The Academic Engagement Network’s Section for Women Faculty, a group of committed feminists and scholars from across all ranks in various disciplines at US universities and colleges, on Thursday expressed its deep disappointment in the National Women Studies Association’s failure to lend its prominent voice in support of Israeli women and girls in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, which is widely recognized as the worst mass murder of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust.
The AEN is an independently run non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC which mobilizes networks of university faculty and administrators to counter antisemitism, oppose the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities, promote academic freedom, and advance education about Israel.
“We are dismayed that for over two months, as testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and emergency medical workers and more documented forensic evidence from the murdered victims have been widely reported, the NWSA has chosen to remain silent,” wrote the AEN women, adding that the NWSA “has not spoken out against the crimes of rape, murder, and other atrocities perpetrated on defenseless women and girls on October 7, 2023. Further, it did not call for the release of hostages in Gaza, including women, girls, and female infants, who were held in dire conditions by Hamas.”
Indeed, according to the AEN women, “Major women’s organizations have been slow to denounce the use of rape as a weapon of war against Israel. On December 1, 2023, UN Women finally called for investigations and prosecutions of gender-based violence during the Hamas attack. Women’s rights leaders have also now spoken out to condemn the rape atrocities during the October 7 attack. Yet, the NWSA has still said nothing, refusing to show solidarity or empathy for the victims of terror and systematic sexual violence.”
The AEN letter listed the known Hamas violations of Israeli women, stating, “We are sickened, appalled, and distraught” by the:
- extensive sexual assault and degradation of Shani Louk, a young German-Israeli woman, at the hands of her rapists, killers, and a celebratory mob on Gaza’s streets
- merciless murder of Ruth Peretz, a disabled wheelchair-bound teenage girl, and her father
- sadistic torture of young women and girls, raped so brutally that their bones broke
- traumas visited upon young girls, who saw their mothers killed before their eyes, and upon fathers, sons, brothers, and grandfathers who lost their loved ones on that black day, including Ilan Troen, a member of this faculty organization
- barbaric killing of advocates for peace and Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, including Canadian-Israeli Vivian Silver, a lifelong feminist and social justice activist who devoted her life’s work to this cause
- depravity of the attackers, who took women and children into Gaza, and who are still holding one mother, Shiri Bibas, and her sons—4-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir—in captivity
- scores of young girls who will suffer lifelong post-traumatic stress as a result of their weeks in Hamas captivity.
The letter continues: “We are outraged by the NWSA’s abandonment of women and girls who have experienced horrible atrocities, and by its utter refusal to acknowledge the plight of Israeli women and girls in either its recent programming or its public statements.” Moreover, “the NWSA’s first statement unconscionably sought to rationalize and justify the Hamas massacre,” and “the second, by accusing Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza, waded into Holocaust inversion. As historians have recently noted, this charge is an antisemitic canard in which Jewish victims of genocide are now cast as akin to their Nazi tormentors.”
The letter also noted that “at the NWSA annual conference, held on October 26-29, ‘educational resources for meaningful solidarity’ included panels, exhibits, and materials covering conflict and violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar, China and ‘sites of struggle’ in the United States involving Native Americans. The ‘systemic violence in Palestine’ also received extensive coverage. Not a single session or panel was devoted to the use of rape as a weapon of warfare, including by Hamas.”
Jewish feminist involvement in NWSA has been dwindling since 2015 when the NWSA membership voted to “back the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel” along with other major academic organizations.
That same year, in response to accusations of antisemitism following their support for their member Jasbir K. Puar, a Rutgers University professor who accused Jews of harvesting organs, NWSA stated it held firm in its conviction.
The AEN women added: “We are disgusted by the NWSA’s antisemitic attempt to exclude Jews from progressive causes and anti-racist work and activism on account of their Zionist identities and beliefs. We are deeply concerned that on account of this indefensible position, Jewish scholars and students are now thoroughly ostracized from the association, and by extension, from the discipline of Gender Studies. Jewish feminist engagement in the NWSA has been in decline for a number of years. The organization’s professional standing has truly been diminished by its antisemitism.”
They also stated that “Our concerns and opposition to the NWSA’s positions should not be misconstrued as a lack of empathy for the plight of Palestinians, including women and girls in Gaza who have long suffered gender-based discrimination, oppression, and violence under the cruel rule of Hamas. We acknowledge the hardships that women and girls in Gaza are now facing.”
And then, because you can’t be an American Jew and not snap even a little bit at your brothers and sisters in Israel, the AEN women also shed a tear for “hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women and girls” who “have been displaced from their homes and mourn the lives of the innocent who have been killed in Israeli aerial bombardments. Both Palestinians and Israelis deserve freedom, protection and safety, and self-determination.”
Sure, but you know something, they could have kept that last one to themselves if they weren’t going to explain that those “innocents” are employed full-time as human shields for the Hamas rapists, to be killed as collateral.
Finally, after declaring that “The NWSA has lost its moral compass,” the AEN women called on this racist and antisemitic group to condemn the Hamas weaponizing of rape, advocate for the Israeli women and girls who are still in Hamas’s captivity, and, in an attempt to conjure the biggest possible lipstick for this pig, undertake “necessary long term action steps, including forming a Task Force to assess and evaluate antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in the NWSA and in the field of Gender Studies more generally.”
Naturally, the proposed task force should also reevaluate the scope of the Jewish trade in harvested organs.
