Hamas and Feminist Dissonance

It was predictable that Hamas officials and their radicalised international supporters would deny that sexual violence against Israeli women and men was committed on 7 October 2023. But denials from the academic field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are more surprising because they appear to violate two of the field’s salient principles: support for women’s sexual autonomy and insistence that women who lodge charges of sexual violence should be believed. Instead, a number of academic feminists have not only rejected Israeli claims, they have also embraced Hamas, along with all the reactionary patriarchal baggage of radical Islam, thereby abandoning their own stated values.

This subversion of academic feminism has been unambiguously apparent in multiple events organised by women’s and gender studies programs across the US since the 7 October attacks. The most recent of these was held on 11 February, when the Gender and Women’s Studies department at the University of California at Berkeley sponsored a webinar panel discussion titled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine.” The original abstract for the event read:

Some of the more important accomplishments of feminism include the insistence on “believing women” who come forward with accusations of sexual assault, and the awareness of increased sexual violence during militarized conflicts. Yet these achievements are currently being turned against real feminist concerns in Palestine. This talk will look at how Zionism has weaponized feminism, so as to serve Israel’s genocidal intent, by upholding debunked accusations of systematic Hamas mass assault, while ignoring documented reports of Israeli abuses.

The abstract was taken down after UCB law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon published a critical op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on 3 February. Solomon anticipated that the panelists’ talks would likely “celebrate antisemitic violence” and create “a hostile environment for women” on campus, thereby violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two days later, UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons responded to Solomon in a letter to the Journal:

The optional event that Prof. Solomon referenced hasn’t happened yet. The courts have made clear that the campus administration can’t cancel an event based solely on fears of what might be said. If the event proves to be a venue where odious views contrary to our institutional values are expressed, I will, as I have in the past, respond appropriately.

The event duly went ahead as planned, but when one of the panelists expressed precisely the kind of views that Solomon predicted, Lyons never responded.

The 11 February panel featured three speakers: human geographer Walaa Alqaisiya, anthropologist Nadine Naber, and Nada Elia, an Ethnic Studies scholar. Their presentations consumed the entire hour allotted for the webinar, which left no time for questions.

Alqaisiya’s talk probably sounded harmless to the uninitiated, since her points were buried under an impenetrable layer of postmodern jargon. She claimed that Zionism “occupies queerness” and that “hetero-colonising” blocks “Palestinian struggles for liberation.” Nevertheless, “de-colonial queerness” could be used to counter “Zionist settler imaginings,” and the Palestinian queer movement alQaws is busy opposing “ecocidal violence.” Alqaisiya acknowledged that an Israeli soldier had raised the rainbow-coloured Pride flag in Gaza in November 2023, but she dismissed this display as an act of “pinkwashing” (the anti-Zionist claim that Israel’s progressive record on gay rights is used to obscure the greater crimes of Zionist occupation and oppression). She challenged depictions of Palestinian women as passive and downtrodden with the assertion that their “anti-imperialist feminism” transforms their experience into a form of “living martyrdom.”

Traitors to the Human Mind

As an aggressive activist strategy, the “pinkwashing” charge is shameless and shrewd. As moral reasoning, it is inane.

QuilletteJamie Palmer

Nadine Naber sought to recast the subordinate role that radical Islam imposes on women as voluntary and politically valuable. She argued that efforts by Palestinian women in Gaza to protect and nurture their families are comparable to those of poor African American and “Latinx” mothers in Chicago. Both, she said, are acts of “revolutionary motherhood,” critical to “resisting state violence.” (One may well ask if the women themselves experience it that way.) While the problems faced by these two groups of women clearly derive from very different sources, Naber’s American analogy seemed to be intended to elicit the sympathy of her American audience by evoking a familiar point of reference. Left unmentioned was the fact that much of Gazan women’s suffering results from Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields, which deliberately places mothers and children in harm’s way. 

Nada Elia’s presentation was more disturbing than the two that preceded it, since it bore at least the veneer of scholarly respectability. She denied that Hamas had committed any rapes on 7 October but went on to allege that the Israeli military had engaged in sexual violence “from the start” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beginning with the kidnapping of a young Bedouin girl in 1949 who was then “sexually enslaved.” Mention of this outrage, she pointed out, had even been recorded by Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion in his contemporary diaries. And in the decades that followed, sexual violence was repeatedly inflicted on Arab men and women in Israeli prisons and detention centres—crimes documented by the UN High Commission on Human Rights and by NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Elia specifically mentioned a 2024 UN report prepared by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (also known as the “Pillay Report,” after its lead investigator, Navi Pillay). Elia noted that the Pillay Report accuses Israelis of subjecting Palestinian prisoners to various forms of ill-treatment, some of which have been sexual in nature. When the report became public, Elia said, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich expressed outrage about the leaks involved but not about the acts themselves. Indeed, she asserted, unnamed “Israeli officials” have claimed that sexual violence is needed to maintain their country’s security—and that “all measures were legitimate against terrorists.” 

“Why are global north feminists not outraged?” Elia demanded rhetorically. They are not outraged, she went on, because they engage in what she called “the Palestine exemption,” which exonerates Israel of all wrongdoing—including (but not limited to) sexual violence—by weaponising charges of antisemitism to discredit and dismiss any criticism of Israel. At the same time, these feminists uncritically accept and promote false charges that Hamas committed gang-rape on 7 October. An unspecified New York Times article, Elia maintained, reported that no direct testimony exists from alleged victims, and there is no evidence rapes occurred, much less that they were premeditated. (Elia may have been referring to a Times article from 4 March 2024, which discussed a report by Pramila Patten, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. More likely, Elia had in mind a 13 June 2024 article about the Pillay Report.)

To understand how feminist academics have arrived at this point, it is helpful to consult Kara Jesella’s Quillette essay “A Feminist History of Antisemitism,” published in late 2023, which thoughtfully explores the relationship between concurrent developments in the women’s movement and academia. Jesella begins by reminding us that feminist hostility to Israel was not common in the years before the Second Intifada began in 2000. “Jewish feminists expressed their love for Israel, or at least an acknowledgment that the country needed to exist. And when criticisms of Israeli policies did surface, they often came from Jewish feminists themselves, who had no difficulty distinguishing Israeli citizens from the actions of their government.”

But, she continues:

[C]hanges in feminism’s in-group formations and theorizations enabled the antisemitism and anti-Zionism that were latent at the advent of the movement to become salient and entrenched. The shift to identity-based feminism—which includes the women-of-color feminism and queer theory now regnant—has produced some exciting, inventive, moving, and sophisticated feminist theory. But it has also contributed to an ideological climate that scorns discussions of antisemitism and Israel and is now profoundly inhospitable to Jews.

These trends were compounded, inside and outside the academy, by the growing influence of anti-imperialist ideology and its application to Israel, “despite Jews’ historic ties to the region.” In 1975, American delegates to the United Nations’ International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City joined their counterparts from African and Arab nations to help pass a “Zionism is racism” resolution. Five years later, in Copenhagen, the conference welcomed a delegation from the PLO headed by the notorious hijacker Leila Khaled.

As antipathy to Israel proliferated on the Western Left, Jewish feminists were compelled to adopt a new identity—what Jesella calls “the secular, anti-racist, Jewishly identified, quite-possibly-lesbian feminist who was conversant in women-of-color feminist theory and supported a two-state solution at a time when the Jewish establishment still did not.” While many Jewish feminists could live with such an identity, the advent of queer theory made even that impossible. According to Jesella, “queer theory thrived on the transgressive frisson of the unexpected and the illegitimate. If you’re hip, you know that biology has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. You also know that Israel needs to be destroyed.”

As a result, “the ideal feminist persona had shifted from the educated working woman to the young radical to the lesbian woman of color, and now, to the queer Palestinian terrorist.” It was at this moment that the concept of “pinkwashing” emerged.

A History of Feminist Antisemitism

The story of how activists and academics exchanged the struggle for universal female improvement for a politics of division and hatred.

QuilletteKara Jesella

Jesella’s account of academic feminism’s devolution helps to explain how a webinar so obviously hostile to Israel—and to Israeli women, in particular—could be held at an august progressive institution like Berkeley. But the denial of rapes by Hamas on 7 October and the corresponding charges of a long history of Israeli sexual violence have other roots as well. Depictions of the Jew as a sexual predator have been deeply embedded in centuries of European antisemitism and, more recently, in the variant now omnipresent across the Arab world. The image of the Jewish rapist was a staple of Nazi propaganda, especially of the pornographic kind.

A more proximate cause of this trope’s revival plausibly lies in the appearance of the novel Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli and the subsequent controversy surrounding it. First published in Arabic in 2017 as Tafṣīl Thānawī, an English translation by Elizabeth Jacquette appeared in 2020, followed by a German translation from Günther Orth in 2022. The novel is based on reports (some of which are disputed) about the aforementioned kidnapping of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949, but as a work of fiction, it amplifies the horror of that incident. As the Guardian’s critic put it, “Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it is shining off the page.”

In Arabic, the novel served to revive long-suppressed memories of a shameful moment in Israeli history, and drawing on persistent tropes of Jewish men’s sexual predation, it lent fresh support to hostility toward Israel in the region. But it was the English and then German translations that heated up anti-Zionist sentiment in the West, where the novel’s much-vaunted literary qualities brought it widespread attention among cultural elites. Minor Detail was nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020 and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, before it won LitProm’s LiBeraturpreis for women writers from the Global South in 2023.

It was that last award that led to the controversy. Litprom is an independent group, but it receives funding from the Frankfurt Book Fair, where it planned to honour Shibli on 20 October 2023. But when Shibli was announced as the prizewinner, the fair cancelled the award ceremony, which was scheduled to take place just two weeks after 7 October. The Frankfurt Book Fair is partly funded by the German government, and this no doubt influenced their decision. “In light of the terror against Israel,” the fair’s director Juergen Boos told the press, “Litprom is looking for a suitable format and setting for the event after the book fair.” Meanwhile, the fair would “give Israeli and Jewish voices additional time on our stages.” Boos said that his organisation strongly condemned “Hamas’s barbaric terror against Israel. … Our thoughts are with the victims, their relatives and all the people suffering from this war.”

The decision to give the award to Shibli had already caused dissent within Litprom. The previous summer, a German member of the prize jury, journalist Ulrich Noller, resigned in protest, stating that he believed the novel “serves anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic narratives, and it not only allows such interpretations, but opens up space for them.” The writer Maxim Biller concurred, arguing in a review for the Suddeutsche Zeitung that “the book ends with the symbolic murder of the frightened Palestinian first-person narrator by a few faceless, nameless, brutal Israeli soldiers, which ultimately makes the novel just an unliterary piece of propaganda.” And Carsten Otte, a literary critic at Die Tageszeitung, wrote that Shibli’s novel portrays Israel as a “murder machine.” Interestingly, both of those newspapers are left-leaning.

Even so, a number of international voices vigorously protested the fair’s decision. Over 600 signatories—including Nobel laureates Abdulrazak Gurnah and Olga Tokarczuk, prominent authors Colm Toibin and Annie Arnaux, and dozens of publishers and literary agents—sent a letter of protest to the organisers, while several Arab publishing-industry groups pulled out of the fair altogether.

Although Shibli was not publicly honoured in the end, the controversy probably brought her novel more public attention than it would otherwise have received. It also lent credence to allegations of a long history of Israeli sexual violence at the very moment when the world was beginning to hear reports of rapes committed by Hamas in Israel just weeks earlier. That may have been why even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz began to cast doubt on reports of sexual violence committed on 7 October. Hamas was clearly benefiting from a cultural uproar that was shifting attention from allegations about their own recent atrocities to those attributed to Israelis in the past.

Although Nada Elia did not mention Minor Detail by name during the Berkeley webinar, the novel surely informed her dubious assertions about incidents of sexual violence on the part of the Israeli military. Unfortunately, given the event’s time constraints, no one had a chance to challenge those claims, or any other aspect of her presentation, though there were certainly multiple grounds for doing so.

Elia’s complaint about “global north feminists” who allegedly make use of a “Palestine exemption” was particularly strange, since it is Israel that is frequently subjected to a double standard. In her discussion of the Pillay Report, Dina Rovner, a legal advisor at UN Watch, argues:

[T]he Commission creates a perverse moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, treating them on completely equal footing. Nowhere in the report does the Commission acknowledge or consider that Hamas is a terrorist organization which, by definition, flouts the rule of law, while Israel is a law-abiding democracy whose military operates according to international law with processes and mechanisms to address the legality of strikes in advance, as well as complaints after the fact. By this false moral equivalence, the Commission applies different standards to Israel than to any other democracy engaged in a just war of self-defense, denies Israel’s right to self-defense, and whitewashes Hamas terrorism. 

Throughout her talk, Elia offered a skewed presentation of sexual violence on the part of Israelis and Palestinians, past and present. She insisted that Israel had a long history of committing such abuses, and she said that Patten’s UN report had been unable to confirm some reports of rape in certain Israeli kibbutzim. But she neglected to mention that Patten also reported that:

Based on the information gathered by the mission team from multiple and independent sources, there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.

This selective reading of documents undermined Elia’s position. In fact, since she never presented direct evidence from either Patten’s or Pillay’s reports, it seems reasonable to conclude that she had only encountered their findings second-hand, through the New York Times. It therefore matters which Times article she consulted. If she relied on the 4 March article, she would have obtained a fairly accurate description of the Patten report. But the 13 June article is a tendentious opinion piece by Erika Solomon, slanted against Israel.

Elia also uncritically repeated claims drawn from dubious reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the UN Human Rights Council. These sources have been widely criticised for their anti-Israel bias on many issues, including sexual violence, by organisations such as UN Watch and NGO Monitor. In mid-November 2023, Danielle Haas, a senior editor at HRW, sent a candid resignation email to over 500 staff members, in which she accused the organisation of politicising its work on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict:

Following the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, years of institutional creep culminated in organizational responses that shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.

Elia’s own biases led her to say nothing about the fact that, if and when IDF members are accused of engaging in sexual violence or other violations of the laws of armed conflict, the Israeli government (unlike Hamas) takes the charges seriously. All reports of ill-treatment on the part of the IDF or other Israeli government personnel, sexual and otherwise, are investigated by the relevant authorities, and perpetrators are tried and appropriately punished.

Bias and Betrayal

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QuilletteGerald M. Steinberg

Israeli historians Tuvia Friling and Benny Morris point to other problems in Elia’s presentation. Friling, a specialist in Holocaust Studies and an IDF veteran with many years of service, found Elia’s depiction of Israeli responses to charges of sexual violence misleading and offensive. “There is no reason to claim that the Israeli soldiers (who include myself, my friends and family, the soldiers whom I commanded and who commanded me) are the same soldiers who, according to these claims, harmed Palestinian women and men sexually as a regular practice,” he told me. “I was in the regular army from the age of eighteen to 22, served as a paratrooper and as an officer in the Golani brigade. I fought in the Yom Kippur War and until age fifty, served in the reserves. In every briefing before going into any operation/battle, the officers were, and are, careful to remind the soldiers about the rules of warfare—rules accepted by us, in Israel.” Nonetheless, he conceded, “on the fringes of the fighting there also were and can be” incidents of sexual violence. “However, in the IDF that I know, any such action will result in an investigation, prosecution, and [the] unequivocal condemnation of the commanders.”

Reflecting on the War of Independence and Ben Gurion’s diary entry, Friling noted, “It must be remembered that the IDF, at that time, was a young army, an army of a few weeks, months. Most of its soldiers were new immigrants who came either from Europe after the experience of the Holocaust, or from Islamic countries. In both places, the value of ‘purity of weapons’ was not the basis of soldiers’ education. Nevertheless, incidents of sexual violence, to the extent that they occurred, were dealt with harshly by the commanders.”

“Yes, there were actions in which the soldiers of the young IDF deviated in 1948–1949 and there were also such in 1956.” But, he concluded, “then and today, the IDF did—and still does—the maximum possible in combat to adhere to its ethical code. If and when there are anomalies, they are treated as abnormal phenomena and certainly do not express the spirit of the IDF and the spirit of Israeli society.”

Morris, a historian of Israel, remarked that Elia’s claims exaggerate the scope of Israeli sexual violence. He pointed out that far fewer incidents are purportedly perpetrated by the IDF than by other regular military forces in conflicts like the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And crimes allegedly committed by the IDF do not compare to the campaigns of atrocities carried out by terrorist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017, or the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group currently fighting in the Congo. (In Congo, physician Denis Mukwege reports that the health centre he founded has treated more than 83,000 survivors of sexual violence, almost a third of whom are children.) In those conflicts, Morris said, “rape was industrial and organized and policy, as apparently it was by the Hamas on 7 October.”

Concurring with Friling, Morris stated that “rape was rare as far as can be determined,” although he conceded that, “some cases probably went unrecorded. Yes, the Nirim gang rape and murder [involving the Bedouin girl] occurred, but it was a very rare case and resulted in twenty or so IDF soldiers being put on trial and receiving (admittedly light) jail sentences (1–5 years).” Morris mentioned other incidents for which soldiers had been tried and punished, including one in Acre, during which the victim’s father was murdered, and an investigation involving the rape and murder of four women by a squad of soldiers, which was followed by investigations but no conviction or punishment. But this, he said, was exceptional. “In general, Ben Gurion and the IDF were far more sensitive about cases of rape than of massacre in 1948.”

Notably, according to Morris, there have been no reports of rapes by the IDF in Gaza since the start of the war there in 2023. “In 2023–2024, the IDF overran many of Gaza’s populated cities and towns and, more recently, so-called crowded refugee camps in the West Bank (Tulkarm, Jenin), but no Palestinian or foreign observer complained of a single act of rape in either territory.”

Contemporary academic feminists like Revital Madar, a legal scholar whose research focuses on “the intersection of law, sovereignty, and violence in the context of Palestine-Israel,” would probably dispute Morris’s last assertion. She has argued that silence about incidents of sexual violence in places like Gaza are not reliable evidence of their absence. Because they are “colonised,” women there are in no position to lodge complaints. But that contention can also be reversed: perhaps the reason there has been so little direct testimony of Hamas’s rapes is that many of the victims were murdered after being sexually assaulted. Returning hostages may also be wary of speaking out because other Israelis remain in the hands of the terrorists. Though none of those still being held are women, men are
not invulnerable.

As Patten’s report to the UN acknowledges:

The true prevalence of sexual violence during the 7 October attacks and their aftermath may take months or years to emerge and may never be fully known, given that sexual violence remains a chronically underreported crime in every conflict-affected setting, due inter alia to trauma, stigma and fear faced by survivors. As in other conflict-affected contexts, there remains a significant likelihood that the findings of the mission team, in terms of verified violations, only partially reflect the crimes actually committed.

On both sides, however, such reasoning remains speculative, and relying on it to challenge the validity of evidence or its absence may encourage scholars to invent history out of whole cloth to suit political ends.

Havi Dreifuss, an Israeli historian who specialises in Eastern Europe and Holocaust Studies, provides another important insight into denials of sexual violence on the part of Hamas. An important difference between 7 October and the Holocaust, Dreifuss notes, is that the Hamas attack occurred in the digital era, which allowed its fighters to broadcast displays of their atrocities on the internet. Did these include sexual violence? While Hamas has been eager to celebrate other forms of violence, including the murder of Israelis, they have been reluctant to do so the same with incidents of rape. Not only were these crimes absent from their broadcasts, but in public statements, officials have also flatly denied they were ever committed.

Patten’s report found that:

While the mission team reviewed extensive digital material depicting a range of egregious violations, no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources. Nonetheless, some digital material of circumstantial elements such as naked or partially naked bodies may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence. The mission team took note of the averments of the Israeli authorities that some of the incriminating online materials, including those specifically depicting acts of sexual violence, had been removed or restricted by various platforms or by the offenders themselves. While it is possible that digital evidence may have been posted and then removed from official channels and social media profiles, possibly due to concerns by the various groups that it may be incriminating, it is the view of the mission team that, had clear digital evidence of sexual violence or orders to commit sexual violence been circulated in the mainstream, it would have likely been discovered given the volume of the information posted online and further recirculated, making the removal of all trace of such material unlikely.

Notwithstanding these gaps in the evidential record, Patten stated that considerable evidence of sexual violence on 7 October had been found: “Although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.” Moreover, in a press release that accompanied the report, Patten added, “With respect to hostages, the mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.”

Why Hamas would seek to hide its members’ sexual predations—at a time when they were more than willing to boast about other forms of violence—is difficult to determine. The Nazis concealed all of their actions, including sexual violence, not because they were ashamed of them or thought that they were not entitled to carry them out, but because they knew that the rest of the world would view them as crimes. Perhaps the same is true of Hamas, at least when it comes to sexual violence. It is also possible that they are aware that admitting to rape would violate Islamic restrictions. Understanding this anomaly requires deeper research. 

The panelists were trying to reconcile two antithetical sets of values: those of patriarchal radical Islam and those of modern Western feminism.

But none of this explains why some academic feminists continue to categorically deny that any sexual violence occurred at all on 7 October, especially since these denials put them at odds with one of their own fundamental principles. Here, Kara Jesella’s insights about the impact on the field of changing feminist theorising and the influence of anti-imperialist ideology are relevant. The growing antisemitism these shifts produced did not seem to trouble most scholars in the field. But resolving the contradiction between their founding principles and the values and practices of some decolonial groups required some tricky manoeuvring. The accusations of sexual violence on 7 October made this contradiction impossible to ignore. Forced to choose between believing the claims of Israeli women and maintaining solidarity with Palestinians, Western academic feminists chose the latter.

Hints of the dissonance this choice produced are apparent in the initial abstract for the Berkeley panel:

Some of the more important accomplishments of feminism include the insistence on “believing women” who come forward with accusations of sexual assault, and the awareness of increased sexual violence during militarized conflicts. Yet these achievements are currently being turned against real feminist concerns in Palestine. 

What are those “real feminist concerns”? If the panel hoped to define them—and to construct some sort of alternative feminist conceptual scaffolding—it failed. And it failed because the panelists were trying to reconcile two antithetical sets of values: those of patriarchal radical Islam and those of modern Western feminism.

Nadine Naber’s concept of “revolutionary motherhood” rings hollow in the face of the suffering of Gazan women and their children, which Hamas and its supporters frequently publicises along with their own acts of violence. It is unlikely that those women see themselves as heroes of the resistance when they are being barred from entering the tunnels Hamas has constructed to protect its own fighters. Walaa Alqaisiya is deluding herself if she thinks that widespread “de-colonial queerness” exists in the Muslim world, much less that it can become strong enough to fight “ecocide.” And Nada Elia’s denial of Hamas’s sexual violence is not just an insult to feminism, it is a blatant form of antisemitism.

Sadly, ending hostility toward Israel among academic feminists is a distant prospect given the current politicisation of much of the academy. Intellectual standards in broad swathes of the humanities and social sciences have declined to the point that informed debate and balanced instruction are now scarce. Thus, even the emergence of compelling new evidence will probably do little to change minds or improve teaching.

Building on Patten’s report and the work of other investigators, an initiative called the Dinah Project is currently trying to sift through all the available evidence to present the clearest possible picture of what actually occurred on 7 October. The group is conducting systematic research under the auspices of a reputable academic institution (yes, such a thing does still exist) and will soon be issuing what promises to be the most comprehensive and methodical report to date. But because that institution, Bar-Ilan University, is Israeli, its report will undoubtedly encounter considerable scepticism from anti-Zionists, and the controversy over Hamas’s sexual violence will persist. Even if Dinah’s findings prove to be overwhelming, they are unlikely to persuade contemporary academic feminists to reconsider their denials of rape. Too much has already been invested in their preferred narrative of Palestinian innocence and Israeli depravity for facts to make a difference.