hero-israel

[hero-israel]

This shit is so hilarious I had to reactivate this blog just to share it:

Enjoy that תסורח with your הצמ dumbasses.

#Jewish voice for peace #JVP #bds #Christian antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #Cultural appropriation

[hero-israel]

OP would have supported school segregation in the '50s. Southern students were hugely against integration - there is no shortage of pictures of them screaming this - and it could only go forward by acts of the President of the United States, National Guard, and FBI, as ruling-class as you can get.

#Leftist antisemitism #alt-left #horseshoe theory #Columbia university

[hero-israel]

Harvard Kennedy School of Government poll of young adults (age 18-29) regarding the Gaza war:

While only 38% of young Americans tell us that they are following the news about the war between Israel and Hamas very or somewhat closely, the proportion rises among registered voters (45%) and those most likely to vote in November (52%). Overall, we find that Democrats (49%) are more likely to follow this news closely compared to Republicans (32%), and those with a college degree (50%) are more likely to be following these events compared to current college students (39%) and those that never attended (32%).

When young Americans are asked whether or not they believe Israel's response so far to the October 7 attack by Hamas has been justified, a plurality indicates that they don't know (45%). About a fifth (21%) report that Israel's response was justified with 32% believing it was not justified. Across most subgroups, more young Americans say the actions of the Israeli government were unjustified than justified. Republicans see Israel's actions as justified (36% justified, 16% not justified), while Democrats (14% justified, 44% not justified) and independents (19% justified, 30% not justified) feel the opposite is true.

Young Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza by a five-to-one margin (51% support, 10% oppose). No major subgroup of young voters opposes such action.

Asked whether or not they sympathize with various groups involved in the war, we found that majorities of young Americans hold sympathy for the Israeli (52% sympathize) and the Palestinian people (56% sympathize), while they have far less sympathy for their governments (29% sympathize with the Israeli government; 32% with the Palestinian government). Seventeen percent (17%) expressed sympathy toward Hamas; for those who were presented with the information in a split sample that Hamas was an Islamist militant group, sympathy dipped to 13%.

Further down the poll, you can see that I/P was ranked as next-to-last in importance out of 16 issues polled.

Sympathy for Israelis and Palestinians are each at high levels... higher for the latter, which I copingly attribute to underdog syndrome. It clearly matters that most young people don't know what Hamas is, and that probably no one receiving this poll understood what "permanent ceasefire" means. Who WOULDN'T want a permanent ceasefire? But lasting peace is very different from just letting the hostages die in the tunnels and waiting for Hamas to strike again.

Nearly half of young Democrats seeing the Israeli response as unjustified is terrible. If/when violence steps up against American Jewish targets, we must assume they will not take our side.

#israel #palestine #harvard #joe biden #hamas

[hero-israel]

Passover

This potsherd from 475 BC was found on the island of Elephantine, close to the border between Egypt and Nubia, which was home to a small, close-knit Jewish community at the time.⁠

It reads; “To Hoshaya. Greetings! Take care of the children until Ahutab gets there. Don’t trust anyone else with them! If the flour for your bread has been ground, make a small portion of dough to last until their mother gets there. Let me know when you will be celebrating Pascha (Passover). Tell me how the baby is doing!”⁠

Besides a wonderfully evocative peek inside a daily conversation, the sherd contains one of the earliest non-biblical references to #Passover. Passover commemorates the liberation of the ancient Israelites from Egypt and is observed annually by Jewish people all over the world. This year, Passover begins tonight and ends on Sunday 4 April.⁠

You can find out more about this sherd and many other fascinating objects relating to Judaism in our collection in 'The Jewish Journey' by Rebecca Abrams, available in our online shop -> https://www.ashmolean.org/jewish-journey

#passover #judaism

[hero-israel]

Something I've found quite frustrating is that critics of the IDF's conduct in Gaza seem to be making easy and simple (but wrong) accusations, that then allow Israel/the IDF to respond to those accusations and ignore a real but more complicated problem (or at least distract from it).

The prime example of this is food aid: it seems like every criticism on this front is "Israel is stopping food aid entirely because it is deliberately trying to starve Gazans to death!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And then Israeli/IDF spokespeople can go "no, we actually let a lot of food in, here's a photo of all the pallets of food that have gotten into Gaza that no one has picked up and distributed yet" and then not have to talk about how right now the ACTUAL problem seems to be that food aid can't get where it needs to go WITHIN Gaza, and how that is actually at least partially the fault of the IDF invasion because it damaged or destroyed the literal streets trucks of food aid would take to get to where it needs to, as well as the logistical systems to distribute it, plus the fact that getting the food where it needs to go requires crossing areas that the IDF considers open-fire zones, and that sometimes means that food aid convoys get blown up by the IDF even though the IDF should know they're food aid convoys and not terrorists.

And to be fair the other side of the coin is Hamas and other armed groups stealing food for themselves or to sell on the black market, and the third side of the coin is organizations like UNRWA being incompetent at distributing the aid, and that after prodding by the US and others and several catastrophic failures the IDF/Israel appear to be making a serious effort to fix things, but still, people miss the point to make easy (and wrong) arguments.

This is a good summary of why entering Gaza was an obvious trap, why I could never come out fully in favor of it, and why I can't say with any real confidence that it has made anything better. Once you've destroyed a territory's infrastructure and roads, there are only so many times you can say "but that's not the real problem" when people are (allegedly) starving. With the whole world making accusations and asking loaded questions non-stop, just the sound of repeatedly having to answer them makes the reasons seem less important than the crisis. It's just as Colin Powell warned in 2003 - "you break it, you bought it."

[hero-israel]

The independent bookstore preparing to open in my corner of the Boston area is sharing fundraisers for the idiot Columbia kids on Instagram. The fiber arts group I'm a member of sharing memes about those dirty zionists. The comic artist I support on Patreon is having a whole lot of fun with Holocaust inversion rhetoric. The roar is getting so loud in every single alt-y, arty, left-ish, intellectual scene. I rely on Jewish community, I seek out other Jews to share these interests. But it's impossible to ignore that these are becoming my only options. It's like we're being excommunicated.....from these communities that we've fucking bled for, for decades.

Yes. The institutions and norms of American progressive and artistic life were founded or led or strongly influenced by Jewish creativity and philanthropy, and we are increasingly being purged from them as Palestine settler-colonizes Every. Single. Issue. The 2015 movie "Selma" showed Martin Luther King Jr. meeting with white Christian religious leaders but erased all Jewish involvement, erased Rabbi Heschel. The arts, the museum world, the comics industry, even Hollywood... we built these movements and industries, and we're suddenly not good enough to be included anymore.

#leftist antisemitism

[hero-israel]

My Spanish teacher just gave us a mahmoud darwish poem to translate. The war is hardly brought up in my country. So I want to ask you for your opinion of him, since you are the only jewish blog to have mentioned him. From his wiki, it seems he's ok with a two state solution and peace and hated hamas, but he still saw israel as an enemy and a lot of pro palestinians use his poetry to justify their so called resistance which is just antisemitism. Thank you so for your time and may hamas be defeated and the hostages returned!

Thank you for standing with us!

Mahmoud Darwish is worth reading. Even when he says things I disagree with, he opposed terrorism and suicide bombing and at least seemed open to discussing coexistence. More on his overall stances and views here and here.

He was also honest enough to understand the true reason for the world's fixation on Palestine:

"Do you know why we, the Palestinians, are famous? Because you [an Israeli interviewer] are our enemy. Interest in the Palestine question comes by way of interest in the Jewish question. It's you they're interested in, not me. If our war had been with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me. So we are unlucky that our enemy is Israel, which has so many sympathizers in the world, and we are lucky that our enemy is Israel, because Jews are the center of the world. You have given us defeat and renown." --Mahmoud Darwish, 1996

#mahmoud darwish #israel #palestine

[hero-israel]

Can’t wait for the incoming “we don’t have healthcare in America because of military spending to Israel” cries if the $20 billion aid bill to Israel that passed the House today passes the senate but crickets on the $60.8 billion dollar aid to Ukraine that passed the house today as well lol

Online lefties really are morphing rapidly into Newt "we could have had a balanced budget if not for the Endangered Species Act" Gingrich. Welcome to political awareness, Gen Z, you are totally right that money is zero-sum, so everybody who likes the Smithsonian Museum is okay with babies in Gaza starving to death.

And that also goes for Jon Stewart, who had a routine a few weeks ago about how Iron Dome gives you an impressive look at everything you can accomplish if you don't pay for healthcare or education. Stopping the genocidal fascist army from exterminating the Jews IS healthcare.

#leftist antisemitism #israel #gaza #ukraine #jon stewart

[hero-israel]

Honestly for so many antizionists they claim to not be antisemitic but they only disagree with hating Jews they already agree with.

They are “nonviolent peaceful protestors” but if any counterprotestors get beaten up it was because they were being “provocative” and so deserved it.

They seem genuinely baffled that Jews around them are uncomfortable with them supporting ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Levant.

I’m just tired of being gaslit

"Baffled" is the word. The online left-o-sphere is so thoroughly snarled with shared struggle brainworms that they just know what to say, not what it means. I mentioned here not long ago that a contact of mine posted a "river to sea" meme, then backed down and admitted they didn't know which river it was.

[hero-israel]

master post of dogs celebrating passover

#judaism #passover

[hero-israel]

Hi. I want to preface this by mentioning I am a non Jewish supporter of Israel and of the Jewish people, but I have some serious questions that really bother me and make me rethink my position.

Reading up on the beginning of the Zionist movement and its leaders, I cannot help but think, how can they simply ignore that there are already people there, or that said people would be alright with becoming a minority? Did they really think Arabs and arabised people living there would just be alright with it?

I do believe that Jews are indigenous to the land and that it’s only just that they have their homeland back, but I think the way they went about it was wrong. It’s not the fault of the people living there that Romans exiled them after all. Some Zionists leaders admitted that the only way to establish a state was against the will of the native population and that some ethnic cleansing is necessary to achieve it.

I want to support Israel but I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that many innocent people who lived there for generations were kicked out after the lands were bought by Zionists, or ended up ethnically cleansed in the civil war even if they didn’t participate in the hostilities. It feels morally inconsistent to me to just ignore this or brush it aside.

What is your view on all of this?

My view is that it's fine to believe exactly what you said - "the Jews are indigenous, it's only just that they have their homeland back, but the way they went about it was wrong." Nothing in that construction justifies hatred or violence against Jews or Israelis, nor does it prevent building a better future for Palestinians.

Israel exists. It houses half the world's Jewish population and a majority of all Jewish children, mostly descendants of refugees from obliterated communities in the MENA or Europe (more the former). Those political realities matter far more than an essay debate published in 1928. You may have already encountered people who try to relitigate the Civil War by pointing out that Abraham Lincoln unlawfully suspended habeas corpus and didn't even really like black people anyway, so instead of a gruesome and devastating war led by a morally compromised man it would have been better to allow the South to gradually phase out slavery on its own, that it should have happened some other way. Well, it DIDN'T happen some other way, it happened and people well into the 21st century need to move on with life. If anyone in the world had an excuse to cling to bitterness forever, it would be the Jews of Israel vis-a-vis Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Poland and Russia and Germany. So why are the Jews of Israel able to move on with having relationships with all those countries that persecuted and destroyed them? And if they can do it, shouldn't casual observers half a world away do it?

By all means, read up on early Zionist history, see what the ideas were and how they had to change when exposed to real events (and also see how they were specifically opposed to population removal). Some, like Martin Buber, urged a binational state formed cooperatively with Arabs. Ze'ev Jabotinsky warned that Arabs would never accept large numbers of Jews as their equals and that promises of shared wealth were a fantasy, therefore Jews would need to demonstrate military power and win respect and negotiations that way. Albert Einstein had initially hoped for a binational state, but once history happened the way it did, he accepted - and loved - the Israel that he got.

I also think you should look a bit more deeply into just why so many people departed Palestine in 1948, and just how many generations had passed since their own ancestors had in turn immigrated there.

Whatever you may read about the 1920s, or 1940s, you will find nothing that justifies hatred, harassment, violence, or genocide against Jewish people at any place or time, including Israel today. If you truly are a supporter of the Jewish people as you claim to be - and we would be happy to have you - by all means look at the true toll of history and keep speaking up for our protection and our lives.

#israel #palestine #zionism #palestinians #martin buber #albert einstein #ze'ev jabotinsky #ottoman empire #nakba

[hero-israel]

Wrote Oscar Wilde’s father William, an Anglo-Irish surgeon, in 1838 following time spent overseas:

“Were I asked what was the object of greatest interest that I had met with and the scene that made the deepest impression on me during my sojourn in other lands, I would say that it was the sight of the Jews gathering to mourn over the stones of Jerusalem.  It was a touching sight to behold, in front of the Mosque before the western wall, one of the western walls which formed the holy of holies and the ancient temple … it was a touching sight, and one that years will not efface, to witness that mourning group and hear them singing the songs of David beneath the shadow of those very stones that once rang with the same swelling chorus when Jerusalem sat on high.  But not now are heard the joyous tones of old, for here every note is swollen with the sight of Judah’s mourning maidens, or broke by the sobs and smothered groans of the patriarchs of Israel.  But that heart must be sadly out of tune whose chords would not vibrate to the thrilling strains of Hebrew melancholy chanted so sad and low by the sons and daughters of Abraham in their native city.  Much as they venerate the very stones that now form the walls of the enclosure, they dare not set foot within its precincts: for the crescent of the Moslem is glittering from the minaret of Omar, and the blood-red banner of Mohammed is waving over their heads.”…’

His account of his travels was first published in 1840; the passage I quote above appears in a book entitled From Oxford to Rome, and how it fared with some who lately made the journey, published in London in 1847.

Although William Robert Wilde used the term “mourning maidens” most of the women who worshipped at the Kotel were married and many were not young, but otherwise what he writes is a fair summary of the situation surrounding Judaism’s holiest site in the long years of Ottoman rule. 

Here, for instance, is another first-hand account of Jews at the Kotel by a sympathetic nineteenth-century Christian traveller (name not given, though from a seeming hint dropped it may have been Ferguson), which I found in a British newspaper (the Lancaster Gazette) of 16 December 1848:

“Forbidden to approach the site of their Temple, they pay a heavy tax to the Sultan for the miserable privilege of meeting on a small strip of ground adjoining its outer wall, when they put their petitions through the crevices, in the fervent belief that they will find the same acceptance as when offered in the Temple in all its glory.  Once a week [Fridays] they meet thus to pray, and once a week to wail over the desolation of their Temple ….  And thus, week after week, and year after year, and century after century, they have gathered together and wept, till time … has given that grief reverence and majesty for its antiquity alone.  The ceremony to which I refer was, by the sorrowful earnestness of the supplicants, rendered extremely interesting.  Old men were there who had lived all their lives in expectation of the consolation of Israel, and were now about to drop into the grave without seeing that hope fulfilled.  And children were there, brought by their mothers, to join their prayers for the day it might be yet their lot to behold.  But there was one … circumstance which detracted somewhat from the interest of the scene.  Few of the maidens of Israel were there.  Can it be that the allurements and occupations of the present life, and the gay dreams of youth, had tempted them to forget that they were strangers in the land of their fathers?  Perhaps, rather, that years of danger and suffering had taught youth and beauty to shun the evil eye of the Moslem.”

A long and graphic eyewitness account from later in the century sheds further light on the sorry situation.  First published in the London Daily Telegraph, it was reproduced by the Jewish Chronicle (7 January 1870).  Here it is, without further comment from me, for its significance speaks for itself:

“In this clear, bright moisture-free air everything looks so close and near that you fancy you could drop a stone down upon the roofs that lie far away beyond rifle shot and it is only as your eye becomes accustomed to the distance that you take in the grandeur of the city upon which you look…. At your feet is the vast, bare, open space on which once stood the Temple of Solomon – on which now stands the Mosque of Omar. A few Mussulmans [sic] sit smoking gravely under the shadow of the trees planted here and there close beneath the Sacred Shrine … But, unless you wear the turban, there is no entrance here for either Christian or Jew, without special permission. The ground is too sacred, in the eyes of the Muslim, to be desecrated by the foot of the unbeliever….

The most impressive memory I shall ever carry away with me from Jerusalem is that of the Jews weeping before the walls of Zion. The Hebrew population is said, in the guide-books, to be about one-third of the whole city…. The Jews of Zion are neither prosperous, active, nor influential; and, as Muslims and Christians, disagreeing in everything else, agree in oppressing the children of Israel, these have a hard time of it in the city of their fathers. No native Jew can enter the precincts of the Temple, where now stands the Mosque of Omar, without the risk of being maltreated and stoned, if his presence is detected by a Mussulman. Once a week, however, and once a week only, the Jews are permitted by the Turks to come and pray at the foot of one of the high stone walls on which the plateau of Solomon’s Temple is supported. The hour of prayer is fixed, whether by chance or irony, upon the Mussulman Sabbath; at that hour the Jews flock to the narrow strip of ground, enclosed beneath high walls, where alone they can pray in public for the coming of the Messiah, and the restoration of the chosen people to the Promised Land. There are a few Rabbis, clad in long fur-lined cloaks and low-crowned velvet caps; but the great bulk of the worshippers are aged men and women of the poorer sort … 

Men and women stand apart, the worshippers, as they each arrive, taking up their station close to the wall, with their faces buried as far as may be in their slits and fissures. All along the line there rises a murmur of wailing cries and sobs. There are few amongst the company who have not Hebrew books of prayer in their hands, out of which they recite long swings of words chanted to a low sing-song tune. From time to time one of the elders reads out a prayer, and at each pause the chorus of men and women join in with a long wailing cry. But, as a rule, it seemed to me, each person prayed after his own fashion, and the voices rose and fell in a constant ebb and flow of sound; but, as worshipper after worshipper turned away slowly from the wall, after kissing it repeatedly, you could see tears running down their wrinkled cheeks.

The Turkish soldiers were lounging on the parapet of the wall above. In former years, they would throw down stones upon the Jews as they stooped in prayer, or insult them with opprobrious names. Now the power of the West is too much dreaded for the Moslem official to venture upon the exhibition of his contempt for the unbeliever. But, amongst the common folk, who have not the terror of the Pasha before their eyes, the old hatred of creed still survives. On the day when I visited the place of wailing, a group of dark-eyed, bold-faced stalwart Arab women sat with their children, in a corner of the pathway whereon the Jews were praying. An old Jewish dame, very feeble, bent, and wrinkled, laid her large hide-bound prayer-book on a stone beside her while she buried her head in a hole in the wall; forthwith one of the Arab girls stole up stealthily and carried off the book in triumph. The old Jewess, when she discovered her loss, begged and prayed for its return, but was told she could not have her book again unless she paid five piastres – about a shilling – to the girl who had stolen it. There was wrangling and whining for ever so long, but the Arab girl stood firm; the Jewish women were afraid to touch her, and at last they made up the sum amongst themselves by odd half-pence, and handed it to the impudent young hussey, who pocketed the coin, and then announced that now she would not return the prayer-book, as she saw the old woman valued it, till she had double the price named.

Seeing that our party were strangers, one of the Jewesses came up to me, and asked me, in German, to help them get the prayer-book back. I volunteered, through my dragoman, to pay the couple of shillings which was needed to redeem the book; but the Arab wench raised her terms again, and stood out for more. Happily, a threat that I would take the old woman to the English Consul – like many other unmeaning menaces in this world of ours – succeeded where persuasion had failed; and the girl, pouring forth a volley of abuse against myself, the Bible, and the Jewish race, raised up the prayer-book into the air, threw it as hard as she could fling right into the midst of the group of Jewesses, and then ran down the hill laughing loudly.”

[EoZ] Compare with today.

This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 11 years and over 22,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I’ve written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

#arab antisemitism #muslim antisemitism #ottoman empire #palestine #israel #gaza

[hero-israel]

I’ve seen a lot of posts from fellow Jews about how hard it feels to observe Pesach this year, how it even feels wrong while there are Jews being held in captivity right now.

I would argue that’s the very point of Pesach, and observing it has never been more appropriate than it is now.

The first Seder was not a celebration of a victory already won. The first Seder was held by the Jews while we were still in Egypt, while we were all still enslaved, huddled inside with lambs blood on our doorposts. We were anticipating imminent departure from Egypt, but it hadn’t happened yet and we had no way of knowing if it would.

Pesach is not an after-the-fact celebration of finally being out of danger. The origin of the Seder is a deliberately premature celebration, a demonstration that we have so much faith in G-d saving us that we act as if it’s already happened.

We don’t have the Seder because we are finally free. We have the Seder as a show of faith that we will be, no matter how unlikely it seems.

חג קשר ושמח

[hero-israel]

My family has the great privilege of owning a copy of that particular illuminated Haggadah. In addition to the delightful artwork, the covers are ornately-carved metal with inlaid decorative stones. What makes it even more special is that it was edited by Cecil Roth, for whom I have always had a soft spot ever since I read the Jewish history textbook that he wrote and rewrote, edited and re-edited, one frantic edition after another, as he watched what seemed to be the final destruction of Jewish history.

Illustrations created between 1934-36 for the Passover Haggadah by Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (Polish, 1894-1951)

#passover #judaism #arthur szyk #cecil roth

[hero-israel]

Really stuck on the comment above - this is a Charlottesville moment.

You know how I was saying earlier that there is no justification for rape and torture ever, under any circumstances?

These people are calling for that to happen to Jews every. single. day.

There is no excuse for this whatsoever. I better hear the gentiles insisting that the pro-Palestinian movement is not antisemitic condemning this with your whole chest.

#leftist antisemitism #alt-left #columbia university #hamas #palestine #gaza #rape culture #genocide

[hero-israel]

I included the entire text of the article below, which I encourage you to read. I'm just including small snippets above the cut, because the whole article is a little long, but I want to emphasize these points:

"But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill? Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.

[...]

The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as 'part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.' 'Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,' Elman said, and 'this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.' One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. 'There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,' she told me, 'to centering "white feminism" or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.' By this logic, white feminism is inherently 'problematic'—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they 'see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to "white feminism."'

[...]

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance 'armed resistance' but cannot do the same for sexual violence. 'You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was "only" guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.' [...] Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence. Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. 'The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,' one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence. The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good. Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures."

"On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.

Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.

Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. 'Believe women' and 'Silence is violence' have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.

Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.

Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as 'unsubstantiated.' Others have accused the Israeli government of 'weaponizing' accusations of rape to justify Israel’s 'genocide' in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.

News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. 'We categorically deny such allegations,' Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, 'and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.'

Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of 'the biggest failure of journalism' since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, 'There is no evidence mass rape occurred.'

Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.

Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.

But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?

Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate 'armed resistance' against Israeli occupation.

Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.

Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.

Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.

Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government.

In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting 'trickles of information' from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. 'Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,' Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, 'What do we do?'

As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: 'No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.' Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted.

Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent.

The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. 'Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,' it concluded. 'Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.'

The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail:

'Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape' 'Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape' 'Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members' 'Sexual Offenses of Males' “Execution During or After the Rape” 'Binding and Tying' 'Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs' 'Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas' 'Destruction and Mutilation of the Body'

The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that 'there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.'

The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the 'most accurate and comprehensive' accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true.

Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators 'found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.'

This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an 'apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.' In addition, it notes that 'several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape' as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.

The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding 'reasonable grounds to believe' that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.

At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team 'was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri'). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were 'reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.' On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found 'reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,' including 'the rape of two women.' In addition, 'along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.'

At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are 'inconclusive.' But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.

Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to 'sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.' The UN report also concluded that violence may be 'ongoing' against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: 'If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,' a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.

For shelly tal meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. 'I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,' she told me. The response was 'complete silence. I was astonished.'

'Before the war,' she said, 'I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.' In the aftermath of October 7, she said, 'I felt completely betrayed.'

What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are 'capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.'

That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. 'Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,' Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. 'The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.'

Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had 'no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.' The 'first priority,' she said, 'was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.' Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.

There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted.

The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to 'the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.'

The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined 'Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.' Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 'witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,' as well as 'video footage, photographs,' and 'GPS data from mobile phones,' the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.

But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Intercept published its story.

What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.

The Intercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, 'it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,' and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency 'to exaggerate and amplify,' which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be 'instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.' Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do 'not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.'

But The Intercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.

In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.

In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that 'a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.' That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.

Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such 'demonstrable fabrications' had 'thoroughly discredited' Mendes, and the article notes that 'she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape' (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would 'rely on Mendes’s testimony,' and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ 'premier witnesses.' But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in 'Screams Without Words,' relaying her account of having seen four women 'with signs of sexual violence, including some with "a lot of blood in their pelvic areas."' Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that 'she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.'

The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting 'witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.'

The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims 'specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,' and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.

But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. The Intercept concedes that 'individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred' but is quick to add that 'rape is not uncommon in war.' It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that 'there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.' (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, The Intercept contends, is whether the Times 'presented solid evidence' to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, 'the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.' And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.

Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, which concluded that 'widespread sexual and gender-based crimes' had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as 'derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.')

The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticism of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage 'and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.'

The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in 'at least three locations' on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that 'there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.'

Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept 'is running out of cash,' and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. 'The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,' Tani wrote, 'who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.'

Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had 'addressed these questions repeatedly' and pointed to an interview in which he had said that 'the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.'

Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.

The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.

But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.

The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as 'part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.' 'Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,' Elman said, and 'this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.'

One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. 'There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,' she told me, 'to centering "white feminism" or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.' By this logic, white feminism is inherently 'problematic'—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they 'see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to "white feminism."'

Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s 'unhinged,' Petrzela said, 'but in some ways totally predictable.'

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance 'armed resistance' but cannot do the same for sexual violence. 'You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was "only" guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.'

Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. 'Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,' he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.

Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.

Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. 'The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,' one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.

The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.

Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.

As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.

When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.

Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible."

#Antisemitism #Palestine #Hamas #Gaza #rape denialism #rape culture #misogyny #me too

[hero-israel]

If this Passover feels ironically painful to you, you are not alone.

Passover is a time when we reflect on moving from slavery to freedom מֵעַבְדוּת לְחֵרוּת. With so many having their freedom forcibly taken away in unimaginable ways, it feels like since Oct 7 part of our own freedom is missing too.

I hope this Passover, despite the heavy hearts, brings you moments of peace and reflection.

Let's keep those who can't be with us in our thoughts and prayers, and use this time to appreciate and fight for the precious freedom we often take for granted.

Wishing you the best Passover possible under the circumstances. Let’s hold onto hope and push for a future where freedom is truly universal.

#Passover #Judaism