Jewish Life <\/em>magazine, the most widely read Jewish publication in South Africa. In her article, aptly titled \u201cIsrael in Context: Silence!\u201d Goldman vehemently called out the U.N. for its double standards: \u201cThe U.N.\u2019s disregard and tone-deaf response to Hamas\u2019s attack is woefully unsatisfactory.\u201d<\/p>\nIn describing the violation of Israeli women and girls, the writer asserted: \u201cThe obscene and repulsive treatment they meted out to the Israeli women, both those barely alive and those already dead, cannot be comprehended by anyone for whom morality is a life value. It cannot. It is too incomprehensible, too unfathomable, too repellent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goldman chronicled the emergence of international laws prohibiting sexual violence against women and girls: \u201cIn 1993, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (replaced in 2006 by the U.N. Human Rights Council) declared systematic rape \u2026 to be crimes against humanity punishable as violations of women\u2019s human rights. In 1995, the U.N.\u2019s Fourth World Conference on Women specified that rape by armed groups during wartime is a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
She then pointed to a landmark 1998 case in which a \u201cRwandan tribunal had ruled that specifically, \u2018rape and sexual violence constitute genocide.\u2019\u201d She noted, \u201cIn 2008, the U.N. Security Council adopted resolution 1820, which stated that \u2018rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
As a sociologist, I am deeply troubled by the distortion, dismissal and denial of irrefutable evidence of sexual violence and torture of Israeli women and girls. As I wrote at Women\u2019s eNews<\/em><\/a> last fall, \u201cThe abject failure for organized women\u2019s groups to repudiate the brutal rape of Israeli teenagers and women signifies a serious failure in the women\u2019s movement today.\u201d<\/p>\nSince I wrote that editorial, I have seen over time how the disgraceful role played by the U.N. in renouncing and shunning Israeli victims of sexual violence has affected the women\u2019s movement. Sadly, Israeli rape victims and their Jewish counterparts in the Diaspora stand alone. The signs of \u201cmicroaggression\u201d towards Israeli rape victims are clear. Yet there is no outcry from the women\u2019s movement to redress this striking inequity.<\/p>\n
I am going to add my \u201cscreams\u201d by turning up the volume and shouting from the rooftops until the women\u2019s movement and the U.N. acknowledge the horror of the unprecedented sexual violence painstakingly captured in Sandberg\u2019s Screams Before Silence<\/em>. To do anything less would be a betrayal of my sisters in Israel and of womankind.<\/p>\nThis is an edited version of a piece originally published by Women\u2019s eNews on May 16, 2024.<\/em><\/p>\n
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