A male rape survivor of October 7 has now come forward.
"They pin you to the ground, you try to resist, they take off your clothes, laugh at you, humiliate you, spit at you…They touched [private] parts, they rape you…There is a circle, [people] laugh, and you don’t know what to do in the moment, whether you should resist or let it pass, how to deal with the situation. There was a very difficult rape…It’s a very tough moment. Weakness in the entire body. As if your blood is cheap. They were wildly intoxicated, celebrating, laughing with their pistols, with their knives. You disassociate yourself from the situation, but on the other hand experience it very strongly. Very difficult."
survivor "Dalet" on Israel's Channel 12 News
DECONSTRUCTING BOGUS ARGUMENTS
(1) “Hamas couldn’t have raped Israeli women on October 7 because there wouldn’t have been time to rape in such a chaotic fighting environment.”
Anyone familiar with the history of warfare knows this is an absurd argument. Rape has been used as a weapon of war for as long as war has existed. In many cases, it took hours and hours for the Israeli military to reach the southern Israeli communities and disarm Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. The terrorists had plenty of time to subject Israeli women — and even men — to sexual violence.
(2) “Hamas are pious Muslims, so they wouldn’t rape anyone.”
Firstly, anyone can be a rapist, regardless of their religious views. Second, Islamist terrorists have long utilized rape as a tool of war and genocide, as they did during the Yazidi Genocide between 2014-2017, when ISIS sold over 6,400 Yazidi women and girls into sexual slavery. Hamas’s own patrons, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has used rape of female detainees in its campaign to crush the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.
(3) “The oppressors rape the oppressed, not the other way around.”
The view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exclusively through an oppressor versus oppressed dichotomy is myopic to say the least, but regardless, this is also not true. Towards the end of World War II, for example, millions of German women were raped by the Allied forces and freed forced laborers from countries such as Poland.
(4) “There is no evidence of rape on October 7.”
There is extensive evidence, ranging from extensive eyewitness testimonies, perpetrator confessions, digital footage such as photographs and videos, survivor testimony from a gang rape victim which has not been released to the public for their protection, and forensic evidence, including bodies that reached the morgue with bloody pelvic regions, genital mutilation, broken pelvises, semen, and more. International forensic pathologists have verified much of this evidence.
The unfortunate truth is that sexual violence has been weaponized against Jews, and Jewish women and girls in particular, for thousands of years.
IN ANTIQUITY
Rape was a common weapon of war in the Roman Empire. The Babylonian Talmud describes the close relationship between the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the rape of Jewish women during the First Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE). According to this account, when Titus breached the walls of Jerusalem and looted the Temple, he raped a Jewish woman over a Torah scroll inside the holiest part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies. Afnat bat Penuel, the daughter of the High Priest, was taken captive and sold into the sex slave trade.
According to Josephus’s account of the Siege of Masada (72-73 CE), fear that the Roman soldiers would rape the women and children was a motivating factor for the Jews’ murder/suicide pact. Rabbinic sources describe rape in both the First and Second Jewish Revolts. Following the unsuccessful First Jewish Revolt, the Romans enslaved some 97,000 Jews; sexual slavery was a hallmark of Roman captivity.
For the first thousand years of Jewish civilization, Jewish identity was passed down through the father. This changed sometime in the first century, around the time of the First Jewish Revolt. Rabbi and historian Shaye J.D. Cohen argues that mass rape posed such a large societal problem during the Jewish-Roman Wars that the rabbinical authorities instituted the law of matrilineal descent; after all, one always knows who the mother is.
POGROMS IN EUROPE
A pogrom is a violent riot or attack against Jews. The word “pogrom,” meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” was coined to describe the antisemitic violence that targeted the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sexual violence was a hallmark of pogroms, both in Europe and elsewhere. Sometimes the rapes were spontaneous; others, they were highly ritualized, as was the case in the city of Skvira in December of 1919. In this case, the perpetrators gathered the Jewish residents together, divided the men from the women, and then proceeded to systematically rape the women, sometimes going so far as to rape every single female member of one family.
During the Russian Civil War, between 1917-1923, some 100,000 Jews were murdered; it’s estimated that no less than half of the Jewish women in the cities and villages targeted were raped.
In many cases, rapes during pogroms were a matter of public spectacle. In a 1919 pogrom in the city of Rossava, the Cossack perpetrators publicly raped every other Jewish woman and girl — ranging from a 12-year-old girl to a 70-year-old woman — and left them to bleed to death on the streets.
Unfortunately, because of the shame associated with sexual violence, we will never know the full extent of what happened to Jewish women over thousands of years of European pogroms.
IN PALESTINE
The rapes of October 7 were not new in the history of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
In the 1517 Hebron pogrom, local Jews were raped, beaten, and killed.
In 1834, in the midst of the Peasants’ Revolt in Palestine, an Egyptian army general launched an assault against Hebron to eliminate the last pockets of resistance. The assault succeeded. However, despite the fact that the Jews of Hebron had not been involved in the revolt, the army chose to attack the Jewish community, indiscriminately raping and slaughtering Jews. In the end, 12 Jews were killed, including 5 young girls. Ancient synagogues were desecrated and Jewish homes were ransacked. Jewish assets were also stolen, leaving the community destitute for years to come. The violence united the local Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities. The Jews referred to the massacre as “the great destruction.”
In Safed, a 33-day-long massacre took place at the hands of the local Arabs who took advantage of the power vacuum. Witnesses described the horrifying violence, including the rape and slaughter of Jewish men, torture, the beatings of rabbis, the destruction and desecration of synagogues, and the looting of Jewish assets. Women and children were robbed of their clothes and fled naked to nearby fields until the violence passed. The only Hebrew printing press in Palestine was destroyed. Some 500 were killed and hundreds were seriously injured. Though not many, a few local Arabs did try to protect the Jews.
In 1929, local Arabs attacked the apolitical ancient Jewish community of Hebron.The descriptions of the violence are hard to read: a boy’s head was torn off, a 7-year-old was tied to a door and tortured for hours on end, women were raped, many were mutilated, and 7 men were castrated.
During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Palestinian Arab militias and Arab armies committed a number of atrocities, including gender-based violence. On May 13, 1948, 157-220 Jews were murdered, many execution-style, by the Jordanian and Palestinian Arab forces in Kfar Etzion, with at least one attempted rape documented. The Arab forces also decapitated and paraded the heads of Jewish soldiers, disemboweled pregnant Jewish women, mutilated and dismembered Jewish women and prisoners of war, and more.
DURING THE HOLOCAUST
One of the most underreported issues regarding the Holocaust is the systematic sexual abuse of Jewish prisoners. Though Nazi law prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and Jews, the reality was much different.
Throughout World War II, the Nazis established over 500 brothels in Nazi-occupied Europe, many of them in concentration and death camps. Some 34,000 women were trafficked through these brothels, where they were raped by Nazi soldiers, camp guards, and police, as well as by other more “privileged,” non-Jewish prisoners as a “reward” for good work. Additionally, some gay prisoners were forced into raping women at the brothels to try to “cure” them of their homosexuality. The brothels were open for all non-Jewish prisoners to use.
Beyond the brothels, Jewish women and men in Nazi camps were often subjected to sexual assault during random strip searches and other inspections.
Sometimes, Jewish women in the concentration camps were raped at random. For example, a survivor of Janowska camp testified, “One time in the roll-call order there were young people, and the older people were sitting, and the Ukrainian took — her name was Bosha — took her out, and we thought maybe he was going to save her, but when she came back, she said he raped me, and then he came and shot her.”
Sexual violence against Jewish men during the Holocaust was also widespread, though an even more taboo topic. Oftentimes, the Jewish men were raped by other prisoners. Sidney Klein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Slovakia, recounted his experience of rape at a camp hospital: “He took me to the office, and he was offering me all kinds of things, and he raped me, he raped me and then he wanted me to come and see him like every week…I was trying to get away from him, and a few times I was able to do it, but then he was threatening me that if I am not going to come, I will lose my job.”
As of 2011, the USC Shoah Foundation had collected over 1700 Holocaust testimonies including references to sexual harassment, abuse, molestation, and rape.
ELSEWHERE IN THE ISLAMIC/ARAB WORLD
Sexual violence against Jewish women has long been recorded in the Arab and Islamic world, dating back to the earliest days of the Arab conquest. After the Arab armies slaughtered the Jews of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, Jewish girls were taken captive as sex slaves.
The forced conversion of Jewish women and girls to Islam for the purpose of marriage is extensively recorded. Other cases of the rape of Jewish women in Arab and Muslim-majority lands are much more recent, as was the case in the Farhud pogrom of 1941, when an unknown number of Jewish women were brutally raped.
SINCE OCTOBER 7
There have been at least two documented cases of antisemitic hate crimes in the Diaspora involving rape since October 7. In April, a French man allegedly kidnapped, tortured, and raped a Jewish woman as "vengeance for Palestine." In text messages to the victim’s mother, the rapist said that he was planning to “prostitute” the Jewish woman.
In another case, also in France, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was gang raped by two teenage boys, with a third one watching. One of the perpetrators was the girl’s boyfriend, who was enraged that she had hid her Jewish identity from him.
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