Where’s the solidarity with Jewish women? - opinion

It’s difficult to revel in the solidarity that International Women’s Day is supposed to summon when Israeli women hostages are being held in Gaza by Hamas terrorists that we know are rapists and perpetrators of sexual assault and while groups of women across the world are not only stepping back from supporting these victims but are calling liars the Israeli and Jewish groups that cry out for acknowledgment and justice.

Finally, yet months too late, a UN team investigating the sexual violence against women in Israel on October 7 found ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that such violence did indeed occur. Reasonable grounds?

While this wording leaves much to be desired, still, it is an important official confirmation. Yet one wonders if the UN report will do anything at all to change the narrative surrounding the gender violence that began almost five months ago.

Even before the report was issued this week by Pramila Patten, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, there was evidence and eyewitness accounts that women of all ages, including children, were raped and gang raped. Women and girls were violently and sadistically killed with their underwear torn off, faced down with their heads blown off.

Hamas terrorists admitted to necrophilia – to dirty and dishonor the victims. Barred by Islam to do so, they did it anyway. As the UN report states: “In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.”

And most frustrating and infuriating, while we in Israel have known for some time that women in captivity were being sexually abused and cried out to the heavens about it with little sympathy from the international women’s community, the UN report states there is “clear and convincing information” that sexual violence is “ongoing.”

While the ongoing lack of response from international women’s groups regarding the rape and sexual violence perpetrated against women on October 7 and its aftermath may be attributed to a combination of complexities including, at least close to October 7, limited access to information, today, months after that blackest of black Sabbaths, with all the reports, news accounts, witnesses and victim testimony, it can only come down to one thing – antisemitism.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a subject of intense political polarization and women’s groups have diverse memberships with varying perspectives on this issue, that alone can’t explain the on-going silence about Jewish women being massacred and sexually assaulted in the most horrific ways.

Do women’s organizations need to like a woman’s government to support her right not to be raped for political reasons?

Do international women’s organizations really need to make excuses for Hamas, citing absurd reasons for the behavior of thousands of Gazans like “colonization” and “racism” while the organization gleefully, boastfully, and passionately slaughtered civilians, uses their own as human shields and doesn’t seem to mind if its own women and children are killed in wartime but expects and counts on it? Do the leaders of these organizations seriously believe that these men should rule anyone on earth, let alone women? And why has there been so much disbelief about their acts worldwide?

Leaders of women’s groups must break the silence around the gender-based crimes that its sisters in Israel endured and are still taking place today in Gaza and look deep inside and analyze how their own prejudices that are informing their opinions of what is taking place.

 If they do not, these groups have legitimized violence against women, and have made the world a much less safe place for women everywhere, especially for Jewish women. And Jewish women’s groups and their allies must continue to work, using all their formidable resources, in all public discourse platforms including in political, academic, and media frameworks to challenge the false history that is being hardened into untrue “fact.”

It is hard if not impossible to separate the dramatic upsurge of antisemitism worldwide to the cold lack of sympathy exhibited by women’s groups toward the victims of Hamas’s sexual crimes. As Jews are facing an increasingly dangerous moment in time, Jewish women must now be doubly vigilant. Their sisters do not have their backs.

The writer is the president of Kam Global Strategies, an international strategic communications and public relations company based in Jerusalem.