My latest: Israel’s beating heart

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-story 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 color 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.

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