AVIVA-BERLIN.de im Oktober 2025 - Beitrag vom 05.10.2025


Sexual Violence on October 7th. Part one: The Elusiveness of Knowledge
T. G. Moraga

T. G. Moraga is an independent performing artist and researcher of Feminist Theory in science and technology studies (STS). She was raised in Jerusalem and has lived in Berlin for the past 12 years. In her article, written 5 months after the 7th of October attack, she deals with the "elusiveness of knowledge". In October 2025 she revisits her text and takes an analytical look back at the situation then and today, and how it has been assessed by feminists and international women´s organizations: in Israel, in Berlin, worldwide.

Part one: The Elusiveness of Knowledge
Part two: Berlin Alliances
Part Three: The communicative act of gender violence in war.

The following is a three-part article written 5 months after the 7th of October attack. In this initial text of Part one, we will deal with the elusiveness of knowledge in the context of sexual violence on October 7. In this specific context, the concept of the elusiveness of knowledge was introduced by Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, dealing with the question of what can be known about the 7th of October. We will be considering different aspects; the difficulty of gathering forensic evidence, how different Israeli and Palestinian tradition of burial affect the knowledge about the death, and how media affects who knows, what, and when. We analyze the limits of knowledge but leave it to the reader to determine to what extent the silence of feminist organizations reflects antisemitic sentiment.

T. G. Moraga is an independent performing artist and researcher of Feminist Theory in STS. She was raised in Jerusalem and has lived in Berlin for the past 12 years.

Retrospective:

This text has been initially written in March 2024, 5 months after October 7th. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the passing time until today, as we are approaching October 7th 2025, in hopefully peaceful directions. The war in Gaza is still ongoing, with tens of thousands of people dead in war. Some of the Israeli hostages have been released home in exchange deals for Palestinian prisoners who committed terror attacks. Some hostages were murdered under captivity, and few remain in captivity. The future of the Gazian population remains obscured, having ongoing processes in the UN for a new Palestinian state, and simultaneously, unofficial threats of forced migration out of the strip by the Israeli radical right wing. Not to mention the attempts of different nations to use their capacity for reaching an end to the conflict, being accompanied by diverse economic treaties and interests.

In this a-counting of events, IDF-soldiers and Hamas-fighters are often forgotten. As if their death is not painful to their society and their families, as if they are not in effect carrying the war themselves, witnessing atrocious events and conducting atrocious acts. The 7th of October is a horrific day to now be part of the history of human war. War operates through mechanisms that are largely concealed, as the spotlight of the end of war tends to shift to the "winners" and their gains. But in this very turning away, war functions as a machinery that crystallizes the place of victims. A role traditionally assigned to women, children and elderly.
The horrific massacres on the 7th of October, and in particular the sexual violence, function both to demoralize the Israeli army but also to ignite the Israeli war. A stone becomes guns, bombs, armies, drones, airplane bombing, missiles. And people´s lives, souls, bodies and minds are all abused as a strategic measure to insight a specific escalating reaction by the enemy.
And so, numbers do not summarize, nor can they measure or depict the situation in full. And symmetry or asymmetry is utterly inadequate form to depict the situation. Yet what can be done? If after two years the conflict does not seem closer to resolution, people all over the field of conflict seem to have more radical positions, and the world as a third party has failed at bringing Palestinian and Israelis closer together.
As a feminist and Israeli, I decided to dare and share my thoughts in public now, exactly because the world has not played a mediator role.

Left, right, conservative, progressive — these terms are black and white views, that keep us all in radical separation. Worst! polarized ideas in this case function in a celebration of the conflict, in a problematic empathy based on a notion of the singularity of victim and victimizer, rather than a complex and dynamic understanding of it. And the step of responsibility taking is nowhere to be heard of- how can you stop if you do not see there are other alternatives?
Signals. We are back to signals, we are not communicating, we are not talking, we are defiantly not listening.
In these past two years among shouts of "stop the war!", through eyes and heart, I heard the streets, phones, and state shouting "keep the conflict alive". And so, this is part of a communicative call, to consider the need for acting as a unifying force for civilian on both sides, rather than fall into the premade trap, both Hamas and Netanyahu´s government has set on. The trap of taking a position on one of the "two" sides of war.

Part one: The elusiveness of Knowledge

To speak, I must position myself? To be positioned, I must reveal myself. The danger in the revelation must be considered.

This text is not positioned in space but rather in hard times, where finding the right words requires significant effort. Knowing the type of criticism that will arise, I find myself contorting my way through expression. Yet, I can only hope these words reach you, whoever you are, in a space of open heartedness.
Before we start with this text, I ask you to please take a moment to close your eyes and repeat to yourself the words: Israel Israel Israel.
What comes to your mind is your biased starting point to this reading. We all have one.
As I sit down to write these words, approaching and reproaching the topic from different angles again and again, looking for the most dignified form to relate to the atrocities that happened on the 7th of October, I find myself failing again and again. No justice can be done here, not to the victims who are no longer alive nor to the survivors nor to the experiences that these events have left in the hearts of Israelis and Jews. Nor to the Palestinian civilians displaced who are now experiencing the military response to the attacks, not to the Palestinian lives lost, not to the people who lost family members, houses, and those who died before witnessing their possible future emancipation. Not to the generations in this conflict, nor to the generations to come. Coexistence is so fragile once again.

By writing these words, I witness an invisible voice in my head demanding a sort of symmetry, fairness, fullness in description, no omission, depicting multiple narratives and diverse realities, telling the suffering and events of "both" sides (but there are far more than two), doing so from my situatedness, accounting for it, and being responsible for it and its privilege. But, on the 7th of October, I was hurt as an Israeli, as a woman, as a Jew, as a human. And thereafter I was neglected by queer, feminist, progressive, and critical thought as the discourse failed to sustain complexity and resist the polarization boiling in the global streams of communications.
Inside me, I detect a refusal to conform to my learned, discursive, feminist pattern. This pattern suggests or hopes to find a good or correct feminist form to write on this topic. There isn´t. This is not a time machine that can bring back those who died and undo the suffering of the ones who still need to go about living.

Immersed in thoughts of loved ones submerged in atrocities, with sentiments of betrayal and impotency towards "the world", I think of feminist resistance to historical contingency (Haraway 1991, pg. 187), and as a Jew I ask: does humanity in its totality really has the wish and ability to learn from this event?
But, the ability to learn relies in this case on two scarce resources.
First, is the mare´s ability to grasp the map of "contingency", to be able to understand the degree of complexity. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is commonly characterized by the phrase "It´s complicated". It sure is complicated. So how can we begin to grasp "the problematic" of the conflict, when even critical thought has caved back to a dualism of bad and good? (See Footnote 1)

And second, we, as situated socio-political creatures, are partial in any matter, as a neutral objective position doesn´t truly exist (a position Feminist thought worked hard to stabilize). But in this topic, we are partial in an exacerbated and fractured manner, as the "truth" is revealed to us through a media mechanism invested to feed our partiality. The "world" in this conflict is not one, nor is it impartial. And it is failing in its most important role, to de-pluralize and find common ground for the parties involved. To mediate, not take a side.

Not yet the 7th of October

On the early morning of the 7th of October, around 8:00 am Berlin time (9:00 am Israel time), my partner at the time called out from the kitchen, "My mom says that war has started".
For us Israelis, the combination of these words is neither bizarre nor surprising.
Over the previous months, there were public alerts issued by diverse security and military personnel at the highest ranks, warning that the civil demonstrations in Israel, against the current government´s attempts to weaken democracy, were sending a clear signal of societal destabilization to Israel´s enemies. There were serious concerns that these circumstances might lead to an attack on Israel.

On the 6th of October, Israeli society was on the verge of a civil war, with violent hate speech and polarization widespread, dealing with conflicts on issues of class, elites, religion, the burdens of military service, and taxes. At the heart of it all was the question of Israel´s identity as a democratic Jewish state. The debate was whether to prioritize Israel´s Jewish character or its democratic values. This reached a climax when a significant portion of the army´s pilots and reservists announced their withdrawal from service, if the government continued to risk democracy by its rushed juridical reform. This reform proposed measures that might leave space for the government not to follow international law in extreme circumstances and give the government the possibility to overrun the high court decisions.

One of the immediate and loud Israeli criticisms against Israel´s Prime Minister Netanyahu, his government, and the military, is that during the past decade, they were enabling the strengthening of Hamas´s military abilities. By shutting their eyes to the evidence of militarization, while believing Hamas´ false messages: that Hamas is interested in the prosperity of the Gaza population by reducing the violent conflict and increasing the ability of flux of Palestinian workers into Israel. Work not war.

At the center of this carefully elaborated political chaos caused by Netanyahu, although not necessarily fully conscious in malign intentions, looms the shadow of his trial for three corruption cases.
The fact that an attack broke came as no surprise. But what truly shocked us Israelis (and the Jewish community worldwide), and what none of us has yet to recover from, was the brutality, ability, and meticulous planning of the attack on October 7th. Its scope of violence, cruelty and hate, its clear aim to destroy human life, souls, and desecrate — all of it struck deep.

The message from Hamas was clear: we don´t wage war the western way, we do not follow UN ethics within war-violence (human rights of do or don´t); we adopt a radical violant Islamists way, which also disregards Islamic ethics of war.
It is worthwhile to emphasize the difference between Islamic and Islamist traditions; both aim to introduce Islamic law to govern the socio politics of a society. But Islamists have radical stands, that see terror as a measure to enforce the Sharia ("the path", the law of Islam) globally. Hamas as a vocal violent Islamist organization communicated to us: We go beyond killing, we use radical excessive spectacles of horror, we decapitate body parts, we rape, we gang rape, we slaughter, we kill Mothers in front of their children, we kill your elderly people and send life feeds of their last breaths on Facebook to their families. We do horror, document it, and instrumentalize it to create psychological terror.

After the 7th of October

What happened was so disturbing, new, and unimaginable that it took me weeks, or even months, to get the smallest grip on the amount of physical and psychological destruction of body and soul. The brutality, pain, fear-spreading, terrorizing, and humiliation in the diverse and inconceivable actions that are still overwhelming.
In October 2023 as I struggled to process, barely functioning from afar, for three weeks, before the war in Gaza fully began, the international community seemed stuck in the simplistic, perhaps old view of the conflict, of oppressed versus oppressor, victim versus victimizer, good and evil. The events of October 7th only fueled this polarized understanding. A situation, I and others argue (Rolnik 2024, Weimann & Weimann-Saks 2024), Hamas and its allies strategically crafted to exploit for the strengthening of their cause.

Amidst the pain, it was particularly hard to deal with the phenomena of global-scale denial of the massacre, especially the disbelief in despite the clear evidence of rape and gender-based violence. This denial persists, through ignorance coupled with anti-Semitism. Where over 30% of American TikTok youth denied the massacre, mirroring the troubling trend of Holocaust denial (Rolnik, 2024).

Lose lose situation

What´s even more troubling was the failure of feminist and women´s rights organizations to believe the victims at the proper time. These organizations are supposed to be the guardians of women´s safety and rights, which makes their disbelief all the more concerning.

Hamas has indeed created an impossible situation for Israel, one that poses a challenge for which the UN war treaty offers no clear answer; With reports of women being raped and others kidnapped, Israelis and Jews lie awake at night, grappling with the knowledge that our sisters and mothers are suffering and our soldiers, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and 18-year-old kids will not return from war. As I write these words we find ourselves caught between the accusations of genocide, the difficult decision (which is unfortunately not in our "the people" hands) of whether to end the war knowing the threat of massacre and extermination by Hamas still exists, or continue it and deal with the ethical question of war, adding to it the escalating tensions on our northern border, the state of hipper Trauma of the Israeli society, its dysfunctional government, hundred thousands of displaced Israelis, and civilian casualties in the ongoing war.

Hamas´ attack on the 7th of October was a daring provocation: What will you do now dear Israel, with the eyes of the world upon you?
Yet, Hamas has constructed a win-win scenario for itself. As a violent Islamist organization, its priority lies not in safeguarding its people but in advancing its ideological agenda. Consequently, it deliberately operates within densely populated and sensitive civilian areas such as hospitals and schools. It does not guide its population to safety in its approximately 500 kilometers of underground tunnels (BBC 2023). It tragically leaves, and many times forcefully obligates and even shoots at its Palestinian population of women, children, and elderly, using them as tokens of war.
The use of civilians as tokens of war is a charge that could also be leveled at the Netanyahu government for neglecting the Israeli cities around Gaza, which have been suffering constant bombarding by Palestinian missiles over the past decade. The current Israeli government failed to protect people in their homes on the 7th of October where they were murdered in front of their families, burned alive, raped, and butchered. The government is also not too concerned with providing safe shelters amid the ongoing war in homes in the south and north of Israel.

The notion that male politicians tend to lack the ability to prioritize empathy towards their own and their enemy population might be a historical stereotype that unfortunately bares degrees of truth within it. Yet the failure to recognize and put in central position this conflict as a manifestation of cross-border (diverse) patriarchy is a profound failure for transnational feminist thought and we will attend to that.

Sexual violence on the 7th of October – the Dinah Project report

I debated with myself if to bring in this publication the crude testimonies of survivors that I have transcribed from media extracts. I have decided to erase this part.
My initial impulse was to describe the evidence and expose it further to the world. Yet in the process of doing so I felt that I was perhaps also using the testimonies to try to convince skeptical minds. But the documentation and evidence of these horrors are already public. Therefore, reproducing the testimonies for that aim, would moreover reproduce the harm and darkness that Palestinian men brutally perpetrated. But it would not necessarily convince the unconvinced. And most importantly, such testimonies are delicate material that should not be used for political persuasion. Just like images of Palestinian pain should not be exposed for that purpose. Because that is a moment where victims become Tokens of war.

As time past, a dedicated team of women, professionals, in collaboration with a UN investigator, who conducted a full investigation on the sexual crime that was committed by Hamas-terrorists, covering testimonies of survivors, of volunteers (Zaka) who dealt with the bodies on the scene, together with photographic forensic evidence. I therefore decided not to engage directly with the evidence itself but to recommend to look fully at the Dinah Project Report at: thedinahproject.org.

Following is an Israeli police report, and a short description from Israeli women´s organizations regarding the events that occurred on that day.

Testimony and information brought by the Police

The Israeli police have more than 50,000 videos from the 7th of October. It used facial recognition technologies to attribute specific crimes to each of them. The police hold hundreds of cell phones belonging to Hamas-terrorists from Gaza. The Police investigation of these Palestinian reveals that Hamas´ combat plan defined each squad carrying two GoPro cameras and two more terrorists who transmitted a direct broadcast to Hamas headquarters from their mobile phones (Steinitz 2023). The Hamas psychological terror did not begin on the 7th of October but has a history of elaborate evolving media mechanisms (Weimann& Weimann-Saks 2024).

Law professor and women´s rights activist Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who worked in the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and as a member in the UN Committee on Elimination of all forms Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) for over a decade, describes the investigative work made by women´s organizations in Israel:
"The sexual violence used by Hamas on October 7th took on many faces. It wore the face of rape, it wore the face of abuse involving the amputation of limbs, both of women and men. It wore the face of sexual organ mutilation. And I also think that we will never know, neither the numbers nor the extent. The significant point is that these were not isolated incidents; they were cases that recurred in multiple scenes during one season. The more incomprehensible the horrors are, the more convenient it is for people who want to deny them, really, to adhere to this narrative that it cannot be because it is so incomprehensible, it is so atrocious. I think we have been forced to acknowledge that anti-Semitism does indeed exist, and some are very influenced by it; we saw it in the responses to October 7th." (Halperin Kaddari 2023).

The illusiveness of knowledge

In the frame of these events, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari elaborated on the notion of the illusiveness of knowledge. The illusiveness of knowledge she says, can begin to be understood in questions such as: what do I know? What do I not know? What can be known?
Halperin-Kaddari explains for example that there is no forensic evidence for the rape because of the chaotic situation of the unprecedented number of bodies, which had to be dealt with quickly to comply with Jewish ritual burial, under an overall panic and ongoing fighting. To speak of mass rape is particularly difficult because there are deficiencies in documentation, there is no ability to allow for a regular criminal process where a link can be made between perpetrator and victim.
Therefore, the fragmented knowledge currently does not allow for a legal documentation process of sexual crimes, as understood from conversations with local authorities, the police, and legal advisors; it is not clear at all whether such a process will be possible in the future.
Instead, Halperin and the Israeli women´s organization opted for Historical documentation, because it is possible and vital for dealing with tragedies like these. There is a vast difference between the level of detail in evidence and methods of collecting testimonies in an international historical investigation, as opposed to a legal process. Testimonial evidence is elaborated in the form of a story in a complete narrative, and not in the form of a police interrogation. (Halperin 2023, Dinah Project 2025)

In regards to the international silence, Halperin says that there are arguments for doubting if the international silence indeed happened. But according to her, it nevertheless existed. She reaches this conclusion by creating a timeline of significant events in the development of awareness and recognition of Hamas´ sexual violence on October 7th. Halperin and her team examine when the information about sexual assaults was accessible to the public in foreign journalism. Concurrently, she examines the response-time of the UN Women´s Organization in by comparing the war in Ukraine during the events of the Bucha massacre. She concludes that the response-time of the UN Women´s representatives regarding sexual crimes of October 7th was slower than the events of the Bucha massacre (Halperin-Kaddari, 2024). It is important to note that Halperin deals only with the UN Women´s Organization, a body that publicly absorbed criticism from feminist Israelis and Jews. Becaouse in the case of other international women´s organizations there is no doubt that a significant silence occurred and that the international women´s organizations and sisterhoods abandoned women and victims of the massacre, as well as all Jewish and Israeli women in total. Of course, there are also organizations primarily media organizations, where feminists indeed reported on the events in ´adequate´ time frames.

Burial Ritual

On the illusiveness of knowledge, I would like to connect to another related analysis made by Poet and scholar Cynthia Gabbay (2023). Gabbay speaks of the use radical Islam makes of the Christian perspective and emphasis on vision. Her analysis explains how the difference between the handling of corpses in Judaism and Islam creates a difference in the visualization of death and puts Israel at a crucial disadvantage; Since what is not seen in Christianity is rendered nonexistent:
"...bodies are not currency for satisfying the thirst for postmodern information… The public, of Christianized culture, a continuous recipient of the charismatic call, needs to see to believe, needs to see it all, even when covering one eye to exemplify the ambiguity of its necrophilic thirst and the moral rejection thereof. The dead bodies of the Holocaust were not exposed by Jews, although perhaps they were necessary for the world to believe the unprecedented...Before October 7th, there were already deniers of October 7th." (translated from original in Spanish, published on social media or social networks, Gabbay 2023).

What we need to take from Gabbay´s description is the cultural epistemological difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis when handling the dead. Here, an example is helpful. In Israel, many of the corpses of the massacre of the 7th of October were unidentifiable at first glimpse. In many cases, limbs, and burned corpses had to be sent to special identification centers based on genetic tests. This situation together with the Jewish Halachic procedure of a fast burier created unprecedented situation. Since the Jewish burial must happen promptly, the same day of death or even at night, in order not to burden the soul of the dead further, as the soul can only raise to the next world when the body is buried. Hamas has also handled deceased bodies who they murdered in Israel but were taken to Gaza to exacerbate the spiritual desecrate and later use them as leverage in negotiations, knowing what the bodies meant for the Jews.

In one of those cases, police and burial personnel have brought to bury a corpse without a head, without informing the family. In Jewish burial, the body is covered enrapt inside a fabric sheet, and so the death is never revealed to be seen in public. In this case, the personnel decided to replace the lack of the head with a doll head and continued to carry the ceremony intending to conceal this information from the family and succeeded. But the family, in the processing of the mourning, sensed that something was wrong. Although they actively asked the police for the full information of their beloved death, the police did not provide the painful truth. Until a court order was given that allowed the excavation of the body from its tomb. After which the family came to know the truth. At this point, one can think of different reasons why the police did not disclose the information in the first instant, or in the following months when asked. It could have been for covering their ´wrongdoing´, it could have been to spare the family further pain. The police were put in a never-yet-thought situation, and their reaction was probably influenced both by care for the family and the pressure to act fast. Wrong, or right? what is clear here is that information about the truth, that Hamas had decapitated the head of the victim, took months to come out.

Yet, on the 8th of October, a celebration of the massacre began to spread around the world. A celebration holding the strongest of contradictions: A celebration of deniers of a massacre. Weeks followed, and evidence became more visualized by the media, but the contradiction only grew. The 7th of October, perhaps the most technologically advanced documentation of a massacre in human history, with thousands of evidential videos circulating on the net, was also heavily denied. Was it because of the human limits of ´wanting´ to know? Or am I being too easy by not blatantly calling it antisemitism- an epistemic manipulation of accommodating the ´real´ for one´s convictions?

Radical Islamist leaders of Hamas and its allies have studied the Israeli soft spot over the decades. With Gabbay´s analysis, it is easier to reflect on and understand the occult and ´personalized´ communicative mechanism Hamas put forward on the 7th of October. Based on a survey made in December 2023, only 10% of Palestinians believed Hamas had committed war crimes. This can be explained by the fact that 85% of the Palestinian population did not watch videos shown by international news outlets of acts committed by Hamas (Andrew and Salman 2023).
And so, we can see that it is indeed more than possible that Hamas has intentionally crafted an event for the propagation of different and parallel discursive realities and narratives. A situation where the world becomes ever more detached from the Israeli experience, while it is ever more occupied with Israel´s alleged and true actions. And Israel, is tortured by psychological terror, one that is not seen nor understood, as it is not experienced, by the World.

The "World" opinion is manipulated through certain actions and symbolic messages crafted for the external world. Other ´messages´ are sometimes hidden from it (due to their corporal nature, which can´t be experienced through media) and are instead directed "intimately" to the Israeli population. To use the population as a leverage that pressures the authorities of the conflict. Palestinian armed groups and Israeli governments have a history of communicative language, a sense-making through challenging each other´s boundaries over decades. This is done through violence towards the counter population and by igniting its population to take part in the violence as well.
Let us take the concept of ethics for a moment, it is a concept valued in (Christian) Europe, in the liberal arena, and currently trending in the decolonial and feminist fields for sure. However, ethics is not a native word to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, yet it is many time used by both parties when communicating to the Western world.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict speaks and instrumentalizes diverse languages, but the dominant one is a conversation between diverse patriarchies. Patriarchies such as the Western modern hybrid (for example an Israeli macho who could be both a soldier and work in high-tech), the biblical problem-solving men (a man that believes in major force and the need for men to actively serve God, usually can be seen as radical Islam or radical Jew), or the patriarch who values honor, hospitality, and trustworthiness sometimes to death.
All, of the above are fought to the limit of existence. Because in the rationale of patriarchy, there is only one discourse allowed: the discourse of the patriarch in power. Any other discourse must be silenced, and best if eradicated.

However, the communicative language of Hamas, is used in the Western Christian world media, it arrives to youth phones, it is modern and sophisticated.
Hamas should not be mistaken by the West to be thought of as a "primitive Islamist" lacking rationality or functioning from the sentiment of oppression. On the contrary, Hamas, its leadership, with the help of its allies, is a rather sophisticated and manipulative organization, a master in discourse. It possesses great analytical skills, capable of carefully crafting and executing multiple narratives in a single attack on Zionism and Jews, as a massive media hyper-event. A media campaign that as Gabbay says tapes into sentiments of guilt and compassion of Christians.

In Berlin 2023-2025

Since finishing this text, in the past year and a half, I entered different conversations, with feminist women in the bars of Berlin. I witness antisemitism embedded in ignorance, self-righteousness, and a wish to act "against war and genocide". I recognize that this youth spirit is being instrumentalized by taping these emotions, by flattening and simplifying the discourses and reality to be one genocidal event. I also witnessed a strong difference and a careful hug, coming in some cases with age, of women above their 40ies, who were able to hold complexity on the matter. One of them even challenged my hypothesis and told me that I am putting too much responsibility on Hamas´ shoulder and taking away the responsibility of young (and not only young woman) to self-reflect about their antisemitism, or hatred towards the Patriarchi that convolutes into heating per say. Do the new tendencies to frame Zionism as a colonial project of domination oversimplify history and provide certain feminists with a convenient excuse to express hatred toward patriarchy? Are Palestinians only women, children, elderly and Israelis are only male soldiers, alpha men politicians, and no women? Do women not engage in violence, insight it and keep it alive in Israel, in Palestine and in Berlin?

Empathy, like a breath, at moments it is gone and then again it expands.
The streets of Berlin have been loud and silent simultaneously. The text to follow will deal with the reception of the topic in the streets of Berlin.

Bibliography:

Carey, Andrew, and Abeer Salman. "Palestinians support Hamas decision to go to war with Israel, survey suggests, with no political solution on horizon", CNN, December 21, 2023.

BBC News, "Gaza Tunnels: Breaking Down Videos from Hamas´ Secret Network" video, October 31, 2023.

Dinah Project report, A Quest for Justice October 7 and Beyond, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Nava Ben-Or, Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, June 2025, Jerusalem.
thedinahproject.org

Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183-201. New York: Routledge, 1991.
philpapers.org

Donna Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, chap. 7. Routledge, 1991.

Guy Rolnik, Rolnik report, Kan11
www.kan.org.il, The Chaos Algorithm, January, 2024.

Gabriel Weimann and Dana Weimann-Saks, "הלוחמה הפסיכולוגית של החמאס - The Psychological Warfare of Hamas." Kesher / קשר, no. 61 (2023): 9–29 doi.org

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, 2023, Lecture: "Sexual Crimes and Gender Horrors of October 7th: On the Fragmentation of Knowledge, in the Personal and Collective Dimension".

Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts: Knowledge as a Basis for Action and Healing, The Leonard Davis Institute - Hebrew University, video lecture, 24.02.2024 אלימות מינית בסכסוכים מזויינים: ידע כבסיס לפעולה והחלמה
doi.org

Moshe Steinitz, "Rape and Sexual Abuse as a Tactic: The Investigation File of Black Sabbath", 08.11.2023, Kan11 www.kan.org.il


(Footnote 1) Certain academic-activist political debate needs to be criticised for centering the conflict on the legitimacy of the existence of the state of Israel (the reference to Zionism). This is a theoretical mindset, it neglects the fact of Israel´s existence, in what seems to be a bizarre hope that dismantling its legitimacy will undo the present cataclysmic reality, as if its millions of civilians will just disappear. In this path the radical left is embracing the narrative of states like Iran, and terror organization such as Hamas, who never recognized the existence of the state of Israel. Even in the extreme case of the state of Israel losing its existential legitimacy, one should ask: where does it lead? What such position does, is to strengthen the legitimacy of the Israeli right wing. The critical debate is not in touch with its effect- it fuels "the problematic" and expands its field, instead of closing its gaps, instead of bridging and multilayering. It is a criticism that neglects to do its job, when it also fails to create dedicated terms for the conflict, instead it borrows terms such as ´Apartheid state´, ´Genocide´, ´Colonial Capitalist Project´ to describe the situation.
And of course, the state of Israel and the Israeli society should have, and in fact to a certain extant is having, a reflection on the Nakba and the Palestinian point of view the Haaretz paper has been a relentless space of uncomfortable reflection, and much has changed since my childhood, for documental works such as "1948: Remember, Remember Not" (by Neta Shoshani), to reach national TV.