Recently, Amit Soussanna, an Israeli woman who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th, held hostage for 55 days, and eventually released as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel, said that a Hamas terrorist raped her at gunpoint. Another released hostage, Chen Almog-Goldstein, said that while she was not raped, some of her fellow female hostages who she met in captivity, and who have not yet been released or rescued, told her that Hamas terrorists had raped them. While decent people of all backgrounds and worldviews support these women and others who were raped on October 7th or afterward, the usual suspects are demeaning Soussanna and other Israeli survivors.
One major Twitter account, which had spent the months before Soussanna’s courageous testimony mocking those who spoke out about Hamas sexual violence on the grounds that no Israeli survivors had publicly spoken about their experience, compared Soussanna to racist white women who falsely accused black men of raping them, leading to lynchings and wrongful convictions. (In 1975, feminist journalist and activist Susan Brownmiller published a groundbreaking book about rape called Against Our Will. Among many other things, the book criticized certain leftists for focusing solely on opposing racist false accusations of rape and seeing the fact that millions of women are actually raped every year (and even the key role rape has always played and still plays in various racist, antisemitic, ethno-supremacist and theocratic oppressions) as unimportant and definitely not a real political issue they needed to address. Evidently this has not changed as much as one would hope.) Various other Twitter accounts have mocked other released Israeli female hostages for saying they were scared their captors would rape them and have even claimed female hostages are deeply and romantically in love with their ‘heroic’ and ‘honorable’ Hamas captors.
I don’t have anything especially clever or original to say about this, nor do I hope to change the minds of people who say such despicable things. I just want to say that Amit and Chen and all the other people who have spoken out about sexual violence they endured or witnessed on October 7th and afterward are very brave and deserve everyone’s support. And to all the Jews, survivors of sexual violence and other people who are being re-traumatized by all this, you matter and I stand with you. Everyone please stay strong and listen to and support the released hostages and family members of hostages who are making extraordinary efforts to end this nightmare.
