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Along with the bodies of two members of the Bibas family, including the youngest hostage Kfir, who was nine months old when kidnapped and taken to Gaza, and an unidentified woman in the place of Kfir’s mother Shiri Bibas, Hamas released a fourth body at the same time. This was the body of one of the oldest hostages, 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. Lifshitz was a gentle and kind soul, by all accounts, a lifelong peace activist who continued to believe in the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. He spent much time helping Palestinians from Gaza to receive treatment in hospitals in Israel. None of that peace activism or help he gave to Palestinians, of course, would have mattered to the Hamas goons who murdered him. More on the life of Oded Lifshitz can be found here: “Super grandpa and lifelong peace advocate: Family mourns slain hostage Oded Lifshitz,” Jerusalem Post, February 20, 2025:
…Lifshitz, an 83-year-old who helped found Kibbutz Nir Oz, was a lifelong peacenik and Palestinian rights advocate; Lifshitz worked for years for daily paper Al HaMishmar before his retirement….
In his work as a journalist, Lifshitz reported extensively on the Bedouin sector in Israel and reportedly took a case to the High Court, which resulted in the return of some of their land, AP reported.
He was part of an organization called Road to Recovery that helped Palestinians cross the Erez border in order to receive treatments in Israeli hospitals. “They have been human rights activists, peace activists for all their lives,” his grandson told Reuters.
Because of his experience in activism and his connections to the Arab world, his daughter said that he was more than aware of how destructive jihadist forces were.
Lifshitz had an unclouded vision of what could happen if Israeli-Palestinian divisions festered to a point beyond return.
“When the Palestinians have nothing to lose, we will lose, big time,” Lifshitz wrote some years ago in Haaretz. “The question is, what do we do then?”
Lifshitz was a political naif, who did not realize the depth of the Palestinians’ hatred of Israelis and of Jews, based on, and encouraged by, the texts and teachings of Islam. He wanted to help the Arabs, thinking that they would respond in kind. He went before Israel’s High Court to argue a claim on behalf of some Bedouins who believed some of their land had been wrongly taken by the state, and won their case. He worked to bring Gazan Arabs into Israel for medical treatment. He did all this, but of course none of that would have mattered to his Hamas captors, to whom he may have spoken in the period between his seizure in Israel at Kibbutz Nir Oz, and his murder in Gaza. He is dead, but his widow and family, and all the other families who had their relatives raped, tortured, murdered, or taken hostage, likely have had their hopes for “two states living side by side in peace” smashed on the reef of Muslim hatred, and may never be so full of naïve hope again, or rather, their hope now is more likely to be for an Israel that understands what monsters it is facing, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to devastate those who want to destroy the Jewish state and its people.
The kibbutzim are inhabited by those who believe in small-scale socialism. Politically on the left, readers of the far-left paper Haaretz, many of them are supporters of the Meretz Party that clings to that will-o’-the-wisp, the so-called “two-state solution,” with Palestinians and Israelis living side by side, in a Middle Eastern version of Edward Hicks’ “The Peaceable Kingdom” in which the lion lies down with the lamb. Some have even believed they were “living side by side in peace” with the Palestinians in Gaza until, on October 7, 2023, 6,000 members of Hamas, accompanied by hundreds of Gazan civilians who wanted to join in the fun, smashed into Israel, where they proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate (breasts sliced off, genitalia cut off, eyes gouged out from people who were still alive), and murder 1,200 Israelis in ten kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival. That was the day when the Israeli left was mugged by reality.
Those who live in the kibbutzim have historically taken a soft line toward the Palestinians, helping tens of thousands of them to find employment in Israel that provided them with wages three to four times greater than what they could earn in Gaza, a program that ended, for security reasons, with the outbreak of the Gaza war, and also helping them — as Oded Lifshitz did — to transfer Gazans who needed advanced medical treatment to Israeli hospitals for their care.
The last wounded words on his life and death surely belong to Lifshitz’s widow, Yocheved, who like Oded had all her life been a peace activist, and made this searing statement: “He was a staunch advocate for peace, he had great relations with Palestinians, and one of the things that hurts the most is that they betrayed him and took him down to hell after he fought for them his whole life.”
They betrayed him, and they murdered him, as they did so many other helpless Israeli civilians. And many of those Israelis who had been peace activists have been permanently disabused, and will now call for the total destruction of the Palestinian terror groups. Most Israelis no longer trust any of the Palestinians. In the most recent opinion poll, only 21% of Israeli Jews — less than half the percentage in 2017 — supported the concept of a “two-state solution.” More than two-thirds of them — 71% — now support the annexation by Israel of all of Judea and Samaria. Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 has brought many Israelis, and especially those once on the left, such as Yocheved Lifshitz, to their senses. Now they know what Palestinians applaud, reward, and participate in: the rapes, the tortures, the mutilations, the murders of helpless Israelis, including the kind and gentle great-grandfather Oded Lifshitz, whose body is finally home.
Excellent analysis.
Well duh!
Sadly took October 7 to realize the obvious.
Who is it that realizes???
The Muslims are begging Jews to kill them for all intents and purposes.
We should oblige in a spirit of justice and joy.
Free the Lion from the Zoo then get Eaten Liberals will never learn
jews havent learned from history and will continue their blinkered beliefs that normal people can live with arabs . the history of the terrorist entity called islam is proof you cant . the jews murdered their messiah yet will embrace islam . the jews and israel will have no peace up until they recognise [ he whom they pierced ] that wont come until the end of the 7 year tribulation of the book of revelation . meanwhile the savagery of islam will continue . prepare for worse .
“Lifshitz was a gentle and kind soul, by all accounts”
No, not even close. He was a deluded narcissist. People like this man do what they do to feel good about themselves. It’s called “moral narcissism”. That’s the only thing that could explain a Jew giving a helping hand to the islamic nazis who want to kill him.
Are we still talking about this deluded narcissist?
FPM ran an article about this guy a couple of weeks ago by Robert Spencer. Here’s what I wrote then and I’m reposting it now:
Oded Lifshitz would probably be alive today if he hadn’t been a dumbass Leftist peace activist. It’s very hard to work up any sympathy at all for virtue signaling people like this who think they can change the world by being nice.
As I always say, “My sympathy meter is pegged at zero.”
Who holds a music festival lacking any armed security, so close to the enemy, in a war zone? In this country it is obvious the American Left has learned nothing from the shellacking they got last November. I wonder if the Leftist Israelis have learned anything from the Oct 7 attack? I sure hope so.
A tragic (but not surprising) ending for a well-meaning but naïve person. People like him are vaguely aware of the dangers of helping rattlesnakes but they do it anyways because they do not comprehend the depth of the evil in these psychopaths. I’m sure he has helped many people throughout his life and the odd one might even have been grateful. Hamas, however, have no heart, no conscience, and no humanity whatsoever.
I am puzzled as to why there are still 21% of Israelis Jews who support a two-state solution. Do they not realize that Palestinians have no interest in a solution? No desire to let any Jews live? That their entire existence is focused on the destruction of Israel? Why would they even contemplate living side-by-side the Jewish people in peace?
It all comes from that misguided Tikkun Olam “repair the world” crap that liberal Jews (in both Israel and America) embrace.
Not only do they always vote for their own executioners, they always manage to be on the wrong side of history.
There will always be kind hearted, mis-guided people who do what they think is HUMANE for certain people and then find out way too late that they’ve been fooled and used. Most of the time it doesn’t end with capture, torture, and murder!
Evidently the radio stations in Israel never played AL Green’s (the singer not the impeacher) “The Snake”!
I recall PRESIDENT TRUMP using that during his first term but now he needs something much more sinister and much more disgusting as a reference! Oh, how about DEMOcrat in Office??
And they shall call evil good and good evil. The Gazans are just plain evil and the people who trust in them are foolish – and even dangerous.
The Kibbuzim represent the farming communities of Israel. Their destruction is a terrible tragedy. I don’t understand the failure of Israeli intelligence leading up to 10/7. I am told that people at the kibuzzim were complaining about hearing gun fire from Gaza and that the security “leaders” ignored their complaints. I just don’t get it.
Islamic taqiyya, and Israeli ignorance of what the Qur’an actually says – or maybe unawareness that the later, more violent Quranic revelations are held to have priority over the early peaceable ones – are part of the explanation.
He isn’t the first naive do gooder who has been butchered by the Islamist fascists
And he won’t be the last
You watch American college students, with no real knowledge of the history of Israel, chanting heinous, violent and abhorrent antisemitic remarks and wonder, would a single one of them live through a 24 hour period as a Gazan “activist,” before their inevitable rape, kidnapping, assault and eventual murder? My guess is they would wish for death long before their vile killers granted them that peace. Left-wing Israeli Jews were less naive than American activists and it still took less than 24 hours to turn their belief system on its head. May God grant the left the wisdom to embrace the reality on the ground in Israel.
21% of Israelis wanting a two state solution is far too high.
How many October 7th’s is it going to take before they WAKE TF UP?
“This was the body of one of the oldest hostages, 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz.” Islamist radicals , communists, and Marxist rebels always will do this…eat their young. This is truly the war between the Good and the Evil…and the Light and the Dark.