A leading Reform rabbi told his congregants during Shabbat services yesterday that the murder of Shiri Bibas and her young children Kfir and Ariel caused him to "snap" and reject the Two-State Solution, the Jewish News Syndicate reported.

"Something snapped in me this week," said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. "After 16 months of keeping it together, my heart finally cracked. The plight of the Bibas family struck me so deeply, that I do not even know where to place all of these emotions running rampant inside of me."

“It is what the Bibas family symbolizes — the concretization and normalization of pure evil in the face of pure innocence — that finally crushed me this week. Whose kills nurselings? Who slays toddlers? When I see red-headed children now, I think of Ariel and Kfir. When I see mothers swaddling their babies, I think of Shiri."

"This was the week that finally ended the hope – at least in my lifetime – for a Palestinian state and a Jewish state existing side-by-side,” he added. “The Palestinians themselves strangled this fragile hope in its crib.”

"A community that condones the murder of infants and toddlers, a people that is not horrified by the savagery, the cheers, the parading of infant remains, is desperately troubled and suffering from moral miasma and social collapse," he declared. Palestinianism is infused with fantasies of conquest and mythologies of victimhood, fueling an endless cycle of violent depravity, in part encouraged and even funded by perhaps well-meaning but naive Western politicians and NGOs and glamorized by armchair revolutionaries whose fervor increases the further they are from Gaza."

"Of course, there are many decent, kind, peace-loving Palestinians. But the polite lie that we tell ourselves over and over again is that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians. It is simply not true. We recite this like a mantra so that we do not have to face the terrible truth that Hamas is the Palestinians, that Palestinianism is more about destroying the Jewish State than creating a state of their own. How many times do we need to hear the word 'no' before we accept that when the Palestinians say 'no, they mean 'no?" he asked.

"I hope I am wrong ... Nothing would please me more," he clarified, adding that this would only be possible if the Palestinian Arabs become willing to coexist with Israelis. Until that time comes, "we must cease deluding ourselves that a Two-State Solution is available now."

The bodies of Shiri, four-year-old Ariel, and ten-month-old Kfir were returned to Israel a little over a week ago. Forensic examination revealed that the children were strangled by their captors with their bare hands in November 2023, just a few weeks after they were kidnapped from their home.