Silence is violence … but not for Jewish women
The #MeToo and Believe All Women brigade are publicly and energetically refusing to believe the first-hand accounts of Israeli women. But I cannot forget this image – as a woman, and a human. Warning: graphic.
By GEMMA TOGNINI
You can see her only from behind. In any other circumstances her long, dark, wavy hair would seem beautifully wild, untamed even. Here, it falls down her slender back, just above where her hands sit, bound and dirtied. Your eyes travel to the bottoms of her khaki pants. They’re filthy and bloodstained in places that speak of the unthinkable.
She’s being led by the elbow, paraded barefoot through a dusty Gazan street. There’s blood on her ankles and arms too. A person, I won’t call it a man (these are the actions of a coward, not a real man), pushes her head roughly as he shoves her into a waiting car to the jeers of bystanders lining the streets.
Where are the modern-day feminists? Where are the #MeToo and Believe All Women brigade?
I’ll offer a couple of answers to start with. They’re publicly and energetically refusing to believe the first-hand accounts of Israeli women, Jewish women. At the very least they’re downplaying and diminishing, gutless in their mealy-mouthed responses to October 7. Or they’re silent altogether. Hiding, cowardly and complicit in their refusal to speak.
These are the progressive feminists who say rape is violence. Unless, of course, it’s the rape of Jewish women, Israeli women. Then, apparently, rape is resistance.
...
The number of women and young girls defending Hamas’s femicide, savagery and brutal subjugation of women as a means of resistance is astonishing. I don’t understand it but I do believe it’s a telling window into both a person’s intellectual soundness and moral compass.
The main reason the image of that young woman continues to haunt me is because every so often, for a brief moment, I imagine it being me. Or my niece. My mother, aunty, sister-in-law or girlfriends. The terror of that thought leaves me breathless.
There is no middle ground here. No sanctuary to be found in sins of omission or words unspoken. The divide between those who deny and deflect and those with the courage to confront grows daily. There is one enemy women in Gaza deserve freedom from, and that enemy is Hamas.
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