The battlefield between feminism and rapes of war

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/01/2024 (624 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the end of December, the New York Times published a harrowing story under the headline, “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

The Times investigation recounts, in gruesome detail, the rape and mutilation suffered by Israeli women during the Hamas-led attacks, based on video footage, photographs, GPS data and interviews with more than 150 people. Hamas denies these allegations.

“Women don’t do this,” a reader wrote in the comment section. “That’s all I want to say.”

And yet, it’s women who pay the price of war — with their bodies, their lives and their children.

Ostensibly, that was the truth at the heart of Hear Our Voices, an event that took place at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Wednesday night about the gender-based violence of Oct. 7. The program, which was hosted in person and livestreamed by Jewish Child and Family Services, featured a keynote address from Ayelet Razin Bet Or, an Israeli lawyer and women’s rights expert, and a conversation between Razin Bet Or and Gail Asper.

The keynote address included a grim slideshow presentation recounting the brutalization suffered by these women and called out the international community, organizations responsible for women’s rights, such as UN Women, and global feminists, for not condemning it sooner.

Rape and gender-based violence has long been used as a tool of war, stretching back … well, as long as the existence of war. There are too many examples to list in this space. Rape was a fixture of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Rwandese women and girls had been raped. It was a fixture of the Bosnian war of the same decade, in which 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped.

In the Second World War, Jewish women were raped by Wehrmacht forces. German women were raped by Soviet soldiers. French women were raped by American GIs.

The violence rarely falls neatly on the sides of “good” guys and “bad” guys because war is hell and in hell everyone is capable of being a monster.

These examples are listed not to compare or undermine what Israeli women went through, but rather to illustrate the long, horrible history of women’s suffering in war and the long history of silence that often accompanies it. Because that’s what war does. It makes us care about some people more and other people less and it achieves this aim through dehumanization.

And what’s the goal of gender-based violence and the objectification of women? Dehumanization.

It’s terrible that Israeli and Jewish women feel abandoned and ignored. I believe that these women experienced sexual violence. I believe they deserve support and to be heard, as survivors and in death.

But what’s less believable is that this is the way they would want their stories to be told, that this is the way they would want to be remembered. Slides containing photos of nameless, faceless women, their bodies contorted, their pants bloodied, shown in a presentation that veered into agitprop. (The claim that Hamas beheaded babies, for example, was repeated at least twice.)

Is this “bearing witness” to the horrors suffered by these victims? Or is this just further exploitation of women’s bodies to drive a political agenda and justify violence? Violence that, every day, is killing women.

Razin Bet Or was emotional during her presentation and I believe her when she says her heart is hurting.

Everyone who took the mic on Wednesday kept saying, “all women matter” and “women everywhere matter,” but I couldn’t help but wonder — which women? There wasn’t even a cursory pass at solidarity or even an acknowledgment of the gender-based harms currently being experienced by Palestinian women, who also feel abandoned by global feminism.

Palestinian women and girls cannot be erased from a conversation about gender-based violence. We need to speak out and care about it all. No “buts” or “ors.” It’s “and.” We must condemn gender-based violence in all of its forms.

Since there are clearly no limits to human suffering, there cannot be limits to our compassion.

So, what is a feminist’s role in all of this?

Writing in the Intercept, Judith Levine says, “Feminism is, at heart, a movement against domination. It is feminist to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Feminism is a movement against violence. It is feminist to denounce barbarity, no matter how enormous the crimes that motivate it.

“To oppose domination and violence, feminists — not as women or mothers, Israelis or Palestinians — must demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege, an arms embargo from the Western powers, and the implementation of a massive humanitarian operation in Gaza.”

So yes, feminists need to speak up — and call for a ceasefire now. That’s the only way that women’s bodies will no longer be, as Razin Bet Or put it, “part of the battlefield.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com