Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: hostages

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Wednesday, August 07, 2024

Say Their Names: The Nameless American Hostages of Gaza (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Three Americans held hostage in Russia were released a week ago today. While you may not have been familiar with the name Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with dual US/Russian citizenship, it is almost certain you knew the names of the other two now-freed hostages: Paul Whelan, and Even Gershkovich. But how many of you are familiar with the names of the 8 American citizens still held hostage in Gaza?

Edan Alexander
Itay Chen HY"D
Sagui Dekel-Chen
Hersh Goldberg-Polin
Gadi Haggai HY"D
Judith Weinstein Haggai HY"D
Omer Neutra
Keith Siegel

Some of the eight are no longer alive, their dead bodies held captive by Hamas and their families denied the chance to bury their loved ones. Others still live in daily torment. Their names, if not their bodies, need to live in our minds, and in the minds of the public. In that task, the world has failed them.

One exception that proves the rule is the name “Hersh Goldberg-Polin,” thanks to the intensive efforts of his parents, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin. The two have somehow managed to keep their son’s name front and center; not an easy feat in our ever-changing news cycles. The campaign on behalf of their son has made a difference, not least of all because Rachel Goldberg is both appealing and a gifted speaker. She appears fragile, yet we admire her strength and wonder how she manages to keep going, day after day. We can tell she is living a nightmare, and her pleas for her son’s release hit home.

Photos have also helped to keep Hersh and his name alive in our minds, in particular, that of Rachel stooping to peek at the camera over Hersh’s shoulder as he sits in a lawn chair. Other visual reminders of Hersh would have to include the eye-catching bright yellow and black posters emblazoned with Hersh’s face and name that sprang up in my town early on. We might not yet have known the details of how it happened; how Hersh was thrown into the back of a truck with a bloody stump where his arm used to be. But we knew he was an American hostage in Gaza and we knew his name: Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Another effective visual reminder of Hersh’s absence is the bit of masking tape affixed to Rachel’s clothing. Replenished daily, the piece of tape is marked with the number of days Hersh has been held in captivity, that number written in ballpoint pen by a yearning mother’s hand. When you see Rachel Goldberg’s Instagram posts, it’s that piece of tape that catches your eye. It’s poignant; a real punch to the gut to see it. Rachel Goldberg literally wears her pain on her shirt, and for her followers, the strip of tape is a stark, daily reminder of just how long this nightmare has lasted for her son, Hersh. All of these things, the posters, the photos, the piece of tape, the soft-spoken, quietly-suffering mother have served to cement the name “Hersh Goldberg-Polin,” firmly in our minds.

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But what about the other 7 American captives? Do you know their names like you know Hersh’s name? Have you heard their names spoken by the American president and/or his administration? Is the American media keeping their names alive in your mind?

If not, why not? They managed to make you remember the names “Paul Whelan” and “Evan Gershkovich,” so why not follow the same recipe on behalf of the American hostages in Gaza? After all, politicians and journalists, if they know anything, know branding. They know how to use a name to their advantage. And they know how to keep a name quiet when it is controversial, harmful, or distasteful.

Take President Biden’s triumphant remarks on the release of the three Americans wrongfully detained by Russia. In those remarks, the president managed to get in a dig at his opponent, Donald J. Trump, with a false accusation regarding the number of Americans held since before he took office. What Joe Biden didn’t do, is get the names of the Gaza hostages out there to the American people:

I will not stop working until every American wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world is reunited with their family. My Administration has now brought home over 70 such Americans, many of whom were in captivity since before I took office. Still, too many families are suffering and separated from their loved ones, and I have no higher priority as President than bringing those Americans home.

Today, we celebrate the return of Paul, Evan, Alsu, and Vladimir, and rejoice with their families. We remember all those still wrongfully detained or held hostage around the world. And reaffirm our pledge to their families: We see you. We are with you. And we will never stop working to bring your loved ones home where they belong.

Think of the impact it would have had, had Biden slowly recited the names of the hostages in the course of his speech, pausing for effect between each name. One small edit was all it needed:

We see you. We are with you. We remember our eight hostages in Gaza:

Edan Alexander
Itay Chen HY"D
Sagui Dekel-Chen
Hersh Goldberg-Polin
Gadi Haggai HY"D
Judith Weinstein Haggai HY"D
Omer Neutra
Keith Siegel

And we will never stop working to bring your loved ones home where they belong.

We should all say their names, of course, but in particular, the American president should be saying their names at every possible occasion. Because they are Americans. And because the president is currently working to negotiate a Gaza ceasefire—it’s something that is happening right now.

Which makes it totally appropriate to mention their names:

Edan Alexander
Itay Chen HY"D
Sagui Dekel-Chen
Hersh Goldberg-Polin
Gadi Haggai HY"D
Judith Weinstein Haggai HY"D
Omer Neutra
Keith Siegel

In fact, this writer could not find a single instance when Biden recited the names of these eight. He refers to them only as “hostages.” Of course Biden had no trouble using the release of Natalie and Judith Ranaan and little Avigael Idan to his advantage. Biden said THEIR names aplenty. But not these eight—those Americans still in the clutches of Hamas. Not even in his statement marking 100 days of captivity for the hostages of Gaza:

Today, we mark a devastating and tragic milestone—100 days of captivity for the more than 100 innocent people, including as many as 6 Americans, who are still held being hostage by Hamas in Gaza. For 100 days, they have existed in fear for their lives, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. For 100 days, their families have lived in agony, praying for the safe return of their loved ones. And for each of those 100 days, the hostages and their families have been at the forefront of my mind as my national security team and I have worked non-stop to try to secure their freedom.

Since Hamas brutally attacked Israel on October 7, my Administration has pursued aggressive diplomacy to bring the hostages home. We saw the first results of that effort late October, when two Americans were reunited with their loved ones. In November, working in close coordination with Qatar, Egypt, and Israel, we brokered a seven day pause in fighting that resulted in the release of 105 hostages—including a 4-year-old American child—and allowed us to surge additional vital humanitarian aid into Gaza. I was deeply engaged to secure, sustain, and extend that deal. Sadly, Hamas walked away after just one week. But the United States and our partners have not given up. Secretary Blinken was back in the region this past week seeking a path forward for a deal to free all those still being held. I look forward to maintaining close contact with my counterparts in Qatar, Egypt, and Israel to return all hostages home and back to their families.

I will never forget the grief and the suffering I have heard in my meetings with the families of the American hostages. No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100. On this terrible day, I again reaffirm my pledge to all the hostages and their families—we are with you. We will never stop working to bring Americans home.

That is the sum total of Biden’s statement, leaving the eight hostages to remain nameless before the public. How hard would it have been to include those names? It would have made so much sense to name the hostages before the public as the president of the United States.

But it’s no wonder Biden keeps a low profile when it comes to the hostages of Gaza. With the left ascendant, the Jews are in bad odor. Which renders Jewish hostages unmentionable not only by the president, but by the mainstream media as well.

Even the word “hostage” is a no-no if one is to go by today’s CNN homepage or Middle East section. Ditto today’s NY Times front page and world section. The word “hostage” is nowhere to be found, let alone those eight precious names:

Edan Alexander
Itay Chen HY"D
Sagui Dekel-Chen
Hersh Goldberg-Polin
Gadi Haggai HY"D
Judith Weinstein Haggai HY"D
Omer Neutra
Keith Siegel

Biden has done a very thorough job of keeping the names of the American hostages under wraps, and the media has fallen right in line. With Kamala Harris waiting in the wings, it can only get worse. Meantime, the dire situation of the hostages drags on.

There doesn't seem to be much if anything we can do about the hateful attitudes of those who strive to keep the hostages’ names out of sight and out of mind. They're antisemites; their hate isn’t logical and there’s nothing you can do about that. What you can do is what they won’t do:

Say their names.

Edan Alexander

Itay Chen HY"D

Sagui Dekel-Chen

Hersh Goldberg-Polin

Gadi Haggai HY"D

Judith Weinstein Haggai HY"D

Omer Neutra

Keith Siegel

***
Note: Edited after sharp reader ahad_ha_amoratsim suggested that Z"L should be changed to HY"D, wherever it appears. And he is correct. Z"L means "May his/her memory be a blessing," while HY"D means "May God avenge his/her blood."

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Longest Pause: My Cardiac Arrest and Me (Judean Rose, Part III)

I slid off the chair to the floor, but I know nothing of this. I am gone. Only later do I ask Dov, my husband, how it happened. “Slid” was his word. “You slid off the chair onto the floor,” said Dov.

“Did I hit my head?”

“No, the medics kind of caught you and eased you down to the floor.”

“Then what happened?”

“The MDA guy immediately started compressions,” says Dov, with some awe in his voice. He is obviously impressed with the grace and speed with which this impromptu team of medics sprang into action.

I chew this over for a few days, this scenario, as described to me by my husband.

Slowly more questions occur. “What did I look like?”

“You were white,” his voice catches.

I hear that it is too difficult for him to speak about it—he had watched me die. Still, I have to ask. “Like all-over white? Were my lips white?”

“You were completely white,” he says.

I take mercy on him and table my questions. For now.

As for what I remember, it was this. I knew nothing. Not a thing. And then I was aware of blackness, and slowly color came, pixelated at first, and stole over the blackness and I heard, “Varda, Varda!” my husband’s voice, and the medics’ voices, and someone was slapping my face, and the MDA guy said. “Varda, your heart stopped for two seconds. You are going to the hospital.”

“No, no. I don’t want to go.”

Basically, at this point, I was not compos mentis. I think I hadn’t been for much of the time the medics were with me, because if it had really been a money thing—my mind would have long been at rest. The medics called MDA in spite of me, which already meant I was off the hook for payment. And now that my heart had stopped, there was no way I would not be admitted, which meant I would not have to pay for an ER visit. It is therefore impossible for me to explain the true reasons for why I continued to protest. “Is it about the money, or something else?” asked the MDA guy as I continued to protest.

“It’s the money . . .” I said.

“Ah ha! Varda,” said the MDA guy,” you are not going to have to pay. Your heart stopped.”

“. . . and my husband,” I said, in a feeble voice. “He needs me to take care of him,” but no one heard me. They were too busy strapping me onto a stretcher in preparation to take me out of our apartment for transport in the ambulance.

“I’m sorry. I’m so heavy,” I said, embarrassed.

“You’re not so heavy,” said the MDA guy.

As they take me out of the apartment, I see the sky is no longer dark, as it had been when I awoke that morning. More embarrassment, thinking of the neighbors on our quiet street, waking up to the ruckus of medics loading someone in crisis (me) into an ambulance. I feel bad to be the cause of this too early, too noisy, rude awakening.

I am in the ambulance, and as we drive away, I feel as though I am flailing from side to side, unmoored. “But how will I keep from falling?” I say aloud.

“Don’t worry,” says Elisheva the medic, who is also my friend. “We strapped you in very well. You can’t fall.”

It didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel the straps, but I trust Elisheva. There is no place to look but up, so I do. I am looking at the interior of the roof of the ambulance. Everything is as if in brownout. Then suddenly the brown lifts away and the “ceiling” looks bright white. “I feel better!” I cry out.

Elisheva says, “Good, good!” encouraging me. Then the brownout returns. This happens several times. Each time the foggy, beigey brown clears to white, I say, “I feel better!” surprised. Relieved.

Each time, Elisheva says, “Good!”

At some point during the ride to the hospital, I wonder why this is happening to me. And then I know. It is October 7. It is the atrocities, the war, the ongoing situation with the hostages. I lift my head and look at Elisheva, “The hostages,” I cry to her, knowing she will feel me. “I can’t bear it,” I say and both she and the MDA guy look at me, and the brownout comes once more.

It was the most alive I had felt since this whole thing began. And I knew that what I had promised would not happen, had happened.

At the start of the war I had said to myself, “I will not let Hamas break me,” and now it had. I had broken. It had been too much for me. I was human, flesh and blood. It was too much for a body to bear and not be overcome. I had suppressed it too much. Had tried to, anyway.

I had vowed not to write about the atrocities, not to play the poor us card before the world. I talked “around” the harshness, the hideousness of Hamas and what they had done and continue to do, in my columns. I wrote about rape fear, rather than rape. I wrote about Gazan support for Hamas; the “ceasefire deal with the devil;” the dirty money trail that led to October 7^th; the fickleness of Joe Biden in regard to his (non)support for Israel; and so on and so forth. Anything but to talk about women raped until finally dead, their legs that could not be closed, but stood at odd angles, broken. Raped front and back, the men, too. Women raped in front of their husbands, husbands raped in front of their wives. Daughters, sisters, children in front of parents, in front of each other. Sights and sounds that would haunt the survivors, the few of them that remained, forever.

I vowed not to write about any of this, even as it ate me from inside. I knew it was eating me from inside. But it was not fair for me to be feeling this. I was not the one suffering. The suffering belonged to the raped, the murdered, the decapitated—those who could no longer feel, and those who felt still, wherever they were, in the depths of some tunnel suffering unimaginable horrors.

I remember the day I heard about Hamas baking a baby in an oven. I was in the car with my husband when I read it on X, and I cried out. “What?” asked my husband.

But I could not tell him. First because I was too consumed with the pain, the thought of the baby and what it experienced, and then because I knew it was too upsetting to share. It was something that was new to me. It had obviously just come to light. I didn’t want anyone else to have to know this—to have to live with this knowledge of the baby, in the oven, and what it experienced. Even now, I can’t write about it without crying.

I moaned and cried in the car the whole way home, telling my husband, “You don’t want to know. It’s too awful. It’s too awful.”

He understood I had heard about an atrocity just come to light and he said I was right. He didn’t want to know. So I moaned and wailed the whole way home. I couldn’t stop. I cried about this on and off for days. Couldn’t, shouldn’t wipe it out of my mind, and it ate away at me and ate away at me. But I did not deserve to have this pain, I thought. It wasn’t about me, but about the victims. I had no right to make it about me.

Years ago, when my column was hosted on a different platform, it was understood that the terror victim beat was mine. I had a knack for making people feel the horror, for making it real, for making the victim real, someone the reader had never met. I had a knack for making women cry, reading my words.

And it began to feel icky, to feel exploitative. I didn’t want to have thousands of pageviews only when I wrote about tragedy that didn’t feel as though it rightly belonged to me. It was a writerly trick, no more. I stopped. I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Plus, I have to say it affected me. I took it to heart. I thought about the victims all the time. I dreamt of them. I carried them with me. It hurt my heart. My heart. And finally my heart stopped. It had had enough, had broken.

Hamas had, indeed, broken me. Broken my heart.

Several times a day I think about the hostages and the victims of October 7, and my eyes well up with tears. “No! It’s not about YOU,” I chide myself, though I know that this is my people and I too, own the sorrow and the tragedy.

And yet something inside me feels guilty for imagining that I know anything at all about what these people, MY people had suffered—even now continue to suffer! I can picture it all in my writer’s mind. I’m a creative. I picture everything in “living color,” the full horror of it all. I hear the sounds, the flames, the screaming, I picture the baby. I can’t, I can’t.

***
In the ER, Elisheva sits by me as I go in and out of that strange brownout. “How long is this going to take,” I ask her. “I need to get home to take care of Dov.”

“You’re not going to be taking care of Dov, now.”

“But he just had surgery!” I moan.

“You’re not going to be caring for Dov. And you’re not going to be cleaning for Pesach.

I continue to protest.

“Varda, this is serious,” she says.

Finally, I get it. Just as I finally understood that I had to go in the ambulance—had to go to the hospital. I lie back. I accept it for what it is. I died.

“You weren’t with us for a while,” says Elisheva, “You were lucky you were awake when it happened.”

***

The day the war breaks out, I awaken to the noise of war. Booms. Artillery. I know what I am hearing. My husband comes home from shul to tell me what he knows. But he sees that I know and understand that we are at war.

Not that I did know or understand. I could not have imagined the full horror of it all. No one could have imagined it except for the sick minds of the black-souled terrorists who perpetrated deeds the Devil himself could not imagine and would never have contemplated.

My youngest begins getting ready to go back to base. His elder brother says, “What’s with all the panic? Slow down,” and I hear the younger say, “You don’t understand!” and then whisper something about thousands of terrorists on the loose, terrible things happening, terrible.

He gets ready to go, and as he’s going down the walk to his car, the sirens go off and we make him come back in to go into the safe room. Finally, he is able to leave with whatever food I can pack for him in a hurry.

Later, as the holiday comes to a close, the other son says to me, “Don’t listen to the news. I’m telling you, Eema. Don’t listen to the news.”

Telling me not to listen to the news is like telling me not to breathe the air, not to drink water. I am all about the news. “Don’t do it, Eema,” he says, my son, so wise beyond his years. “It’s not just the war on the battlefield. There’s also the psychological war. They want to break us, Hamas.”

That stays with me. “Hamas wants to break us.”

I vow that Hamas will not break me. I say it to myself all day long—say it until I am blue in the face. But invariably, I hear things on the news. I cannot live under a rock. I need to know what is going on. And I hear terrible things. Things that break me more and more.

Each time I chide myself. “How dare you make it about you? How dare you,” but I can’t stop it from eating away at me. It nibbles at my heart, at the very core of me.

Sometimes I listen to the testimonies of the survivors obsessively. I can’t stop. I also cannot bear to hear them. “You’re not the only one,” I tell myself. “Everyone in the country feels what you feel. Everyone. And the survivors have it far worse—feel it far worse than you ever could”

But the hostages? How can I not feel this? The scenarios of what is happening to them come to me unbidden. I can’t help it. I picture it all. I picture it all. I cannot stop.

And it eats away at me, at my heart, until my heart says “ENOUGH,” and stops on a strange dark morning.

I don’t really understand why, after it stops, my heart once more begins to beat, except that God puts this instinct to live in all of us. We live, sometimes with terrible knowledge, in spite of ourselves. Whether or not we feel we can bear it all—all that life throws at us.

Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to tell me that my heart stopped for 30 seconds. He seems impressed by this number. My son who accompanies me to the hospital trades glances with me. We’d gone from the two seconds cited by the MDA guy to 30.

That was in the ER.

Sometime after I am moved to the Intensive Care Cardiac Unit, another doctor comes and says, “You had a ‘pause’ of 40 seconds.”

My son and I look at each other, both of us thinking, “First two seconds, then 30 seconds, and now 40??”

The doctor nods. “Yes,” he says. “I counted it. There was a lot of ‘noise’ on the EKG but I counted it myself and it was 40.”

We can see this is a long time from his perspective—that he is impressed by this number.

Actual screenshot from my hospital release letter detailing the 40-second "pause."

The next morning, the ward cardiologist comes to see me and he explains that there are pauses, long pauses, and very long pauses. Mine was apparently impressively long. “That is a LOOOOONG pause,” the white-haired physician tells me, adding that in his entire career, he had never seen such a long “pause.”

After many days and much testing—the tilt test, a shot of atropine, an MRI—the doctors decide to put in a pacemaker. The local anesthetic doesn’t work, and I scream as the knife slices into my flesh. “This is nothing,” I tell myself on the table, “compared to what the hostages are suffering, compared to what the victims of October 7 suffered.”

I am certain Hashem is giving me just the smallest taste of what they felt/feel in their agony. Just the tiniest taste, so that I will have some understanding, just a glimpse of what they went through, are still going through. They deserve that, the victims and survivors. They deserve for us to know and to feel it, too.

Our people, a part of us. A part of my own flesh, my own blood, my own people, my nation. My heart. I hope that in some way, my experience on the table will serve as a kapara against whatever sins had brought this down upon our people. “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement.”

Once home, I ask two cardiologist friends, “What’s the longest ‘pause’ you’ve seen in a patient.”

One says, “Ten seconds,” the other says, “Ten, maybe 15 seconds. Three seconds earns you a pacemaker, he adds.”

Neither one had seen a 40-second pause.

When I go back for my two-week checkup, the doctor squints at me, trying to place me. I say, “I’m the one with the 40-second pause,” and she remembers the case immediately, if not my face. What was my face to these physicians? I was a “pause.”

The longest pause they had seen. I was a miracle: In spite of Hamas, and almost in spite of myself, I lived.

Hamas broke me, but didn’t break me, because I lived.

My heart is not the same and there is lasting damage, yet I live to tell the tale.

I live.

Because that is what the Jewish people do. We live and outlive our enemies. And there is not a thing they can do about it. It’s ordained by someone far more powerful than Hamas. And Hamas will come to know this as the flames begin to lick at their feet for all eternity.

No one can best Hashem. No one. The Jewish people will dust themselves off, never forgetting what has been done to them, and they/we will continue to live.

Our God is more powerful than Hamas, than even the worst that Hamas can do to us. The evil ones will never, ultimately, win.

As for me, my heart will never be the same, and that is only right. I am not stone, should not be stone when my/our people are suffering.

Now I know: it’s not that my heart betrayed me. I had to break, a least a little. My injured heart proved to me that I am human, something that Hamas will never be.

Earlier: Part I: Varda wakes up, and begins to feel truly ill, and Part II: The medics arrive.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Rape Fear and the Jewish Israeli Experience (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

When the war started, I phoned my neighbor to make sure she knew she was welcome to bring her family to our safe room, at any time of the day or night. We talked about logistics and how we were having a key made for them and how I didn’t at all mind a LOT of children in a small space because I’d had 12 of my own. The whole time, my neighbor, whom I’ll call “Terry” out of respect for her privacy, said, “Thank you, but so far we’ve been sitting in the stairwell, and that’s fine with us.”

I got the idea she didn’t think the missiles were all that big a deal, and so finally I confessed, “Yeah. To tell the truth, I don’t worry so much about the missiles either. It’s the other stuff I worry about.”

“Exactly. It’s the other stuff,” said Terry.

Neither of us had to elucidate the nature of that “other stuff,” and I won’t say it here, either. But the thing I think about when I think about that “other stuff," is rape.

I can’t swear that this is the thing that worries my neighbor most, when she thinks about the things she fears most. She didn’t say. But then again, she didn’t have to—fear of rape is not exclusive to this writer—it’s fairly universal among women and researchers have been studying the phenomenon for years.

Take, for example, this abstract from “Fear of Rape Among Urban Women,” a 1985 paper by the (in-)felicitously named Mark Warr, of Penn State University (emphasis added):

Sample survey data from Seattle are used to examine fear of rape among urban women. The magnitude and prevalence of such fear are striking, particularly among younger women, who fear rape more than any other crime. The high fear attached to rape stems from the fact that it is perceived to be both extremely serious and relatively likely; and from the fact that it is closely associated with other serious offenses such as homicide and robbery. Fear of rape also lies behind fear of other offenses among women in our sample, and is strongly associated with certain social or lifestyle precautions.

Some four paragraphs into the introduction to this paper, Warr says something that touches on the universal nature of fear of rape among women. More women, it seems, are scared of rape than are actually raped (emphasis added):

This paper is not about those who rape, nor is it about those who are direct victims of rape. Rather, the paper considers a much larger group: those who fear rape. One of the major developments in criminology during the past 20 years has been a general realization that the social consequences of crime are not limited to those who are directly victimized. That principle is particularly true when it comes to fear of victimization, because the number of fearful individuals greatly exceeds the number of actual victims during any given period.

Wikipedia has something on “Rape Fear” that speaks to cause: the socialization of women. Women have been raised to fear and protect themselves from rape (emphasis added):

Socialization of Women

The fear of rape, unlike other fears of specific crimes, is almost exclusive to women. Among women, it is also one of the strongest crime-related fears, and is the strongest crime-related fear for young women. Levels of fear of rape vary among women by age, race/ethnicity, residential area, and other factors, but are especially high for women who have been victims of rape in the past or know victims personally (the latter group may include a significant portion of women, with one study estimating that over half of women know rape victims). Women are socialized from a very young age that rape can happen anywhere, to anyone, at any time. They are taught that they should always be aware of the possibility of rape and protect themselves from it. Young women are taught strategies to keep themselves safe, and this idea is instilled in them at a young age. This teaching women about the possibility of rape at a young age may contribute to higher levels of fear of crime in women. Studies have shown that women that take more precautionary steps to avoid being raped have more fear of actually being raped, whereas women who work nights and are outside in the dark tend to have less fear of rape. This may be because women that are out in the dark alone are more familiar with the area, so they feel that there is less of a threat.

“What women know and men don’t: Women have an ever-present fear of being attacked,” a 2019 review of a PBS documentary, begins with a taste for the reader, of how fear of rape is experienced by women, and why (emphasis added):

Every day, women live with fear. It’s not paralyzing, but it’s omnipresent -- whether you’re walking out of work in the dark or asking a friend to watch your drink.

“Ask any woman you know. You always have a plan,” said Mary Dickson, who worked on a PBS documentary about women and fear in 1996. Nothing’s changed since then, she says.

The fear is low hum beneath the music of your regular life, implanted in your teenage years. You’re afraid a strange man will attack you.

So you don’t run at night.

You don’t park in a public garage.

You don’t enter an elevator already occupied by a single man.

You don’t leave a party without your friends.

Women are raised to fear and protect themselves from rape. But fear of rape exponentially increases when women read about or see images or footage of rape. Perhaps that is the reason I sensed that my neighbor Terry felt as I did, after photos emerged of a female hostage being led away to Gaza, her pants bloodied at the crotch. I am also fairly certain that like me, Terry finds it difficult to stop thinking about Shani Louk, whose story I can’t bring myself to relate here.

We, the women of Israel, know that Hamas, in addition to raping women—and it must be said, men—uses fear of rape as a form of psychological warfare, to inspire incapacitating fear in Israeli women and rage in their men. For this reason, Israeli experts have advised Israelis not to watch the footage, read the stories, see the photos, or listen to podcasts where the atrocities might be mentioned. These things spike fears; in the case of women, fear of rape.

Female Fear, a US Dept. of Justice resource, speaks of several types of media that can trigger rape fear in women, among them “frightening press accounts” (emphasis added):

In the United States, the Nation with the highest rape rate in the world, warnings, admonitions, and fear of rape are handed down from mother to daughter. Although rape happens to 1 female in 12, frightening press accounts, violent pornographic movies, cultural stereotypes of rapists and their victims, attacks on friends and acquaintances, and escalating statistics have contributed to women's fear of rape. In exploring the social and psychological specter of rape in women's lives, this study probes both the myths and realities of rape and society's response to it, including strategies women have developed to protect themselves. Fear of rape is reflected in the way women think, organize their lives, and relate to others. As the authors indicate, a reasonable amount of fear is useful in motivating women to take reasonable precautions. The book presents concrete ways both women and men can begin to alleviate the destructive effects of the fear of rape. These include educating the public, integrating women into their communities, promoting legal reform, and forcing accountability in media coverage.

Fear of rape explains the “Believe Women” campaign, which arose out of the #MeToo movement. Rape is one of women’s foremost fears and concerns. Why then, do women at the forefront of efforts to support women, make excuses for Hamas rapists when the victims are Jewish?

The UN, however, bears special mention for its spectacular betrayal of Israeli women in the face of widespread rape by Hamas terrorists, still an ongoing situation for Israeli hostages of both sexes.

An October 26 Jerusalem Post editorial speaks of that betrayal (emphasis added):

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s speech to a special Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war on Tuesday began promisingly enough.

“Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” he said at the beginning of the speech.

Then Guterres’ moral compass went haywire, and he began to justify what he had just said was unjustifiable.

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

Why does Guterres justify violence against Israeli Jews, and fail to mention at all, the sexual violence and the rape and degradation of Israeli women? How does anything make rape an excusable offense? In the enlightened world, how can it be that the head of the UN uses his soapbox to blame the Jewish victims and tell lies about the Jewish State—and the Gazan people?

By November 30, however, Guterres had apparently changed his tune. It must have been getting more difficult to get away with the sort of outright Jew-hatred that makes allowances for rape when the victim is a Jew. Hence his post on X.

"There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted.

"Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere."

There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted.

Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) November 29, 2023

But why so vague? Where is the mention of rape? Where are the words “support Israel women” and “believe Israeli women” and what do we gleam from these omissions?

Here is my takeaway: with his fuzzy pronouncements of “investigating accounts” and “sexual violence” Guterres is telling the world that it’s okay to suspend belief in women when they are Jewish and Israeli; that it’s understandable that Hamas terrorists would rape Jewish women; and finally, that it’s fine and dandy to lie in public and make public proclamations about Jews occupying their own indigenous Jewish territory when everyone knows the bible is their deed.

My neighbor Terry is somewhat new to Israel. She and her family made Aliyah after there was a drive-by shooting not far from their home in the States. They took the shooting as a sign that it was time to leave the States and come to Israel. She hasn’t changed her mind. Why would she when the entire world repudiates her because she is a Jew, doesn’t care if she is raped because she is a Jew?

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Rape fear is real for women everywhere, but fear of rape is compounded in a woman who is Jewish and Israeli, because she knows that the world sees her rape as legitimate resistance, and that the head of the UN himself, sees her genitals and body as free-for-the-taking, subhuman instruments for the release of pent-up Arab anger.

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The Partial Ceasefire Deal with the Devil (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

--1--

If it were you, my child, husband, brother, sister, mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandchild, friend. If it were you I would fight like hell to set you free, to bring you home and into my arms. Safe.

Then we would deal with the aftermath. The nightmares, the poisoned minds of the children raised to hate themselves and what they came from. The massive, multi-level trauma of it all, from beginning to the something that will never end.

Still, from a distance so far away that I don’t want to see it, I know that procuring your release has broader implications. You are a Hamas bargaining chip, or rather an Iran bargaining chip for use with Joe Biden, along with a cascade of other evil actors across the globe who will use human beings—use you—to get what they want. Hamas randomly keeps you alive—if you are alive—to get concessions; to retrench and regain strength to hurt the Jewish people; to score a victory; to wound Israel and live to kill, maim, and destroy more Jews another day.

--2--

Every day since October 7th, we have heard Israeli officials say, all the hostages or no ceasefire. It was clear from the start—Israel had been quite clear from the start. Or rather, the objective was clear until it wasn’t, and Israel began to speak of a “partial ceasefire,” when just to speak of this even in a fuzzy sort of way, already put Israel. at a distinct disadvantage. It must be said and taken into account, that while the hostage deal may save the lives of some of the hostages, it will put an untold number of other lives at risk, for example, just now, our dear Israeli soldiers. To breathe life into Hamas is to wreak havoc with the future. This Amalek must be stopped. Hamas must be obliterated, completely.

Ain breira. There is no choice. It's all or nothing. There is no other way. All the hostages or no ceasefire, partial or otherwise. Israel must hold firm, because a deal with Hamas is Obama’s deal, Biden’s deal, a deal with the devil, Iran. For Hamas, this deal translates to Jews ceding victory and paying the jizya, even unto releasing 300 felons back onto the streets of their natural hate-infested society.

We have certainly learned something here: the going rate for a handful of Jews is 300 felons for Hamas to parade as trophies. "How stupid is the Jew?” you might hear from the laughing crowd as they watch the 300 go by, and slap each other on the back. "They turn Gaza into rubble, then cry to us, 'You won!'"

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Rallies: Do They Make a Difference (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Rallies have figured large in the wake of October 7^th. Not in Israel, mind you. In Israel, we are too busy to hold rallies. We prefer to rally around each other.

Outside of Israel, things are different. There, the rally has become an important vehicle for expressing solidarity; for taking sides, and in some cases, for whipping up the masses to kill Jews.

The rally is many things, but what, in fact, does the rally really achieve for those of us on the side of Israel? It’s all a numbers game, and their numbers will always be larger: There are more of them than us.

Does it matter? Of course it does. The rally is a kind of test; a chance to choose good or evil, though it’s not always cut and dried. There are the sheeple who passively allow themselves to be swayed by the crowd; they just want to fit in. On the other hand, there is true evil, the thugs, and the academics who say they are exhilarated by what happened to the Jews—and the people who tear down posters of Jewish babies held hostage in Gaza.

NYC - New York County public defender Victoria Ruiz caught removing posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas terrorists.

It is absolutely unacceptable for someone with such bias and hate to serve in your office @nyc_defenders pic.twitter.com/mOwajkuArt
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) November 5, 2023

Evil takes other forms, sometimes in the guise of a Jew who will tell you that as Jew, they say it’s okay to commit atrocities as long as you know the context—as long as you know the history. . .

. . . or the woman who shouts “I’m a rabbi and I demand a ceasefire!” These Jews are sick, sicker, sickest and the very definition of the banality of evil.

It must be said that sometimes, and here there is only one phrase, crude as it is, to describe the phenomenon: the rally is a pissing contest. Sometimes the participants scuffle or worse.

Sometimes someone hits an elderly Jew over the head with a megaphone and kills him, and the police can’t decide if it’s murder.

It’s not all bad, though. There are Jews, pure of heart, who flock to rallies to express anguish and cry out for justice, “Justice, justice, you shall pursue.”

That’s very nice. But as I told my relatives on the eve of October 11, “From experience, all of you should stay close to home. I wouldn't go to shul or to rallies. It's not worth the risk, even with beefed up security. Personal safety is more important, and it's bad to be in crowded places. . . Don't be lulled into thinking you're far away and safe. I mean it. Please just stay safe. The rallies don't help us anyway, IMHO.”

The response? “This was an attack on all of us.”

That’s true. I’m glad their eyes are open. But it doesn’t help us in the aftermath. There’s a war, and it is those of us in Israel who must fight it.

What would help us would be unceasing rallies at the White House, protesting Biden’s aid to Iran and Hamas, and his demands for a ceasefire. Short of that, rallies are pretty useless. They may make you feel good, and give you a feeling of communal bonding, but that’s not a good enough reason to get together when it isn’t safe out there for Jews and lovers of justice and light.

***
Our IDF soldiers need ceramic vests to keep them safe as they fight Hamas. We have started a crowdfunding campaign to purchase these vests for my son's platoon: Ceramic Vests for IDF Soldiers.

Even a small donation would be greatly appreciated--each vest costs approximately $520.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!