Warning: This post contains references to sexual violence.
(RNS) — Sitting on my bookshelf at precisely eye level is the saddest book I know. “The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe,” edited by David G. Roskies, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is a 700-page anthology of Jewish literary responses to persecution, from the Bible through the Holocaust.
The book consists of sacred text, poetry, fiction, memoirs and art. Its constant theme is, what did it mean for Jews to record, to remember and to return to some semblance of sanity after the catastrophes that faced our people?
But for the past two days, I have been reading a document that challenges the Roskies volume in its impact. A recently released 300-page report by an Israeli researcher commission on the sexual and gender-based violence during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel and against hostages held in Gaza is a modern book of Lamentations.
The report’s central conclusion: Hamas’ acts of sexual violence were not merely isolated incidents coming from bad actors. Rather, those actions were systematic, widespread, deliberate and integral to the attack itself — a coordinated tactic used to terrorize victims, families, communities and Israeli society at large.
How do you document such a thing? With 10,000 photographs and video segments; more than 1,800 hours of visual material; more than 400 testimonies from survivors, witnesses, released hostages and experts; and pages upon pages of endorsements from authorities, all over the world.
The report shows that there were 13 recurring patterns of sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, sexual torture and mutilation, executions linked to sexual violence, postmortem sexual abuse and assaults committed in front of family members, for which they needed to invent a new word — kinocide, the systematic targeting, torture and destruction of families as a unit.
Those sadistic assaults happened in homes, on roads, at the Nova music festival and on military bases. They happened to hostages in the tunnels of Gaza. The report establishes that these acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal acts under international law.
That is as far as I can go before I retreat into silence.
People often say that Oct. 7 was the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. But, in some qualitative respects — not quantitative — it was even worse than the Nazi atrocities.
The Holocaust began with the Einsatzgruppen, German death squads that rounded up Jews in Eastern Europe and shot them. The Einsatzgruppen and auxiliary police often shot women, children and entire communities at close range, sometimes for days on end, which frequently led to psychological distress, breakdowns, heavy drinking and even suicides among the perpetrators.
But after the Wannsee Conference, which planned the “Final Solution,” the Nazis sought to streamline their process of genocide and make it more efficient. The gas chambers meant that there would be physical and psychological distance between the killers and their victims.
Oct. 7 was different. There was no “efficiency” here. The killings were personal. Hamas terrorists had to look into the eyes of their victims before killing them. It more closely resembles the savage acts of the Cossacks than those of the Nazis. It was killing, raping and mutilation for its own sake.
The Nazis also sought to hide their crimes. Not so Hamas: Hamas photographed, filmed, recorded — often on the victims’ own phones — and gleefully and proudly uploaded the crimes, sadistically showing them to victims’ families.
Many of you will say, but what about what Israel did in Gaza and Lebanon? What about Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir?
Many Jews have felt the need to begin conversations about Israel with the requisite confession of sins of the Jewish state. It goes something like this: “Of course, I disagree with the current government, but … ” For some Jews, every day has been Yom Kippur, and that includes me. I cannot begin to count how many conversations I have had with friends that go precisely that way.
But I am done prefacing my grief with a performative critique of my own people in order to earn some kind of moral goodie bag. I will not condemn Israel as a ticket to the right to condemn what Hamas did.
Consider the timing of Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times column describing sexual abuses in Israel’s prisons. It would have satisfied those who relish wagging their fingers and saying: “You Jews think that Oct. 7 was a horror. Look at what Israel/Jews do.” But what would they say about the Oct. 7 report?
When people accuse Israel of genocide, they ignore the official, legal definitions of genocide. At best, it is because they have allowed their feelings to take over; they lack a word for what they are seeing in Gaza.
But, at worst, they are saying something worse: “You grandchildren of genocide victims — that is precisely what you are doing. You’re as bad as we are.” And, in this context, “we” often means Europeans, who are using Israel’s actions as a way of exculpating the sins of their continent (for which they are not responsible anyway).
Any psychology major can tell you what this is: displacement.
And some will ask, “Playing the victim card, Jeff?”
No. The state of Israel was born, in part, to let the Jewish people permanently tear up that card. The trauma of Oct. 7 left a massive hole in our soul. And that hole does not get more shallow — it only gets deeper. We will no longer be victims, either to actual violence or the moral violence others inflict upon us.
I think of the students at Columbia University and other places who were reported chanting: “Red, black, green and white, we support Hamas’ fight!” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too.” I think of members of the so-called intellectual class and A-list celebrities who equivocate on the crimes of Hamas and who proudly sport kaffiyehs as a fashion statement.
I am so done with them, because so-called sophisticated people, and the cool kids, can also be savages.