Lauren Wolfe on Gaza again: Now it’s bothsidesism regarding rape

I wish she would stop giving me things to write about.

Lauren Wolfe, who, last December wrote the easily debunked article that Israel deliberately targets Gazan journalists (debunked here), just wrote that it is “likely” Israeli soldiers are raping Gazan women:

. . . but [she writes] reporters are unable to report from Gaza, so we have a black hole of information. It’s not a choice necessarily of the press right now.

She was responding to a reader’s comment that he believes Hamas did brutally rape Israeli women on Oct 7^th and he also believes “that Israeli soldiers are doing similar acts to Palestinian women.” This brief conversation was in response to Wolfe’s article proposing why the standard of evidence used in the case of Hamas is higher than for any other war, making it hard to believe they raped Israeli women. She does believe it. Nice of her.

She has covered rape in other war-tormented populations. That gives her a kind of authority in writing on this topic.

So here is why she believes that there is a higher standard in Israel’s case when examining the accusations of rape:

1. Because accepting the taped evidence — that the perpetrators themselves recorded of their acts — might make someone appear to be “on Israel’s side.” She actually wrote that. Granted, she says her source gave that reason, but she seemed to accept it as a legitimate reason to doubt the tapes they originally proudly shared on social media and that they regretted when they realized that it backfired against them.
2. Because the first people on the scene were Israeli soldiers (and Zaka, but she did not mention them) and not forensic investigators. The soldiers and Zaka wanted to identify the dead (something that eventually took many weeks because there were so many of them) and clear the area — perhaps Wolfe thinks the dead women should have been left naked and mutilated, uncovered, with a police ribbon around the crime scenes for however long it would have taken to examine them, hopefully before their bodies would have rotted in the field. Also, in writing this, is she implying that soldiers in other armies would have made sure that forensic investigators arrive on the scene under similar conditions in order not to contaminate the evidence that could be used against the perpetrators?
3. Because the U.N. were unable to interview the rape survivors given that they were still so traumatized and also afraid that their speaking out may have caused “further harm [to] Israeli women held captive in Gaza. As if the U.N. interviewed war-time rape survivors in other conflicts.
4. Because, get this: because “Hamas may have taken some of the survivors into Palestinian territory,” making them unavailable for forensic questioning. Can there be any comment more cynical than this?
5. Because many of the bodies were burned in the attack — thus precluding collecting forensic evidence of rape.
6. Because Jewish law requires burial within 48 hours. This, actually, did not happen in so many cases since it took many weeks to identify the bodies. There was no mass anonymous-grave burials in Israel — families waited. Was forensic evidence of rape and torture collected in these cases. Perhaps.

Do you notice what is missing in this list?

If I need to spell it out for you, it is one hypenated word: Jew-hate. Hatred toward the one Jewish nation in the world because it is a Jewish nation. And in spite of all of that (the list above and the pervasive Jew-hatred) the U.N. did, finally, conclude that Hamas committed sexual crimes against Israeli women.

Furthermore, she did not consider a familiar phenomenon that plays out in rape cases when the accused is someone in whom some powerful authority has a vested interest, such as the college football hero, the son of the mayor, or more. In the case of Hamas versus Israel, Hamas is the beloved, supposed victim of the hated Israel and, therefore, there is a vested interest in not believing Israeli accusations against Hamas.

Gender-based Violence in war

Wolfe wrote about how it is common to report on the torture of men as part of war, but not about the rape of women. She mentioned that dehumanization of a people during conflict can lead to brutal sexual crimes.

Even as Israel hatefully destroys Gaza and its citizens, committing what may be ruled war crimes one day, that does not take away from the hatred that caused members of Hamas to attack Israeli women and girls. If there were ever a conflict in which I’m sure that one side or both would commit sexualized violence, it’s this one.

Notice the “or both” in that quote. She just cannot let Hamas’ crimes stand alone. We will deal with her accusation of Israeli hateful war crimes in a separate article.

She did not even mention how the rape of enemy women (and girls) constitutes a weapon of war.Yet, in the first quote in this article, Wolfe refers to choices faced by the press. She, who calls herself an investigative journalist, apparently made the choice not to include in this article anything that could be gleaned from the reams of materials written about war-time gender-based violence, as it has come to be called in the past decade or more. For example, she could have referred to a two-page brochure on the topic published by the U.N. in which they clearly state that rape is a weapon of war:

Wartime sexual violence . . . is not merely the action of rogue soldiers, but a deliberate tactic of warfare. It displaces, terrorizes and destroys individuals, families and entire communities, reaching unthinkable levels of cruelty against women of all ages from infants to grandmothers. It can leave the survivors with emotional trauma and psychological damage, physical injuries, unwanted pregnancies, social stigma and sexually transmitted infections such as HIV.

In fact, rape is a tool for committing genocide of an entire population. One article easily found online explained that:

In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

Even a student at Claremont McKenna College in California showed she had a good grasp of rape as a weapon of war in her unpublished paper uploaded to the College website. Surely a seasoned journalist like Lauren Wolfe could have given her readers a more substantial article than the fluff she uploaded.

What about bothsidesism: Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women?

I will be brief here.

1. Israeli soldiers have been accused of not raping Palestinian women because they are racist and do not want to touch the Arab women. (For example, here.)
2. In another variation of the racism claim, Israeli soldiers do not rape Palestinian Arab women as a means of maintaining the ethnic boundaries between the two populations. The author worked hard trying to explain why Israeli soldiers differ so greatly from others around the world regarding gender-based violence.
3. If rape is a form of genocide, it would not work in the case of the Jews, who consider the mother’s identity to determine the baby’s religion. Therefore, Jews raping Moslem women would merely produce more Moslems. (As opposed to Moslems raping Jewish women since, according to Islam, it is the identity of the father that determines the baby’s religion. Therefore, their rape babies are Moslem and rape could be a way to genocide Jews.)
4. Israeli soldiers who rape Palestinian Arab women are not regarded as heroes, but are tried in court and if found guilty, serve time in prison. (For example, here.)
5. The Torah prohibits the rape of female prisoners of war — you must wait a month, give her time to mourn, and then, if you want to marry her, you can — or you send her back home.

Of course, there have been instances in which Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian Arab women (note point 4 above), and it is possible that we will discover that there were some cases of rape by Israelis in Gaza. However, this is not a policy of the IDF. It is considered a crime in the Israeli military just as it is a crime in civilian Israel society.

Feature Image Credit: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons