Israeli women count, too.
Valentina G.
20Y+ Content, Product & Creative Technology leadership at Media, Publishers, Brands ● An optimist dedicated to making things happen ● A proud and passionate European
Because if we do not at least agree on how horrible what has been done to these women is, what is the point of talking about women's rights?
Some 1,200 Israelis were killed and many more wounded when Hamas militants crossed the border to carry out their long-planned progrom. They took more than 240 hostages, sparking the current war. Since then, authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza say more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed.
But the past two months have not only shattered human lives, they have also undermined the ideals that inspired my generation. These ideals have been obscured by the shameful behaviour of individuals and institutions around the world.
Environmentalism, to start with: three generations of us united under the Friday For Future movement, until Greta Thunberg betrayed the movement she started and manipulated it to make it something else.
Even worse is the shameful, complicit silence that surrounded the rapes of Israeli women on 7 October and later those held hostage in the Gaza tunnels.
This silence will long be remembered. And, to add shame to shame, it was not the usual silence of men, but of women, too.
I spent weeks and nights asking myself how it was possible to go from the universal call of the #metoo movement to a #metoo #butnotyou if you are an Israeli woman.
It's time to break this silence. By all means, everywhere, where we can talk, write, publish and share. It is time for you to read, to see and to know.
Do not look away from what has happened. Do not look away from the names and faces of the victims and the names and faces of those who chose to ignore.
Where has the universal solidarity of women gone, if it ever existed?
That the pain of other women does not always have the same value for others, we had already felt with the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021 and the abandonment of Afghan women to their fate: Many were born after we went there to "bring democracy". They grew up believing that they were guaranteed to stay free. By us.
But what happened on the 7th of October, and in the two months that followed, goes beyond even the worst of expectations. There are women who have suffered everything. And, there are women who have given their worst.
What follows is a chronicle of shame. A way of forcing you to open your eyes and ears, if you have not already done so.
Where to start this chronicle of shame?
Be'eri is a kibbutz in southern Israel. It is located in the northwestern Negev desert, near the eastern border with the Gaza Strip. It is surrounded by a landscape of moving beauty. It should be seen as it was before the massacre, as in this video.
Instead, it will always be remembered as the site of a pogrom the likes of which had not been seen since the Nazi era. There it began to be recognised that violence against women was a central, deliberate and planned part of these attacks.
In Kibbutz Be'eri, a paramedic from the Special Tactics Rescue Unit went house to house looking for anyone still alive after the massacre.
He found the bodies of two young teenage girls in a bedroom.
"One on the bed. One on the floor," he told CNN. The girl on the floor was on her stomach. The teenager had been raped, whether she was alive or dead is not known. "Her pants are pulled down to her knees and there's a bullet wound on the back of her neck near her head," (...)"There's a pool of blood around her head and there's semen on the lower part of her back."
Numerous accounts describe similar horrors at the Nova music festival, where terrorists killed hundreds of young people. Rami Shmuel, one of the organisers of the festival, said he saw female victims undressed as he fled the scene. He has no doubt about the atrocities.
"Their legs were spread and some of them were slaughtered," he told CNN.
He went on to say that it appeared that women were specifically targeted for sexual violence.
"Why didn't they take the clothes off the men?" he asked. "Only women, only young girls, beautiful girls, why?"
This is what one woman saw from her hiding place at the Nova Festival:
"They bent someone over and I understood that he was raping her and then passing her on to someone else" (...) "She was alive, she was standing on her feet and she was bleeding from her back. I saw him pulling her hair. She had long brown hair. I saw him cut off her breast and then he threw her on the road, threw her to somebody else and they started playing with her". (...) "I remember seeing another person raping her and while he was still inside her, he shot her in the head".
The evidence is accessible and overwhelming, everywhere across social media. A video still circulating on the Internet shows a teenage Israeli girl being dragged from a vehicle in Gaza by terrorists. In the video she is barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. When she turns around, her jogging pants are covered in blood coming from between her legs. These videos have been filmed and shared with pride by Hamas. The brutalisation of women, including rape, has become a key feature of this horrific assault.
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Why doesn't it interest you?
Until a few weeks ago, the horrific acts of sexual violence against Israeli women on 7 October received disturbingly little attention. One of the most appalling episodes of rape and brutalisation of dozens and dozens of women was treated as a side note.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a human rights lawyer, formed a civil commission with colleagues to document evidence of the atrocities, fearing that as the war devastates Gaza and the lives of thousands of Palestinians, the world seems willing to overlook the violence against Israeli women and girls. She pointed to a United Nations statement issued just a week after the terrorist attacks that made no mention of sexual violence.
"It's much worse than just silence or an insult to us as Israeli women and to our children and to our people," she said of the UN. "When they fail to acknowledge us, to acknowledge what happened here, they fail humanity."
The human rights community has been curiously silent. The Hamas killers, on the other hand, have not been silent at all: Unlike all previous incidents of 'conflict-related sexual violence', as the UN calls it, the Hamas terrorists had body cameras and filmed their actions. They broadcast it both to the families of the victims and on social media, so the horrific footage went viral". Yet for weeks, the UN and all its organs remained silent.
Why? I guess you know the answer, already. The answer lies in an adjective that should be irrelevant: Jewish. They were women, but they were Jewish.
Those who remain: women still hostage.
If you are still reading this, it means you care. As I approach the end of this post, I want to give you one thing that I wholeheartedly recommend you read on:
As I write this, more than 110 of the hostages kidnapped in Israel have been released. At least 10 of them, both men and women, were sexually assaulted or abused while in captivity.
Meanwhile, around the world, many women have given their worst.
This is Samantha Pearson, (former) director of the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta. A few weeks ago she signed a letter called "Stand with Palestine: Call on Political Leaders to End Their Complicity in Genocide", which condemned not Hamas violence but "the unverified accusation that Palestinians are guilty of sexual violence".
This is what the Italo-Palestinian activist Maya Issa said at the demonstration in Rome on 25 November (World Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women):
"What is being asked of us (Palestinians)? It is human to take revenge. The responsibility for the massacres does not lie with Hamas, but with the international community [...]". [...]
At the same demonstration, where Israeli flags were banned but Palestinian flags were widely tolerated, an elderly woman, a survivor of the extermination camps, was pushed by the crowd because she demanded that Palestinian flags be taken down.
6 December 2023. Two months for a UNICEF statement on social media.
It has taken appeals, testimonies and open letters (here: Sheryl Sandberg), and a lot, a lot of anger. It took two months of all this to get a statement, not even officially published on the UN website, only on social media, to tell the truth:
Can we still believe in women and female solidarity?
But as in the Greek myth, at the bottom of Pandora's box, after all the evils of the world had escaped and spread throughout the world, only one thing remained in the box: hope. This hope has many women's names, but one stands out these days.
Two days ago, Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, 51, who has spent most of the last two decades in prison, became the fifth Nobel Peace Prize winner to do so from behind bars. Her children were in Sotckolm on behalf of their mother.
This is their message to the world: https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/relevant-articles/the-letter-from-narges-mohammadi
I was a 19-year-old girl when I was detained because of wearing an orange coat. At the detention centre, breathless with disbelief, horror and shock, I saw grim looking men in black uniforms with whips in their hands who relentlessly lashed the bodies of four women who had been detained without due process of law similar to tens of others. Many years later, the world witnessed last year that a young woman by the name of Mahsa-Jina Amini was confronted by the Morality Police on the pretext of wearing an improper “hijab” and as a result lost her life. (…)
In Iran today, women and the youth are the largest and most radical and progressive social groups that fight against religious authoritarianism and want to bring about fundamental change with an aim to achieve lasting peace in Iran, in the Middle East, and in the world. (…)
Victory is not easy, but it is certain.