#MeToo Unless Ur A Jew: The activists highlighting Hamas’ sexual violence
Grassroots campaigners have collected 300,000 signatures from 50 countries to raise awareness of gender-based violence in the Israel-Hamas war.
Shortly after the 7 October Hamas atrocities, a group of Israeli women founded the #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew online global campaign.
It was in response to the silence of and lack of condemnation from UN Women for the depraved and violent, murderous acts of gender-based violence and war crimes committed against Jewish women and children by terrorists.
On 20 October, UN Women, purporting to be a global champion for gender equality, published a report entitled ‘UN Women Rapid Assessment and Humanitarian Response in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’.
It was followed by an official UN Women statement on 27 October, entitled “In-focus: The conflict in Gaza”.
The emphasis was on Palestinians in Gaza, with a glaring omission by the international body of any mention of the hundreds of Israeli women brutally burned, beheaded, raped, killed and kidnapped during the conflict.
With #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew founder Danielle Ofek based in Washington DC, Noa Matz, responsible for strategy and based out of Tel Aviv with the rest of the team, tells Jewish News the chilling implication is that Israeli and Jewish women don’t count.
To date, just under three hundred thousand supporters from 50 different countries have signed their petition, proclaiming EVERY woman’s life is equally precious and no side of any story should be deliberately excluded.
Matz tells Jewish News: “We understand there is a lot we don’t know. But there is a lot we do know from videos, footage and data that directly shows that there was severe sexual violence and torture of women. The report mentions only the Occupied Palestininan Territories. It is clearly one sided. They have two million followers on their Instagram account and they only mention violence done to the women in Gaza.”
Maayan Zin, whose daughters Ella and Dafna were released on Sunday 26th November after 7 weeks in Hamas captivity.
She describes the “parade of the kidnapped women in Gaza” who were “stripped of their clothes completely. You can imagine the horror. There were a few cases that we know of group rape, one after the other.”
Noa pauses, clearly distraught. Jewish News asks if she’d prefer to write everything down rather than say the words out aloud. She refuses and continues to describe one woman who, whilst being raped, had her breasts cut off before being shot in the head.
She goes on to describe the case of a 13-year old child that a soldier found dead, with her pants down. It was clear that she too had been raped.
Noa adds: “There are many testimonies that people were standing there watching. And, still UN Women and other women organisations are failing to condemn in some way.”
She says their campaign is “targeting UN Women as part of the UN. We know its stated purpose is to maintain global peace. UN Women is dedicated to gender quality and the empowerment of women. As a global champion of gender equality, you would expect them, and the UN as a whole, would stand up for women as a whole in Israel and Gaza.”
Noa adds: “There are victims of Hamas in Gaza AND Israel. But UN Women are taking only a stand for victims in Gaza. Not for Israeli women. Israeli women are excluded from their agenda.”
The movement chose their hashtag deliberately, to “encapsulate the hypocrisy of the UN Women” because “the world will not stand for us.”
Matz says #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew “don’t expect Hamas to follow international law because they are terrorists and animals. But I do expect UN women to enforce it or at least to condemn it. They have all the data.”
The campaigners were supported by Israeli diplomat and lawyer Sara Weiss Maodi, who with her own team, “watched all the footage, video and data. It was a horrific job. And then we sent it out to women’s organisations including UN Women. You cannot say they don’t know. They do know and they choose to remain silent.”
She describes UN Women’s approach as “selective justice, applying only to certain groups. That in certain context it is OK, permissable to do such things.”
It is, she adds, not only dangerous for Jewish women, but sets a global precedent.
Whilst the signatures are important for #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew, they are not the main goal.
With more than 50 volunteers, Noa Matz says their movement is ‘very significant. We are growing very fast. We want to show we have support so they (UN Women) will unequivocally condemn the war crimes done to us.”
Click here to sign the petition.
- The video in this article was created by the Israeli government to highlight the lack of sympathy for Israeli victims of Hamas gender-based violence and terrorism.
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