New Yorker Columnist: Israelis Are ‘Weaponizing’ Oct. 7 Sexual Violence and ‘Demonizing’ Hamas
The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The 12-word title of Masha Gessen’s recent offering in The New Yorker hints at the hatchet job that follows.
In “What We Know About the Weaponization of Sexual Violence on October 7th,” it becomes apparent that Gessen is not, as any reasonable person might think, commenting on how Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war during its October 7 invasion.
Instead, Gessen puts her best effort into supposedly demonstrating how Israel has weaponized Hamas’ October 7 atrocities.
She opens the piece by quoting Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is apparently, by virtue of being a criminologist and feminist scholar, deemed “more qualified” than anyone to answer whether rape and gang rapes were part of Hamas’ attack.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare, was suspended from her job in March after comments she made on a podcast with “three Palestinian American academics” were revealed by an Israeli news channel.
1/ Why is @mashagessen denying Hamas war crimes in the @NewYorker? The rape of Israeli women and girls by Hamas terrorists on October 7 are not just allegations. They are well-documented with witness testimony.https://t.co/NMyaI85CMs
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 21, 2024
Gessen’s quoting of Shalhoub-Kevorkian is grossly deceptive. The academic, readers are told, spoke with “confidence and care” when she put the sexual violence of October 7 into “historical context”:
Rapes, abuses, sexual abuses, gang rapes—it always happened in wartimes,’ she said. ‘It always happened.’ She had written about this wider history, she said, and she had written about the history of Jewish Israeli soldiers, back in 1948, using sexual violence against Palestinians. ‘Abuses and sexual abuses happen,’ she said. ‘And they shouldn’t happen. And I will never approve [of] it, not to Israelis, not to Palestinians, not in my name.’
She was speaking as a Palestinian. Next, she spoke as a feminist:
‘I don’t go and interrogate the rape victims. If a woman said she was raped, I will believe her. I do not need evidence, and I don’t want to go check facts, to be honest. This is my opinion.’
These remarks alone are grotesque, not least because they inaccurately suggest rape was used as a weapon by Israel during the state’s founding in 1948, but also because they minimize the horrors of October 7.
October 7 was not “wartime” — Hamas did not wage war on an army that dark day, when it broke the ceasefire with Israel. Terrorists — aided and abetted by Palestinian civilians — broke into people’s homes, violating and murdering unarmed men, women, and children. The victims were both Israelis, foreigners, and foreign workers.
But more importantly — and more troubling — this was just one of many statements Shalhoub-Kevorkian made on the podcast. She also claimed that Israelis act scared when they walk past her and hear her speaking Arabic on the phone, but added that they “should be scared because criminals are always scared.”
On Zionism, Shalhoub-Kevorkian said it is time to “abolish” the movement for Jewish self-determination, and “only by abolishing Zionism can we continue.”
So, according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, only by eradicating the State of Israel can Palestinians continue. And on the October 7 massacre, she said:
[Israelis] will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies. We stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them.”
Gessen casts her own doubt on whether there is evidence of “widespread, systematic and, particularly brutal” sexual violence, noting in a later paragraph that “most of the women who had been subjected to sexual violence on October 7th were dead. They weren’t coming forward with evidence.”
She claims it is the Israeli government that is amplifying the sexual violence narrative.
There is something deeply ironic in Gessen’s argument that Israel has politicized sexual violence, when she uses the deaths of Israeli women and girls, whose testimonies of the horrors they endured cannot be heard, to criticize the Israeli government.
To bolster her argument, Gessen picks at a February report by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers of Israel, which laid bare the horrific extent to which Hamas brutalized Israeli women.
She states that the “report relied on media articles, television stories, and confidential information that had come through member organizations of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers.” The report’s “weakness,” she concludes, is that “much of the evidence was third- and fourth-hand, as in the case of media accounts that quoted other media accounts that quoted people who said they had witnessed attacks.”
However, Gessen immediately contradicts herself, noting that Hila Tov, a prominent multimedia journalist and activist, conducted the research for the report and that Tov said that “most of the evidence, in the end, came from dead bodies, or, rather, from the recollections and interpretations of volunteers who had gathered the bodies, and from doctors who interviewed survivors.”
The report was based on evidence collected from the scene, testimonies from those who collected bodies, and from doctors who interviewed survivors — the only possible sources of evidence. As a side note, Gessen ignores another piece of compelling evidence that further proves the events of October 7, which is the interrogation videos of Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians in which they admit to raping Israeli women and girls.
Gessen also invites skepticism about the findings of the investigation by Pramila Patten, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, released in March.
In addition to the challenges that are typical of any attempt to document sexual violence, Gessen argues that Israel and October 7 are unique because the victims’ bodies were gathered by “volunteers untrained in forensics” who prioritized a speedy burial as per the Jewish tradition of interring the dead within 24 hours. She adds that “nonetheless,” the report concluded there are grounds to believe that a number of instances of rape and gang rape took place.
Another report that documented October 7 sexual violence by The New York Times in March is branded “controversial” by Gessen. This account, she asserts, included the “sweeping claim” that Hamas commanders had ordered their subordinates to use rape as a weapon of war. She suggests this “raised the bar for any researcher who tried to document the crimes, changing the question from ‘Did it happen?’ to ‘Was it systematic?’”
Gessen cynically suggests that all subsequent reports about October 7 — those she deems “better researched and more comprehensive” — have been “met with disappointment by those who were expecting evidence of systematic crimes.”
Ultimately, we see why Gessen is so determined to undermine the overwhelming evidence of October 7: She believes “Israeli authorities have strategic reasons for claiming that the sexual violence was systematic.”
One reason, she contends, is that Israel is trying to highlight that “however inhumane the Israeli ways of waging war are, the message is, Hamas’s are even worse.” She describes this as a “campaign of demonization” that prompted Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian media to try to “debunk claims that sexual violence occurred on October 7th.”
Aside from the fact that a campaign of demonization against Hamas is probably not a bad thing, given that Hamas is a proscribed Islamist terror group committed to killing Jews and destroying Israel, it is absurd that Gessen manages to find a way to absolve pro-Palestinian activists of what she terms their “equal and opposite campaign of denialism.”
The message is clear: even when pro-Palestinians engage in the most revolting denialism of atrocities, it’s still somehow Israel’s fault.
Gessen closes the piece by juxtaposing what she states are uncorroborated stories of October 7 — “eviscerated pregnant woman; the woman who supposedly had a number of nails driven into her vagina; the claims that eyewitnesses saw Hamas fighters cut off women’s breasts while raping them” — with what she asserts is mounting “evidence of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli facilities.”
First, the accounts she referenced in Israel are not unsubstantiated. Numerous first responders reported finding bodies whose genitals had been mutilated, and these accounts have not been recanted.
It is utterly nauseating to suggest that the horrifying October 7 testimonies are not trustworthy because “rape is common in war and in peace” and that to “convey the trauma of sexual violence, victims and witnesses may feel the need to embellish.” Even more repugnant is the false equivalence between Hamas and the IDF. Testimonies of sexual abuse in Israeli prisons have been propagated by the likes of Euro-Med, which absurdly alleged Israel had trained dogs to rape detainees.
Without directly denying that sexual violence took place on October 7, Gessen suggests the extent of the rapes has been overblown and casts doubt on the severity of the attacks on the victims.
The article is nothing more than an exercise in apologism for the horrific acts of Hamas.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post New Yorker Columnist: Israelis Are ‘Weaponizing’ Oct. 7 Sexual Violence and ‘Demonizing’ Hamas first appeared on Algemeiner.com.