And the land grows still, the red eye of the sky slowly dimming over smoking frontiers
As the nation arises,
Torn at heart but breathing
To greet the miracle that has no parallel
Magash Hakesef / Natan Alterman
Thus began Nathan Alterman’s iconic poem, Magash HaKesef (The Silver Platter), which was written in 1947 following the UN vote on the partition of Palestine.
The poem portrays a somber and reverent moment when a young man and woman soldier appear before the nation.
Then a nation in tears and amazement will ask: “Who are you?” continues the poem.
And they will answer quietly,
‘We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given’
Thus they will say and fall back in shadows
And the rest will be told In the chronicles of Israel
Magash Hakesef/Natan Alterman
Watching the somber procession of vans carrying the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were nine months and four years old when they were kidnapped, their mother, Shiri Silberman Bibas (32), and Oded Lifshitz (85), one could not help but think of Alterman’s words and their message: the establishment and survival of the Jewish state comes at an often unbearable cost.
What was true in 1947 is true in 2025.
The deaths of these hostages – especially the Bibas babies – represent a heartbreaking extension of the sacrifice the Jewish people continue to pay to live in their homeland.
Their deaths are emblematic of the ongoing price Israel’s sons and daughters, parents, and even grandparents and great-grandparents pay for the country’s existence.
Part of a collective story of the Jewish people
Their deaths are part of the collective story of sacrifice that defines Israel’s history and identity. As Alterman wrote in the last line of his poem: “And the rest will be told in the chronicles of Israel.”
Among “the rest” that will be told in those chronicles is how an entire nation stopped on Thursday to pay homage to the hostages – hostages most had long feared were killed by the end of 2023, yet, clinging to the faintest hope, could not bring themselves to say so out loud.
What will be told in those chronicles is the sacrifice some 850 soldiers paid with their lives trying to bring the hostages home.
What will be told is that the country was willing to pay an exorbitant price to bring the hostages home – living and dead – because of a sense of solidarity, mutual responsibility, and those mystic bonds of brotherhood that animate this people and is a pillar of Israel’s strength.
And what, from Thursday’s heart-wrenching day, will be remembered in the “chronicles of Gaza”?
That a ghoulish show was put on where men, women, and children gathered in the remains of a city square – to celebratory music – to watch masked murderers parade around with coffins of a nine-month-old baby, a four-year-old boy, and an 85-year-old man who spent much of his life working for coexistence with those who would later kidnap and murder him.
That Hamas pasted graffiti on the coffins, gave the International Committee of the Red Cross keys for locks on the coffins that didn’t fit, and that children at the ceremony took selfies with recently released terrorist murderers.
Israel’s television stations, all five of them, did well in not broadcasting this “ceremony.” What would be the point? With this show, as well as those over the past month and those still to come, Hamas is hoping to break the country’s spirit. There is no reason to aid and abet them.
Images from that ceremony, however, were broadcast around the world, and in one split-screen moment, the world saw the pictures that the two different societies wanted to project.
On one side of the screen was Hamas’s grotesque terror theater. It is important to note that this show was carefully choreographed.
Hamas did not want to hide the fact that they kidnapped and then traded in the bodies of babies and the elderly; rather, they brought their own children to watch and to cheer.
Hamas prefers to celebrate
This is the image they wanted to project. They didn’t want to hide this – they wanted to celebrate it.
On the other screen were images of thousands of Israelis lining streets and overpasses to pay final respects to people they never met or heard of before October 7 but for whom they felt a tremendous degree of solidarity.
The world saw images of a nation bowing its head and weeping for the lives of their innocents lost. No one, however, should confuse those tears for weakness or those bowed heads for a nation whose spirit is broken.
As Alterman wrote: “torn at heart but breathing.”
Breathing because for Israel and for the Jewish people, grief is never the final word.