Disbelief

By now, one has either heard of the extensive sexual violence committed against women in Israel by Hamas, or one has chosen to live under the most apathetic rock. In the never-ending saga of shedding light on this dark day, more evidence of depravity was released on July 8: the Dinah Project. It is an unbelievably tragic yet admirable effort displaying the best of what people — our people — can achieve with empathy and dedication. However, it is also yet another insidious spotlight on the absolute worst to which others can sink when choosing pure evil.

For me, it’s less about what is actually inside of this report. It’s about the necessity of it. To anyone with a pulse, it should beg the question: Why did this have to be released? Why is this still so relevant and necessary to talk about?

The depressingly obvious answer is that though this horror took place 21 months ago, the pain still exists nearly as fresh because it has been largely ignored by the world.

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The unimaginable brutality addressed here but unaddressed elsewhere serves as a perfect microcosm for the core of Oct. 7 itself: While the extent of the unthinkably vicious savagery is more than the human, especially female, mind can come to terms with, the unfathomable global denial and ignorance of these painful realities rival the original atrocities. And so this gigantic wound on Israeli women has since scarred over but never fully been allowed to heal.

This sadism against women is arguably both the worst of what was committed that day and the worst that one human can do against another … not only due to the nature of the pain the women endured, but because it reveals the nature of the criminals inflicting it: that they chose this deliberately, as sexual violence is always absolutely unnecessary; and that they wanted to cause the most pain possible, because if destruction and death were the only goals, it would have been simpler to just shoot their victims and burn their homes.

These men decided to commit the most gruesome acts not only because they wanted to inflict the maximum amount of physical and emotional pain, but because they thrived off it. They demonstrated the fullest depth of inhumanity possible that day.

Perhaps even worse than the intention of pain inflicted in the moment was their intention to bestow a pain beyond that day. Mass sexual violence is historically used to psychologically defile and humiliate a population — not only the dead, but the survivors and community as well; sexual violence is intended as a double weapon to assault both in the moment and every moment going forward. In this case, the terrorists not only counted on the painful lack of justice regained due to the fact that they also slaughtered most of their victims; they also clearly banked on the global political temperature and everlasting biases to ensure an ultimate humiliation of never being taken seriously. There is no doubt that their endgame was lasting trauma via antisemitic justification of or overwhelming apathy toward such crimes against our women.

Therefore the worst of what was done that day led to the worst of the ensuing aftermath.

As Sheryl Sandberg posed at the United Nations, are we going to believe the Hamas spokesmen who claim that such violence
is forbidden in Islam, and therefore it could not have possibly happened? Or are we going to believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives?

What we have unfortunately witnessed is that “believe all women” — something always enough for other victimized women — expired that day into a resounding disbelief of Jewish ones in favor of their monstrous abusers … or just disbelief that they mattered at all.

Each time another piece of violent evidence is released I consider whether this might be the one that makes a difference, though I realize that if one hasn’t already spoken out by this point, there is little that would bring one to do so now. That’s why the release of this report was dismaying for yet another reason: It was not only what we already knew or reasonably suspected, but it was also what everyone else should have already realized and understood this entire time, yet chose to stay silent.

With an overwhelming amount of viscerally overwhelming evidence, now from six categories of sources, there is no argument as to whether enough proof exists for any denier to believe. But proof was never genuinely what was in question — human worth was.

There are two sobering truths that have plainly surfaced during this time. Many people’s public support is contingent upon the political temperature of the victim, and many women’s supposed “feminism” is grossly outshadowed by their stronger antisemitism. So the undeniable age-old reality has been amplified: While crimes and violence against women are typically ignored anyway unless politically useful, crimes against Jewish women sink to the bottom of the barrel, because even after millennia, at best, much of the world unconsciously continues to view Jews as not fully human, and at worst, many consciously deny our humanity outright.

That another report had to be created demonstrates the double burden Jews face regarding crimes against their own — not simply shouldering the burden of the original pain, but having to seek justice alone by proving that what happened matters. The fact that it had to be meticulously curated shows the timeless double standard of a forever unequal burden of proof. It is a never-ending search for accountability in a world which refuses to offer any, and, sadly, has willingly upheld Hamas’ culminating goal to keep Oct. 7 not just a date in history, but forever alive to re-traumatize.

Shame on the world for tasking such a small community with the ridiculous onus of having to constantly stress that what these women endured matters. Shame on the world for forcing the release of horrors in the hope of getting someone else out there to believe that these daughters, sisters or wives are worthy of the same concern as their own. And shame on the world for placing more value on these women’s rapists and executioners than the women themselves.

Although the report’s existence is deeply troubling, its message is still encouraging. It shows that despite the pain due to a world that moved on too soon, Jews are moving forward in a real, active and productive way, taking this surreal tragedy and using it to tangibly assist the future, not just for these women, but for everyone … even those who hate us, as Jewish innovation tends to do. So while I may not have much faith in the rest of the world ever providing us any justice, I will always have faith that our own will do so.

Until the day when the rest of the world chooses to care, we all must keep fighting for the women who were silenced, both by those who stole their lives and those who later deemed their lives unworthy of any voice.

And as these women are no longer able to speak for themselves, it is our collective duty to speak for them and our responsibility to do what they no longer can: To keep compiling evidence for an uninterested world.

To keep recording and reporting the indescribable.

To keep uplifting the truth about the depths of that day.

And most importantly, to keep being there for our own, because it is clear that no one else will be.  PJC

Sarah Kendis is a musician living in Pittsburgh.