Jew-hating is not a new feminist phenomenon
Demonstrators gather outside the United Nations’ headquarters in New York City during a protest over lack of acknowledgement of the role of sexual violence in the Oct. 7 attack. Photo by Charly TRIBALLEAU / AFP/Getty Images
Each day our screens fill with heart-crushing images of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the terrible death and destruction left in its wake. I grieve for the more than 18,000 Gazans, 70% of them women and children, estimated to have been killed in this tragic incarnation of a centuries-old conflict.
I deplore Israel’s high tolerance for “collateral damage.” I feel the anguish of the many thousands of children traumatized by appalling deprivation, chaos and violence. I despise Hamas for starting the war. I’m sad that the Palestinians rarely get the leaders they deserve.
At the same time, as a Jew and as a woman, I refuse to let Hamas’ brutal assault on Israeli women and girls be forgotten in the fog of war. I feel obligated to describe every violent act committed by Hamas on Jewish female bodies since Oct. 7, lest the erasure of those unpleasant “details” facilitates the terrorists’ campaign to rebrand themselves as “freedom fighters.”
I’m not sure if Jewish women’s suffering was ignored because the events of Oct. 7 happened in Israel, a contentious place, or because the current political climate has allowed antisemitism to bubble up from the depths and go mainstream. But I do know that Jew-hating is not a new feminist phenomenon.
Way back in 1982, I cataloged its many permutations in my Ms. magazine article, “Antisemitism in the Women’s Movement.” In the years since, the world’s oldest bigotry has reared its ugly head many times in various forms. But in 2023, for Jewish feminists like myself, the movement’s deafening silence about Hamas’ sadistic abuse constituted a uniquely frightening betrayal. We discovered, writ large on signs and T-shirts, that Palestinian resistance “by any means necessary” trumps the safety of Jewish women.
Some people are in denial. Rapes didn’t happen, they say; Israel faked the murders. Others accept the facts but are chillingly dismissive of the victims, calling the rape and sexual violence committed against Jews the unavoidable byproduct of a noble rebellion.
You’d think it a no-brainer for decent people, regardless of their political views, to instantly and unequivocally condemn the unspeakable atrocities carried out by Hamas on Oct 7. If no one else, certainly, the feminist community should have been quick to denounce the men who perpetrated such horrific acts against hundreds of Israeli women and girls.
But to their everlasting shame, many of my feminist “sisters” have turned a blind eye to these “incidents” even as unimpeachable evidence, including survivors’ testimony and footage from Hamas body cams, has mounted. The devil is literally in the details, and the diabolical terrorists advertised their own evil.
The “details” include multiple gang rapes, sexual mutilation and abject humiliation, and the desecration of the corpses of murdered women and girls.
If you know women who have been brandishing one of those antisemitic pro-Hamas signs in the misguided belief that it conveys their support for Palestinian freedom, ask them if they themselves would be willing to be governed by militant Islamic fundamentalists whose ideology is larded with violent misogyny, Jew-hatred, homophobia and male supremacy, and whose leaders are capable of beheading men, shooting defenseless women and raping girls.
Why did it take nearly eight weeks for UN Women — the international organization whose purpose is to protect and defend “a woman’s right to live free from violence” — to protect and defend the right of Israeli and other women to be safe in their own country?
For eight weeks, Jewish organizations — among them, notably, the National Council for Jewish Women and Jewish Women International — hammered away at the depraved violence perpetrated on Israeli women and girls while other feminist leaders and media ignored those crimes because the victims were Israelis. Or, perhaps — let’s face it — because they were Jews.
Those progressives who did acknowledge the tsunami of gender-based violence often minimized its impact. Or implored us to put the attacks “in historical and political context,” or to consider “the complexity of the situation,” as if something, anything, could justify the mass torture and murder of women and girls. Some apologists sugarcoated Hamas’ heinous acts with the honeyed balm of “national liberation” or the slippery rhetoric of “popular resistance.” And hundreds of college administrators and professors, including those in departments labeled “women’s and gender studies,” claimed the only way to respect students’ diverse views on Israel-Palestine was to remain “neutral” about Hamas.
You can be sure that women who now excuse Hamas’ travesties never would have forgotten or remained “neutral” about #MeToo sex predators. Nor would they have considered “context” or “complexity” before condemning the U.S. soldiers who committed the My Lai massacre, or the U.S. interrogators who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
All the while, photos of Jewish hostages — infants, children, old women — were ripped from lamp posts, as if, unseen, they might be forgotten.
Gloria Steinem and I, both co-founders of Ms. magazine, and a few other conscience-bound petitioners, pressed its current editors for in-depth coverage of the fate of women and girls on the ground in Israel. Yet in a November online post, Ms. ran a piece on “Combating Terrorism and Misogyny Together” without even a passing mention of the events of Oct 7. And when the magazine did turn its attention to female casualties of the war, it was only to pay tribute to the journalists of all nationalities who were killed while doing their jobs. Not to the ordinary women and girls who, one by one, were targeted by Hamas for torture, rape, and slaughter.
Can you imagine Ms. ignoring hundreds of Black or other women of color who’d been similarly victimized and massacred in one day? I can’t. How did the blood of Jewish women become meaningless? When did intersectionality, a key ethos of 21st-century feminism, become Judenrein?
I’ve been advocating for Palestinian statehood and protesting the occupation for more than 30 years. Now I’m belaboring the need to face up to the terrorists’ cruelty, not to eclipse the extreme suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israel, but to underscore feminists’ moral obligation to express outrage and demand compassion for Jewish suffering at the hands of Hamas.
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