Loading ...I’ve always admired Israeli women. Though I didn’t see any in the flesh before my first trip to the Promised Land 20 years ago, at Sunday School I far preferred the complex women of the Old Testament – Deborah the judge, Yael the assassin, Ruth the first philo-Semite – to the repenting hookers and grieving mothers of the New. The book of Exodus revolves around the actions of five women; the Talmud teaches that ‘the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the merit of the righteous women of that generation’.
Israel is a beacon of freedom in a region steeped in misogyny, viewed with murderous loathing by nations where only men matter
Though the nation of Israel is first mentioned in an Egyptian artefact from 1200BC while ‘Palestine’ has only had its own flag since 1964 (during a 1981 exchange with the US Ambassador to Israel, Menachem Begin said ‘Jews have survived without a strategic cooperation memorandum with America for 3,700 years – and can live without it for another 3,700 years’) ceaseless invasion and persecution had driven the Hebrew diaspora to every corner of the world, where forced conversion and pogroms welcomed them.
In the early years of the 20th century when the level of murderousness against the Jews of Eastern Europe became too much for even this eternally persecuted people, Theodor Herzl’s audacious dream – that the Jews could return to their ancestral homeland – became a reality as many of the young generation of the diaspora retraced their forebears footsteps back to Judea. These were the decades when the kibbutz rebuilt the land, gone to rack and ruin in the absence of the Jews; though of necessity agrarian, the kibbutz project was steeped in modern ideas of socialism and to some extent feminism in that women were expected to work as hard as men – whether they liked it or not. A friend tells me: ‘My grandmother arrived the Soviet Union in 1922, joined a kibbutz and helped clear agricultural land by picking up stones – she cried every day for the first year.’ In order to facilitate this, children were generally raised collectively, visiting with their parents for a few hours a day; this system ended because the majority of women, inexplicably, preferred being a slave to a toddler rather than spending their time with fellow sentient beings.
What hacking a homeland out of a desert began, military training established. The women of the IDF have in recent years become known as much for their good looks as their combat skills, but their fight has always been an existential one since the tiny Jewish state was declared war upon by five Arab nations when the British finally stepped aside. Women were active in the underground armies; with statehood came the Israel Defence Forces, in which Israeli Jewish, Druze, and Circassian (other groups are free to volunteer) women from the age of 18 are compelled to do national service for two years. As Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion said:
The army is the supreme symbol of duty and as long as women are not equal to men in performing this duty, they have not yet obtained true equality. If the daughters of Israel are absent from the army, then the character of the country will be distorted.
Despite this, after the war for statehood was won, women were generally pulled back from the frontline and expected to serve in support roles; ironically, in the light of 7 October, the reason for this was the likelihood of female soldiers being sexually assaulted by their enemies. But an all-female seven-strong tank crew of 20-year-olds fought for 17 hours straight against Hamas, killing 50 of them, whereas civilian women were raped and butchered in droves.
There are so many heroines in the Middle Eastern country the size of Wales; the grandmother seeing this evil for the second time, the mother seeing her children leave to fight, the widow left to bring up her children alone, the little girl freed from Gaza going back to school – most heartbreakingly, the bereaved mother of one of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas and accidentally killed by the IDF. Iris Haim, mother of Yotam, sent a message to the soldiers responsible for her son’s death:
I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar. I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas. We want to see you with our own eyes and and tell you that what you did – however hard it is to say this, and sad – it was apparently the right thing in that moment. And nobody’s going to judge you or be angry. We love you very much. And that is all.
All of them, the nameless heroines, as well as the very public, passionate and proficient Rimons, Noas, Ayelets, Assitas, Cochavs and Tzipis. I have particular admiration for 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, whose abduction was live-streamed by Hamas; calm and smiling, some mistook her assumed her stoicism for dementia, but she said later ‘They spat and cursed at me – it wasn’t nice. But when I sat there I said to myself “I won’t let them break me, I will behave in a way so that my children will be proud of me.” I wasn’t afraid… I wasn’t going to give them pleasure of seeing me afraid.’ At the other extreme, there was the raw grief of the young women involved in the Tel Aviv ‘fashion show’ last month where every model on the catwalk was either a survivor of the 7 October pogroms or had lost a loved one, including the ‘bride’ in the wedding dress, a ‘bullet hole’ exactly where her fiancé’s would have been after he was murdered by Hamas.
The seventh of October has changed everything – Israel, the Middle East, the world. Incidentally, it has even changed feminism; it will no longer be possible for whole swathes of women who considered themselves feminists to be seen now as anything but the groupies of violent men. Three months after that terrible day, Israeli women are still trying to make sense of the singular level of callousness extended to them by organisations and individuals who had been throwing around slogans like #METOO and #BELIEVEWOMEN for the best part of a decade. Now #METOOUNLESSYOU’REAJEW and #BELIEVEWOMENUNLESSTHEY’REJEWS have emerged as Israeli women attempt to comprehend how much the world hates them for inadvertently revealing the death-adoring heart of Islamism. Who would have thought that the women of the left would be the biggest handmaids around, the most surrendered of sister-wives, the most fawning of camp-followers? Many western feminists appear to subscribe to a neo-Marxist power dynamic theory in which the men of Gaza were being oppressed by Israeli women merely by being alive and free several miles away, leading to such unforgivable reactions as those from Rivkah Brown of Novara Media (‘a day of celebration’). When Islamists butchered Israeli women, they were attacking not just Israel, but female freedom, which made it all the weirder that western feminists did not stand with them. Still, all those copies of Fifty Shades didn’t buy themselves.
Israel is a land where women – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – may realise their talents and abilities; it is a beacon of freedom in a region steeped in misogyny, viewed with murderous loathing by nations where only men matter. (‘Palestine’ – for all its radical shape-throwing – is no different from Saudi Arabia, in that women need a male guardian to travel and have been cautioned by the morality police for laughing in public.) But the freedom of Israeli women has been hewn out of horror, and no one will take it from them; the establishment of modern Israel has changed irrevocably the historic idea of what a Jew is – and what could be done to a Jew with impunity. The sexual pogroms committed against Israeli women, filmed as entertainment and used as pornography, sought to return Jewish women to the degraded status which Sartre described in his essay ‘Jew and Anti-Semite’:
There is in the phrase a ‘beautiful Jewess’ a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words ‘beautiful Rumanian’, ‘beautiful Greek’, or ‘beautiful American’… this phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the tzar dragged by her hair through the streets of the burning village… frequently violated or beaten, she sometimes succeeds in escaping dishonour by means of death, but that is a form of justice; and those who keep their virtue are docile servants or humiliated women.
What happened on 7 October was without doubt the worst atrocity committed against the Jews since the Nazis almost 80 years ago. But we will see Israel emerge stronger from this terrible battle. I am not dismissing my own or any other ethnic group of females when I observe, with unqualified admiration, that with such extraordinary women as sisters and soldiers and mothers and leaders, this remarkable people will never be destroyed – however hard the fascist legions of both right and left, past and present, try.
Julie Burchill
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Julie Burchill