The Great Rape Hoax
How Western Feminists Helped to Generate Consent for the Genocide in Gaza
I pose perplexing questions about the current state of feminism: How is it possible that feminist journalists, indefatigable truth-tellers about the harms of gender identity ideology and male sexual violence, remain silent about the rape of Palestinian women by the Israeli military? Why have they contributed to incendiary discourses in support of Israel’s war on Gaza that has facilitated the rape?
For the past 18 months, the rape of Jewish women has played a crucial role for Israel in legitimising Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. Palestinian women have not only been murdered in their thousands, but their sexed bodies (and those of men) have been transformed into battlefields for sexual violation on which Israel’s fury against Hamas has been avenged, and their genocidal intentions to remove Palestinians from their land acted out.
Rape is almost always weaponised in war: First, as a military and political strategy to humiliate, subjugate, and assert control and dominance over “the enemy”; second, rhetorically, as an accusation to dehumanise the foe and make killing morally justified. All evidence points to Israel, not Hamas, weaponising rape in both senses.
Feminist journalists have revealed their collective Achilles’ heel: they align themselves with the dominant, muscular Zionist ideology of Western heads of state, politicians, and cultural commentators, who demonstrate a cruel disregard for the slaughter and rape of Palestinian women. Not only is this deeply shocking, but I propose it is the harbinger of the moral decline of this wave of Western feminism. Selective empathy for Jewish women and seeming indifference to Palestinian women signals a profound dehumanisation of feminist sensibilities.
A genealogy of this present morally reprehensible moment in feminist history reveals it to have been born out of commitment to Zionist ideology and traced back to the campaign #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew.
1. MeToo, ESPECIALLY If You’re a Jew
Within days of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, Israeli Jewish feminists launched what would become both a grassroots feminist campaign and a potent rhetorical tool in Israel’s military arsenal. The campaign was initially directed at what Jewish feminists describe as “the unforgivable silence” about the rape of Jewish women by UN Women, the United Nations entity dedicated to “gender equality” and “the empowerment of women.”
In the aftermath of 7 October, UN Women published a report about the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the ground in Gaza. Within two weeks, Israel had launched strikes by land, sea, and air. As the international community sought ways to respond to the developing crisis, UN Women pointed to “the gendered impact of the crisis.” This “outbreak of violence and destruction” has displaced nearly 493,000 women and girls from their homes, created a surge of widows, nearly 900 new households run by women, and left 3,103 children without their fathers. The report emphasised that these numbers were set to rise without a ceasefire.
Israeli feminists complain that UN Women were only concerned with Palestinian women and had not acknowledged that “hundreds of Israeli women were brutally burned, beheaded, raped, killed, and kidnapped.” It is very clear, Israeli Jewish feminists insist, that “for UN Women, and the UN as a whole, Jews simply do not count.” The UN Women report refers to “the Hamas attack,” they argue, and not the Hamas “terror attack,” thus implying that Hamas violence is somehow legitimate. The report “actively and knowingly worked to create a false and insidious narrative.” They point out that sexual violence, when systematically committed against the civilian population, is a distinct war crime according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), yet the UN hadn’t invoked it. With this sentiment, the campaign #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew was conceived.
Were these incendiary claims justified? In reality, what MeToo feminists requested from UN Women was unprecedented; they sought to exceed the organisation’s mandate by naming and condemning alleged perpetrators of sexual violence before a thorough investigation had been conducted and without coordination with the United Nations Human Rights Office of The High Commissioner (OHCHR), the UN body responsible for this duty. UN Women had not singled out Israel for a lack of condemnation of sexual violence against Jewish women, as it similarly refrained from condemning conflict-related sexual violence in other countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Colombia, and Mali. While it has made statements regarding rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Syria, and Iraq, these came sometime after the incidents themselves, once the OHCHR had conducted an independent inquiry by placing UN teams on the ground to investigate and document abuses. Making exceptionalism of one group of women—in this case, Jewish women—would have been an anti-feminist act, jeopardising its relationship with the many grassroots women’s groups that see UN Women as the only neutral space where civil society and women’s groups from the Global South maintain a voice.
Nevertheless, the MeToo charge was taken seriously. It successfully united two significant cultural narratives: The first narrative is that women’s claims of having been raped have historically been disbelieved. However, thanks to the #MeToo Movement of 2017, the ubiquity of women’s testimonies of being raped means that women are now believed. The second narrative is that anti-Semitism is pervasive, suggesting that Jewish women, among all women, are still not believed, even when there is clear evidence of rape.
Notwithstanding the unfounded claims about the UN, the MeToo narrative was fully embraced as objective truth by American feminists. Activists and women’s groups protested outside the UN building in New York, dressed in nude bodysuits with red paint splattered between their legs, giving voice to the purported rape of murdered Jewish women and the hostages in captivity. Social media campaigns emerged not only using the hashtag #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew but also another one, #Hamas_Raped_MeToo, targeting UN Women and other prominent figures who had openly sympathised with both Jewish and Palestinian women (e.g., Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, Malala Yousafzai) for their alleged “silence.”
The testimonies of men, not women!
An anomaly was embedded deep in the heart of the MeToo claim; it was not the testimony of women that provided evidence for the systematic rape committed against the civilian population, but rather the testimonies of men. The volunteer first responders took journalists around the attack sites and testified to what they described as instances of rape based on the position and condition of the victims’ bodies. Graphic, pornographic accounts were given, particularly by two men, Yossi Landau and Rami Davidian. Each man is a committed Zionist, and neither produced evidence other than circumstantial that could withstand scrutiny in an official investigation.
Yossi Landau is a religious nationalist activist and the head of ZAKA’s operations in the Southern Region. ZAKA is an ultra-Orthodox religious volunteer organisation specialising in disaster victim identification following emergencies. The male-only volunteers who collect and dispose of bodies receive minimal training and lack professional or medical qualifications. No forensic evidence was gathered, not only because chaos reigned in the days after the massacre but also because ZAKA handled the bodies and transported them to morgues for burial under strict Jewish religious law. Collecting physical evidence of sexual assault, such as semen or DNA samples, was thus impossible, which undermined the potential for judicial proceedings, accountability, and justice in the crucial 48 hours.
Landau is responsible for some of the most lurid and later discredited claims, from rape to beheaded babies to a foetus cut from its mother. He describes his method of determining what had happened to the victims: “When we go into a house, we’re using our imagination. The bodies are telling us the stories that happened to them.” Landau is not alone in using this form of “poetic license” where using one’s imagination quickly became a vehicle of media reportage about the events of 7 October where journalists from legacy to independent media copied and pasted imaginary events, outright lies for certain.
Controversies arose about the reliability of first responder claims. The Israeli military organised a showing of footage (from Hamas’s and other insurgent groups’ mobile phones) to a select group of journalists. Whilst providing clear evidence of the murder of civilians and thus of war crimes, it did not provide evidence for rape but rather fitted scenes of dead bodies into rape narratives. A later film, October 7, synthesised accounts from alternative media with compelling footage from the body cameras of dead Hamas fighters, useful maps of the region, and a minute-by-minute timeline. In televised interviews, Landau is exposed as not being a credible witness and he even goes as far to state that anyone questioning the veracity of his stories should “be killed with Hamas.”
Discussing one claim about finding a pregnant woman whose “stomach was butchered open” and whose “baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed,” he insists to a reporter that “if you want to see the picture, I have the picture of it.” When the reporter apologises that he “can’t see a baby here,” Landau stammers that he “didn’t think when we were, we didn’t think, we didn’t think to camera everything …” The film demonstrates that although Landau cannot substantiate his phantasmagorical claims, this doesn’t mean that Hamas (and other insurgent groups) did not carry out atrocities. The film’s point is that “the fiction of October 7 matters far more than the fact.”
The second main witness, Rami Davidian, is a Jewish settler who was lionised as a hero after claiming to have rescued over 750 Israelis at the Nova music festival, where he claims to have witnessed hideous scenes of rape. One of his most explosive claims featured prominently in a propaganda film, “Screams Before Silence,” which shows Davidian seemingly on the verge of tears in a wooded clearing in southern Israel as he declares,“These trees… I saw girls tied up to every tree here with their hands behind them.” Davidian states:
Someone murdered them, raped them, and abused them here on these trees. Their legs were spread… Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them, someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods… Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here. I had to close their legs and cover their bodies, so no one else would see what I saw. No one can see those kinds of things.
Davidian’s stories were immediately embraced by legacy media outlets, with The New York Times declaring in a glowing review of the film that “the refusal by so many people to acknowledge what happened, often accompanied by sneering derision, makes it necessary.” The day before, an op-ed in the Washington Post cited Davidian’s testimony to insist that compared to “the terrible damage inflicted on the civilian population in Gaza,” the “violence described in Sandberg’s documentary… occupies a different plane of calculated cruelty—indeed, of evil.” The New York Times pulled the Hamas rape story from its podcast due to internal turmoil over the shoddy reporting. Controversies surrounding the article, along with the broader issue of Western media outlets’ pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian bias, are covered here.
The Electronic Intifada points out that the only alleged victim of rape in Sandberg’s film is Amit Soussana, who Hamas held in captivity for 55 days. She does not claim that she was sexually attacked on 7 October but that, in captivity, one of her guards forced her on one occasion to perform an unspecified sexual act. When she first spoke to the media in January 2024, Soussana made no mention of sexual violence. She only gave this account publicly months after her return from Gaza and in the context of a media campaign involving the New York Times, the Sandberg film, and the Israeli government. Moreover, no other Israeli hostage released from Gaza has claimed that they were sexually attacked. Since she does not claim that there are any witnesses, it is impossible to verify or fully discount her claim. However, it is not necessary to do so to refute the Israeli thesis that Hamas leaders ordered or carried out systemic rape and other acts of sexual violence as “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes.” The key point is that even if we take her account to be entirely true, nothing in it sustains the accusation that there was a campaign of mass rape on 7 October or against Israelis held in captivity afterward.
There have also been myriad criticisms of the Los Angeles Times which was obliged to retract its reporting of allegedly official Israel claims of the rape of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants. So too was The New York Times under fire last year when it ran “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” a story that came under its harshest criticism from the Israeli family featured within and from a brilliant exposé by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw that shows how nepotism within the Times led to a shoddily-investigated story that had no facts to substantiate its many claims.
Since 7 October, Davidian has turned his stories into an industry, with endless paid lectures in Israel and the US, and perhaps hundreds of media interviews in which, according to Drucker, “he repeats again and again stories that did not exist.” In 2024, Davidian was selected to light the national torch on Israel’s Independence Day, a prestigious honour bestowed upon him in light of his supposed “heroism,” less than two months after the Hamas attacks. In New York, Davidian posed alongside Israel’s notoriously mendacious UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, whom we will encounter soon.
The investigative Israeli reporter, Raviv Drucker, has examined Davidian’s claims and produced a report to be broadcast by the Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 that describes them as rape fabrications. The channel announced that it now would not air the investigation due to the violent backlash and death threats by fanatical Israeli settlers. Drucker has defended his investigation, stating that Davidian’s lies were “not slight exaggerations” like “mildly inflating the number of those rescued—absolutely not.” Instead, “These are stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred.”
Since the investigative report has been buried, the exact nature and quantity of Davidian’s fabrications remain unclear. However, what is clear, argues the alternative media site, The Grayzone, is that they have had their intended effect. While participating in Israel’s public relations push to manufacture consent for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the “heroic farmer” urged the Israeli government on one podcast: “Wipe out Gaza, there’s nothing good about them.”
The Machismo of Politicians
By 31 October, the then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered his rationale for rejecting a ceasefire for the release of hostages, including women, men, and two children. He testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee about what he had witnessed regarding the slaughter in Israel. Without citing his sources, he evokes gruesome scenes intended to illustrate the savagery of Hamas and the impossibility of negotiating with such an organisation. He concludes, “That is what this [Israeli] society is dealing with.” He outlines the points that became central to the “ethical” case for the genocide: “No nation can tolerate the savage violence,” “Israel has every right to defend itself,” “Israel not only has every right but an obligation to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” “Hamas hides in schools and hospitals using civilians as human shields,” and “a ceasefire would consolidate what Hamas has done and no nation would tolerate it.”
The then US President Joseph Biden, ignoring the record of confirmed deaths that indicated only one baby had been killed, misled the Senate by proclaiming that he had seen “pictures of terrorists beheading children.” He reportedly dismissed advice against repeating unverified reports. Before long, both CNN and the Biden White House were compelled to retract their claims. Nevertheless, Landau’s testimony was circulated globally.
Israel and its supporters were quick to portray anyone who questioned these claims as anti-Semites, complicit in the sexual violence and supporters of terrorism. In early November, Eylon Levy, who was then an Israeli government spokesman, tweeted aerial footage of vast crowds in London calling for a ceasefire, with the comment, “I don’t think London has ever seen such a large demonstration of rape apologists before.”
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had made a statement in November 2023, unequivocally condemning the massacres committed by Hamas but reminding the world that “this did not happen in a vacuum.” The Israeli response was immediate, with officials calling for Guterres’s resignation, while numerous Israeli civil society groups and US Jewish organisations argued that the UN has shown little to no empathy for the Jewish victims of the 7 October attack.
By mid-November, the Israeli Special Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, devoted all his diplomatic energy at the UN Assembly not to finding a resolution to the escalating war but to castigating the UN for its deadly silence regarding violence against Jewish women and connecting it to the Holocaust. He framed 7 October as the day when Israel suffered “its most brutal massacre since the Holocaust.” He insisted that the sexual atrocities were not random acts carried out impulsively but were planned by Hamas. This group, some say, is “more barbaric … even more than the Nazis.” He tweeted that UN Women had “lost every shred of moral credibility” and had “forfeited its right to exist.”
By December, Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu and Biden, neither of whom had been known previously for their concern about male sexual violence, cynically evoked moral justification for a war in the name of Jewish women’s rights not to be raped. Netanyahu co-opted the rhetoric of women’s liberation to advance his war-mongering political goals. He publicly endorsed feminist MeToo claims, stating that anti-Semitism is so deeply ingrained that women’s and human rights groups were “silent because it was Jewish women.” Netanyahu then asked, “I say to the women’s rights organisations, to the human rights organisations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?”
Biden echoed Netanyahu’s condemnation and intoned, “Reports of women raped—repeatedly raped—and their bodies being mutilated while still alive—of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling.” He continued, “The world can’t just look away at what’s going on. It’s on all of us—government, international organisations, civil society, and businesses—to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation. Without equivocation, without exception.”
By December, UN Women was under such pressure that it issued a statement that “unequivocally” condemned the “brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel” and called for “all accounts of gender-based violence to be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted.” The statement emphasises that “all women are entitled to a life, live in safety and be free from violence.” No one was appeased. The Israeli Ambassador, who had proudly posed with Davidian, tweeted in response to the statement, mischaracterising the role of UN Women and denouncing the “so-called condemnation” of Hamas as “yet another moral stain on the UN and its organisations.”
2. The MeToo Feminist Movement
By November 2023, American Jewish journalist Bari Weiss expanded the MeToo accusation of UN anti-Semitism to include all feminist organisations, none of which had “unequivocally condemned the horrors” of Hamas, who “cut limbs and genitals, raped, and abused corpses.” In January 2024, she claimed that not only had the international “supposedly nonpolitical human rights organisations” not commented on “the murder, kidnap, and rape of Israeli girls by Islamist groups,” but the feminists one would expect to care the most—the celebrity feminists and the prominent women’s organisations—“have said and done next to nothing.” She had interviewed the first group of released women hostages, none of whom had experienced rape but, upon questioning, provided hearsay accounts. Undeterred by the lack of women’s first-hand testimonies, she encouraged us to imagine the rape that “might” happen in the future. Issuing a trigger warning, she speculated what the four remaining female hostages must be enduring in “the tunnels.” When Hamas released these women during the January 2025 ceasefire, they were well-fed, well-groomed, had spent their captivity above ground, and had not been sexually assaulted. To my knowledge, Weiss has not acknowledged that her rape predictions turned out to be unfounded.
In the UK, Jewish journalist Hadley Freeman took on the mantle of handling this subject. Freeman also criticises feminists who offer any pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist analysis and provides allegedly irrefutable evidence of Hamas’s sexual crimes in the form of testimony from former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In a move demonstrating an astonishing lack of journalistic ethics, Freeman fails to properly cite Blinken’s words, setting his words up in quotation marks to note the citation. Instead, she continues down the path of what has become part and parcel of media reporting on Gaza where alleged atrocities are taken as facts, quotation marks and references completely disposed of, and where one person’s claim is accepted as fact. Freeman writes without citing Blinken, who himself had not provided the source of his information:
The father’s eyes were gouged out, the mother’s breasts sliced off, the eight-year-old girl’s foot cut off, and the six-year-old boy’s fingers cut off. They were all then executed, and their killer then sat down and ate the breakfast the family had been enjoying […] pregnant women were sliced open, and their foetuses beheaded, elderly women raped.
On the heels of Freeman’s piece, British Jewish journalist Nicole Lampert also claims that feminists in the UK are anti-Semitic if they don’t immediately and unequivocally support Jewish feminist’s propositions. She claims that despite alleged irrefutable evidence of rape by Hamas, Israeli Jewish victims are disbelieved. The majority of groups in the UK committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) had a threefold, completely inadequate response: keeping quiet, disbelieving the victims, or insinuating “they deserved their fate.” Lampert quotes the words of a ZAKA first responder, “[A] woman was sexually terrorised with a knife lodged in her vagina and all her internal organs removed; dead women were stacked on top of one another at the Nova festival, their clothing torn at the top while their bottoms were completely bare.”
There is neither empirical evidence of an orgy of sexual violence since the OHCHR investigation had not yet been carried out, nor is there evidence that prominent Western feminists—including those affiliated with or having founded campaigns to end VAWG—were indifferent to the sexual violence against Jewish women or believed that the Hamas rape was legitimate. In contrast, most of the most prominent feminists in the UK fully embraced the MeToo thesis.
By early December 2023, before any official investigation had been conducted, Julie Bindel reflected the identical claims made first by Israeli MeToo feminists. She argues that the UN and other international bodies have dismissed or downplayed reports of sexual violence during the attack, prompting the hashtag #MeTooUnlessUrAJew. Bindel also asserts, without providing evidence of the feminists to whom she is referring, that while they call for an immediate ceasefire (implying that calling for a ceasefire is a moral failing) and roundly condemn Israel’s attack on Gaza, they fail “to show any solidarity with the victimised Israeli women.” She is “appalled to see so-called feminists staying silent about the brutal and widespread use of rape by Hamas terrorists, simply because Israeli Jewish women are the wrong type of victim.” She argues that “unfortunately, the Israeli women murdered after being raped are unable to provide personal testimony.” She insists, nevertheless, that she knows for a fact that women were raped because of the circumstantial evidence provided by the eyewitness accounts of men.
The Times journalist Janice Turner adopted a familiar censorious tone against UN Women and the still unnamed UK women’s organisations. She described the equivocating over the belief in Jewish women’s testimony as “inexcusable and abhorrent.” She cements the idea that evidence for rape had been established since Hamas had strewed it everywhere, from “open-legged girls with no underwear covered in semen” to the film of “the girl in the bloody jogging bottoms.” By sleight of hand, she also recognises that evidence didn’t exist. She says, since semen and DNA evidence have been lost in the chaos, “all we can do is believe Jewish women.” But what Turner blindly repeats is not testimonies of women but of men, stating, “Or if misogynists and antisemites struggle with that, they could at least believe Hamas rapists who are so proud of their crimes.” In an inversion of truth, she says Hamas’s footage (shown at the Israeli military screening screening) is “the ultimate revenge porn.” Rather, the pornographic images were those evoked by the first responders, which were repeated as rape atrocity pornography, and never, as we shall see below, recorded by Hamas.
Feminist journalists have shaped the perspectives of their followers in a social media world where anyone can claim authority on Israel/Palestine, regardless of their ignorance. The digital landscape has been flooded with women vociferously repeating the feminist narrative of rape atrocities against Jews as being objectively true. This feminist writes on X: “Hamas cut the live baby from a Jewish woman’s belly on 10/7 while her one child watched with an amputated hand, and her other child watched with an amputated foot, and the dad couldn’t watch because they’d gouged his eyes out.”
By December 2023, a potent narrative had been constructed to which high-profile feminists argued all right-minded people—those who are not misogynistic, anti-Semitic, faux feminists—should unconditionally comply to demonstrate fealty to our Jewish sisters. We must believe as an objective fact that Jewish women were systematically raped and then killed, even though no woman is alive to tell us; we must, as a substitute for direct testimony, accept the eyewitness accounts of men, whose voices can stand in for women’s voices; we must believe that strewn underwear was smeared with semen, even though there is no corroborating forensic evidence; and we must believe that Hamas took photos of themselves raping, even though only a select group of journalists were allowed to view the footage and none has seen rape.
In other words, feminists were contributing to what Dr Ruchama Marton, the Israeli founder of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, says was the “over-consideration” of rape which Israel was using to galvanise public opinion against a ceasefire admitting, “It is hard for me to say it, but [rape] fuels the revenge and hatred, they go together now, there is not one first and then the second, they are almost one thing[…]It is a war of revenge, a war of hatred, and in this atmosphere, the women’s rape is critical. Men dominate this country, and this is exactly the language they understand. It fuels the war machine.”
Feminists who expressed any criticism of Israel were castigated and marginalised by MeToo feminists. Southall Black Sisters made a public statement on 20 October 2023 wherein they mourned both the loss of life and the violent attacks on persons “in Gaza and Israel.” They also mourned the Israeli war on Gaza, including “the cutting off of food, fuel and medical supplies, electricity and water in contravention of international law.” Southall Black Sisters were appalled by some British media’s coverage of the events and “the failure of practically every British politician to call for an immediate ceasefire.” They encouraged the British government to call for a de-escalation of hostilities and for Israel to adhere to international law. They highlighted that conflict zones “foster an environment conducive to an increase in violence against women, girls, and other vulnerable groups … Palestinians live under an apartheid system, and the suffering of millions of innocent children, women, and civilians, both Israelis and Palestinians, can end only when Israel’s occupation ends.”
Southall Black Sisters say they were heavily criticised by feminists working in the VAWG sector. By December, they issued a follow-up statement to dispel any doubts regarding their condemnation of the use of rape and sexual violence “as a weapon of war,” but maintained that nothing could justify the unprecedented level of killing since the beginning of the 20th century, which has disproportionately impacted Palestinian women and children. They rejected the prevailing perspective that has come “to dominate the mainstream (feminist) narrative” and expressed their outrage at this “ideological weaponisation” used to silence criticism of Israel.
There has been a notable silence from self-proclaimed “leftist feminists,” not regarding Israeli women, as Jewish feminists claim, but about the horrors faced by the Palestinian people and the ongoing genocide. In February 2025, feminist journalist Raquel Rosario Sanchez describes how, apart from the high-profile feminists mentioned above, the majority of feminists in the Global North, particularly in the United Kingdom, whether on the left or right, have been shamefully silent on Israel’s assault on Gaza, with many either downplaying the gravity of the situation or skirting around the issue. Rosario Sanchez directly critiques what she calls the “double standard within the feminist movement” and draws attention to the fact that “feminists speak about the rights of women all over the world, but Palestinian rights still represent the greatest taboo of the feminist movement.” Support for the pro-Palestinian position is “The Great Unspeakable.” There have been more articles mocking and infantilising those who are pro-Palestinian, such as the writing of reactionary feminist cultural commentator Mary Harrington, and by free speech proponents who decry cancel culture but attempt to silence criticism of Israel, than commentaries that set out the complexity of the political situation.
Rosario Sanchez points out how pro-Palestinian sympathetic voices are “targeted and intimidated shutting their mouths and toeing the previously approved line.” She is not a stranger herself to the “cancellation” process. Where she was once the target of transactivists who attempted to silence her critique of gender identity ideology and its consequences for the erosion of women’s rights, Rosario Sanchez has more recently become the target of feminists for her unapologetic pro-Palestinian views and anti-Zionist legally protected beliefs. Her article in The Critic tells us that feminists have advocated that she be sacked from her job, removed from positions, and left without her professional reputation intact.
3. Rape by Hamas or Rape Atrocity Propaganda?
It’s hard enough to determine the facts of sexual violence during a war; it’s even harder when avenging sexual violence has become a pretext for continuing the war that kills innocent women, children, and men. How can any factual account be established when misinformation is rampant, and Israel, supported by ideologically driven feminists, controls the narrative while encouraging the media’s worst suspicions?
The legal body authorised to investigate issues of sexual violence and its scale, the OHCHR, was initially barred by Israel. Why? The Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, described the Commission as “terror-supporting” and steeped in “Jew-hatred.” Israel commissioned an alternative team from the UN Office of the Representative to the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, led by Pramila Patten. Patten’s team spent two weeks in February 2024 in Israel and the West Bank, where Israel controlled her access to information—including sites, reports, and witnesses.
Patten was unable to address the two questions for which many were seeking answers: the allegations of sexual violence and its scale, and the identity of the perpetrators. Her team did not have a UN mandate to investigate sexual crimes on the ground but to “gather information,” where the evidence gathered could not meet the criteria according to legal standards. Crucially, she was unable to obtain a single firsthand testimony or video proving the allegations of mass rape, nor did she interview any survivors, despite publicly appealing for survivors to come forward and speak confidentially.
By March 2023, Patten had produced a report that concluded that “in the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified.” She was “unable to establish the prevalence of sexual violence, and the overall magnitude, scope, and specific attribution of these violations would require a fully-fledged investigation.” While the team spoke with returned hostages, the report does not indicate that they had been sexually assaulted. She did conclude there were “reasonable grounds” to believe sexual violence had taken place in several locations, including “rape and/or gang rape.” She relied for this conclusion on first responders’ graphic testimony and circumstantial information. In other words, Patten had built a tenuous case for rape that she could not investigate. Casting a critical eye on the Patten Report has been left to alternative media sources: The Grayzone, the Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, The Intercept, and the Palestine Chronicle.
The Patten Report served as the reference point for understanding the sexual violence of 7 October and continues to do so today. At a special session to discuss her report, Patten insisted that her findings constituted a moral imperative for a ceasefire and warned that sexual violence should never be used as a tool to “legitimize further violence in the region” or “to serve wider political and military ends.” Nevertheless, the as-yet unproven allegation of rape was utilised by all legacy media and headlines worldwide to announce that Hamas’s rapes had been “confirmed” and by Israel as propaganda to continue its bombardment of Gaza with impunity. Erdan tweeted that the Report “… finally recognises the sexual crimes that were committed during the Hamas massacre. Will this wake you up?! Will you understand that a ceasefire means abandoning the female Israeli hostages in Gaza to continually being sexually abused by Hamas?”
The OHCHR conducted a formal, independent inquiry that examined violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, as well as possible international crimes committed by all parties between 7 October and 31 December 2023. This inquiry culminated in an extensive report published in June 2024 stating that it:
… reviewed testimonies of rape obtained by journalists and the Israeli police but has not been able to independently verify such allegations owing to a lack of access to victims, witnesses, and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies [and] also unable to verify reports of sexualised torture and genital mutilation. In addition, the Commission found some specific allegations false, inaccurate, or contradictory and discounted them from its assessment. (paragraph 26, emphasis mine)
The pornographic videos that politicians and select journalists have testified to seeing do not exist, a fact confirmed by the Inquiry that reviewed thousands of photos and dozens of hours of video provided by the Israeli government or obtained from open sources. Its report also detailed how the military systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to sexual and sex-based violence, including forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualised torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment. Israeli soldiers filmed themselves ransacking homes, rummaging through drawers filled with lingerie to mock and humiliate Palestinian women, referring to them as “sluts.” This sexual and sex-based violence extended to men, with the report highlighting that males were repeatedly filmed and photographed by soldiers while subjected to forced public stripping and nudity, sexual torture, and inhumane treatment. It concluded that sex-based violence was intended to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian population as a whole.
In late autumn 2024, Hamas has requested a third UN investigation, but Israel has refused it. Patten suggests that Israel is currently obstructing the UN from investigating sexual crimes, fearing that it would require granting access to explore allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli detention.
In conclusion, after 18 months, there are still no complainants willing to testify to having been raped. Indeed, the Chief Prosecutor of Israel, Moran Gez, admitted in January 2025 that she has not identified a single victim for whom a prosecution can be brought. She points out that, sadly, there is a vast gap between public perceptions and what has been presented in the media versus the factual reality. In her view, the reason for this gap is either that the victims were murdered or that women who were raped are not prepared to reveal it. However, this frequent rationale for why no victims have been identified cannot account for the total lack of forensic, visual, or credible eyewitness evidence, especially given that the sexual attacks were supposedly so widespread on 7 October that they were planned, orchestrated, and systematic.
4. The Israeli Rape of Palestinian Prisoners: “Welcome to Hell”
Palestinian women would presumably be no less reluctant or ashamed than Israeli women to come forward as victims of rape or sexual assault. Yet, they have provided multiple firsthand accounts of sexual assault by the Israeli military, to which UK feminists seem completely indifferent.
A rushed process of detention followed on 7 October, in which more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, both military and civilian, were converted into a network of detention camps. Three major Israeli rights groups, including the Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and B’Tselem, an Israeli information centre that documents human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, all based on the protocols adopted at legal hearings, legal complaints, lawyer documentation, and detainee testimony, describe abuse as a feature of Israeli detention, and a breach of the international legal prohibitions of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. These spaces operate as torture camps where every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering.
There has been an increase in the number of women in Israeli custody since 7 October, accompanied by an intensification of sexual assault in detention, according to Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Israel and the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, the nearest organisation in Palestine comparable to the CWJ (Centre for Women’s Justice, co-founded by Julie Bindel) in the UK, produced a report in February 2024 in a joint submission to the UN. Multiple women describe invasive strip searches, with detainees being kept naked for long periods, asked to open their legs and hold degrading positions while male guards looked on and masturbated or threatened rape. Women reported being forced to strip and stand naked in front of an Israeli flag. They also reported that soldiers took degrading pictures of them and put them online. Such photographs are a form of blackmail. One woman said the soldiers told her, “No one will marry you, no one will touch you after they see what we did to you.”
Welcome to Hell is the name of a report by B’Tselem investigating prisoners held in the detention centres since 7 October. It has uncovered a systemic, institutional policy focused on continual abuse and torture. Various testimonies revealed repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity, by soldiers or prison guards as an additional punitive measure. The male witnesses who gave testimonies to B’Tselem described blows to the genitals and other body parts; the use of metal tools and batons to cause genital pain; the photographing of naked prisoners; penises being grabbed; and strip-searches for the sake of humiliation and degradation. The testimonies also reveal cases of gang sexual violence and assault committed by a group of prison guards or soldiers.
In July 2024, nine soldiers were arrested for the brutal rape of a male detainee was partially caught on video. He had been held at Sde Teiman, a detention centre that one lawyer described as “brutal and beyond imagination.” The man suffered from a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs. He was later transferred to hospital, unable to walk and with “gruesome injuries that required surgery.” The Israeli military police opened an investigation into this case when the footage became public and shared on social media. A gang of ultra-right-wing Israeli nationalists (whose ideology, as described earlier, is shared by Yossi Landau) stormed the facility alongside Knesset members, protesting the soldiers’ arrest. Intense debates erupted in the Knesset and on Israeli TV about the legality or illegality of raping Israel’s “enemies.” Ultra-right-wing Israeli nationalists took to the streets to demand that the “heroes” of the rape be freed, a view echoed across Israel’s political spectrum, even in centrist news. The rapists themselves were given airtime to defend their actions, and media personalities endorsed the gang rape as a weapon against Palestinians, none of whom they say are innocent. Two Israeli women journalists added their voices to this chorus, warning against drawing a “false symmetry” with Hamas’s “sexual atrocities” on 7 October. They found “infuriating” any attempt to make this rape incident equivalent to rape by Hamas.
The OHCHR released a press statement contradicting Western media, which treated the sexual torture scandal as a deviation. The torture and sexual violence at Israel’s Sde Teiman prison only represent the tip of the iceberg. First, Israel’s widespread and systemic abuse of Palestinians in detention and arbitrary arrest practices has gone on for decades. The journalist Azadeh Moaveni (bio), who has seen the terrible violence enacted on women in wartime in every conflict she has covered (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Ukraine), reminds us that many Palestinian women, especially young women, and political activists, sexualised abuse was part of life under occupation long before 7 October: being called a whore and strip-searched at checkpoints on the way to work or school, being pulled from bed and dragged barefoot through the streets in nightclothes and without a headscarf; being held up at a checkpoint while pregnant or forced to give birth behind a checkpoint wall; being subjected to invasive and degrading strip searches during detention; facing the sexual blackmail where images or video footage showing women undressed or in degrading positions were used to extract a confession or collaboration. The OHCHR statement says the previous sexual violence, torture, and degrading treatment of thousands of Palestinian men and women who have been detained, mostly without trial, is now exacerbated by the absence of any restraints by the Israeli State since 7 October.
In the eighteen months since Israel’s war in Gaza began, Israeli soldiers have openly boasted about their misogyny in broad daylight and shared an abundance of videos and photographs documenting abuses against Palestinians, including looting homes in Gaza, mockingly wearing women’s underwear, defiling mosques, and beating and humiliating detainees. A 90-minute documentary has been produced about this phenomenon, utilising footage pulled from soldiers’ personal Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube accounts. This is further compounded by the understanding that there will be no repercussions.
In March 2025, the OHCHR, which had reported months earlier on the human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine (as described above), submitted a report on the “sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence by the Israeli Security Forces since 7 October 2023” titled More Than a Human Can Bear. The Commission concludes that Israeli detention is characterized by widespread and systematic abuse, as well as sexual and sex-based violence that has increased significantly in severity and frequency since 7 October, following orders from the Minister for National Security, Ben Gvir. The frequency, prevalence, and severity of these crimes have led the Commission to conclude that sexual violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilise, dominate, oppress, and destroy the Palestinian people. Forms of sexualised torture, including rape and violence targeting the genitals, are inflicted with either explicit orders or implicit encouragement from the top civilian and military leadership. Sexual and sex-based violence was intended not only to humiliate, punish, and intimidate individual Palestinians but also the civilian population as a whole.
5. Palestinian Feminists Speak Out!
The academic and Middle East expert Maryam Aldossari writes about the unified outcry and empathy from prominent UK feminists towards Jewish women, but notes their lack of concern regarding the sexual violence faced by Palestinian women. The main question she asks is: “Why have the sexual assaults of Palestinian women not provoked a similar outrage?” Aldossari argues that “the genocide in Gaza has highlighted the feminist movement’s failings, casting a shadow of shame over it.”
Why are the stories of Palestinian women ignored by feminists? Increasingly, Aldossari believes this is not a lapse of attention to what is happening in Gaza “but wilful blindness—the consequence of a moral compass that may be broken beyond repair.” Remaining silent on one of the worst atrocities against women in our lifetime is indefensible. The feminist silence on the necessity of a ceasefire in Gaza “represents not only a moral lapse but also a political one.” Ultimately, she argues, “the selective empathy of Western feminists helps to reinforce power structures that perpetuate the cycle of violence.” Silence is not a neutral stance but a passive endorsement of the ongoing tragedy.
When feminists ignore the horrifying images from Gaza, it signals a profound dehumanisation of Palestinian women. When 70% of those killed are women and children; when Palestinian women are digging through rubble to find their missing children; when mothers are holding their lifeless babies; when families are burning to death in tent camps while they sleep; when mothers watch their children die from hunger as a result of Israel’s starvation campaign; and when children cry for food amidst famine conditions, silence is a betrayal of feminist principles. The deliberate focus away from Palestinian suffering “signals a loss of direction in the feminist movement,” argues Aldossari, and “shows that those leading it, many of whom were once trusted, are harbouring anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia.” “Even the bare minimum expectation—to acknowledge the struggles of Palestinian women enduring systemic marginalisation—has not been met.”
Aldossari points out that when Western feminists embrace the portrayal of Israel as just an underdog hitting back at terrorism, any criticism of Israeli actions is swiftly branded as anti-Semitism. The moral imperative that Hamas, rather than the Israeli government, bears responsibility for Israel’s starvation, slaughter, sexual humiliation, and sexual violence facilitates the complete dehumanisation of Palestinian women and men. From the outset of the war on Gaza, an unsettling narrative has permeated Western media, portraying Israel as a paragon of civilisation starkly contrasted against the bastion of backwardness that is the Middle East. The narrative that Israel upholds civilisational values and is a safe haven for women and “LGBTQ communities” is signified by the photograph of a triumphant gay Israeli soldier obscenely holding up the Pride Flag against the backdrop of the desolation he and his colleagues have wrought.
The symbolism of Israel as a progressive culture, a bastion of women’s equality, and a safe space for homosexuality, while Palestinian men are portrayed as bestial and oppressive towards women, serves as a public relations exercise that conceals certain truths: Israel is not free from homophobia, Palestine is not a fundamentalist Islamic territory, and the Palestinian approach to homosexuality is more complex than these reductive discourses convey. Moreover, in Israel, the male machismo associated with war provides the social context for an already existing problem of domestic violence to be exacerbated, according to the Israel Observatory on Femicide.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective, a US-based organisation of Palestinian and other Arab women and feminists, contends that Israeli propaganda portrays Palestinian men as violent and regressive, even though it is Israeli men who routinely sexually violate women. Since 7 October, Palestinian men have been depicted as inherently misogynistic and barbaric, despite daily footage showing them digging their children out of the rubble, rushing them to hospitals, or screaming in agony over their dead daughters’ bodies. Concurrently, the Israeli state (its judiciary, army, and penal system) commits acts of sexual violence, sexual humiliation, and torture with apparent global impunity. Palestinian women are not calling out to Western feminists to defend them from their allegedly brutish menfolk; they are pleading to anyone who will listen to be protected from the very Western warmongers that feminists have been actively helping facilitate.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective reminds us that rape and the threat of rape have been indispensable for the success of the Zionist project. Rape and the threat of sexual violence have loomed over Palestinian women since Israel’s creation and thereafter. They thus cannot be disassociated from colonialism, a term that raises the hackles of many feminists despite its accuracy. Grasping Israel’s colonial enterprise is critical to comprehending the historical circumstances that have produced and continue to reproduce the present sexual oppression of Palestinian women.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes how terrorism was adopted as a military strategy by David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. Pappé quotes Ben-Gurion’s directive from 1948 regarding how operations can be carried out “either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously … In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Ben Gurion described in his diary one of the state’s earliest secrets as a “horrific atrocity” An army unit in 1949 took a Bedouin teenage girl captive, took turns to rape her till she was unconscious, and then killed her. He writes that this was indicative of a much larger problem where the Zionist forces went “rogue,” noting, “The situation in the army is very bad,” including “the looting, rape, and murder, which had taken place in the course of the war.”
What we would now term ethnic cleansing involved the forced exodus of 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from their towns and villages. At Deir Yassin village, for example, at least ninety-three Palestinian villagers were killed in cold blood, and a number of the women were raped before being killed. Of those killed, thirty were babies. At Tantura village, 110-230 Palestinian men were killed, and all the women and children were gathered in the place where the bodies of their dead husbands, fathers, and brothers were dumped. The Deir Yassin and Tantura atrocities are only two cases of many similar brutalities that occurred. They greatly influenced the fear and flight of Palestinians in other villages and led to the entrapment of Palestinians in Gaza as permanent refugees.
Tamam Mohsen, a Palestinian academic and journalist, describes how the psychological and physical torture of Palestinian women prisoners since 7 October must be understood within the ongoing context of sex-based humiliation, which Palestinian women have faced in all aspects of their lives since the establishment of Israel, in clear violation of international laws and conventions. The conquest of land and the expulsion of Palestinians have gone hand in hand with sexual violence, and it is through this project that Israel has maintained its exogenous polity since 1948.
To commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in November 2024, the Palestinian Feminist Collective urged feminists and all people of conscience to confront Israeli policies that use the language of women’s liberation to justify genocide and military occupation. There was no response from feminists. Ironically, it was left to Hamas on International Women’s Day the following year, 2025, to make a public statement valuing Palestinian women’s dignity and strength:
[W]e recognise and appreciate the vital role of Palestinian women in our people’s struggle … [They] have set the finest examples of legendary steadfastness, determination, and strong will. They continue to raise and prepare generations, uphold national rights and identity, defend values, and resist the enemy’s plans to displace our people and erase our cause and sanctity.
“But do you condemn Hamas?” is the question that has been constantly posed to Palestinians and allies who seek a decolonized and liberated Palestine. The question not only reduces 75 years of settler colonial history to a simple yes or no answer but also focuses on individual feelings: one must condemn Palestinians before one can even mention, much less condemn, the genocidal onslaught that has claimed thousands of lives. This call to condemn is a trap “designed to ensnare the already condemned.” Aldossari points out that the feminist silence regarding the sexual violence inflicted by Israeli soldiers, along with their fixation on Hamas, contradicts the very principles that feminism claims to uphold. She insists that “instead of the worn-out question asking everyone to denounce Hamas,” she is “turning the tables.” She asks feminists: “Can you condemn Israel’s actions and the ongoing oppression of Palestinians?”
6. The Moral Decline of Feminism
Almost universally, gender-critical feminist journalists have signed the October Declaration. A list of signatories can be found here. Signatories endorse the interpretation provided by British Friends of Israel: 7 October was “a brutal terrorist attack” on a Western civilised democracy that “resulted in murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping.” Any failure to “use the correct language,” for example, by describing Hamas as “‘militants’” or “‘fighters,’” “creates the false impression that Hamas and Israel’s armed forces are morally equivalent.” “More Jews were killed that day than on any other day since the Holocaust.” Hamas’s actions “have led directly and indirectly to the tragic deaths of the Palestinian civilians.” Julie Bindel tweeted her reason for becoming a signatory: “It’s time to take a stand for civilisation.”
Nicole Lampert admits to feeling rage at those organisations that she alleges see Hamas as “resistance fighters.” She accuses the UN of encouraging Hamas, starting with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who she alleges “gave succour to the terrorists by saying the 7 October massacre “did not happen in a vacuum.” She also accuses the UNWRA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees that has supported the relief and human development of Palestinians since 1948 when they became refugees) of perpetuating Israel’s war by calling the grandchildren of those who “left” Israel in 1948 “refugees” and encouraging their futile dreams of the “right of return.” Furthermore, she criticises (the still unnamed) women’s charities for hypocrisy, noting their failure to speak out against the sexual violence perpetrated on 7 October, which has set the feminist movement back decades.
The journalist and gender-critical activist Helen Joyce, Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters, opposes—like I do—the philosopher Judith Butler’s view that a man can be a woman if he identifies as one. Joyce comments that Butler’s views on Hamas are “loathsome beyond words.” Butler described the events of 7 October as better understood as “neither antisemitic nor a form of terrorism, but “armed resistance’ to colonial rule, apartheid, and statelessness.” She suggests that when discussing Hamas, it is entirely appropriate to remember Israel’s own historical and ongoing violence waged against Palestinians. Joyce disregards the historical context to which Butler refers and chooses to highlight Hamas rape as the ultimate horror, placing it above the slaughter of civilians by Hamas (and other insurgent groups) as well as the Israeli military. She responds to Butler by asking: “Rape as ‘uprising’?”
Similarly, Janice Turner illustrates Palestinian feminists’ point that Western feminists are completely insensitive to the Palestinian historical context. The Nakba (catastrophe) is the term Palestinians use for the forced expulsion, massacre, and rape perpetrated by Zionist militias in 1948 and the ongoing occupation. Janice Turner states that, although she is aghast at Israel killing Palestinian civilians and at settlers seizing Arab land, the context of illegal occupation is “not relevant” to rape by Hamas since “one universal principle transcends all else: rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity.” Her singular focus on rape is so all-consuming that she deems it to be the existential war crime. In contrast, Israel’s war on the civilian population, including the killing of thousands of children, constitutes war crimes against humanity so egregious that the ICJ (International Court of Justice), the highest court in the world, has ruled that Netanyahu is a war criminal.
Turner’s priorities demonstrate what Palestinians attempt to remind us of but whose cries fall on deaf ears. Pro-Israel feminists fully embrace the significance of the Holocaust, finding the memory of this historical event a motivation for the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. In contrast, they not only disregard the importance of the Nakba for Palestinians, and whose horrors continue to unfold in the present with absolute impunity given to the Zionist project by Western leaders, but they castigate as anti-Semitic those who apply a historical lens to the Palestinian motivation for 7 October.
Immediately after 7 October, Julie Bindel criticised “so-called feminists” who did not endorse the MeToo campaign for abandoning the feminist principle that rape is rape, regardless of the victim or the perpetrator. She wrote: “Rape is rape, whether or not you like the victim, and a rapist is a rapist, even if you support his cause.” She has reneged on her principles. Bindel has not once condemned Israeli soldier rapists, even though she supports their Zionist ideological cause.
Besides the silence regarding rape, feminists overlook the significant sexual and reproductive harm faced by Palestinian women that the OHCHR 2025 Report outlines. In the everyday lives of Palestinian women in Gaza, the importance of biological sex is amplified under war conditions. The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system—exacerbated by the lack of water and access to sanitation facilities—has inflicted severe harm on women, affecting all aspects of reproduction, including pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum recovery, lactation, and the inability to manage postpartum bleeding and menstruation hygienically and with dignity.
Shamefully, feminists remain silent when their speculations about Hamas are proven wrong and the subsequent evidence contradicts their views. Having disseminated misinformation about an organised, systematic orgy of rape, they have not retracted their allegations in light of the 2024 OHCHR inquiry, which reported that there is not a single victim of rape of an Israeli woman for whom a prosecution can be brought. Nor, incidentally, have they mentioned that the head of ZAKA himself has been a suspect in multiple rape cases.
The narrative about the soldier Naama Levy, whose bloodied jogging bottoms had become the main symbol and irrefutable evidence of Hamas’s “mass rape” at the Nova festival, has been proven false. Her pants were bloodied by her hands, which had been tied behind her back while she was sitting. It is now known the Israeli government and Levy’s family always knew this to be the case. Not one feminist has made a retraction. The original Jewish feminists who created the MeToo campaign no longer call, as they had done earlier in their manifesto, for The ICC (International Criminal Court) to investigate rape as a distinct war crime, perhaps because they fear Israel itself might be indicted.
While feminists critique gender identity and condemn trans-identifying men who dress in women’s clothes as misogynistic mimicry and mockery, not one has commented on the obscene selfies taken by Israeli soldiers wearing women’s underwear with their tongues hanging out or strung across the bedroom walls of the ransacked or partially demolished houses of the Palestinian women they have just evicted from their homes or killed.
The manifesto of Hashtag MeToo feminists originally called upon “Humanity worldwide to speak up!” It pointed out that “every woman’s life is equally precious.” It insisted, “No side of any story should be deliberately excluded.” There is a terrible dark irony in these statements. Politicians and cultural commentators have done little else but speak out against the unevidenced systemic rape of Jewish women. “Humanity” has never spoken out on behalf of the well-documented systemic rape and sexual abuse of Palestinian women, either before 7 October or after it. What hope, then, does the ordinary Palestinian woman have of humanity when even avowed feminists turn their faces away from her rape?
Before 7 October, commenting on the paucity of feminist hashtag politics, Julie Bindel wrote: “Spare me hashtag feminism.” Hashtags are “all part of the rich tapestry of communication, but it won’t end male violence or bring about justice for women.” How right she was! After 7 October, she hypocritically endorsed #Me_Too_Unless_Ur_A_Jew. It has not stopped male violence but has rather helped incite it, not only in Palestine but in Israel. Nor has it brought social justice for Palestinian women. Lampert claims that what has set feminism back decades are feminists who are “Hamas supporters.” I argue that if feminism has been set back, it is by the feminist journalists and cultural commentators like her who cite rape not to quell the conflict or call for a ceasefire but to endorse a genocidal war where rape has been pivotal as a lever.
So, I say to journalists such as Bari Weiss, Hadley Freeman, Nicole Lampert, Janice Turner, and Julie Bindel—journalists who claim to expose the truth of sexual politics and male power—you have failed miserably! The rape you have left unreported is that of Palestinian women, evidence of which has been thoroughly documented through UN investigations, organisations such as B’Tselem, or alternative media. The most accurate, objective, and thus ethical feminist hashtag to tout, if you insist on lowering feminist politics and analysis with slogans, should have been: “#MeToo Unless You’re a Palestinian.”
With “feminism” like theirs, who needs misogyny?
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