One woman's view

I find it nearly impossible to say anything useful about the current carnage in Israel/Palestine. What Hamas did was an atrocity; what Israel is doing in Gaza is another atrocity. Both are about vengeance; both exemplify the human species at our worst. And all participants, including US enablers, are products of and embedded in cruel histories which trap us in being less than our best.

I do appreciate the perspective the feminist commentator Jill Filipovic brings to the coverage of the nightmare.

The truth is that I dislike the “women and children” formulation — it’s infantilizing of women, it’s emotionally manipulative, it totally ignores the fact that men are also innocent victims of war, and it presumes a natural feminine pacifism that I’m not sure exists. But also, it is women and children who are suffering the most in this war, in large part because most people in Gaza are either women or children. It is women and girls who are the most likely to be raped in conflict, subjected to a particular kind of torture and humiliation designed to break their souls as well as their bodies. It is women and children who routinely make up the majority of innocents killed when men start fighting. It is women and girls who particularly suffer under fundamentalist patriarchal religions and governments. And it is women and children who routinely do the least to foment and perpetuate violence and war, but nevertheless feel the heaviest consequences of violence and war bear down on them.

... The vast majority of decision-makers and violence-purveyors on both sides of this current war are men who have long made clear they have little interest in women’s rights, freedoms, or even basic safety. The vast majority of people who are suffering from this war are women and their children.

This isn’t necessarily because women are naturally more peaceful than men, and it’s certainly not because motherhood elevates women to a higher moral status. Women, being people, are just as capable of hatred and vengeance and bloodthirstiness. If women have launched fewer wars than men, it is perhaps because women have not had nearly as many opportunities to launch wars.

... the mounting evidence shows that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women; [that] does not negate the suffering of Palestinian women in this war, and certainly does not justify it. That the policies of the state of Israel mean that Palestinian women have suffered so badly and for so long does not negate the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists, and certainly does not justify them.

I am 100% positive that a number of people will reject what I’m saying here as some sort of “both-sides” equivocating. But I’m not trying to do math or weight scales. No one has to diminish one suffering to elevate another.

I’m not writing to solve an equation, let alone a conflict. I am writing to say that it is the people who are least responsible for this war — women, children, innocents of all kinds — are bearing the heaviest burdens of this war.

This moment may yet lead to worse. It will also eventually end. What are we willing to put into reconstruction?