KINSELLA: Israel’s heart has not been silenced

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If countries have hearts, and they actually do, then Israel’s heart was found — for more than 500 days — at a little place called Nir Oz.

That’s where an entire country’s wounded heart had taken up residence: At a modest single-storey home, with a red roof and white walls, and a backyard full of kids’ toys. There were bikes and trikes, and a multicoloured soccer ball on the picnic table. There were Tonka toys, too, and a folded-up baby’s carriage on its side. It looked like play had been suspended for dinner, and then bedtime. Life, suspended.

There was a hammock strung between a post and the single kumquat tree that was in the backyard. If you stood there long enough, and I did, you could picture Yarden or Shiri Bibas in the hammock, smiling, laughing, watching Ariel running around, playing in his Batman jammies. Ariel, who looked like what an angel would look like, was just four years old.

Ariel will be four years old forever. His little brother, Kfir, was nine months old, and that is what he will be forever, too. Some monsters in the shape of men took them from their home in Nir Oz on the morning of October 7, 2023, and — shortly afterwards, no one knows for sure when — murdered them with their bare hands, and then crushed their tiny bodies with stones and concrete, to make it look like they had been killed by Israel, during an airstrike.

Someone has planted some flowers at the base of the kumquat tree, which Ariel loved. The flowers are reddish-orange, as if to recall the colour of Ariel and Kfir’s hair. For more than 500 days, all of Israel, and millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world, held out hope that the Bibas boys were still alive. They would post online reddish-orange words of prayer, and everyone knew what it referred to: Ariel and Kfir. Those boys, and their home in Nir Oz, became Israel’s centre, its beating heart, for more than 500 lightless days.

On the walls by the back door at the Bibas home, now long abandoned, there is red and black spray paint: Black means kidnapped, red means murdered. Rita Lifshitz lived at the kibbutz, too, and she regards the boys’ toys for a while, her face expressionless. “People woke up at 5:45 a.m.,” she says. “They heard gunshots, and they got up and heard that we were under fire.” Shiri’s parents lived at Nir Oz, and they were among the first to be killed, Rita says.

Nir Oz is almost exactly 800 metres from the fence with Gaza. A lot of the people who lived there were farmers, producing tomatoes or wheat or whatever. Yarden Bibas was a welder.

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The residents of the kibbutz were mostly left-of-centre and wanted peace. They would ferry Gazans to medical treatment in Israel, as Rita’s father-in-law Oded Lifshitz did, many times. Hamas and the Gazans kidnapped and slaughtered him, too, only returning his body on the same day as Ariel and Kfir’s. They were returned in black caskets, vandalized with Hamas propaganda. Shiri’s coffin contained someone else’s remains. After an outcry, Hamas acknowledged its deceit and finally let her go home.

When Hamas poured into Nir Oz, targeting mothers and fathers and children and grandparents — killing or kidnapping half the kibbutz’s population of 400 — Yarden rushed out to save his family. He would be wounded and taken hostage, the only member of his family to survive. Standing at the grave of his wife and sons at Tsoher Regional Cemetery on Wednesday of this week, Yarden Bibas said: “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you all.” He wore a reddish-orange kippa, and his words were suffused with a grief that is beyond words.

Right around the same time, in far-away Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a vigil was happening at the corner of an intersection in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. It was called to remember the Bibas family, and lots of people came. At one point, a smirking man paraded across the street towards the Jewish families — holding up children’s stuffed toys, just like the ones the Bibas boys had in their backyard. He then, police allege, assaulted a woman and called her “a f***ing fat bitch.” He was later arrested and charged.

Who does that? Who can show up at a vigil to remember two little boys and their mother, and wave around toys, as if to mock their deaths? Whoever does that has no soul, I think. Just a black hole where their heart is supposed to be.

I have been to Nir Oz, and I can tell you this: Israel’s heart has not been silenced. It beats for the Bibas boys and their mother and everyone else, Jew and non-Jew, who was taken on that day.

I do not think it will ever be stilled.