Don’t you dare look away from 7 October sexual atrocities, say Jewish women protestors
Group wear red-stained jogging pants in public demonstrations at women's history sites across London
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
A group of Israeli women staged a demonstration with a difference on Sunday — trying to explain the rapes and violence of 7 October to a British audience by using stories familiar to the British public.
Florit Shoihet, who is originally from Ashkelon, worked with a loose coalition of Israeli women living in the UK, together with some British Jews, under the banner of “Remember 7/10”, to mark the vicious Hamas attacks on southern Israel.
On Sunday, after attending a demonstration protesting against the indifference of the UN to the sexually abused female victims of October 7, around a dozen members of the Remember 7/10 group moved into Parliament Square.
There they dressed in clothing designed to attract attention — red-stained jogging pants to mimic the real-life blood-soaked clothes of those who had been raped and sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists.
Carrying graphic posters, the women stood next to statues of three women in and around Parliament Square — suffragette Millicent Fawcett, Second World War British agent Violette Szabo (captured and executed by the Nazis), and the British Iceni tribal queen Boudicca, or Boadicea, whose daughters were raped during the Roman army defeat of her army.
Florit told Jewish News: “We were trying to use British contexts to explain what had happened to the women in Israel. Each of the women whose statues we gathered at, was a woman of importance in British history, who was relevant to our message. At Millicent Fawcett’s statue, it was very powerful.
“We were holding signs including ‘Me Too Unless You’re A Jew’, ‘Remember 7/10’, and posters asking people to recognise the rapes that happened on that day. People were stopping by and talking to us and were very respectful — and we felt we made an impact”.
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