Uncategorized
‘Two Israels’: What’s really behind the judicial reform protests
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause two weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy protests continued among Diaspora Jews and Israeli expats, including those who gather each Sunday in New York’s Washington Square Park.
On its face, the weeks of protest have been about proposed legislation that critics said would sap power from the Israeli Supreme Court and give legislators — in this case, led by Netanyahu’s recently elected far-right coalition — unchecked and unprecedented power. Protesters said that, in the absence of an Israeli constitution establishing basic rights and norms, they were fighting for democracy. The government too says the changes are about democracy, claiming under the current system unelected judges too often overrule elected lawmakers and the will of Israel’s diverse electorate.
But the political dynamics in Israel are complex, and the proposals and the backlash are also about deeper cracks in Israeli society. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently said in a podcast that the crisis in Israel represents “six linked but separate stories unfolding at the same time.” Beyond the judicial reform itself, these stories include the Palestinians and the occupation, a resurgent patriotism among the center and the left, chaos within Netanyahu’s camp, a Diaspora emboldened to weigh in on the future of Zionism and the rejection on the part of the public of a reform that failed the “reasonableness test.”
“If these protests are effective in the long run, it will be, I think, because they will have succeeded at reorganizing and mobilizing the Israeli electorate to think and behave differently than before,” said Kurtzer.
I recently asked observers, here and in Israel, what they feel is really mobilizing the electorate, and what kind of Israel will emerge as a result of the showdown. The respondents included organizers of the protests, supporters of their aims and those skeptical of the protesters’ motivations. They discussed a slew of issues just below the surface of the protest, including the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divisions over the increasing strength of Israel’s haredi Orthodox sector, and a lingering divide between Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe and Mizrahi Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern and North African.
Conservatives, meanwhile, insist that Israeli “elites” — the highly educated, the tech sector, the military leadership, for starters — don’t respect the will of the majority who brought Netanyahu and his coalition partners to power.
Here are the emerging themes of weeks of protest:
Defending democracy
Whatever their long-term concerns about Israel’s future, the protests are being held under the banner of “democracy.”
For Alon-Lee Green, one of the organizers of the protests, the issues are equality and fairness. “People in Israel,” said Green, national co-director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement in Israel, “hundreds of thousands of them, are going out to the streets for months now not only because of the judicial reform, but also — and mainly — because of the fundamental question of what is the society we want to live in: Will we keep living in a society that is unequal, unfair and that is moving away from our basic needs and desires, or will it be an equal society for everyone who lives in our land?”
Shany Granot-Lubaton, who has been organizing pro-democracy rallies among Israelis living in New York City, says Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the coalition’s haredi Orthodox parties “are waging a war against democracy and the freedoms of citizens.”
“They seek to exert control over the Knesset and the judicial system, appoint judges in their favor and legalize corruption,” she said. “If this legal coup is allowed to proceed, minorities will be in serious danger, and democracy itself will be threatened.”
Two researchers at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Herzliya’s Reichman University, psychology student Benjamin Amram and research associate Keren L.G. Snider, said Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform “undermines the integrity of Israel’s democracy by consolidating power.”
“How can citizens trust a government that ultimately has no limitations set upon them?” they asked in a joint email. “At a time when political trust and political representation are at the lowest points, this legislation can only create instability and call into question the intentions of the current ruling party. When one coalition holds all the power, laws and policies can be swiftly overturned, causing instability and volatility.”
A struggle between two Israels
Other commentators said the protests revealed fractures within Israeli society that long predated the conflict over judicial reform. “The split is between those that believe Israel should be a more religious country, with less democracy, and see democracy as only a system of elections and not a set of values, and those who want Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state,” Tzipi Livni, who served in the cabinets of right-wing prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert before tacking to the center in recent years, recently told Haaretz.
Author and translator David Hazony called this “a struggle between two Israels” — one that sees Israel’s founding vision as a European-style, rights-based democracy, and the other that sees that vision as the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
“Those on the first side believe that the judiciary has always been Israel’s protector of rights and therefore of democracy, against the rapaciousness and lawlessness of politicians in general and especially those on the right. Therefore an assault on its supremacy is an assault on democracy itself. They accuse the other side of being barbaric, antidemocratic and violent,” said Hazony, editor of the forthcoming anthology “Jewish Priorities.”
As for the other side, he said, they see an activist judiciary as an attempt by Ashkenazi elites to force their minority view on the majority. Supporters of the government think it is entirely unreasonable “for judges to think they can choose their successors, strike down constitutional legislation and rule according to ‘that which is reasonable in the eyes of the enlightened community in Israel,’” said Hazony, quoting Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and bane of Israel’s right.
(Naveh Dromi, a right-wing columnist for Yediot Achronot, puts this more bluntly: “The problem,” she writes, “lies in the fact that the left has no faith in its chance to win an election, so it relies on the high court to represent it.”)
Daniel Tauber, an attorney and Likud Central Committee member, agrees that those who voted for Netanyahu and his coalition have their own concerns about a democracy — one dominated by “elites,” which in the Israeli context means old-guard Ashkenazi Jews, powerful labor unions and highly educated secular Jews. “The more this process is subject to veto by non-democratic institutions, whether it be the Court chosen as it is, elite military units, the Histadrut [labor union], or others, the more people will lose faith in democracy,” said Tauber.
Green also said there is “a war waging now between two elites in Israel” — the “old and more established liberal elite, who consist of the financial, high-tech army and industry people,” and the “new emerging elite of the settlers and the political far-right parties.”
Israelis protest against the government’s planned judicial overhaul, outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
And yet, he said, “I think we will lose if one of these elites wins. The real victory of this historic political moment in Israel will be if we achieve true equality, both to the people who are not represented by the Jewish supremacists, such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to the people who are not represented by the ‘old Israel,’ such as the haredi and Mizrahi people on the peripheries.”
The crises behind the crisis
Although the protests were ignited by Netanyahu’s calls for judicial reform, they also represented pushback against the most right-wing government in Israeli history — which means at some level the protests were also about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of religion in Israeli society. “The unspoken motivation driving the architects and supporters of the [judicial] ‘reform,’ as well as the protest leaders, is umbilically connected to the occupation,” writes Carolina Landsmann, a Haaretz columnist. If Netanyahu has his way, she writes, “There will be no more two-state solution, and there will be no territorial compromises. The new diplomatic horizon will be a single state, with the Palestinians as subjects deprived of citizenship.”
Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, said that “once awakened, the simmering resentment of those liberal Israelis about other issues was brought to the surface.” The Palestinian issue, for example, is at an “explosive moment,” said Novik: The Palestinian Authority is weakened and ineffective, Palestinian youth lack hope for a better future, and Israeli settlers feel emboldened by supporters in the ruling coalition. “The Israeli security establishment took this all into account when warning the government to change course before it is too late,” said Novik.
Kurtzer too noted that the Palestinians “also stand to be extremely victimized following the passage of judicial reform, both in Israel and in the West Bank.” And yet, he said, most Israelis aren’t ready to upend the current status quo between Israelis and Palestinians. “It can also be true that the Israeli public can only build the kind of coalition that it’s building right now because it is patently not a referendum on the issue of Palestinian rights,” he said.
Religion and state
Novik spoke about another barely subterranean theme of the protests: the growing power of the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, parties. Secular Israelis especially resent that the haredim disproportionately seek exemption from military service and that non-haredi Israelis contribute some 90% of all taxes collected. One fear of those opposing the judicial reform legislation is that the religious parties will “forever secure state funding to the haredi Orthodox school system while exempting it from teaching the subjects required for ever joining the workforce. It is to secure for them an exemption from any military or other national service. And it is to expand the imposition of their lifestyle on non-Orthodox Israelis.”
What’s next
Predictions for the future range from warnings of a civil war (by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, among others) to an eventual compromise on Netanyahu’s part to the emergence of a new center electorate that will reject extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.
David E. Bernstein, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law who writes frequently about Israel, imagines a future without extremists. “One can definitely easily imagine the business, academic and legal elite using their newfound political voice to insist that future governments not align with extremists, that haredi authority over national life be limited, and, perhaps most important, that Israel create a formal constitution that protects certain basic rights,” he said. “Perhaps there will also be demand to counter such long-festering problems as corruption, disproportionate influence over export markets by a few influential families, burgeoning lawlessness in the Arab sector and a massive shortage of affordable housing.”
Elie Bennett, director of International Strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute, also sees an opportunity in the crisis.
In the aftermath of the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur war, he said, Israel “rebuilt its military and eventually laid the foundations for today’s ‘startup nation.’ In this current crisis, we do not need a call-up of our reserves forces, or a massive airlift of American weaponry to prevail. What we need is goodwill among fellow Israelis and a commitment to work together to strengthen our society and reach an agreed-upon constitutional framework. If we are able to achieve such an agreement, it will protect our rights, better define the relationships between the branches of government, and result in an Israel that is more stable and prosperous than ever as we celebrate 75 years of independence.”
—
The post ‘Two Israels’: What’s really behind the judicial reform protests appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
(JTA) — An elected Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania announced Monday night that he has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, citing concerns about antisemitism.
In a statement, David Wecht, who is Jewish and served as Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair from 1998 to 2001, said he believed antisemitism has moved from the fringe of the Democratic Party to the mainstream.
“Nazi tattoos, jihadist chants, intimidation and attacks at synagogues, and other hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled,” he wrote. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.”
Wecht wrote that he had long understood that antisemitism “always festered on the fringe” of the right, a fact that hit home in 2018 when a far-right shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where he and his wife were married in 1998.
“In the years that have followed, that same hatred has grown on the left,” he said in his statement. “It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late.”
Wecht previously made national headlines for his 2020 ruling against an effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Through a spokesperson, Wecht declined to be interviewed about his exit from the Democratic Party.
Wecht’s comments come as Democrats wrestle with a range of internal tensions over antisemitism. The ascent of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who recently covered up a Nazi Totenkopf skull-and-crossbones tattoo, to become Maine’s Democratic candidate for Senate, and the increasing coziness between some progressive politicians and Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has said he favors Hamas over Israel, have particularly alarmed some members of the Jewish community.
Wecht is the son of renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who was involved in investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Wecht’s mother, translator Sigrid Ronsdal, spent the first six years of her life living under Nazi occupation in Norway.
“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has clashed with his party over Israel, tweeted following Wecht’s announcement. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party—but I fully understand David’s personal choice. The Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”
The post Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
(JTA) — As mourners gathered Tuesday for the funeral of Abraham Foxman, they were saying goodbye not only to one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the last half-century, but to one of the dwindling number whose moral authority was forged in the Holocaust itself.
Foxman, who died Sunday at 86, spent decades as one of the world’s most recognizable Jewish advocates, serving for nearly 30 years as the ADL’s top professional and another two decades before that in its leadership ranks. Presidents sought his counsel. Antisemites sought his absolution. Popes welcomed him. Prime ministers argued with him.
Many of the speakers at Park Avenue Synagogue credited his accomplishments to his outsized personality, his sense of humor and his intuitive leadership skills. And yet his past hung heavy over the funeral, which also served as an elegy for the last generation of survivors and how, like Foxman, they shaped Jewish communal life in the years after World War II and the founding of Israel. Born in Poland, Foxman survived the war in the care of his Catholic nanny.
“His life story of rising from the ashes is our story,” said Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, in a video tribute. “It is the story of our people born in the world at war. The Holocaust shaped Abe’s character and defined his mission to combat antisemitism and hypocrisy, to call up racism and bias, to speak up for the Jewish people and a Jewish democratic state of Israel.”
Others recalled that beyond fighting antisemitism, Foxman’s past inspired him to build a communal juggernaut that championed pluralism, democracy and civil rights.
“He knew exactly what the absence of those things looked like,” said Stacy Burdett, a former ADL colleague, referring to the Holocaust. “Abe lived in our world as a moral witness, not just to what human beings can survive, but to what they’re obligated to defend.”
Packing the sanctuary were Jewish communal leaders, former ADL colleagues and bold-face Jewish activists such as the lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (Not able to attend was Jonathan Greenblatt, Foxman’s successor at ADL, whose mother died in Florida on Saturday.)
When they weren’t recalling Foxman’s early trauma and subsequent accomplishments, eulogists painted a portrait of a Jewish communal warrior as a consummate hugger.
Thomas Friedman sent a video tribute, recalling how they met when the future New York Times columnist was a camper and Foxman was a counselor at Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin. (That’s also where Foxman met his wife, Golda, who survives him, as do his two children and four grandchildren.) Friedman said that no matter how often or angrily they disagreed over something Friedman had written, usually about Israel, Foxman would sign off with affection.
“It’s true, if Abe really disagreed with you, you always knew because his text would end ‘love you, hugs,’” said Burdett. “The more strongly he disagreed, the more hugs and the more emojis.”
Former White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, in a video tribute, recalled shouting matches with Foxman during the Biden administration that left aides outside her office terrified.
“And when Abe and I emerged laughing and hugging,” she said, “we both had to reassure my team that all was fine, that we loved each other and not to worry.”
Rice credited Foxman with helping shape the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, and thanked him for defending her when others attacked her personally for administration positions on Iran and Israel.
But even as his children and grandchildren recalled Foxman as a family man, the shadow of the Holocaust fell across the synagogue’s ornate, Moorish-style sanctuary.
“You were a hidden child,” his daughter Michelle said, “and at the same time, you sought to hide the trauma from your children.”
She said she learned much of her father’s Holocaust story not from conversations at home but from his speeches, interviews and articles.
Foxman, who became ADL’s national director emeritus when he stepped down in 2015, was certainly among the last survivors to lead a major Jewish organization.
Fewer and fewer of those witnesses remain; according to the Claims Conference, as of January 2026, an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors are still alive. Nearly all are “child survivors” who were born after 1928.
In discussing how Foxman’s childhood shaped his activism, Sarah Bloomfield, director of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalled his traumatic childhood. His Polish Jewish parents fled to present-day Vilnius after the Nazi invasion of Poland; when Vilnius too came under Nazi control, his parents left him in the care of his nanny, who baptized him as a Catholic.
“This is what he said: ‘I’m only here because one Polish woman made a choice to save a Jewish child,’” Bloomfield recalled Foxman telling her. “She risked her life to protect the life of another human being, a Jewish child in Hitler’s Europe. Her name was Bronislawa Kurpi.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, said Foxman was less interested in the “logistics” behind his survival (he and his parents were only reunited after several bitter lawsuits) than in the “singular moral act” of his rescuer. “In a world consumed by fire,” Cosgrove said, “one human being chose courage, one person chose decency, one person chose light.”
His grandson Gideon recalled asking Foxman how his history shaped his life’s work.
“He said that he felt obligated to make something of himself so that all the other Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust didn’t die in vain,” Gideon said.
And up until the end, said Burdett, Foxman was still feeling that obligation, shaped by a cataclysm that for many is becoming a distant memory, when recalled at all.
She recited his remarks last year during Yom Hashoah ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol.
“As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach,” Foxman said at the time. “As a survivor who came to this country as an immigrant, I’m troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized.”
The post At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability
(JTA) — A sweeping new Israeli report on sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and against hostages in Gaza concludes that the crimes formed part of a deliberate strategy. It also lays out a roadmap for turning two years of documentation into legal prosecution.
The report concludes that “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.”
The report comes from Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, an independent panel convened in the immediate wake of the attack. The commission was led by Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an attorney and international law expert who was recently awarded the Israel Prize, Israel’s top civilian honor, for her work.
Starting by collecting online material filmed or circulated by Hamas, the commission labored for two years in an effort to generate a factual record that Elkayam-Levy said could withstand the scrutiny and denial that has accompanied claims about sexual violence on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, particularly the idea that the sexual violence was systematic.
Researchers reviewed and analyzed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to more than 1,800 hours of footage, alongside more than 430 testimonies from survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.
They identified 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence across Oct. 7 attack sites, abductions and captivity, including rape, gang rape and other forms of sexual assault, sexual torture, forced nudity, threats of forced marriages, postmortem abuse, the public display of victims and the filming and dissemination of sexualized violence.
The evidence “proves that it wasn’t isolated violence, it wasn’t random,” Elkayam-Levy said. “It was a strategy, carried out with exceptional cruelty on victims and on hostages in captivity.”
The report also says genocide must be examined as a possible legal characterization, citing the “scale, coordination, and systematic nature of the violence,” the targeting of civilians as part of a campaign to destroy Israelis and Jews, and the infliction of severe bodily and mental harm, “including through sexual violence and torture.”
The report devotes specific attention to sexual violence against men and boys, documenting rape, sexual torture, mutilation and sexualized humiliation that the authors say has often been overlooked in public discussion of Oct. 7.
The report includes testimonies that have already surfaced, such as from Amit Soussana and Keith Siegel, two former hostages who said they had been sexually assaulted by their captors.
But it also includes accounts that had not previously been made public, including cases of sexual violence inflicted in the presence or near vicinity of family members. In at least one case the researchers documented, family members held hostage together were forced to perform sexual acts on one another, an example of what the commission characterizes as “kinocidal” sexual violence, meaning violence aimed at destroying family structures by exploiting familial bonds.
Yet the report aims to go beyond simply documenting horrific traumas. A 70-page legal section argues that the documented acts support prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and sexual and gender-based violence linked to terrorism.
It notes that victims of the Oct. 7 attacks represented 52 nationalities, giving multiple governments potential avenues to investigate and prosecute through domestic terrorism laws, extraterritorial jurisdiction or universal jurisdiction.
So far, those efforts remain “scarce and fragmented,” the report says, with investigations or legal steps undertaken in the United States, France, Germany and Canada, as well as at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. In the case of the ICC, its prosecutor sought warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif over crimes including rape and other sexual violence, but all three Hamas leaders were killed by the IDF and the proceedings were terminated.
The report argues that sexual violence prosecutions do not have to depend only on direct survivor testimony, a central issue for Oct. 7 cases as many victims were murdered, witnesses were traumatized and released hostages could speak only after months in captivity. International courts have relied on direct witnesses, expert witnesses, forensic material, circumstantial evidence and digital documentation, while ICC rules do not require corroboration for sexual violence crimes.
“The report shifts the global conversation from whether this happened to what the consequences should be,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview ahead of the report’s release. “We’re going to see a before-and-after moment with it.”
Whether that comes to pass remains to be seen. The report arrives in a climate of denial around sexual violence on Oct. 7 that was fueled in part by early accounts that were later challenged. Critics of Israel’s claims have repeatedly pointed to disputed elements in an investigation published in The New York Times in December 2023, including the case of Oct. 7 victim Gal Abdush, whose relative questioned whether there was proof she had been raped, and to accounts of sexual violence by ZAKA first responders that were later debunked. Those cases helped denialists attack the wider body of evidence documented by UN officials, Israeli investigators, journalists and groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Elkayam-Levy herself has been the subject of criticism, with a March 2024 report in Yedioth Aharonoth citing unnamed government officials questioning the commission’s structure and the accuracy of some of her early public claims, including a widely debunked account that a pregnant woman had been found with her womb cut open — criticism that was picked up by skeptics of Oct. 7 sexual violence claims.
In response, Elkayam-Levy said some of the early mischaracterizations reflected the confusion of the first days after the attack, when first responders and those recovering hundreds of bodies were working in traumatic circumstances.
“It is precisely because of that early chaos, and the widespread denial, that this report was prepared under the strictest international verification standards, with every testimony and piece of evidence carefully cross-checked and corroborated,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy said the backlash she personally experienced was “very scary,” with threats to her life and antisemitic groups circulating her image alongside accusations that she was “lying about Hamas.”
The team, made up of about 20 employees and additional volunteers and contributors, worked from a hidden location, with some researchers choosing to remain anonymous throughout.
Elkayam-Levy said the release of the archive may not stop denial from “social media trolls,” but it changes the evidentiary landscape in ways serious observers can no longer ignore.
She pointed to remarks made early on in the war by philosopher Judith Butler, who cast doubt on reports of rape on Oct. 7, comments Elkayam-Levy said caused deep anguish to victims and those documenting the crimes.
“Every item is now archived and here to stay, for her to feel ashamed of what she did and to be remembered as a person who did not stand with the victims, who forgot the purpose of her work as a feminist,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy is optimistic that prosecutions could result. She said accountability may unfold over years and across borders, with some Hamas leaders and perpetrators already hiding in Turkey and Qatar and others likely to reach Western countries.
“I think it will be the same as the Holocaust, that different Nazi leaders were prosecuted around the world,” she said.
Still, Elkayam-Levy said even successful prosecutions would not be enough to convey the magnitude of the crimes or preserve their place in historical memory.
“You don’t learn about the Holocaust from the prosecution of a single person,” she said. “You learn it from the documentation, from the witnesses, the survivors.”
The report calls for an “incontrovertible judicial record,” citing the Nuremberg trials, recent German prosecutions of ISIS crimes against Yazidis and Ukraine’s war-crimes documentation as models for legal efforts that can establish an enduring record as well as punish perpetrators. It recommends a coordinated strategy combining Israeli proceedings with international cooperation, evidence-sharing, specialized war-crimes units and prosecutors trained in sexual and gender-based crimes.
The Civil Commission is not alone in arguing that the sexual violence of Oct. 7 requires a legal response. The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel submitted an early report to the UN in 2024, and the Dinah Project, led by legal experts at Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center, published an 84-page report in July concluding that Hamas used sexual violence as a “tactical weapon” during the attacks and in captivity. A month later, the UN Secretary-General listed Hamas among parties “credibly suspected” of patterns of rape or other sexual violence in armed conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said the new report should not be treated only as a document for prosecutors, legal scholars or women’s rights advocates. Sexual violence is too often treated as an issue that “belongs to women’s committees,” she said, when the findings should also be studied by those responsible for national security and counterterrorism.
Accountability should also extend to social media platforms, after Hamas-led perpetrators filmed and circulated images of victims to “glorify the atrocities in real time,” according to the report.
The commission has drawn support from high profile figures including David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and tech executive Sheryl Sandberg, who has campaigned internationally for recognition of Oct. 7 sexual violence.
The archive is led by Karen Jungblut, a former archivist at the USC Shoah Foundation. The commission has also been approached by people trying to document sexual violence in other atrocity settings, Elkayam-Levy said, including Druze contacts seeking guidance after recent attacks in Sweida, Syria.
The report’s release came a day after the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a law establishing a special military tribunal to try captured Hamas-led Oct. 7 perpetrators, with authority to impose the death penalty in some cases. But it warns that capital punishment could deter international support and extradition, noting that comparable hybrid courts combining domestic and international elements do not permit capital punishment.
Executions, Elkayam-Levy further argued, could overshadow the legal record, divert attention from victims’ suffering and turn the proceedings into a global controversy. “My fear is that the terrorists will be remembered more in the universal, historical memory than the victims themselves.”
In taking testimonies from survivors, Elkayam-Levy said, one of the final questions her team asked was what gave them strength and what justice meant to them. The answers, she said, were striking for how little they had to do with indictments or convictions.
“More than anything else, they want the truth to be heard and for them to be recognized and believed,” she said.
The post Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability appeared first on The Forward.