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Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame

(JTA) — When a lawyer for Donald Trump asked E. Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream while allegedly being raped by Donald Trump, I thought of Letty Cottin Pogrebin. In her latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” she writes about being assaulted by a famous poet — and how the shadow of shame kept women like her silent about attacks on their own bodies.

That incident in 1962, she writes, was “fifty-eight years before the #MeToo movement provided the sisterhood and solidarity that made survivors of abuse and rape feel safe enough to tell their stories.”

Now 83, Pogrebin could have coasted with a memoir celebrating her six decades as a leading feminist: She co-founded Ms. magazine, its Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as president of Americans for Peace Now and in 1982 blew the whistle on antisemitism in the feminist movement. 

Instead, “Shanda” is about her immigrant Jewish family and the secrets they carried through their lives. First marriages that were kept hidden. An unacknowledged half-sister. Money problems and domestic abuse. An uncle banished for sharing family dirt in public. 

“My mania around secrecy and shame was sparked in 1951 by the discovery that my parents had concealed from me the truth about their personal histories, and every member of my large extended family, on both sides, was in on it,” writes Pogrebin, now 83. “Their need to avoid scandal was so compelling that, once identified, it provided the lens through which I could see my family with fresh eyes, spotlight their fears, and, in so doing, illuminate my own.”

“Shanda” (the Yiddish word describes the kind of behavior that brings shame on an entire family or even a people) is also a portrait of immigrant New York Jews in the 20th century. As her father and mother father move up in the world and leave their Yiddish-speaking, Old World families behind for new lives in the Bronx and Queens, they stand in for a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”

Pogrebin and I spoke last week ahead of the Eight Over Eighty Gala on May 31, where she will be honored with a group that includes another Jewish feminist icon, the writer Erica Jong, and musician Eve Queler, who founded her own ensemble, the Opera Orchestra of New York, when she wasn’t being given chances to conduct in the male-dominated world of classical music. The gala is a fundraiser for the New Jewish Home, a healthcare nonprofit serving older New Yorkers.

Pogrebin and I spoke about shame and how it plays out in public and private, from rape accusations against a former president to her regrets over how she wrote about her own abortions to how the Bible justifies family trickery.

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity. 

I found your book very moving because my parents’ generation, who like your family were middle-class Jews who grew up or lived in the New York metropolitan area, are also all gone now. Your book brought back to me that world of aunts and uncles and cousins, and kids like us who couldn’t imagine what kinds of secrets and traumas our parents and relatives were hiding. But you went back and asked all the questions that many of us are afraid to ask. 

I can’t tell you how good writing it has been. I feel as though I have no weight on my back. And people who have read it gained such comfort from the normalization that happens when you read that others have been through what you’ve been through. And my family secrets are so varied — just one right after the other. The chameleon-like behavior of that generation — they became who they wanted to be through pretense or  actual accomplishment. 

In my mother’s case, pretense led the way. She went and got a studio photo that made it look like she graduated from high school when she didn’t. In the eighth grade, she went up to her uncle’s house in the north Bronx and had her dates pick her up there because of the shanda of where she lived on the Lower East Side with nine people in three rooms. She had to imagine herself the child of her uncle, who didn’t have an accent or had an accent but at least spoke English.

You describe yours as “an immigrant family torn between loyalty to their own kind and longing for American acceptance.”  

There was the feeling that, “If only we could measure up, we would be real Americans.” My mother was a sewing machine operator who became a designer and figured out what American women wore when she came from rags and cardboard shoes, in steerage. So I admire them. As much as I was discomforted by the lies, I ended up having compassion for them.  

It’s also a story of thwarted women, and all that lost potential of a generation in which few could contemplate a college degree or a career outside the home. Your mother worked for a time as a junior designer for Hattie Carnegie, a sort of Donna Karan of her day, but abandoned that after she met your dad and became, as you write, “Mrs. Jack Cottin.”

The powerlessness of women was complicated in the 1950s by the demands of the masculine Jewish ideal. So having a wife who didn’t work was proof that you were a man who could provide. As a result women sacrificed their own aspirations and passions. She protected her husband’s image by not pursuing her life outside the home. In a way my feminism is a positive, like a photograph, to the negative of my mother’s 1950s womanhood.

“I’m not an optimist. I call myself a ‘cockeyed strategist,” said Pogrebin, who has a home on the Upper West Side. (Mike Lovett)

You write that you “think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” What were the Jewish pressures that inspired your parents to tell so many stories that weren’t true?

Think about what we did. We hid behind our names. We changed our names. We sloughed off our accents. My mother learned to make My*T*Fine pudding instead of gefilte fish. Shame and secrecy have always been intrinsically Jewish to me, because of the “sha!” factor: At every supper party, there would be the moment when somebody would say, “Sha! We don’t talk about that!” So even though we talked about what felt like everything, there were things that couldn’t be touched: illness, the C-word [cancer]. If you wanted to make a shidduch [wedding match] with another family in the insular communities in which Jews lived, you couldn’t let it be known that there was cancer in the family, or mental illness.

While I was writing this memoir, I realized that the [Torah portion] I’m listening to one Shabbat morning is all about hiding. It is Jacob finding out that he didn’t marry Rachel, after all, but married somebody he didn’t love. All of the hiding that I took for granted in the Bible stories and I was raised on like mother’s milk was formative. They justified pretense, and they justified trickery. Rebecca lied to her husband and presented her younger son Jacob for the blessing because God told her, because it was for the greater good of the future the Jewish people.

I think Jews felt that same sort of way when it came to surviving. So we can get rid of our names. We wouldn’t have survived, whether we were hiding in a forest or behind a cabinet, a name or a passport, or [pushed into hiding] with [forced] conversions. Hiding was survival.  

I was reading your book just as the E. Jean Carroll verdict came down, holding Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting her during an encounter in the mid-’90s. You write how in 1962, when you were working as a book publicist, the hard-drinking Irish poet Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) tried to rape you in a hotel room and you didn’t report it. Like Carroll, you didn’t think that it was something that could be reported because the cost was too high.

Certainly in that era powerful men could get away with horrible behavior because of shanda reasons. 

Carroll said in her court testimony, “It was shameful to go to the police.” 

You know that it happened to so many others and nobody paid the price. The man’s reputation was intact and we kept our jobs because we sacrificed our dignity and our truth. I was in a career, and I really was supporting myself. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I would have been pilloried for having gone to his hotel room, and nobody was there when he picked up an ashtray and threatened to break the window of the Chelsea Hotel unless I went up there with him.The cards were stacked against me.

In “Shanda,” you write about another kind of shame: The shame you now feel decades later about how you described the incident in your first book. You regret “how blithely I transformed an aggravated assault by a powerful man into a ‘sticky sexual encounter.’” 

I wrote about the incident in such offhand terms, and wonder why. I wrote, basically, “Okay, girls, you’re gonna have to put up with this, but you’re gonna have to find your own magical sentence like I had with Behan” to get him to stop. 

You write that you said, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!” And that got him to back off.

Really painful.

I think that’s a powerful aspect of your book — how you look back at the ways you let down the movement or your family or friends and now regret. In 1991 you wrote a New York Times essay about an illegal abortion you had as a college senior in 1958, but not the second one you had only a few months later. While you were urging women to tell their stories of abortion, you note how a different shame kept you from telling the whole truth.  

Jewish girls could be, you know, plain or ordinary, but they had to be smart, and I had been stupid. I could out myself as one of the many millions of women who had an abortion but not as a Jewish girl who made the same mistake [of getting pregnant] twice.

The book was written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the book you write powerfully about the shame, danger  and loneliness among women when abortion was illegal, and now, after 50 years, it is happening again. Having been very much part of the generation of activists that saw Roe become the law of the land, how have you processed its demise?  

Since the 1970s, we thought everything was happening in this proper linear way. We got legislation passed, we had litigation and we won, and we saw the percentage of women’s participation in the workplace all across professions and trades and everything else rise and rise. And then Ronald Reagan was elected and then there was the Moral Majority and then it was the Hyde Amendment [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion]. I was sideswiped because I think I was naive enough to imagine that once we articulated what feminism was driving at and why women’s rights were important, and how the economic reality of families and discrimination against women weren’t just women’s issues, people would internalize it and understand it and justice would be done. 

In the case of Roe, we could not imagine that rights could ever be taken away. We didn’t do something that we should have done, which is to have outed ourselves in a big way. It’s not enough that abortion was legal. We allowed it to remain stigmatized. We allowed the right wing to create their own valence around it. That negated solidarity. If we had talked about abortion as healthcare, if we had had our stories published and created organizations around remembering what it was like and people telling their stories about when abortion was illegal and dangerous…. Instead we allowed the religious right to prioritize [fetal] cells over a woman’s life. We just were not truthful with each other, so we didn’t create solidarity. 

Are you heartened by the backlash against restrictive new laws in red states or optimistic that the next wave of activism can reclaim the right to abortion? 

I’m not an optimist. I call myself a “cockeyed strategist.” If you look at my long resume, it is all about organizing: Ms. magazine, feminist organizations, women’s foundations, Black-Jewish dialogues, Torah study groups and Palestinian-Jewish dialogues. 

Number one, we have to own the data and reframe the narrative. We have to open channels for discussion for women who have either had one or know someone who has had one, even in religious Catholic families. The state-by-state strategy was really slow, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted that. She almost didn’t get on the court because she didn’t like the nationwide, right-to-privacy strategy of Roe but instead wanted it won state by state, which would have required campaigns of acceptance and consciousness-raising.

So, the irony is she hasn’t lived to see that we’re going to have to do it her way. 

You share a lot of family secrets in this book. Is this a book that you waited to write until, I’ll try to put this gently, most of the people had died?

I started this book when I was 78 years old, and there’s always a connection to my major birthdays. And turning 80 – you experience that number and it is so weird. It doesn’t describe me and it probably won’t describe you. I thought, this could well be my last book, so I needed to be completely transparent, put it all out there. 

My mother and father and aunts and uncles were gone, but I have 24 cousins altogether. I went to my cousins, and told them I am going to write about the secret of your parents: It’s my uncle, but it’s your father. It’s your family story even though it’s my family, but it’s yours first. And every cousin, uniformly, said, “Are you kidding? You don’t even know the half of it,” and they’d tell me the whole story. I guess people want the truth out in the end.

Is that an aspect of getting older?

I think it’s a promise of liberation, which is what I have found. It’s this experience of being free from anything that I’ve hid. I don’t have to hide. Years ago, on our 35th wedding anniversary, we took our whole family to the Tenement Museum because we wanted them to see how far we’ve come in two generations.

—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Why They Deny the Crimes of October 7

The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Even as they recorded their crimes in obsessive detail, the Nazis worked to deny and erase them. As the Shoah unfolded, they worked to conceal evidence: destroying documents, dismantling camps, burning bodies, and erasing traces of mass murder. Yet when the war ended and the scale of the Holocaust became undeniable, Nazis and their ideological fellow travelers did not retreat from denial. They escalated it. They sought to rewrite reality itself by denying, minimizing, relativizing, or distorting the crimes they had committed.

This eventually became a global phenomenon despite the Holocaust being one of the best-documented crimes in human history. Mountains of evidence existed: transport records, photographs, films, camp infrastructure, eyewitness and survivor testimony, perpetrator confessions, and the physical remnants of industrialized murder itself. None of it was enough for the deniers. Because Holocaust denial was never about evidence. It was about rehabilitating the perpetrators, delegitimizing Jewish suffering, and once again recasting Jews as manipulative liars, weaponizing victimhood for sympathy, power, or political gain.

Denial as Ideological Warfare

Today, something disturbingly similar is unfolding around October 7, particularly regarding the sexual crimes perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women, men, and children.

A major new report by the Civil Commission, led by the inimitable Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, presented what CNN described as “the most comprehensive body of evidence yet” documenting systematic sexual violence during and after the October 7 genocide. The report draws upon survivor testimony, released hostages, eyewitness accounts, forensic evidence, therapists, medical experts, and first responders. Its conclusion is unequivocal: Hamas and affiliated terrorists used sexual violence as a deliberate weapon of war designed to maximize pain, humiliation, and terror.

The details are beyond horrifying. Women were raped beside the bodies of murdered friends. Victims were found partially naked, mutilated, tied to trees and poles, shot in the genitals, or executed after assault. Witnesses described gang rapes at the Nova festival. Former hostages spoke of sexual abuse, forced nudity, threats of forced marriage, and prolonged sexual humiliation in captivity.

Hamas terrorists and many Palestinian perpetrators recorded their crimes in sickening detail. Murders, kidnappings, torture, humiliation, and sexual violence were filmed, photographed, celebrated, and distributed online by the perpetrators themselves. In some cases, atrocities were broadcast through the victims’ own phones and social media accounts. Unlike the Nazis, Hamas’ violence was not hidden; it was publicized and glorified.

And yet denial persists.

Almost immediately after October 7, before the bodies were even cold, social media filled with claims that reports of rape were “Israeli propaganda.” Activists and commentators insisted there was “no evidence.” Others claimed Israelis had fabricated the allegations to justify war. Some demanded impossible evidentiary standards that are almost never applied to sexual violence anywhere else on earth. Even now, as testimonies accumulate and further evidence emerges, denial remains deeply embedded within parts of activist, academic, and media culture.

That is because, like Holocaust denial, this is not about evidence. Holocaust denial emerged despite overwhelming proof because the denial itself served a purpose. It protected the moral image of the perpetrators while transforming Jews from victims into deceivers. The denier does not simply reject facts. They reject the legitimacy of Jewish suffering itself. The same mechanism is visible today.

When Jewish Suffering Becomes Inconvenient

For many people invested in a worldview in which Israel represents absolute evil and Palestinians represent absolute victimhood, acknowledging the sexual crimes of October 7 creates tension. Jewish women cannot be permitted to exist as victims because their reality complicates the narrative. Israeli suffering becomes ideologically intolerable. And so it must be doubted, obscured, minimized, or erased altogether. This is why so much October 7 denialism focuses specifically on the sexual crimes.

Sexual violence carries a specific moral weight in contemporary society. To acknowledge that Hamas terrorists and their collaborators committed widespread and systematic acts of rape, mutilation, and sexual torture would require many activists to confront a reality: that individuals and movements they have celebrated, romanticized, excused, or sanitized committed acts of extraordinary brutality.

We should also recognize the profoundly anti-Jewish nature of this phenomenon. Jews are uniquely subjected to suspicion toward their suffering in ways that have become normalized across political and cultural life. The distrust of Jewish testimony has become so deeply embedded that many people no longer even recognize it as prejudice.

The Crime Continued Through Erasure

The tragedy is not only the crimes themselves, but what their denial reveals about the world Jews inhabit. After the Holocaust, many believed humanity had learned something: that there existed a moral obligation to listen to victims, document atrocities honestly, and ensure genocidal violence could never again be erased through propaganda and denial. Yet within hours of October 7, that promise began collapsing in real time.

The lesson of Holocaust denial should have taught us that evidence alone is never enough against ideologically motivated hatred. There will never be enough footage, enough testimony, enough witnesses, enough forensic evidence, or enough reports for those who have already decided that Jewish suffering does not count.

That is the real connection between Holocaust denial and the denial of October 7. Both ultimately rest upon the same underlying premise: that Jews are uniquely unworthy of belief, uniquely suspect in their suffering, and uniquely undeserving of moral sympathy.

Ultimately, when these crimes are denied, minimized, relativized, or erased, the victims are violated a second time. The murdered are stripped not only of their lives, but of the truth of what was done to them. The raped are stripped not only of bodily autonomy, but of the dignity of having their suffering acknowledged. Denial is never neutral. It is the continuation of the crime through erasure.

That is why speaking clearly about October 7, including the systematic sexual crimes perpetrated against women and girls, matters so profoundly. We cannot bring back those who were murdered. We cannot undo the horrors inflicted upon the victims. But we can refuse to abandon them to silence, distortion, and denial. We can bear witness. We can speak plainly. And we can ensure that those who suffered are not erased by a world that too often finds Jewish suffering uniquely difficult to acknowledge.

Founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, Ben M. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People (2021), Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) and The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025). Educating, inspiring and empowering, his work focuses on Jewish identity and historical and contemporary Jew-hatred. A Holocaust scholar for over fifteen years, Ben came to prominence during the Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis in the UK and quickly became one of his generation’s leading Jewish thinkers and voices against Jew-hate. The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Remembering Abe Foxman: My Time with a Hero of the Jewish People

ADL National Director Emeritus Abe Foxman. Photo: ADL

Hearing the news that Abe Foxman died last Sunday at the age of 86 triggered a slew of memories about the man now being memorialized as “one of the last great architects of postwar American Jewish public life.”

Historians will surely write books studying Abe and his half-century legacy of fighting antisemitism, including 27 years as national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

But as Foxman was being eulogized by Jewish and non-Jewish leaders around the world, I recalled the amazing experiences I had with him, as I witnessed his quixotic quest to eliminate the infectious plague of antisemitism from the planet.

I come to this exercise with a unique lens; I may be the only newspaper reporter who both covered Abe, and then later went to work for him as ADL’s Director of Interfaith Affairs.

That history afforded me the opportunity to interact with Abe as both an outsider and an insider.

I experienced the little human asides — the famous hugs, as a reporter being called “tattele,” Yiddish for “good boy” which was somewhat cringeworthy for a journalist, and that time during a black-tie fundraiser in West Palm Beach where he came up to me and whispered, “get me out of here.” (I was never quite sure whether he was joking or not.)

So here I share some highlights of my time with the man that many remember so fondly.

As a young Holocaust survivor from Poland who was rescued, raised, and baptized by his Catholic nanny, Abe fully understood the importance of positive interfaith relations for the long-term health and welfare of the Jewish people.

As a reporter covering religion and interfaith issues, he called me one day and asked if I wanted to go to Rome and meet the Polish Pope, John Paul II. I was sure he was joking. The next thing I knew, I was sitting with him in a large conference room in the Vatican with a small contingent of ADL officials and the Pope. It was clear from their honest, direct, and warm exchange that these two sons of Poland held each other with great respect.

Several years later, as ADL’s interfaith director, Abe called me into his office after hearing that the Pope had selected Timothy Michael Dolan, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, to be the next Archbishop in New York City.

Abe’s directive was clear: “Find out when he’s coming to New York and make sure we are the first organization to meet with him.” Several frantic phone calls later, I arranged for Dolan to meet with us in Abe’s office a couple of days after he arrived in Manhattan. Dolan was immediately taken by Abe’s charm and thoughtful gift. It was the start of a long and deep friendship for us, that despite various controversies, held fast over the years.

But when it came to defending Jews and their dignity, Abe the charmer became Abe the bulldog. Late one afternoon in February 2012, he summoned me to his office.

He was clearly upset. It was revealed that the names of Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and his late father had been found in the genealogical database of the Mormon Church, now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, making them available for posthumous baptism. Abe told me he was immediately calling one of the highest officials at church headquarters in Salt Lake City and demanding they remove the names, apologize, and stop baptizing Holocaust victims. Abe had his direct number. The Church Elder picked up the phone and attempted to explain the situation in bureaucratic terminology. But Abe wasn’t having it, holding fast to his demand. Within a few days, the church apologized stating this was not their policy. Abe tasked me to work with their interfaith director to monitor the situation and make sure they kept their word.

Abe also dedicated himself to defending others — embodying ADL’s mission statement “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment for all.” When it became clear that local elected officials around the country were blocking Muslim communities from building or expanding their mosques by using questionable legal loopholes, Abe quickly approved my proposal to create an interfaith task force, ICOM, to support the rights of Muslim Americans to build their houses of worship. In addition, ADL’s civil rights division would file amicus briefs on behalf of the Muslim communities.

When it came to responding to haters of Jews and Israel, Abe generally criticized them with equal force, no matter the political party or the prominence of the person. In this age of polarization, this perhaps is the most important lesson to recall.

At his funeral at the ornate Park Avenue synagogue in Manhattan on Tuesday, more than 500 family, friends, current and former ADL officials, and New York and national Jewish leaders gathered to say goodbye to Foxman.

The funeral included video eulogies by Israeli President Issac Herzog, and Ambassador Susan E. Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, who said she loved Foxman, and that he always had her back. Sara J. Bloomfield, the longtime director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., consistently referred to Foxman as “a giant.” New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman, who first met Abe in summer camp when he was a teenager and Foxman was his camp leader, called him a “modern Maccabee.”

Foxman was also remembered as “a man of gravitas and humor” and as a “person of consequence” — respected and listened to by presidents, prime ministers, and popes.

He especially was remembered as a man who put family above everything, as testified by his two children and four grandchildren, who provided many touching details of his love and devotion to each one of them, being in touch every day with a call or an email, and ending his messages with “LOL” — which despite their corrections, Foxman insisted meant “lots of love.”

His daughter Michelle even located her father’s 1958 high school yearbook from Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in Brooklyn. Standing on the bimah or platform in front of the synagogue pews, she read his moving essay about the importance of the State of Israel to the Jewish people after the Holocaust, and his “secret mission” — conceived as an 18-year-old — to spend his life defending it.

Park Avenue Senior Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who led the service, stated that with Foxman’s passing, it was now the obligation of the leaders in the room, and future generations, to continue the fight against exploding violent antisemitism and anti-Israelism, and the protection of American democracy.

Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg is ADL’s former national Director of Interfaith Affairs and Outreach, and a national award-winning journalist.

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The Media Keeps Treating Terrorists as Civilians — Here’s the Proof

Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus Photo: Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini.

Since October 7, 2023, the media has worked tirelessly to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting civilians.

Yet despite Israel’s extensive efforts to minimize civilian harm, the terrorist organizations it is fighting have systematically worked to ensure the opposite outcome.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah have embedded themselves deeply within civilian society, inflating casualty figures while obscuring the military identities of many of those killed.

In both Gaza and Lebanon, this strategy has produced what researchers describe as a “resistance society” — a system in which operatives simultaneously hold civilian professions that provide both legitimacy and operational cover.

Journalism is among the most visible examples.

In Gaza alone, more than 100 terrorists operating under the cover of journalism have reportedly been killed by the IDF since October 7. Meanwhile, Hezbollah-affiliated media figures in Lebanon are routinely portrayed by international outlets as innocent civilians or independent reporters.

But the evidence does not come solely from Israel.

Again and again, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah themselves publish martyrdom posters identifying deceased operatives not only by their military affiliations, but also by their civilian professions.

The pattern is striking: terrorists simultaneously serving as doctors, teachers, paramedics, police officers, lawyers, musicians, and journalists.

Hospitals as Operational Cover

International media coverage has consistently framed Israeli military operations near hospitals as attacks on civilian medical infrastructure. But Hamas and Islamic Jihad have repeatedly embedded operatives inside those facilities, stripping them of protected civilian status under the laws of armed conflict.

Hospitals in Gaza have allegedly functioned not only as treatment centers, but also as operational hubs, weapons storage sites, and cover for terrorist activity. Many individuals publicly described as “medical workers” were later identified by terror organizations themselves as operatives.

One prominent example is Marwan Al-Hams, identified as a Hamas operative who was detained in July 2025 over suspected knowledge regarding the whereabouts of fallen IDF officer Lt. Hadar Goldin.

Palestinian and pro-Palestinian media initially portrayed his detention as the “abduction” of a medical professional — coverage that largely disappeared once his Hamas affiliation became public.

Other documented cases include:

  • Ayman Abu Teir, identified as an Islamic Jihad commander.
  • Khaled Al-Rakiei, who led the Islamic Jihad in the western Gaza Strip while working as a doctor in Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital.
  • Murshid Abu Abdullah, identified as a commander in Islamic Jihad’s Khan Younis Brigade and the managing director of the al-Baraka Specialized Health Center, as well as a radiology technician at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
  • Rami Talal Mohammed Jarghoun, a commander in Islamic Jihad’s al-Balad Battalion’s Support Unit within the Khan Younis Brigade and an administrative supervisor at the European Hospital in Khan Younis.
  • Najm Abu al-Jibeen, a Qassam commander who worked as a nurse.
  • Salem Juma Ishaq Sharab, a commander in Islamic Jihad’s Military Ambulance Unit in the Khan Younis Brigade, a nurse at Nasser Hospital, and treasurer of the Palestinian Nursing Association.
  • Diaa Nafez Abdulhadi Felfel, a commander in Islamic Jihad’s Military Ambulance Unit in its Northern Brigade, and a nurse and the emergency room supervisor for the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza.

Ambulances and Emergency Services

The same pattern extends to paramedics and emergency medical services.

Hezbollah operates its own medical infrastructure through the Islamic Health Authority, whose personnel have been identified as Hezbollah operatives.

Evidence has suggested that the ambulances are used to transport terrorists between locations discreetly. The IDF has additionally released videos displaying weapons in ambulances.

Hamas has similarly exploited ambulances. Ibrahim Abu Tzakar, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist who participated in the kidnapping of an Israeli civilian, also worked as a paramedic.

The Classroom-to-Terror Pipeline

While Israel has been accused of “scholasticide,” mounting evidence points to extensive terrorist entrenchment within Gaza’s educational infrastructure.

Teachers and professors have repeatedly been identified as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah operatives. Some UNRWA-affiliated teachers were allegedly involved in the October 7 attacks themselves.

Among the documented examples:

  • Muhammad Ghafour, an Arabic teacher in an UNRWA school and a Hamas member.
  • Fathi al-Sharif, a Hamas commander in Lebanon who also headed UNRWA’s teachers’ union there.
  • Dr. Riyad Abu Hashish, a university history professor, and Mahmoud Ahmed Abu Shamala, a physics teacher, were senior Islamic Jihad terrorists.
  • Ali Jaafar Marji, a Hezbollah operative, also worked as a​ physics teacher in Hezbollah’s independent education system.

The consequences extend beyond staffing.

Children as young as 13 have reportedly appeared in the ranks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, underscoring the extent to which extremist ideology has permeated educational and social systems.

Hamas and Gaza’s Security Apparatus

Hamas’ integration into civilian institutions extends deeply into Gaza’s police and internal security infrastructure.

The terror group has reportedly sought to incorporate 10,000 police officers into a future governing framework in Gaza despite many officers maintaining affiliations with Hamas or other terror factions.

This overlap helps explain why Israel has repeatedly targeted police infrastructure during the war.

Cases cited include:

Terror Embedded Across Civil Society

The phenomenon is not confined to healthcare, education, or policing.

Terror organizations also benefit from embedding operatives in professions that carry social legitimacy or cultural influence.

Examples include:

These dual identities help terrorist organizations blur the line between civilian and combatant while strengthening their entrenchment inside society.

When terrorist organizations systematically embed themselves within civilian infrastructure, that fact is not incidental — it is central to understanding the conflict.

Much of the evidence documenting these affiliations comes directly from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah themselves. Their own martyrdom announcements repeatedly reveal that many individuals later described internationally as “civilians” were active members of terror organizations leading double lives inside civilian society.

The question is whether international media outlets are willing to acknowledge the pattern — or whether they will continue reporting only half the story.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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