Anyone who watched the first, horrifying videos of Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 could reasonably assume that sexual violence was at least part of this terror campaign. Bystanders recounted the rapes of friends at the Supernova music festival. Further reporting has supplied more details of the extraordinarily brutal picture of sexual assaults that took place. And while sexual trauma is often hard to document because of shame, bias and a lack of witnesses, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the director of the Israeli Commission on Hamas’ October 7 Crimes Against Women, argues for more resources to document this evidence but unsparingly relays that the problem here is simpler: Many of these victims cannot speak up because they are dead (some of them, forensic evidence suggests, were posthumously violated again).
In times of war and peace, rape is always a crime. Sexual violence on the battlefield, perpetrated against women, children and men, remains perhaps the ultimate, most intrusive way of asserting dominance, and international law in the last three decades has criminalized this behavior more strongly. Here in the U.S., breaches of sexual consent in civilian life (intimate partner violence, street harassment, workplace propositions, etc.) have increasingly come to be understood as existing on a continuum with stranger rape, all of which merit redress. Feminist activists can largely take credit for this formidable progress on all fronts.
So why, then, in a moment when statements of solidarity fly fast and furious, have feminists and their progressive allies not been more outspoken about the grotesque sexual violence visited upon Israeli women on Oct. 7?
Many feminist organizations rushed to express support for the Palestinian cause while eliding the plight of Israeli victims. The organization UN Women issued a four-page report last month exclusively addressing the impact of the war on women and girls in Gaza but made only a brief condemnation of the Oct. 7…
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