Denial Is Not Just A River in Egypt
For the Atlantic I wrote about the phenomenon of October 7 rape denialism -- and why it matters.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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What I’ve Been Up To The Past Few Weeks
Last month, I mentioned I was working on one of the more challenging articles I’ve ever reported and written. Today, it is finally live at The Atlantic — a deep dive look at the phenomenon of October 7 rape denialism.
I didn’t volunteer to write this piece. An editor from the Atlantic reached out to me and asked if I would consider writing on the subject. Just a week earlier, the left-wing publication, The Intercept, had written an article on the subject that amounted to more than 6,000 words of rape denialism. Since I usually choose topics to write about based on how much they piss me off … it didn’t take much coaxing.
Also, one of my perennial pet peeves is how issues that affect women — for example, abortion, reproductive health, and sexual violence — become categorized as “female issues,” rarely addressed by men.
However, an article that was supposed to be 1000 words mushroomed into something much bigger — and mainly because it was unfortunately necessary to prove that sexual violence had actually taken place on October 7. Quite simply, there remains enormous skepticism on the anti-Israel left that Hamas engaged in rampant and systematic sexual violence.
I read the major reports that have come out since October 7 (a UN report detailing the day’s sexual violence appeared as I started working on the piece). I poured through the December 28 New York Times article “Screams Without Words” and other major articles from the Times of London to the Guardian and the BBC. I watched YouTube videos of interviews with first responders, and I spoke to many in Israel and the US who are investigating the issue of sexual violence on October 7 — some of whom I cited in the piece and some I did not.
From this research, I concluded that sexual violence occurred on October 7 and was systematic in nature. As Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University interviewed, told me, investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”
The corpses of murdered Israeli women were found on kibbutzim, at the Nova Music Festival, and at military bases, all in various states of undress, their arms bound and underwear pulled down. Many, if not most, were then dispatched with bullets to the head. In multiple locations, women were shot in the genitals, and their bodies mutilated (although the UN Report is more circumspect on this point). Even though no rape survivors have come forward, several eyewitness accounts backed up these claims — and last month, a released Israeli hostage confirmed that she was sexually assaulted while in captivity.
But, at the same time, there is a lack of forensic evidence to support these allegations. As I wrote in the Atlantic, this is one of the most galling elements of the efforts at rape denial.
As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”
That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”
Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. [Orit] Sulitzeanu [head of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel] told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.
Why Fight On This Hill?
One of the questions that I was most interested in exploring in this piece is the phenomenon of rape denialism — and why so many on the left are willing to push back on the clear evidence of sexual assault on October 7. There are a few explanations, though the one that resonated the most with me comes from Jonathan Freedland, a columnist at the Guardian.
Freedland suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”
Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.
Finally, I addressed the issue of why this matters.
The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.
Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.
As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.
When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.
Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.
I think I’ve said enough about the piece at this point — I hope you read it.
However, I need to bring up another point about reporting this article.
I spend a great deal of time in the article looking at The Intercept’s efforts to cast doubt on allegations of mass rape. Three things stood out.
The dearth of original reporting by The Intercept. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals named in their story and whose credibility they malign.
The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer the question of whether sexual violence occurred on October 7. They simply looked at the places where the evidence was unclear or where false claims had been made (and as I noted in the piece, that did happen) — and appeared to have ignored the evidence that sexual violence occurred.
Lastly, was the repeated refusal of one of the co-authors of the piece, Ryan Grim, to directly answer the question of whether he believes Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether Hamas members committed any of these assaults. We asked him three times, and also his co-authors. They never gave us a yes or no answer.
To the last point, my interactions with Grim have been less than pleasant. After I emailed him with questions about the piece, he promptly started following me on Twitter and then began attacking me — labeling me a genocide denier and a sociopath, among other bon mots.
In a follow-up email, he called me a “hack” and said I had a “weird obsessive hostility” toward him, but he also made clear he wasn’t “complaining” that I was writing this piece.
Honestly, it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me!
Anyway, ever since I got that email, I’ve been desperately wanting to post this gif, so I hope you’ll indulge me.
Musical Interlude
I will be sure to read the whole piece. That madmen meme is perfect
I tried to read through the Intercept article and the summary total for me was that the rape crisis centers in southern Israel didn’t report rape and there wasn’t physical evidence, and by the way, look how racist that one reporter is on Twitter (spending paragraphs explaining how a few of their ‘likes’ are being investigated). It was exhausting and I gave up