This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri; a 4-year-old boy, Ariel; and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir — who had been kidnapped back to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Their bodies are to be returned to Israel this week; Hamas held the corpses hostage, and in return received the release of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

It is instructive to recall the circumstances of the Bibas family’s kidnapping. They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty.

This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: the reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn’t exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip.

None of this is meant to alleviate the moral responsibility to attempt to distinguish between terror and civilian targets — a task Israel has accepted with more success than any country in the history of warfare, achieving a nearly 1:1 terrorist to civilian death ratio in the heavily urban Gaza Strip. But it is vital to recognize that the Palestinian nationalist cause is itself honeycombed with cancer: that it is rooted not in a desire for an independent state to exist side-by-side by Israel, as the mythical two-state solution has now suggested for decades, but in a desire for the complete extirpation of Jewish life in the Middle East.

Again, Palestinian civilians kidnapped and held babies. They then held their corpses hostage to achieve the release of murderous Palestinian terrorists. Oct. 7 was not a “jailbreak,” an attempt to achieve freedom or political sovereignty; it was, simply put, a massacre, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and incite a multifront war that would destroy the State of Israel in toto — or, in the absence of such an achievement, to mobilize world support to isolate Israel for defending itself.

In this latter task, Hamas and its allies found admirers throughout the Western left. They knew full well that they would meet with such support: The Western left has, since the 1960s, taken the position that deliberately murdering babies is justifiable in pursuit of the rebellion of supposedly subject peoples. Frantz Fanon, saint of the Third World left, said as much: “In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. … For the native, life can spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.” Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s perverse “The Wretched of the Earth,” suggested that the only way for the West to alleviate its bloodguilt would be to commit suicide: “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.”

Israel is not in fact a colonizing power — Jews have preexisted Muslims in the area by nearly two millennia. But the left’s logic requires no factual basis for its decolonization narrative; all it requires is a supposedly victimized people, to be identified by their level of poverty and stagnation. For the left, it does not matter if that poverty and stagnation result from terrible decisions made for decades by the very people who now claim victimhood status: People are immediately deemed victimized if they are angry and violent. The angrier and more violent — and the more successful their opponents — the more justified these pseudo-victims must be.

This is evil. If you side with those who deliberately kidnap babies and hold them for ransom, you are siding with evil. If you demand concessions to those who perform such atrocities, you are siding with evil. From college campuses to the streets of London, from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, we can see just who sides with evil. And as Israel lays to rest the corpses of the Bibas family, we should be reminded that those who side with evil share its moral consequences.

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