First Lady Michal Herzog: Silence from women in UN is 'deafening'

Sexual violence against women – and men as well – in Israel has been ignored systemically on an international level since the war against Hamas broke out on Oct. 7.

Slowly but surely since then, the evidence has been mounting that could no longer be ignored, forcing international human rights and women’s organizations to recognize the suffering that Israelis of the South endured.

Israeli women have been at the forefront of presenting the realities of the Oct. 7 atrocities on the global stage, and no one has been a more prominent advocate for Israeli women than First Lady Michal Herzog.

“The relentless work that Israeli women and Jewish women around the world are doing is having an effect, and it’s causing some change in the way human rights organizations, especially the UN, look at what happened on Oct. 7,” Herzog told the Magazine in an interview at the President’s Residence on the occasion of International Women’s Day, which is marked today.

“It took eight weeks for UN Women to put one phrase of condemnation together – and not a very deep condemnation,” she said.

The interview was conducted prior to the report released this Monday by Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten, who confirmed that she and her team had received conclusive evidence pointing to sexual violence, torture, rape, and necrophilia against Israelis on Oct. 7.

At the time, Herzog had expressed confidence in the report’s revealing, as it ended up doing, the truth about the Oct. 7 massacre.

“We had a very emotional meeting here at the President’s Residence,” she said, referring to Patten and her team. “We also gathered a group of leaders from NGOs in Israel who deal with women’s matters and gender-based issues, as well as jurists specializing in international law. We had a very emotional meeting because, as we told her, we felt betrayed.”

Herzog explained that the “deafening silence, especially by UN women, but also other human rights organizations” had left Israeli women feeling abandoned, but that Patten’s voice “and the expression of solidarity on her part was very important for [them] to hear. So it was a very emotional meeting with her.”

While Patten was understanding of the Israeli suffering that had occurred, her report did mention that they had not spoken directly with sexual violence victims, though they had received reliable evidence that it had occurred and that those victims who would not speak with Patten and her team were undergoing intense psychological treatment for the most acute symptoms of trauma.

“We have to give them time,” Herzog said when asked what Israel can do to allow the victims to feel comfortable enough to come forward.

“We know that as women, first of all, we have to believe them. We have to give them a comfortable atmosphere of believing them because this is the whole #MeToo issue; it is all about believing,” she explained. “But the survivors, we cannot urge them. We have to give them the time. Someone said it’s treatment before justice; you have to treat the survivors when and where they choose to come out, and we have to do it very gently.”

In mid-February, Herzog attended and spoke at the Munich Security Conference’s panel on sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.

“We see such a late response in the world... and the condemnation of these events takes a long time,” she said at the conference. “It is actually a reinforcement of the almost systematic unawareness of the sexual violence that takes place around the world.”

In an interview with the Magazine, she said that the Israeli delegation had come with six families of hostages, and two hostages who came back from captivity. “So it was very moving.”

“I felt that it was very important that we bring Israel’s voice to the world,” she continued. “It’s the corridor meetings that are really important, not just the official ones. I came back surprised at the very welcome way we were treated. And ‘we’ – meaning the Israeli delegation, the president, myself – whether it was about the issue that I deal with, which is gender-based violence…”

She highlighted that Israel is in shock because this is the first time it has been made a victim of conflict-based sexual violence, but in reality this is not new to the world.

“In Ukraine, the Yazidis, of course, the Boko Haram story, which in April will be 10 years old… I think there was compassion between women [in Munich],” she said. “I’m not talking now about the reaction of the human rights organizations around the world but between women who speak to you and women and groups that have experienced this terrible experience. I think there is a compassion.”

Asked what Israel should do in response to the organizations that recognized the Oct. 7 sexual violence months later, Herzog said, “I think we don’t have the privilege of not cooperating. I’m a great believer that you have to speak, and you have to speak to people who maybe misunderstood you in the beginning or ignored you.

“The fact is, the more you speak to them, you talk to them, you convince them, you bring them the evidence, you show them, you bring them to the field... You have to meet people and witnesses; the more they understand, they can’t ignore it. So I think the way forward is a way of cooperation.”

Personal touch

Herzog observed that from her years of experience, maintaining personal relationships is key to understanding one another on a broader diplomatic level.

“Olena Zelenska, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife, we have become friends over the past two and a half years,” Herzog said. “She immediately called me to find out, first of all, how I was on a personal level, how my kids were, how I am, and also to show her solidarity. She’s not the only one.

“I feel that the soft power that first ladies have comes through. It has results because you create relationships. You become friends, in a way.”

In politics, especially international relations, soft power is the ability to cooperate. This is in contrast to hard power, which is based on coercion and force; and smart power, which involves strategic diplomacy and persuasion.

Nevertheless, while Herzog remains hopeful about Israel’s external relationship, Oct. 7 has left an indelible scar on the hearts of Israelis.

“I’m not sure that we comprehend the ramifications yet,” she said. “We’re clearly still in the trauma stage. We’re not yet in the post-trauma stage. We spent the month before Oct. 7, the president and, I going from one ceremony to the other, marking 50 years since the Yom Kippur War. We insisted on attending every ceremony that we were invited to because we said we needed to thank the people, the heroes of 1973, because who else will thank them after so many years?

“Little did we know that the last ceremony we attended was on October 6 at noon, and the next day the Oct. 7 attack happened. I’m sure that for many, many years ahead, we will still be talking about it, processing what happened. We all know someone firsthand, everyone lost someone or has someone in the army or knows someone displaced from their communities in the North and South.”

While Herzog was confident that Israel’s mental health systems are strong, she warned that the system would be overwhelmed in the near future because there was no way to prepare for such a crisis.

“There’s going to be a lack in the field because the needs are tremendous,” she observed. “But there’s an understanding that this needs to be dealt with. Reservists, for example, are not just sent home after the reserve duty; they have a processing week.”

During that time, professionals guide the reservists on how to ease their way back to the normal, everyday living that existed before Oct. 7. Psychologists, social workers, and other professionals help them process their experiences.

Some women’s organizations have expressed concern that women being systemically ignored was part of the reason Oct. 7 was such a catastrophe, since female soldiers repeatedly warned that something was brewing. While Herzog said she did not believe a direct cause-and-effect relationship could be drawn between the two, she did say that women are sorely missing from decision-making tables.

“There needs to be an inclusion of women in the important rooms that make decisions for this nation,” she said. “We need more women. We need more women at decision-making tables in local government and in leadership. We need more women because women know how to listen to women.”

Furthermore, she said that women “think differently, they think sometimes more practically, they’re more aware of things, they see the details. It’s a different way of thinking. And we need that kind of thinking to help us through the crisis we’re in.” 