Silence is violence, but not for Jewish women

A still taken from video appearing on social media showing 19-year-old Israeli Naama Levy being taken prisoner by Palestinian militants.

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.

19-year-old Israeli Naama Levy being shoved into a car by Palestinian militants.

This image was captured, I think, in the wild 48 hours following October 7. It seems a blur now, and of all the terrible things I’ve forced myself to watch in the past month, of all the first-hand accounts I’ve forced myself to listen to and read, I can’t forget this image. As a woman. As a human. But I want to try to achieve the impossible. Put emotion to one side and take a clinical, analytical, surgical approach as I ask a question that many of you have been asking since this pogrom was launched.

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.

These women are immoral and without conscience. To these activists, teachers and academics who live in safe ivory towers, and to the ignorant and undecided, let me take you through some inconvenient truths about life for women in Gaza. It is a way of life that isn’t determined by the Israelis but by Hamas, the government so many of you love to point out was democratically elected, as was Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party.

In Gaza, there are no laws prohibiting violence against women in a family situation, not even sexual violence.

So, when you’re throwing your fist in the air and yelling “From the river to the sea”, you’re championing a regime that says it’s OK for a father to rape or beat his daughter. A son is legally permitted to abuse his mother.

Palestinian terrorists surround a truck reportedly carrying a captured Israeli woman in the Gaza Strip on October 7. Picture: AFP

About 15 per cent of married women in Gaza experience sexual abuse from their husbands. More than half say the abuse is ongoing.

More than 63 per cent of Palestinian men agree that a woman should tolerate violence to keep the family together. One in five young girls is married before the age of 18. More than half of married women in Gaza admit to being subject to some form of violence at the hands of their husbands, be it physical, sexual, psychological, social or economic. Less than 1 per cent will report it, for fear of the consequences. If she does make it to court, then the law views a woman’s testimony as worth half that of a man.

A man caught in adultery will serve six months in prison. A woman will be jailed for two years and, if she’s granted a divorce, she must pay him for the privilege. A man? In Gaza a man can get divorced whenever he likes, for any reason he likes, and he won’t pay a cent to anyone.

There’s no safety for girls at school, either, according to the available data. As many as 16.7 per cent of school-aged girls report suffering physical and or psychological violence at the hands of their teachers or classmates. They don’t enjoy basic freedoms such as what clothes they’ll wear. Police enforce the modesty of women, the boundaries of which are decided by men.

People are marching in support of this. Sections of the media are bowing at the altar of this aberration, a way of life none of them would ever willingly submit to. They’re the same people who throw around phrases like “silence is violence”. But their own silence about the plight of Israeli women is OK.

They’ve lost their minds. But by refusing to denounce what happened to Israeli and Jewish women, modern feminists are championing a cause that denigrates Gazan women. You can’t make it up.

All of this information, this data, is embarrassingly easy to access. It’s freely available online on a variety of non-government organisation and academic websites. In the bitterest of ironies, I sourced much from the UN, specifically UN Women, the official offshoot that supposedly champions women the world over but whose social media and public comments have ignored the plight of Israeli and Jewish women. Case in point: it shared one post condemning the atrocities on October 7. One. It then deleted the post, using an excuse that the situation had moved on and the post was dated.

This same UN that adopted a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza but voted down a provision that condemned Hamas’s murderous October 7 attack. It doesn’t even try to pretend.

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.