Yossi Schwartz, ISL – RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 28.12.2023
100 Demonstrators gather during a “#metoo unless you are a Jew” protest outside of United Nations headquarters in New York City on December 4, 2023. Some of them were wearing white costumes with red paint all over including between legs to symbolize blood and rape. Israel has accused international rights groups of silence over alleged rapes of Israeli women during the October 7 attacks on settler colonialists. The Zionist police say they have been examining evidence of sexual violence, ranging from alleged gang rape to mutilation.
“The full scale of the assault is yet to be uncovered,” says a Zionist organization by the name of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. No doubt they believe it but based on what evidence?
Many people do not believe the alleged rape and the accusation of “#MeToo, except if you’re a Jew.” That there is an Antisemitism conspiracy to hide the rapes is without any foundation. To believe Israel that has been proven to be a liar after repeating unconfirmed reports about the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October hard evidence is required to prove that Israeli women were raped by Hamas. The allegation of the rape has been used by the Zionists and their supporters to claim that those who do not believe it are those who oppose the Jewish state and its right to defend itself from Islamic barbarism.
In the real world, the role of progressive people who oppose rape and racism is not to believe allegation of unverified acts of violence against women, and verifying blindly the allegations. It is true that in wars women are raped, but it is also true that white racists accused nonwhite men of rape of white women as the history of the lynching black people accused of rape of white women when there was no rape as the history of the U.S shows.
As a matter of fact, the allegation that Arabs raped white Israeli women was immediately adopted by right wingers who until then did not give any thought on rape and oppose equal rights for women. Verifying acts of sexual abuse, particularly amid the chaos of war, takes a long time. Yet in the imperialist states the story of rape of Israeli women was adopted immediately by the pro Zionists.
Since the belief that Hamas raped Israeli women is based not on forensic evidence but on the argument that in a war it is common to rape women of the other side to humiliate the enemy, it is much easier to believe in light of the genocide of the people of Gaza many of them women that Israeli soldiers raped Arab women. Palestinian women who were released from Israeli jails tells of torturer and rapes and no one in the West has raised the accusation that Arab women are raped by armed Israelis.
Ultimately, the outcry “Hamas raped Israeli women” distracts from the annihilation of Gaza and its people and lends Israel justification for a new ethnic cleansing. Needless to say, Benjamin Netanyahu is exploiting the opportunity and he is calling for “voluntary migration” of those living in the Strip. Avigdor Liberman also is calling for the expulsion of one and a half millions to Sinai desert. So are politicians from the party of Lapid.
“On October 13 — two days after Israel cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza while it continued its indiscriminate bombardment — U.N. Women, whose mission is to promote gender equality globally, issued its first statement on the war: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls,” it began. The 198-word statement called for “unrestricted humanitarian aid,” a restoration of the basics for survival to Gaza, and the “immediate release of hostages.” It reiterated the group’s support of Palestinian women in their fight for social, political, and economic rights. It did not say the same for Israeli Jewish women, who already have these rights in the Israeli Constitution. Hamas was not mentioned” [1]
“On October 20, the organization published in a new tab a “Rapid Assessment and Humanitarian Response in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Among the bullet points: 493,000 women and girls were already displaced from their homes; 668,000 were in need of protection from gender-based violence. This document did not mention Hamas’s attacks either. It did not report on human rights violations or even provide a death toll” [2]
“In early November, Israeli women’s groups flagged what The Guardian called “significant failings” on the part of the state “in preserving forensic evidence that could have shone a light on the scale of sexual violence committed against women and girls in last month’s Hamas attacks.” One report suggested that the investigation’s lack of cohesion and coordination was to blame for the failure to photograph, preserve, or properly examine the bodies for evidence of sexual assault before their burial. In fact, said the Times of Israel, the problem wasn’t necessarily incompetence; not using “time-consuming crime scene investigation protocols to document rape cases” was the result of forensic triage, which prioritized identifying the dead, burned, and decaying bodies. That decision, claimed the Times, “has fueled international skepticism over Hamas’s sexual abuse of victims” [3]
“Civil society groups in Israel, such as the ad hoc Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children as well as Physicians for Human Rights, to discover evidence for the assaults on women. One of the authors of the physicians’ group’s paper admitted to the New Yorker that they excluded videotapes recorded by the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, in which Hamas fighters assert that they were ordered to commit the murders and “sully” Israeli women. Such evidence was “unreliable,” said the PHR author, because of what the paper called “severe concern that the interrogations included the use of torture” [4]
Under heavy pressure on November 24, U.N. Women organization deleted an Instagram post condemning Hamas’s “brutal attacks” and calling for immediate release of the hostages.
“On December 1, eight weeks after the fact, U.N. Women released a statement “unequivocally condemn[ing] the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7.” It continued: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks” [5]
“Feminists began leveling accusations at other feminists and other people. In The Forward, Letty Cottin Pogrebin indicted unnamed “sisters” (in quotes) who acknowledged the attacks but “minimized” them or “implored us to put the attacks ‘in historical and political context’” — a sin equal to “justify[ing] the mass torture and murder of women and girls.” Who were the traitorous feminists who have “turned a blind eye” to Jewish women’s suffering? “Turned a blind eye” was one of the only phrases Pogrebin linked — but the link led only to a piece in the United Kingdom’s Jewish News, also arguing that feminists are turning a blind eye to the horrors of October 7” [6]
Thus, the accusation of ignoring or belittling the rape of Israeli women became a political weapon by Israel and its supporters to ignore or belittle or justified the genocide of the Palestinians over 21,000 70% women and children so far without any forensic evidence, by admission under torture and while the alleged raped women were dead and buried without examining them.
The rapes exists but only in the pro Zionist propaganda.
Down with the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza!
End the war now and exchange all prisoners!
Down with the Zionist apartheid state from the river to the sea!
Free red Palestine from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] Judith Levine There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7 https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence-hamas-israel/ December 24 2023
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid