Jeff Robbins

By nightfall on Oct. 7, 2023, enough details of what several thousand Hamas gunmen had done to about 1,200 Israeli civilians had emerged to make clear the scope of their savagery: youngsters executed en masse running for their lives from a dance festival, families tied together and burned alive or machine-gunned to death as they sat trembling and begging for their lives, toddlers and babies slaughtered. In the following days, eyewitness accounts, video footage, forensic evidence and even taped admissions revealed one particular aspect of the savagery that had gotten “lost” in the already mind-numbing revelations of the genocidal monstrosities committed by those seeking Israel’s annihilation: brutally violent rapes of Israeli girls and women, the mutilation of their genitalia, the murders following the rapes, even the rape of corpses.

That very day, professors at places like Columbia and Cornell were arguing that Hamas’ barbarity had to be “contextualized,” or enthusing that what Hamas had “achieved” was “exhilarating.” Thirty-four Harvard student organizations publicly blamed Israel for the slaughter of Israelis, a refrain vigorously picked up in certain professedly progressive quarters. The Democrats’ nominee for Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, was more thoughtful about it; he waited a full six days before accusing Israel, the victim of the genocidal attack, of genocide.

If the mass slaughter of Israelis dancing or in their beds wasn’t enough to penetrate the moral conscience of self-identifying progressives, and it wasn’t, the earnestly credulous among us might have imagined that the barbaric sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli females might have moved those who claimed, you know, to support women.

But no.

Feminist groups were silent. Human rights organizations, ditto. Progressives, not interested. The United Nations, forget about it.

CNN anchor Dana Bash confronted the then Chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, about the silence from those who might have been expected to, say, condemn Hamas for their sexual violence both on Oct. 7 and, it had emerged, against the young women they had kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.

“It’s kind of remarkable,” Bash asked Jayapal, “that this issue hasn’t gotten enough attention globally — widespread use of rape, brutal rape, sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas. I’ve seen a lot of progressive women, generally speaking, they’re quick to speak out for women’s rights, and speak out against rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent about what we saw on October 7th and what is happening inside Gaza to the hostages. Why is that?”

Whereupon the lead progressive in the U.S. House of Representatives babbled. She said she had opposed sexual violence during the Iraq War, 20 years earlier. She mumbled that rape is never appropriate. She said that in general she was against it. She said she did not necessarily “know” that progressives had been silent about Hamas’ sexual violence but couldn’t point to anything she or anyone else had said condemning it. And then she finally got to progressives’ comfort zone, which is blaming Israel for “the situation.” “They are bringing themselves to a place that makes it much more difficult strategically for them to build the kind of allies to keep public opinion with them,” she said.

How so? Progressives’ denunciation of Israel began on Oct. 7 itself, before Israel had had the opportunity to do anything to stop the reprise of the massacre promised by Hamas. Progressives’ inability to unequivocally condemn the massacre, and their actual defense of it, began that very day. So to excuse their own silence about the massacre and mass rape of Israeli women by blaming Israel was a depravity all by itself.

Last week’s release of a report by The Dinah Project, “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond,” provided a fresh reminder of the need, as it states, “to ensure recognition and justice for the victims and survivors” of that day and, in particular, of “the widespread heinous acts of conflict-related sexual violence aimed at a total dehumanization of Israelis and Israeli society.” The Report, found at www.thedinahproject.org, represents a collaboration among the British government and various nonprofits. It ought by rights to prod some self-reflection by some self-styled progressives who make a special exception for sexual violence when it comes to Israelis.

It’s a dismal feature of a dismal time that it probably won’t.

Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.