Silence Is Violence — but Not When
It Comes to Israeli Rape Victims
Dec. 5, 2023
Opinion Columnist
On
Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked
Representative Pramila Jayapal why so many progressive women
have been silent about the extensive reports of widespread rape and sexual
assault carried out by Hamas against Israeli women during the massacres of Oct.
7.
What
followed was a master class in evasion, both-sidesism and changing the subject
from the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“I’ve
condemned what Hamas has done,” Jayapal allowed, briefly, before moving
immediately to condemn Israel. Bash persisted: “I was just asking about the
women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking about Hamas.”
“I’ve already answered your question, Dana,” Jayapal
replied, adding that while rape was “horrific,” it “happens in war situations.
Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However,
I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against
Palestinians.”
A
day after the CNN interview, I attended a conference at the United Nations
headquarters in New York, organized by the Israeli mission and Jewish groups,
in which Hamas’s “tools,” to use Jayapal’s term, were described. Sheryl
Sandberg, Hillary Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand were among the headline
speakers. But the important testimony came from Israelis who bore witness to
what they had seen firsthand or heard from eyewitnesses of Oct. 7.
Here
is some of what I heard, which people like Jayapal would do well to hear also.
It’s extremely graphic.
Yael
Richert, a chief superintendent with the Israeli national police, quoting a
survivor of the Nova rave massacre:
Everything was an apocalypse of
corpses. Girls without any clothes on. Without tops. Without underwear. People
cut in half. Butchered. Some were beheaded. There were girls with a broken
pelvis due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart, in a split.
An
unidentified survivor of the rave, shown in a video with her face obscured:
They laid a woman down, and I
understood they were raping her. He was basically shifting her around and
passing her to another person. She stood on her feet; she was bleeding from her
back. He’s pulling her hair. She’s not dressed, and he cuts her breast, throws
it on the road, and they are playing with it.
Shari
Mendes, an architect and army reservist who helped identify and prepare female
corpses for burial as part of the Israel Defense Forces morgue staff,
describing what she saw:
It seems as if the mutilation of these
women’s faces was an objective in their murders. Some heads were bashed in so
badly that brains were spilling out.
She
added:
Many young women arrived in bloody shredded rags or just in underwear,
and their underwear was often very bloody. Our team commander saw several
female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in
the breasts. There seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of
victims.
Simcha
Greinman, an emergency medical worker with ZAKA, Israel’s volunteer
identification, extraction and rescue teams:
I was called down on Oct. 7 to collect
bodies and remains from the terror attack. On one of the days, I was called
into a house, told there were a few bodies there, and I walked into the house.
I saw in front of my eyes a woman; she was naked. She had nails and different
objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we cannot
identify her, from her head to her toes.
He
went on:
On a different day, we got a mission
to go into another house. I walked into this house, into the bedroom; there was
a woman leaning on her bed. She was half-naked, from the waist down. She was
shot in the back of her head. When we turned her around she had an open grenade
in her hand. Thank God no one on our team got hurt.
Following
the testimonies, Yifat Bitton, an Israeli law professor, noted that the victims
had been “silenced twice”— first by Hamas on Oct. 7, and then “by the silence
of the very U.N. organizations that were entrusted with the mandate of
protecting them.” There were clear signs of sexual abuse from the first moments
of the attack, and by mid-November there were authoritative reports of Hamas’s
widespread sexual assaults.
Yet it took U.N. Women, the agency that
has that mandate to look out for women’s rights globally, eight weeks
before issuing a perfunctory statement saying
it was “alarmed” by accounts of gender-based atrocities during the attacks of
Oct. 7.
As for other so-called human-rights organizations, the
website of Human Rights Watch — which includes a page ostensibly devoted to women’s rights —
has dozens of news releases about the war in Gaza. Not a word about the rapes.
From Amnesty International: nothing that can be found on its website. The National
Organization for Women denounced the Oct. 7 attacks on the day they occurred
and last week issued a news
release condemning “rape as a weapon of war.” But it contained no mention of
Hamas.
Why
not?
In
a remarkable floor speech last week, Chuck Schumer, the
Senate majority leader, spoke of “the sting of the double standard,” which, he
said, “is at the root of antisemitism.” He also recalled a talk he heard in
college by Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, who confronted left-wing
hecklers at an event at Harvard.
“We
have lived with the double standard throughout the centuries,” Eban told the
protesters, Schumer said. “There are always things the Jews couldn’t do.
Everyone could be a farmer but not the Jew, everyone could be a carpenter but
not the Jew, everyone could move to Moscow but not the Jew, and everyone could
have their own state, but not the Jew.”
To
which one can today add: Every victim of sexual violence should be heard; no
condemnation of rape should ever come with qualifiers; “Silence Is Violence.”
But not when it comes to Jews.