On February 1, the world watched as Yarden Bibas was released from Hamas captivity after over 15 months. On the morning of the October 7 massacre, terrorists kidnapped him and his wife, Shiri, and their two small children, Ariel and Kfir.
The fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir is unknown, but there are grave concerns for their lives and indications that they did not survive.
Every Israeli, and indeed, nearly every Jew, knows their names and faces. The suffering of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the human and national disaster that Hamas inflicted on Israelis on that fateful day. Yet on the very same day that Yarden was released, Israelis were accused of “weaponizing” his family’s suffering.
Muhammad Shehada, for instance, wrote an article – in Mehdi Hasan’s publication, Zeteo, (big surprise) – titled “Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?” He appears to link the “fervent hopes and prayers” of Israelis for the Bibas family to perceived “malicious intent” on the part of the Israeli government.
For Shehada, the national sorrow for the Bibas family is not a normal human response to an atrocity on innocents. It’s a weapon, a “ticking time bomb,” in his words.
Across the anti-Israel sphere, people argue that the outpouring of grief over the Bibas family is an organized propaganda operation designed to “lay the groundwork” for torpedoing the ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal. Israelis cannot grieve. There must be a malicious, ulterior motive.
This pattern is not unique to the tragedy of the Bibas family. Investigative journalist Eitan Fischberger provided several examples of this phenomenon in a post on X/Twitter. He wrote, “There’s nothing – literally nothing – that they won’t accuse us of weaponizing.”
Just a couple of weeks after October 7, Raz Segal, an Israeli historian no less, accused Israelis of “weaponizing the Holocaust.” Apparently, recalling the Holocaust after the largest slaughter of Jews ever since is in poor taste. Shortly after, the Feminist Solidarity Network for Palestine accused Western media of helping Israel to “weaponize rape allegations,” referring to the (proven) allegations of Hamas’s sexual violence on that day.
Again, grief, trauma, and solidarity are reduced to mere political maneuvers.
Around the one-year anniversary of the massacre, Naomi Klein argued that Israel has “made trauma a weapon of war.” Her evidence? The fact that Israelis have made efforts to document the Hamas atrocities and survivor stories. For her, October 7 documentary films and memorial events were not about chronicling the horrors and spreading the survivors’ testimonies for the sake of documentation and remembering the dead.
'Israeli grief is insincere'
Instead, they had the “explicit goal of reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars.” Explicit goal. Normal people grieve; Israeli grief is insincere. Then, after the November 7, 2024, Amsterdam “Jew hunt,” in the words of one of the organizers, an author at +972 Magazine accused Israelis of “weaponizing Jewish fear.” Examples like these are ubiquitous. In the same vein, there are entire books dedicated to arguing that Israelis and Jews weaponize antisemitism.
This dynamic, to varying degrees, permeates both social media and mainstream journalism – where Jewish and Israeli experiences are often met with skepticism, outright denial, and contempt. Grief and sorrow themselves become a point of contention.
Israelis, seen by the radical anti-Zionist set as the ultimate evil settler colonialists, are stripped of their right to express these emotions. A deeply human reaction to tragedy becomes an orchestrated, cynical political ploy.
This dehumanizing phenomenon needs to be viewed within the context of a larger narrative that seeks to paint Israelis as uniquely malicious and violent actors on the global stage. Whereas other countries conduct military operations, Israel does “bloodletting,” notes Brendan O’Neill in his book, After the Pogrom.
This language is common. Other nations respond to threats; Israel carries out “state-sponsored terrorism.” Other countries inevitably cause civilian casualties; Israel wages “war on children.” Other countries eliminate terrorists; Israel carries out “wanton assassinations of [...] activists.” Other countries go to war; Israel commits “genocide.”And while other nations mourn their collective tragedies, Israelis use their own tragedies as a weapon.
After the 9/11 attacks, America was gripped by national trauma, grief, and unity. The names and faces of many victims became ingrained in the national consciousness. Survivors’ testimonies were recorded, documentaries were made, and public commemorations were held.
While the US government certainly used 9/11 to justify policy decisions – some controversial – it would be obscene to claim that America’s collective grief was an insincere, orchestrated effort to push a war agenda. The sorrow of families who lost loved ones was not a weapon or a “ticking time bomb” set to incite violence – it was a human response to an atrocity.
But in the case of Israelis – and Jews more broadly – the radical anti-Zionist set, and even some mainstream commentators, who engage in a toxic form of victim-blaming, where Jewish suffering is never just suffering – it’s a maneuver, a ploy, a trick. This is part of a much older pattern, a millennia-old cycle of delegitimization, in which Jews are seen as schemers and manipulators.
The same people who tell Israelis they’re weaponizing the Bibas family’s tragedy are the ones who claim Jews weaponize antisemitism, and a subset of them are people who believe a deceitful cabal of Jews control the world. Some things never change.
At the end of his post on X, Fischberger wrote, “Next up: How Jews weaponize their existence.” His quip cut to the heart of it. Denying a group the right to grieve is a violation of a fundamental human right, akin to denying one the right to self-defense, and thus the very right to exist.
The writer is an independent journalist focusing on extremism, disinformation, and Mideast history and politics, and he is the co-host of the Lappin Assessment podcast.