We were still hoping to see red-haired toddlers Kfir and Ariel Bibas return home with their mother, Shiri, when I saw a woman rip their photograph off a wall and shred their tiny faces with her fingernails. At that very moment, in reality, someone was strangling them in Gaza.
In Rome this week, vandals attacked the Beit Michael Synagogue in Monteverde and defiled the memorial plaque of Stefano Gaj Taché, the two-year-old murdered by antisemitic terrorists as he left the synagogue on Oct. 9, 1982. These are not isolated acts. They belong to the same uninterrupted chain of hatred.
During the Holocaust, one and a half million Jewish children were murdered. Among them were my father’s four little sisters and his beloved brother, Moshe. On Oct. 4, 1943, in Poznań, Heinrich Himmler explained to Nazi officers that all Jewish children must also be killed to ensure the permanent extinction of the Jewish people and to prevent future revenge.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar issued handwritten orders to his executioners to dismember, rape, burn and abduct—even children in the arms of their mothers and grandmothers. And they obeyed.
Today, in Europe, we see their ideological heirs—antisemitic mobs who threaten civilization, morality and physical safety, not only for Jews but for the entire democratic world. This is the same world in which women, gays and dissidents are honored rather than persecuted, unlike in Iran or Gaza.
And yet, after every catastrophe, the Jewish people return to life.
After the war, Jews rebuilt homes in Israel and across the Diaspora. Against all odds, Jewish communities revived. Israel today has one of the highest birth rates in the democratic world. Children again fill the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Rome with laughter. The Nazis were defeated.
Today, Hamas is shattered and hiding in what remains of its tunnels. The Jewish people have never been so strong.
We have cried as we rebuilt our defenses. We have struggled to restore ourselves after they touched our children. And we stood firm—from the Ghetto of Rome to Kfar Aza.
To those who chant “Free Palestine” while celebrating murder, who fantasize about terrorizing Jews into flight, who imagine that denying knowledge, human rights and freedom in the name of antisemitic and anti-Western hatred will break us—know this:
You are only reawakening a 2,700-year-old identity born in Israel, one that teaches its children liberty and equality—and how to defend their home when necessary, with bare hands if required.
This is not merely a cultural war. It is a geopolitical one: between democracies and tyrannies. And the bottom line is: cowards, you will be defeated.
