About two weeks ago, the one-year birthday of Kfir Bibas – the youngest Israeli abducted to Gaza, he also has Argentine citizenship – was celebrated throughout Buenos Aires. Several important buildings and monuments were illuminated with orange light and rallies were held demanding his release, together with all of the remaining hostages.
The baby’s abduction is an atrocity that has resonated throughout the world, but it is a particularly painful issue for the average Argentine because of the country’s special history, which carries a grave warning that must not be ignored.
From 1976-83, Argentina was ruled by a religious, right-wing, military junta that, in addition to the mass murder of an estimated 30,000 people suspected of left-wing activity – among them thousands of Jews, a proportion far exceeding their share of the population – also abducted and “disappeared” citizens, tossing them, drugged and bound, into the ocean from planes.
Members of the junta also systematically raped female detainees, especially those of Jewish origin. All of these things were done in part with Israeli weapons, after systematic training in weapons use and in tactics of repression by IDF officers, who were fully aware that all of this was taking place.
Then, like today, all of the Israeli representatives who came to Argentina preferred to ignore the matter of the disappeared, mainly because it complicated the warm relations between Israel and the junta regime.
Beyond these atrocities, the biggest open wound that burns Argentina to this day is the seizure of babies from the rape victims or from women who were pregnant when they were abducted, to be given to members of the military.
The human rights organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo says about 500 newborns were taken from their mothers, some of whom were Jewish, in captivity.
For decades this was covered up, because the condition for the return of democracy after the Malvinas/Falklands war in 1982, which was intended to keep the leader of the failed junta in power, was fake unity and amnesty for the right-wingers for their actions as part of the coup d’état.
It was only after decades of struggle that the mothers of the disappeared – now operating as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo – were able to restore to one of these infants, Claudia Victoria Hlaczik, her identity.
It was 1999, and she was 22 at the time. Since then, 141 more such citizens have been found. It was one atrocity too many, and as a result all of the immunity laws were overturned: Since then, the military personnel are being tried, one after another, and sentenced to long prison terms.
What can be learned from the horrible Argentine experience is that all of the women who gave birth in captivity, without exception, were murdered and disappeared immediately after their newborns were seized. The unbearable descriptions are documented in dozens of court rulings. The mothers, according to the abductors, were terrorists, but the children simply needed a right-wing, religious education, and that is how they were “saved.”
The testimony of Israeli female hostages who have returned from captivity raises serious concerns that those who remain in the Gaza Strip continue to suffer rape in captivity, nearly four months after they were abducted, while the IDF blows up homes and tunnels but does not rescue them.
The warning from Argentina should flash bright red: If Hamas members behave as members of the Argentina junta did – and in many ways their antisemitic ideology is similar – they will soon begin to realize that some female hostages are pregnant, and this will seal their fate. They will be held until they give birth, murdered and the children will be taken without leaving a trace. Argentina has not yet recovered from this.
