The 12-word title of Masha Gessen’s recent offering in The New Yorker hints at the hatchet job that follows.

In “What We Know About the Weaponization of Sexual Violence on October 7th,” it becomes apparent that Gessen is not, as any reasonable person might think, commenting on how Hamas used sexual violence as a weapon of war during its October 7 invasion.

Instead, Gessen puts her best effort into supposedly demonstrating how Israel has weaponized Hamas’ October 7 atrocities.

She opens the piece by quoting Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is apparently, by virtue of being a criminologist and feminist scholar, deemed “more qualified” than anyone to answer whether rape and gang rapes were part of Hamas’ attack.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Social Work and Social Welfare, was suspended from her job in March after comments she made on a podcast with “three Palestinian American academics” were revealed by an Israeli news channel.

 

1/ Why is @mashagessen denying Hamas war crimes in the @NewYorker? The rape of Israeli women and girls by Hamas terrorists on October 7 are not just allegations. They are well-documented with witness testimony.https://t.co/NMyaI85CMs

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 21, 2024

Gessen’s quoting of Shalhoub-Kevorkian is grossly deceptive. The academic, readers are told, spoke with “confidence and care” when she put the sexual violence of October 7 into “historical context”:

Rapes, abuses, sexual abuses, gang rapes—it always happened in wartimes,’ she said. ‘It always happened.’ She had written about this wider history, she said, and she had written about the history of Jewish Israeli soldiers, back in 1948, using sexual violence against Palestinians. ‘Abuses and sexual abuses happen,’ she said. ‘And they shouldn’t happen. And I will never approve [of] it, not to Israelis, not to Palestinians, not in my name.’

She was speaking as a Palestinian. Next, she spoke as a feminist:

‘I don’t go and interrogate the rape victims. If a woman said she was raped, I will believe her. I do not need evidence, and I don’t want to go check facts, to be honest. This is my opinion.’”

But more importantly — and more troublingly — this was just one of many statements Shalhoub-Kevorkian made on the podcast. She also claimed that Israelis act scared when they walk past her and hear her speaking Arabic on the phone, but added that they “should be scared because criminals are always scared.”

On Zionism, Shalhoub-Kevorkian said it is time to “abolish” the movement for Jewish self-determination, and “only by abolishing Zionism can we continue.”

So, according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, only by eradicating the State of Israel can Palestinians continue. And on the October 7 massacre, she said:

[Israelis] will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies. We stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them.”

Gessen casts her own doubt on whether there is evidence of “widespread, systematic and, particularly brutal” sexual violence, noting in a later paragraph that “most of the women who had been subjected to sexual violence on October 7th were dead. They weren’t coming forward with evidence.”

She claims it is the Israeli government that is amplifying the sexual violence narrative.

There is something deeply ironic in Gessen’s argument that Israel has politicized sexual violence, when she uses the deaths of Israeli women and girls, whose testimonies of the horrors they endured cannot be heard, to criticize the Israeli government.

To bolster her argument, Gessen picks at a February report by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers of Israel, which laid bare the horrific extent to which Hamas brutalized Israeli women.

However, Gessen immediately contradicts herself, noting that Hila Tov, a prominent multimedia journalist and activist, conducted the research for the report and that Tov said that “most of the evidence, in the end, came from dead bodies, or, rather, from the recollections and interpretations of volunteers who had gathered the bodies, and from doctors who interviewed survivors.”

The report was based on evidence collected from the scene, testimonies from those who collected bodies, and from doctors who interviewed survivors — the only possible sources of evidence. As a side note, Gessen ignores another piece of compelling evidence that further proves the events of October 7, which is the interrogation videos of Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians in which they admit to raping Israeli women and girls.

Gessen cynically suggests that all subsequent reports about October 7 — those she deems “better researched and more comprehensive” — have been “met with disappointment by those who were expecting evidence of systematic crimes.”

Ultimately, we see why Gessen is so determined to undermine the overwhelming evidence of October 7: She believes “Israeli authorities have strategic reasons for claiming that the sexual violence was systematic.”

One reason, she contends, is that Israel is trying to highlight that “however inhumane the Israeli ways of waging war are, the message is, Hamas’s are even worse.” She describes this as a “campaign of demonization” that prompted Palestinian activists and pro-Palestinian media to try to “debunk claims that sexual violence occurred on October 7th.”

First, the accounts she referenced in Israel are not unsubstantiated. Numerous first responders reported finding bodies whose genitals had been mutilated, and these accounts have not been recanted.

It is utterly nauseating to suggest that the horrifying October 7 testimonies are not trustworthy because “rape is common in war and in peace” and that to “convey the trauma of sexual violence, victims and witnesses may feel the need to embellish.” Even more repugnant is the false equivalence between Hamas and the IDF. Testimonies of sexual abuse in Israeli prisons have been propagated by the likes of Euro-Med, which absurdly alleged Israel had trained dogs to rape detainees.

Without directly denying that sexual violence took place on October 7, Gessen suggests the extent of the rapes has been overblown and casts doubt on the severity of the attacks on the victims.

The article is nothing more than an exercise in apologism for the horrific acts of Hamas.

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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