{‘W} e have come so far in believing survivors of rape and assault in so many situations,” wrote the former Meta executive and founder of LeanIn.org, Sheryl Sandberg, in a recent CNN op-ed. And yet, Western organizations supposedly devoted to women’s issues have spent the weeks since the 10/7 massacre of Israeli civilians — a slaughter that featured the methodical rape, abuse, and torture of Hamas’s female victims — laying low. In conflicts elsewhere around the globe, Sandberg observed, evidence that rape has been used as a weapon of warfare “evoked a loud response from global women’s organizations.” But similar crimes committed by Hamas have not.
She’s right. The events that survivors of and first responders to the atrocities Hamas committed describe are rendered more painful by the indifference to them displayed by women’s activist organizations.
“He didn’t pick up his pants,” said one witness to a gang rape at the Nova rave. “He shot her while inside her.” An Israeli combat medic described the condition in which he found one female body: “There was a liquid on her back that looked like semen. She was shot in the back of the head.” Another responder testified through tears that he encountered “a naked woman with a sharp object stuck in the intimate area of her body.” One Israeli morgue worker testified to the evidence of mass sexual violence. “We saw many women with bloody underwear, with broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises,” she said. And so on.
Reticence in the face of this barbarism is unnatural. Maintaining one’s dispassion when confronted with horrors like these requires a herculean commitment to moral relativism. But that’s what we’ve been forced to witness. Those prominent women’s organizations that haven’t held their tongues since 10/7 have humiliated themselves in the effort to avoid anything that too closely resembles basic human decency and common sense.
As Haley Strack observed of the Global Fund for Women’s attempt to establish a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, the massacre prompted the group to condemn the violence experienced by “Palestinian women and girls” (to say nothing of the “gender nonconforming” Palestinians flourishing under Hamas’s rule). The Fund attributed all of that violence to “Israeli military occupation” and “a society dominated by patriarchy.” “We have also called for all allegations of gender-based violence to be rigorously investigated, prioritizing the rights, needs, and safety of those affected,” read a statement provided by the women’s-rights group UN Women after it briefly published and then sheepishly deleted a general condemnation of Hamas. Unsatisfying as these statements are, at least these groups spoke up. As The View’s Alyssa Farah Griffin observed, from the United Nations and its commissions on gender-specific violence to the feminist international, silence has been the rule.
“Well, they don’t want to exacerbate it,” Griffin’s co-host, Whoopie Goldberg, posited with undue charity. She suggested that the caution women’s groups have displayed since 10/7 is a form of prudent deference to the logic of hostage-taking. Maybe they don’t want to inflame Hamas. The group does tend to fly off the handle, you know. And of course, Goldberg added, the pursuit of a lasting resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict requires all of us to put aside our parochial interests and consider the greater good.
Goldberg has it exactly right, although not in ways that reflect well on her or the groups she’s defending. For years, women’s organizations have allowed competing priorities to overtake their mandates, dwelling on their raison d’être only when a women’s issue maps neatly onto their primary objective: popularizing progressive policies.
Take the Women’s March, an organization that exploded into prominence when it organized a mass protest against Donald Trump shortly after his inauguration. The group was lauded as the apotheosis of female empowerment, but its real point was to “highlight the plight of minority and undocumented immigrant women and provoke uncomfortable discussions about race,” as the New York Times wrote, even if that alienated potential sympathizers.
Women’s March members were stratified by race according to an intersectional hierarchy of bigotries, in which Jews are relegated to the lowest rungs. Its leaders fraternized with Nation of Islam founder and famous antisemite Louis Farrakhan, hectored its Jewish members into withdrawing, and promoted the notion that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” It was easy enough to see from the organization’s desire to dismantle “systems of oppression,” including anti–human-trafficking laws that combat prostitution, that it wasn’t a women’s organization per se.
A Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of 550 specialists on women’s issues in 2018 revealed that the entire field had committed itself to a lie — albeit, a useful one. The questionnaire discovered a consensus had emerged in the #MeToo moment around the notion that the United States was one of the worst places on Earth to be a woman. When it came to state-sanctioned sexual assault, sexual coercion, human trafficking, or even harassment, respondents ranked America alongside pariah states like Syria and Somalia. To make a political point, these experts likened the U.S. to places where “rape as a weapon of war” and “the lack of access to justice in rape cases” are endemic. If they could allow themselves to see state-sanctioned rape where it didn’t exist, rationalizing away the evidence of the practice where it has occurred probably wasn’t much of a burden.
For years, the casual slandering of the American social compact typified the activism organized under the banner of women’s issues. A supposed epidemic of “rape culture” thrived just beneath America’s placid surface, the activists claimed. A moral panic arose around the phenomenon, the evidence of which was to be found in shoddy survey data and fabulist accounts of ritualistic sexual abuse so unbelievable they could only fool the editors of major publications. They wanted to believe. Indeed, the sloganeering around women’s activism in the last decade emphasized belief as a collective civic duty. “Listen to women,” “believe all women,” and “the right to be believed” became axiomatic features of the national discourse, unless the accused was a Democratic political player like former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax. That conflict between Democratic political priorities and philosophical precepts represented one of the first real “tests” of the #MeToo movement, according to NPR.
Of course it did. NPR knew. Everyone knew. The purpose of this activism was to stigmatize Republicans, hasten the Democratic Party’s transition from liberal to progressive political vehicle, and strike a blow against bourgeois values. International women’s organizations cannot condemn Hamas’s sexual violence without abandoning the international community’s steadfast commitment to anti-Zionism. Domestic American women’s groups are similarly bound to a left-wing orthodoxy that assigns oppressor status to the state of Israel and dismisses violence against Israelis as the revenge of the oppressed. Women have nothing to do with any of this. Indeed, they haven’t for a long time.