If feminism is all about advancing women and protecting them from sexual violence, then how come Israeli women and girls are excluded from that? Why is it Me Too unless you are a Jew?
By Rachel Avraham
For over a year now, Western feminists have been inundated with anti-Israel propaganda, claiming that “there is a genocide in Gaza” and the “Palestinian people have the right to resist,” a claim that shields Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of criticism for the violence they inflicted and continue to inflict upon Israeli women and girls, both on October 7 and in captivity in Gaza.
This is because there is a pathological reluctance across the West to believe that Hamas has raped and mutilated Israeli women and girls. When I attended a UNDP Conference in Azerbaijan last spring, I met someone who worked for the International Red Cross and he told me: “A lot of what they are saying about October 7 is simply not true.” He found it hard to believe that Hamas raped children, even though the recent testimony given by teenage victims who were held hostage in Gaza testifying to the barbaric sexual violence Hamas inflicted upon them that was submitted by the Israeli Ministry of Health to the UN leaves little room for doubt. He found it hard to believe that babies were mutilated, even though the testimony given by Zaka volunteers leaves little room to think otherwise. Some of the Western women that I met at that conference were no better, demonstrating more of a care for the women and children in Gaza than the women and children in Israel.
Fast forward a number of months and I went to Portland, Oregon, where I discovered that graduate students, including female ones who purported to care about women’s rights in their own communities, at Portland State University had more sympathy for Palestine than Israel. In fact, some of the women that I met in Portland wanted to join the violent anti-Israel protests on campus, which resulted in the destruction of the campus library. The only thing stopping them was the threat they would get expelled, since they were foreign students and the Office of Foreign Students issued such a threat. They demonstrated zero sympathy for the female victims of the October 7 massacre or the Israeli women and girls held hostage in Gaza.
It does not matter that the Me Too Movement has championed women’s and girl’s testimony as credible, calling upon society to give victims the basic respect of being believed. When it comes to Israeli women and girls who were victims of Palestinian sexual violence, not enough people in the West give these victims the respect that they deserve, even if they purport to be feminist. Too many in the West still proclaim that the mass rapes on October 7 did not happen or demand to see the proof that it happened or claim that Israel exaggerated what happened, or they minimize it as trivial compared to what the people of Gaza suffer.
As a result of such anti-Israel propaganda that has become mainstream in the West, famous feminist philosopher Judith Butler called October 7 “an act of armed resistance” and the director of the sexual assault center at Canada’s University of Alberta Samantha Pearson denied the mass rapes that occurred on October 7. Dr. Lama Abu Odeh, a prominent Palestinian feminist academic who teaches at Georgetown University, published an article titled “Western feminism before and after October 7,” which denied that mass rapes occurred on October 7. She even condemned “Julie Bindel, a radical feminist, whose rush to indict Hamas of rape on October 7 with scant, or easily refutable, evidence” was “an expression of her racism.” How are Jewish female students at Georgetown University supposed to feel about the fact that their university hired a feminist professor who denied that rape took place on October 7? How are these students supposed to feel safe at Georgetown, both as women and Jews?
Furthermore, NGO Monitor reported that the Paris-based EuroMed Feminist Initiative, which receives significant funding from the European Union, “published statements justifying and celebrating the October 7th attack, calling to annihilate Israel, denying Hamas atrocities, and promoting antisemitic imagery.” They added, “an EFI member NGO is “the women’s framework” of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), an Israeli-designated terror organization that participated with Hamas and other Palestinian groups in the October 7 attacks.”
This did not occur in a vacuum. In 2021, the Palestinian Feminist Collective managed to secure the signature of over 150 women’s studies departments and associations at prestigious universities across the West for a call for “feminists everywhere to speak up, organize, and join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
This came a couple of years after Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who led the Women’s March in America, said it is impossible to be both feminist and Zionist: “You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.” However, after October 7, nobody dared to ask Sarsour, “Do you stand up for the rights of Israeli women and girls? If not, how can you be feminist?”
However, in 2017, Emily Shire did write a critical op-ed in the New York Times, proclaiming: “Why should criticism of Israel be key to feminism in 2017?” She was outraged “by the portion of the International Women’s Strike platform that calls for a “decolonization of Palestine” as part of “the beating heart of this new feminist movement.” The platform also states: “We want to dismantle all walls, from prison walls to border walls, from Mexico to Palestine.”” I ask in 2025, why does ignoring the mass rapes on October 7 and the sexual violence inflicted upon Israeli female hostages considered pro-feminist by some in the West? If feminism is all about advancing women and protecting them from sexual violence, then how come Israeli women and girls are excluded from that? Why is it Me Too unless you are a Jew?
Prominent Jewish American feminist Phyllis Chesler wrote an article titled “Why were feminists silent after October 7,” where she claimed that for some time, “Western feminists were more obsessed with the alleged occupation of a country that has never existed—Palestine—than with the real occupation of women’s bodies in Gaza and the West Bank, who were being forced into wearing the hijab and niqab, into child and arranged marriages, and who were being honor killed by their families for minor or imagined infractions.”
After October 7, she noted that lesbians, queers, feminists, and leftists joined anarchists and radical Islamists “in marching for Hamas. They chanted incessantly, carried Palestinian flags, wore keffiyehs, shut down bridges, tunnels, and train stations, terrified children in cancer hospitals, physically and verbally attacked those who were visibly Jewish, both in universities, on the streets, in restaurants, and at home. I did not hear these pro-Hamas marchers, especially the lesbian, queer, and feminist protesters, calling for an end to rape, woman-battering, or the persecution of homosexuals and queers in Gaza. I saw no signs that condemned honor killing or polygamy. No leading American feminist or longtime feminist ally reached out to me. Leading American feminist experts on violence against women, including rape and rape trauma syndrome, remained silent.”
Dr. Sharon Halevi, a professor at the women’s studies department at the University of Haifa, acknowledged, “We Israeli women are on our own after October 7. We should break off from the global feminist movement and form our own feminist movement.” She was adamant that Israeli feminists cannot stand beside women like Judith Butler, who consider Hamas rapists to be part of a “resistance movement.” Indeed, the Western feminists betrayed Israeli women and girls, with their denials, Palestine solidarity and at best, their silence.
Prominent feminist Sheryl Sandberg, speaking in the House of Lords, proclaimed, “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists committed unspeakable acts of sexual violence against women and girls in Israel, and continued to abuse female hostages that it kept in captivity. Today, the Israeli women who are still being held hostage in Gaza continue to face this terror . . . the evidence is undeniable. We must come together to stand against rape as a weapon of war in conflict zones everywhere; Israel is no exception. If we do not, we risk losing 30 years of human rights in progress.”
