An individual Israeli hostage woman's sexual assault, us men, and the historical context of Israel's occupation

It is terrifying to read about this young woman Israeli lawyer who became an initial hostage, but who was released late last year.

However, this is NOT proof of what the Israelis and US legacy corporate media have trumpeted. There are, in fact, Palestinian women's interviews and testimonies of having suffered sexual assault and even rape from individual IDF guards over the years, according to that recent UN group, which some pro-Israel supporters like to suddenly cite. The story of this criminally violated woman is about what individual men do with power over women who are from the other side in a war or conflict. What we men can also never forget is that individual men do this to women of their own ethnicity, national origin, or religion, too. Men don't need an actual war to hurt women in their (our) continuing war against women.

Israel's (and US legacy corporate media's) argument continues to be that Hamas had a SYSTEMIC policy to commit rape--and that it was "widespread" by Hamas soldiers. Again, this is not at all proven with this awful story. We really need to not be misled by the propagandists for Israel. That position of systemic rape is on par with the British government's lies about Germany's rape of Belgium during WWI. Were German soldiers committing atrocities in Belgium, including rape of Belgian women? Absolutely. German soldiers did engage in such conduct. However, this was not systemic or a matter of German military or political policy.

We really need to stop weaponizing sexual assault against women. We must have far more focus on holding mostly men accountable for rape and torture in war situations. It is why I so fully support the international women's groups who do brave and dangerous work to protect women around the globe. However, the context of the particular horrific act this Israeli woman describes is Israel's occupation and repression. I know that's hard to hear, but the occupation is what led to the woman being attacked and held hostage.

As I keep saying, to talk about October 7 in the way we do is to NOT learn the lessons of US history concerning the genocide of Native Americans. Focusing on Hamas' atrocities on October 7 is the equivalent of Americans saying, after a Comanche raid where torture and rape of white settlers occurred, "The Comanches deserve everything coming to them! We're gonna wipe them out!" Don't believe Comanche raids did not have instances of rape and torture? Start here and here.

Yet, no person of good will today would ever say a particularly horrible Comanche raid justified the removal and killing of the Comanche people. It would be supporting a racist policy against Comanches and a genocide in the form of collective punishment. It would also be an insult to our own nation's best values. Yet, many 19th Century Americans cried for the removal and even "extermination" of Comanches after the first major Comanche raid event of March 19, 1840.

The Comanches in the US historical period of the 1840s through 1880s were akin to Sparta in terms of military discipline, and, despite brutalities Comanche warriors may have committed in their war against the settlers, had a strength of cultural cohesiveness and character. What led them to be so hard on white settlers going through the mid and southwest? Think about the year 1840. The Comanches were not ignorant. They had people in their leadership who specifically saw and understood how Cherokees, and other tribes, had, in the 1820s and 1830s, tried to assimilate and use US Constitutional law to protect their rights. The Comanches saw how the US promises made to Comanches and others were broken in a way that was effectively a lie. Worse, not only were the Cherokees deprived of the property in Georgia and elsewhere in which they had lived in peace. The Cherokees and others were forcibly removed, resulting in starvation and disease and death. The Comanches therefore chose violent resistance rather than assimilation. Any of this sound familiar?

For me, this historical lens is a far more comprehensible way to understand what occurred on October 7, 2023. It does not minimize what occurred on October 7, 2023. Instead, it provides the context in which the events of October 7, 2023 occurred. This lens also helps us begin to recognize our common humanity. If we, as Americans, and human beings, truly want to learn from our nation's own19th Century US actions, then, today, regardless of our politics, religion, ethnic/national origin/religious background, we Americans must stand up for the Palestinian people as a whole. This is not about supporting Hamas, though propagandists for Israel keep wanting us to believe that.

IT IS GOOD POLITICS TO END AID TO ISRAEL FOR CONTINUING ITS BRUTAL ASSAULT ON GAZA AND OCCUPATION OF THE WEST BANK

It is also now good politics to be for lasting peace. The majority of Americans do not want to support Israel's brutal occupation and conduct any longer. The Dems are the one party of the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats which really has to effectuate a change on this important foreign policy and indirectly domestic issue. Of the two parties, only the Democrats' constituencies will be able to right the policy wrong of enabling Israel's conduct and its occupation of Palestinians. Otherwise, they will not come out when they know they speak for the majority of Americans and yet their voices are silenced.

If you think those who are threatening to not vote for Dems this fall are "purists," that is ironic for liberal Zionists and liberal supporters of Israel. It is they who need to understand the majority of Americans are not on Israel's side in what they are doing. If Trump is the existential threat corporate libs and Israel supporters continually claim (I agree with them, I must say), then Biden's policies on Israel must change. They must get to at least Bernie's Sanders' position, which is to end aid to Israel while they continue to engage in the behaviors they have before and after October 7. Time for liberal Zionists not to be purists. This election, they themselves say, is about US democracy or our republic. If so, then don't put the nation at risk for a country occupying another people and committing horrible acts on a daily basis. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) is starting to see it, and he is the self-proclaimed "shomer" for Israel. Israel needs its leash tugged. And tugged hard in the form of no more military aid.

Right wingers who realize they don't know anything until after they get elected

This deep dive article from today's Washington Post on the education of a right wing school board member is well worth reading because it reveals almost directly the truly messed up and poisonous  right wing discourse that political normies, let alone progressives, only rarely come directly in contact. Even more beautifully though, the article gives us the full-on right wing's and even conservative's fundamental ideological misunderstanding of political philosophy rooted in their own fears, prejudices, and frankly ignorance--the last in the sense of being initially uninformed, and then compounded with misleading information.

Notice how this woman initially explains her political philosophy about being about "liberty" and "freedom." Then, we get almost immediately what she MEANS by those terms:

“As soon as you start to give privileges to one group, you are taking away from or neglecting others,” Wenhold said. “So, I do think that the solution is going back to teaching our kids that we are all equal in the eyes of God.”

There it is. The zero-sum political philosophy rooted in fear and prejudice. And the line about "God" I'll get to in a bit.

But, first things first. This poorly educated middle aged white woman is concerned that telling white, heterosexual, evangelical right wing Christinan folks in particular they can't publicly discriminate any longer against darker skinned people, non-Christians, or non heterosexual people is itself discrimination. It is, but in a sophist's way. And it is cynical prejudice posing as fairness. To accept such thinking against anti-discrimination laws creates a fundamental contradiction that negates or undermines basic civic rights for a whole bunch of people who are not, well, white, heterosexual, evangelical right wing Christians. The way out of the seemingly "logical" conundrum is why any practical and morally based political philosophy needs to continually recognize tensions that require an enlightened society to balance "liberty" and "equality." If we go too far in one direction, we undermine the other. And even with DEI, we are not at the "too far" in favor of "equality," folks. Really, we're not. 

This woman's fear of earth-bound equality is so deep that it initially drives her to want to decry somehow the unfairness in trying to promote more young women to take courses in STEM. Her twin sister wisely informs her not to make a commotion about the award the school district won to promote more high school females to go into STEM, but her miseducation remains troublesome to her and lingers in her mind.

When teaching government/civics high school classes, I did my best to explain the need to balance "liberty" and "equality" and that the true understanding of those terms arise in the particular, not airy philosophy. I would also archly explain to my civic students to be wary of any speaker or writer they hear or read who begins with a cry for "liberty" or "freedom". It is usually a cry for the right to discriminate against, or repress other people. I would then remind the students who had me in US History classes how those who most often spoke and wrote about "liberty" and "freedom" in their speeches were the ones trying to defend their "right" to literally own other people.

This woman, though, provides us something else. She implicitly recognizes her stance as problematic and prejudiced against even her own gender. So, in her statement about what she meant by "liberty" and "freedom," she added the absolutely vacuous phrase ""we are all equal in the eyes of God." So, lady, we're supposed to wait till we're dead to have "equality"? How convenient for you, Whitey-Normie. How convenient.

Again, recognizing the balancing and overlapping meanings of airy terms such as "liberty" and "equality" allows us to promote a society that allows all to meaningfully participate in our civic or daily public lives. This is consistent with the best values of our main Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton) who understood and accepted the value of balancing "liberty" and "equality" as one which is continually modified through experience. It is why, for example, Madison was so insistent, during the Constitutional debates, in making sure the word "slavery" did not appear in the ultimately drafted Constitution. Madison and others at that Convention wanted to create a document for posterity--notwithstanding the frustration Jefferson voiced from France against the Constitution document by saying the "tree of liberty" needs re-watering with the "blood" of people every 20 or so years. Jefferson's presidential administrations are about Jefferson's practical learning curve as many historians long ago determined. That Jefferson followed most Federalist policies after gaining the presidency is one of the nation's first ironies of History.

What is amusing is the woman was elected to the local school board, yet knew NOTHING about budgeting. She admitted she had to talk a lot with a fellow board member, asking a myriad of questions of how a budget is formed and operates. She appears to know NOTHING about what it takes to build a curriculum. She admitted, too, she never read the Declaration of Independence or Constitution before taking that grifty-right wing adult course, though that was the clarion cry of her candidacy. The same with the Federalist Papers and so-called Anti-Federalist Papers. 

As Daffy Duck liked to say, "It is to laugh."

My former students can tell you how dense those documents are, and that the Constitution is not well understood without learning at least some case law interpreting words over historical time--just as Madison predicted and explained in Federalist Paper no. 37. My former students would also have a lot of fun asking her, even after her taking that grifty-course, to explain Federalist Paper no. 10 in light of Federalist Paper nos. 37 and 41--Madison wrote all three--and in light of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). I would forgive my former students for not remembering the case law, though. Some may remember the case law holdings, though, and I think more than some would remember how we read in class the quote from then-Congressman Nathaniel Macon (Jeffersonian-NC) who, during Madison's administration (1809-1817), who declared he would oppose any and all Hamiltonian economic development legislation because, if Congress can legislate to build a canal, it can pass a law limiting or ending slavery. Thus, the opposition to at least domestic policies from Hamilton to Lincoln to FDR to LBJ to Bernie Sanders go back to the beginning of the Constitutional Republic and is ultimately built on white supremacy and enslavement of darker skinned people. 

The reason I taught what I did in high school history and civics/government classes was to show there is a constitutional basis to support a constitutional vision of federal economic activism and even strong civil rights from the start of the Republic--and especially after the Reconstruction amendments. I then taught it is a conceit to think it is only that vision or the conservatives' constitutional vision. Learning constitutional history also helps expose how most right wingers in our nation who call themselves "Constitutionalists" or "Federalists" (including the misnamed "Federalist Society") are really anti-Federalists, with far more in common with Patrick Henry's anti-Federalist politics than the early Federalists, including Madison--until Madison entered Congress and realized his bread was buttered with Virginia enslavers. That crafty Madison! :)

What the article's ending shows most amusingly is the right wing woman realizing being on a school board and dealing with the practical day to day of running a school district is the opposite of the bullshit she was fed in her grifty-right wing history course for miseducated adults who already believe in magically based delusions. And really, it is not difficult to assume how this pathetic person, back in her high school days, was likely a mess who often fell asleep in, or skipped out on, civics/government and history classes. I admit I once told my mostly guys in the back of the classroom, who worked hard not to listen in class, "Don't worry, guys. In twenty or thirty years, you'll run for office as right wingers trying to tell the nation a whole bunch of wrong things you could have avoided while in high school. And also tell us all about 'liberty' and 'freedom'!"

And we'd all, including them, laugh.

Guernica Magazine and its Discontents

I first read about this imbroglio yesterday. I think Guernica magazine editors made a mistake in publishing this apologia, but compounded that error in removing the essay from the magazine's website. The fact is, the essay now exists, and Guernica published it. The record is the record. I get people at Guernica resigning if they wish, but their acts struck me as primarily performative. I am glad the LA Times provided the link to the essay (see here) from the Wayback Machine so I could judge for myself whether the author's essay was, in fact, an apologia.

I read the essay, and, as well written as it is, I have to admit it is an obvious apologia. The language is passive nearly each time it discusses Israeli conduct which leads or led to Palestinian suffering and death, while Hamas is presented as a larger-than-life monstrous organization whose violent acts are somehow functionally different from Israeli bombs and continued Israeli dehumanization. The essay writer wrote in a manner which made it sound as if all was essentially "normal" in Gaza and the West Bank before October 7, 2023, when 2023 had already been shaping up as the sixth or seventh most violent year since 2006 in terms of Israeli murders of Palestinians. See Wiki (Timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in 2023) for starters on this topic and see how much US media, whether legacy or alternative, did not really cover. It is ridiculous to state there was any functioning ceasefire as far as Israel was concerned during much of 2023. 

Yes, the essay writer does nice things for Palestinian people over the years. However, the way she described how she and a Palestinian family with an injured son were speaking with each other in broken English, Arabic, and Hebrew, reminded me of a southern white belle in Antebellum USA doing an act of kindness toward an injured enslaved person. The essay writer conveyed no sense she truly sees the fundamental problem with a system that creates the situation where she does her charity work, or how charity work can sometimes (maybe more often) morph into an acceptance of larger political and social injustices. Her own reaction to Hamas' atrocities on October 7 carry with that reaction a fundamentally naive view of what was happening before October 7. For someone so clearly learned and elegant in her writing and translation work, she showed no understanding of how British or US colonial structures operated with respect to indigenous peoples, or how one should never be surprised that colonized people will sometimes react with horrific violence against civilians in colonialist governments and systems. For we Americans, we should think back to mid 19th Century Comanche raids of white settlers, where Comanche warriors viciously killed men, women, and children--and raped women before killing them. And then we should remember how the US cavalry reacted--and remember, too, the outcome of our nation's genocide of Native Americans (just under four million indigenous people residing in 1776 in the land of the current continental US compared to merely 250,000 in the US census of 1900. See Wiki for the grim numbers).

For me, the imbroglio, as I am calling it, among this small literary left set is classic because, other than this, who besides people such as myself even knows Guernica magazine? We who inhabit marginalized left circles may fret and start to sound like Bill Maher over Guernica editors' censorship. But, let's consider a reverse scenario with a corporate media legacy publication. Imagine a corporate media legacy outlet published a Palestinian writer who wrote in the same passive voice about Hamas' atrocities on and before October 7th (yes, before October 7th, Hamas committed various acts of terrorism, remember, my fellow lefties? :)). And then the Palestinian writer wrote with a certain naive sensibility where she could do no more than send a reply text to a distraught Israeli Jewish friend, saying in effect, "oh too bad" about the latest Hamas atrocity. And then the writer, in the same essay, wrote in a manner revealing her not correcting a Palestinian friend who said there were "good rockets" being launched against Israeli civilians (the phrase in the essay writer's article was there were "good bombs" being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza). If such an article was published, the general public in the US would be outraged against that media outlet. "How DARE ____________ (media outlet) publish such hateful pro-terrorist propaganda!?!" And there would be so many mainstream voices demanding the article be retracted, just as Guernica editors did. And we lefties would be plaintively crying "Censorship!" Ah, the cynical ironies of politics. 

As it is, we already see how it is fine to hear and see those who yelled most loudly against "cancel culture" suddenly demand firing or canceling people who voice sympathy for Palestinians. I don't think I have to link to examples, do I? :)

I guess I've just lived too long, for I am cynically amused how Guernica's editors compounded their initial publishing error by removing the essay from the magazine's website. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine. What is sad, however, is how these marginalized lefties have revealed how marginalized they are, and that the only publicity they receive is when they personally turn on each other. It's not as ridiculous as the wonderful scene in Life of Brian about the Judean People's Front leader saying how he hates the People's Front of Judea more than the Romans. But, I am thinking about that scene in a way I admit I don't like because I do think Guernica's editors should have seen what I saw as obviously wrong with the essay's tone and perspective. They could have had a kind and compassionate discussion with this intelligent and well meaning writer about her essay--and why she may wish to re-write the essay, and speak again with Palestinian acquaintances and friends, to create an essay with a more balanced and humane lens consistent with leftist antiwar and anti-occupation sensibilities. 

With regard to the essay writer's passive voice, I know I have been very conscious about that passive voice in media coverage when describing Israel's conduct. I continue to see it all over legacy media coverage, and even before October 7, 2023. I was, however, frankly surprised that someone so sympathetic to Palestinian suffering was unable to recognize the meaning of the structural issues of Israeli occupation, and then had the audacity to cut off Palestinian acquaintances and friends with whom she previously worked in her charitable efforts because of this modern version of a horrific Comanche raid. I expect people who identify with left politics to be able to hold two paradoxical thoughts in their heads if they keep in mind the need for human connection, love in a justice-sense, and recognition that unjust systems need to be changed. I guess I am still naive that way.