“Believe women” was the rallying cry of the #MeToo movement, but after October 7, an American Jew who has observed many human rights and feminist groups ignored the sexual violence Hamas committed against girls and women in Israel Question: Where is the “I” in MeToo? Why doesn’t anyone believe the women in Israel?
And I’m not alone.
Ahead of the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, Israel’s Foreign Ministry launched the #BelieveIsraeliWomen hashtag campaign and on October 7 – following media attention – announced a task force to investigate Hamas’s sexual atrocities against women and women children, indifference from the international human rights community and pressure from Israeli women’s groups.
Shortly after October 7, an independent organization of international human rights experts and women’s rights groups in Israel formed the October 7 Civil Commission on Hamas’ Crimes Against Women and Children. Concerned that no Israeli or international organization was documenting Hamas’s sexual violence, she set out to collect evidence of Hamas’s gender-based abuses and encourage government authorities to further investigate these atrocities as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While the first women and children are being released as hostages and the Israeli Ministry of Health has ordered the hospitals treating them to have female doctors and nurses on hand to carry out all physical examinations and learn how to recognize signs of rape and torture and documented, and how to do it Without re-traumatizing them, the United Nations has shown little interest in whether Israeli women suffer violence and has not advocated for Red Cross access to the women still held captive by Hamas.
UN Women Executive Director and Under-Secretary-General Sima Balhous waited until November 22 to mention for the first time that she was “very disturbed by reports of sexual and gender-based violence,” but did not mention that the perpetrator was Hamas and the victims are Israelis and Israelis are foreigners.
Earlier this month, the hashtag #MeTooUnlessURAJew spread widely on social media as grassroots women’s groups in Israel and abroad launched campaigns to express their outrage at the international community’s silence on mounting evidence that Hamas is on October 7th committed systematic rapes.
Women’s rights groups in Israel – including Bonot Alternativea, one of the organizations that led nine months of protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-democratic judicial reforms in Israel – marched in solidarity with the Hostage Crisis and Missing Families Forum. A group of medical professionals also drew attention to the increased health risks of female prisoners, whose ages range from infants to teenagers to older women with heart disease, diabetes, asthma and other health problems, not to mention the impact on mental health trauma.
But many prominent American feminists like Angela Davis have directly victimized Israel and are more interested in using terms like “colonial feminism” than actually advocating for women. Others, like the self-professed anti-sexual violence activist known as V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), never acknowledged in a lengthy statement the shocking abduction and torture of girls and women in Israel on October 7 – something Hamas was all too proud of shared it on social media but carefully avoided mentioning it. (This silence about systematic rape comes from the same person who once said, “We should all be hysterical when it comes to sexual violence.”)
I ask her: If you can’t stand on the side of all women, then what do you stand for? To what extent is rape an act of resistance?
Liad Gross, 36, cries as she holds up a sign for her missing friend Sagui Dekel Chen during a demonstration in front of the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 24, 2023.
Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times
The Civilian Commission on Hamas’ October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children no longer waits for the response from these inhumane human rights celebrities. They have begun collecting evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence and encouraging government authorities to further investigate these atrocities as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“I wish I could go back in time,” says Dr. Cochav Elkayam Levy, head of the new commission and professor of international law, human rights and feminist theory at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I could never have imagined taking on this unimaginable task.” As she described the monumental work of her commission, the evidence gathered so far and the deafening silence of the global community, she paused to catch her breath through tears.
“I thought my colleagues in human rights organizations would condemn such terrible attacks,” says Elkayam-Levy, a 20-year-old scholar of international law and human rights. “I thought, quite naively, that we had to write to them and send them a report.” After presenting a short draft of their findings (signed by 160) to officials from the United Nations and its various bodies, including UN Women and the Committee on the Rights of the Child prominent legal and human rights scholars), she received no response.
“The fact that they are silent is not just an insult to the Israeli victims,” she says. “It is an insult to all victims. International law loses its meaning if one fails to condemn the same crimes when they are committed against Israeli citizens. It weakens the legitimacy of global institutions and allows further violations not only in Israel but around the world.
“The denial and silence of the international community provide fertile ground for the use of women’s and girls’ bodies as weapons in war,” she added. “If international law doesn’t apply to us, do they even consider Israeli women as human beings? Seems like we’re not part of humanity.”
After presenting its case a week ago at a virtual forum titled “The Unspeakable Terror: Gender-Based Violence on October 7,” hosted by various Jewish student groups at Harvard University, the group has gained traction.
So far, the United Nations has shown no sign of caring whether Israeli women suffer violence. This can be interpreted as callous indifference or outright blaming the victim. You would have to be lying under a rock not to have seen the many shocking images of the Hamas massacre in Israel, the most brutal of which show women.
There was Noa Argamani, the young woman at the Nova Festival in Re’im, whose eyes were full of fear and who screamed for help as masked terrorists raced away with her on a motorcycle. There was the naked, limp body of German-Israeli tattoo artist Shani Louk, shown in the back of a pickup truck as it drove through the streets of Gaza like a prized quarry as onlookers cheered and spat at her. Her death has now been confirmed, according to DNA samples from skull fragments. She was beheaded. Her family is unable to give her a Jewish burial.
There was also Shiri Silberman-Bibas, clutching her 9-month-old and 3-year-old sons and sobbing as terrorists screamed and pushed her around. Later Israeli police reports and footage released by the IDF show mothers sadistically killed by Hamas. Among them were charred remains later identified as a mother clutching her baby as they were burned alive.
“Violating a corpse is a particularly heinous war crime, a wound so deep that it takes survivors years, if not decades, to come to terms with it. When it came to the Holocaust, most women, including my own mother, took such brutal truths to their graves.”
As someone who has spent the last decade researching and documenting an untold story of slavery and sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust, I recognized the pattern. Parents were killed in front of their children, children were torn from their parents, families were torn apart, women were stripped naked, physically humiliated, raped in front of their loved ones and in public – these forms of sexual violence were Nazi tactics, but were never documented were documented for which they were never held accountable. Then as now, the world viewed Jewish women with a cold eye.
It took more than 50 years after the end of World War II for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to recognize rape as a weapon of war and prosecute the perpetrators as war criminals. Since then, there has been a growing awareness of how gender-based violence (GBV) is used to terrorize a society, destroy its structure and commit genocide.
A woman’s body represents the body of a nation, says Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. There is no clearer symbol of genocide than systemic sexual violence during war.
Violating a corpse is a particularly heinous war crime, a wound so deep that it takes survivors years, if not decades, to come to terms with it. When it came to the Holocaust, most women, including my own mother, took such brutal truths to their graves. And their perpetrators were never charged, indicted or even acknowledged.
The International Criminal Court’s 2002 Rome Statute recognized the systematic use of rape, sexual slavery or human trafficking, forced pregnancy and sterilization, and other forms of physical violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his work to end rape as a weapon of war, said: “The woman who is raped is the one who is stigmatized and excluded for it.” … We have to get to a point “Where the victim has the support of the community and the man who rapes is the one who is stigmatized and excluded.”
It was encouraging to see Dr. Mukwege and global human rights organizations such as UN Women were quick to condemn Russian forces for their mistreatment of Ukrainian women and children shortly after their invasion began. So why don’t they stand up for the women and children of Israel?
Even worse than their deafening silence is the subsequent gaslighting of Hamas’s more than 1,200 civilian victims – including nationals from over 40 countries. UN Women waited until October 20 to release its first statement, in which it simply condemned Israel. There was no mention of Hamas’s rape victims in Israel or the quarter of a million Israeli civilians displaced in Israel, nor was there any push for humanitarian aid for the hostages held by Hamas. This blatant double standard is not only cruel, it also ridicules UN Women.
“We were completely betrayed by the international community,” says Halperin-Kaddari. “The betrayal affects not only the hostages and victims of sexual abuse, but also the integrity of the institutions and the international human rights framework as a whole.”
Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for twelve years, says that in this role she advocated for women regardless of their nationality, for Yazidi women who have been persecuted by ISIS Iraq is trafficked to women in Central Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sri Lanka.
“But the level of cruelty and brutality perpetrated by Hamas against women and children in Israel on October 7 is unsurpassed,” she added.
And that’s no exaggeration. Atrocities cited by rescue workers include gang rape, in which a woman’s pelvic bones were broken and her legs were twisted into unnatural positions, and genital mutilation. Israeli police chief Kobi Shabtai said a pregnant woman’s stomach was cut open and her fetus removed while she was still alive, and women’s breasts were cut off and thrown around as if they were volleyballs, and there were reports of necrophelia.
Perhaps because of the visibility of this commission, on October 7, the Israeli government finally announced the formation of its own task force to investigate sexual violence – something it failed to do when it began the gruesome and daunting task of identifying and burying the dead . Israeli police said they had collected more than 1,000 statements and over 60,000 video clips and witness statements about rape, although it is not clear whether any of the victims survived.
Police photos of the carnage at the kibbutzim on the Gaza border and at the Nova festival show women’s bodies naked from the waist down, legs spread, blood visible and underwear pulled down. A festival-goer told police about a gruesome gang rape she witnessed:
“They bent her over and I realized they were raping her one by one. Then they handed her over to a man in uniform. She lived. Stands up and bleeds from her butt. They held her by her hair. A man shot her in the head as he raped her, while he lowered his pants they cut off her breast.” In other words, she was murdered while her rapist was still inside her.
Such statements were confirmed by morgue workers, including a volunteer at the Shura military base near Tel Aviv, who spoke of “very bloody underwear.” Another, Alon Oz, who was tasked with identifying the remains of hundreds of soldiers, spoke of “burned women with their hands and feet tied… I saw bullet wounds in the private parts, shots, shots to finish someone off, a missing head, and missing limbs.”
Although this type of forensic evidence is consistent with the type of systemic sexual violence that is considered a war crime, some, such as Israeli Arab Knesset member Iman Khatib-Yasin, said there was no evidence of rape on October 7, although She refused to watch footage of the Hamas massacre being shown to Knesset members. She later recanted her denial.
A Times of Israel investigation found that little physical evidence was collected from the October 7 victims, including rape kits, which have a 48-hour window. At the time, Israel was still an active combat zone, and when investigators had access to the victims, the bodies were in such poor condition that collecting semen and DNA samples was neither possible nor a priority. Many scholars say that the lack of rape kits does not matter as long as factors such as the intent to commit large-scale rape as a weapon of war are proven.
Dr. Elkayam Levy points this out an Arabic-Hebrew glossary that supposedly belongs to Hamas and discovered amid the carnage that contains instructions on how to say 50 sexually explicit terms like “take off your pants” in Hebrew as evidence of war crimes. This is in addition to the statements of captured Hamas terrorists in which they revealed that they were ordered to rape, behead and dismember as many civilians as possible and were even given permission to do so by their imams because such Atrocities contradict Hamas’ teachings in the Koran.
Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College, calls such exceptions a complete distortion of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, who strictly prohibited violence against women, children and the elderly, even during war unless it occurred is in self-defense As for the lack of rape kits to prove sexual assaults were committed, she says such standards were never applied in the tribunals of Rwanda or Bosnia, the latter bearing similarities to October 7th.
“This line of evidence has always been a problem with regard to the victimization of women and sexual violence during war,” says Dr. Afridi, a Muslim.
As for why so many human rights and women’s groups deny that Iran-backed Hamas has committed genocide and crimes against humanity, Prof. Halperin-Kaddari says there is only one conclusion: anti-Semitism.
And many agree, including exiled Iranian activist and journalist Masih Alinejad, who highlighted this fact wipe the Jewish state off the map is the core of Iranian and Hamas terrorism. Muslim reformer Asra Nomani – a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and friend of the late Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by al-Qaeda terrorists in 2002 – spoke out against Susan Sarandon’s anti-Semitic statement that “frightened” Jews get a glimpse of “how it feels”. being a Muslim in America.”
“Anti-Semitism can be so profound that these anti-Semites always dehumanize others, whether women or children,” says Dr. Afridi.
Fortunately, some university presidents are taking action against anti-Semitic academics who promote October 7 denial.
On Saturday, the University of Alberta, Canada, fired the director of its sexual assault center for signing a letter denying Hamas committed sexual violence on October 7.
Meanwhile, David Katz, who handles cybercrime at Lahav 433, the Israeli police’s criminal investigation department, says it could take six to eight months to complete the investigation. But Halperin-Kaddari and Elkayam-Levy hope the world will respond sooner.
“The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court gave a speech in Cairo expressing interest in the October 7 atrocities,” says Elkayam-Levy, who is meeting with diplomats and U.N. officials in New York later this month will meet, while Halperin-Kaddari will take the case to Geneva. They have submitted three petitions, one signed on behalf of women, one by women’s rights organizations and one by international legal scholars.
“It will be a new international tribunal,” she says, “representing victims from all over the world. “In a year we could be at the end of the beginning of our work.” She adds that Israeli society has never experienced sexual violence has been exposed to on such a large scale and there is so much that will unfortunately remain unknown as no victim of sexual atrocities has survived.
And that is what makes criticism of the global feminist community so particularly painful.
“One of my first decisions was to work with allies who demonstrated moral clarity on these issues,” she says. One of these was Prof. Catharine McKinnon, a feminist legal scholar whose work laid the foundation for rape as a weapon of war.
“She is a non-Jewish American professor and we weren’t sure how she would react,” she says. “But in that moment she said, ‘I know you’ve been through hell. “I hope you’re okay,” we all started crying. This is what it means to be believed.”
Marisa Fox is a journalist and filmmaker whose upcoming documentary My Underground Mother reveals an untold story of women’s camps and sexual violence against teenage Jewish girls during the Holocaust.