may praise your name.”

A song I knew from childhood putting those words to music became my son’s new lullaby. “Acheinu” also served well: “Our brethren, from the whole House of Israel, who are in distress or captivity—may God have mercy on them and take them from distress to comfort.” Bedtime became prayer time. I clutched my son and thought about Kfir Bibas every night for 16 months.

Through centuries of Jewish powerlessness, our prayers for our children reflected the lingering hope that God would safeguard the remnant of Israel. Our comfort was God alone. We had no reason to think our fellow humans would care for our helpless little ones, much less defend them with force. And when powerlessness led to attempts to annihilate our people, we asked: Where was God?

After the recent grotesque spectacle, I will be changing my tone. Hamas returned Kfir and Ariel to Israel for burial after holding their mutilated corpses for over a year. Their coffins were sealed, labeled with the wrong names and a “date of arrest,” stuffed full of terrorist propaganda. Thousands of Gazans, including children dancing on the stage where Hamas proclaimed its triumph, flocked to the scene to celebrate. A poster blamed Israel for killing the boys and warned that any further Israeli military action would bring more living hostages to the same fate.

For many Jews, myself included, the depravity of that day has crystallized an important message. We know what Hamas is. We know the NGOs, politicians, and activists who try to create a moral equivalency between those who strangle babies and those who try to kill terrorists hiding behind human shields. We’ve always known who they were. They relish in tormenting us. It’s what they live for. But what’s maddening is that, in 2025, we are letting them torment us.

Some of us still cling to the old mindset of powerlessness, declaring credulously how we were now supposed to be full members of an enlightened world, expressing shock at how every leader of every nation and every NGO disavowed hatred of the Jews and dutifully swore “Never Again” only to go silent when Kfir and Ariel were taken from their mother and murdered. “Where was the U.N.? Where was the Red Cross?” ask those still unable or unwilling to break from the clutches of our past helplessness, even as the U.N. employed and sheltered the terrorist murderers, and the Red Cross gleefully participated in their grisly pageant.

But we are asking different questions now. Why are we giving the world a spectacle of Jewish helplessness? Why are we allowing this parade of Jewish suffering and inviting contempt against us in the process? What good is that vaunted Jewish power when fear of the rest of the world restrains us from using it to defend our own?

When Jewish babies were kidnapped, the then-president of the United States planned a pier to bring aid to their captors. Kfir and Ariel were suffering unspeakably beneath Gaza, and the then-vice president said Israel could not move heaven and earth to get them back—she had looked at the maps, and it just wasn’t worth it. The Joe Biden administration and its USAID Director Samantha Power sent $2.1 billion in “emergency” supplies to Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza, openly funding our enemy’s war of extermination against us under the pretense of “evenhandedness.” And that was the reaction of our supposed best friend, while the rest of the planet from London to Beirut brayed for our blood and defamed us daily for fighting back.

The new U.S. president, himself disgusted by the humiliating procession of Jewish hostages and caskets, has stopped U.S. aid to our enemies and publicly released Israel from a deal designed to ensure our defeat. It’s time to end this desecration. Reports are that, with the hostages retrieved, Israel plans to resume the war and conquer the Strip in the coming month. We do not need anyone’s mercy. We are no longer powerless and need not pray over our children as if we were. We are free to fight our wars and win. We are free to be powerful. Our babies should sleep soundly at night because their “community” will use that power to defend them by any means necessary—if we can find the courage.

We have become more religious since Oct. 7, not less. I still sing for God’s blessing at bedtime. I pray my son will soon be the Jewish leader who embodies the lessons learned from this hideous episode: Stand up for your fellow Jew, and for all decent people. Do what you must to ensure that there are no more Oct. 7s, and for that matter no more Feb. 19s. We will no longer be tormented, and we will take proactive steps to ensure that. We cannot worry about what the world will say.

We cannot get bogged down worrying about the abstractions that somehow always conclude, “and the Jews should accept their fate.” International law didn’t save Kfir and Ariel. Neither did social justice, or human rights, or any of those high-minded concepts. And they never could. If anything, they served as cudgels to stop the Jews from using our power to save precious Jewish babies. We can only focus on doing what is necessary to defend ourselves, because no one else will do it for us.

I will still sing a lullaby for Kfir and Ariel, and the dozens of Jewish children whose spilled blood failed, once more, to arouse the world’s conscience. I know a song set to Deuteronomy 32:43, a verse that belongs on the lips of all who love God and hate evil.

“Rejoice, O nations, over His people, for the blood of his servants He will avenge; their vengeance he shall return upon His enemies, and atone for His people upon His land.”