In this essay, the author considers how the focus on mass rapes allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7 achieves coherency through race, leaving feminist politics mired in racial politics. The feminist truism that women are always raped in war is relied upon to confirm that mass rapes took place on October 7—a weaponization of feminism designed to shut down questions about evidence and the deliberate circulation of false narratives about rape, and, importantly, to legitimize Israeli state violence and genocide in Gaza. Masha Gessen’s July 2024 essay in the New Yorker on the weaponization of sexual violence in war provides an illustration of how an apparently feminist story about sexual violence in war travels along racist rails and gives birth to a storyline about civilized Europeans—in this case Jews—forced to use genocidal force to defend their homeland from marauding, brutal, and misogynist Arabs.
