How am I supposed to think about anything else? (and five other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality to end your week. A special wartime edition.

Since the most recent edition of this newsletter it feels like the world has changed. Writing in the New Statesman after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on 7th October, Robert D. Kaplan recalled Lenin. “History isn’t a linear continuation of what has gone before,” Kaplan wrote, “It zigs and zags. When Lenin said that ­decades can go by and little happens, and then days and weeks go by and decades happen, this is what he meant.”

Not all subscribers to this newsletter know that I am Israeli and Jewish. I was born in Israel, as were my parents and one grandparent. The rest moved to Mandate Palestine from various parts of Eastern Europe before the establishment of the state in 1948. My partner is Israeli, too. His father was born in Israel after his parents immigrated from Tunisia. His mother was a baby when her family moved to the Holy Land from another part of Tunisia. We speak Hebrew at home in London with our young daughters. I have lived in London since the 80s, when my parents moved here.

We are very lucky; our family and friends in Israel are still safe. We didn’t lose anyone close in Hamas’ attack, and none of our loved ones were taken hostage. But we are heartbroken and traumatised by the brutality, the sheer scale of the cruelty and the loss, and the continued minimisation of what happened. We are heartbroken, too, at the continued war. Israel is pummeling Gaza, where now more than 7,000 people have been killed in IDF strikes, many of them children. Israel’s ostensible aim, to get rid of Hamas, doesn’t seem achievable. The price — so much loss of innocent life — doesn’t seem morally justified.

I long for news of a cease-fire, of a release of the hostages, of which there are still more than 200, including babies, children, and the elderly. I have found it difficult to think of anything else since 7th October. Three weeks in, I have managed to find the headspace to write this newsletter again.

For the New Statesman, where I work, I have been covering these events. For anyone interested here are links to my coverage: An essay on Hamas’ attack, what’s next and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s legacy | an interview with a woman whose parents were taken hostage to Gaza (her mother has since thankfully been released) | an interview with Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, on war crimes and genocide claims | an interview with Israel’s UK ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, a Netanyahu protégé with extreme right-wing views, who is trying to convince the world this war is a battle between good and evil.

This work has helped me feel, at the very least, that I am doing something constructive: trying to add sense, truth and compassion to the fog of war and online (and IRL) antipathy.

And now for the reads…

1) UN Women urged to break silence on Hamas attack

Dozens of women’s groups from Israel (and some from elsewhere) have signed an open letter calling on UN Women to address or condemn Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed and injured women and children and took dozens hostage to Gaza. There is evidence that women were raped during the attack, including from eyewitness accounts and marks on the bodies of those killed. The letter concludes:

We, women’s rights organizations that have operated in Israel in the past decades, as well as women’s rights organizations around the world, cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of innocent women and children wherever they are and the blatant disregard of the atrocities held by Hamas to Israeli citizens and the decision to ignore the hostage situation by UN Women.

We strongly implore UN Women - and all other human rights agencies -  to gravely condemn the brutal attack and atrocities committed by Hamas to Israeli citizens as well as the abduction of innocent hostages, to urgently act to protect the special humanitarian rights of women and children, and to do everything in their power to expose and recognize these atrocious and horrific acts of violence against women and girls and to bring the release of all hostages immediately.

Writing in the journal Fathom, one of the signatories, Hamutal Gouri, says:

Now, let me be very clear: as a feminist, peace, and anti-occupation activist, I would, at any given time, add my name and voice to a call to protect and meet the humanitarian needs of women and children in Gaza. I believe we are born with two chambers in our heart, so we’ll have enough room to care deeply about all innocent people who paid the most terrible price during wartime.

My late father, poet, and writer Haim Gouri, always used to say that ‘in politics there are endless shades of grey. In human morality there is, however, black, and white, right, and wrong’. Well, sadly, UN Women, like other progressive organisations made special efforts to navigate the international political public opinion, yet they utterly failed the basic moral test of denouncing wrong and doing the right thing: raising a voice for humanity, for all human beings, for all women, including Jewish women.

P.s. Another open letter from child advocates is now urgently calling for the release of the 30 children held hostage in Gaza. Six are babies and some are still breastfeeding. One of the abductees is a three-year-old whose parents were killed in the attack. She is in Gaza alone. I don’t know if that is the case for others.

2) Pregnant women in Gaza unable to get care

As the Israel-Hamas war grinds on, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is only intensifying. With fuel, water, and food in very short supply (Israel declared a “total siege” on the strip on 9th October), the ability of hospitals and medics, also under bombardment, to deal with the enormous amount of casualties and wounded from the strikes is strained to say the least. There are reports of people (including children) undergoing painful emergency procedures without anaesthetic. On 20th October, UN Women released a rapid assessment of the effect of the war on women and girls, noting that 493,000 had been displaced from their homes. They also noted that “the violence has tragically resulted in a growing number of widows, as an estimated 900 women have become the heads of households following their male partners’ deaths.”

The lack of maternity care in Gaza was one of the key issues highlighted, too. In times of crisis, in times of war, women will continue to go into labour, and the risk to pregnant women and babies is high. Last week, The Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association (PFPPA) said in a press release:

On 8 October, PFPPA’s only center in Gaza was destroyed following an Israeli airstrike to an adjacent building, completely cutting off their ability to offer healthcare to women who have already been systematically denied sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights by the Israeli occupation….

Over 37,000 pregnant women will be forced to give birth with no electricity or medical supplies in Gaza in the coming months, risking life-threatening complications without access to delivery and emergency obstetric care services.

PFPPA quoted a health worker called Wafa Abu Hasheish:

As a health worker and a Palestinian woman, ever since Saturday morning I have been living in constant fear for the safety and livelihood of my family. At the same time I am not able to leave behind my commitment to providing women with health services and information. I have received calls from women having a miscarriage due to the bombings and gas, another going into labor, neighbors reaching out for help… all of which I am trying to assist but with such limited options and resources available and accessible.. I am afraid for their well beings and even for their lives. I do not know how much more the Gazans can take and I am constantly thinking how many more women around Gaza have no one or nowhere to go."

3) Iranian teenager dies after alleged police assault over hijab

A 16-year-old Iranian teenager has died after being allegedly assaulted by police over breaching hijab laws. Earlier this week, a state-aligned news agency reported that Armita Geravand was “brain dead” after losing consciousness on Tehran’s metro earlier this month. On Saturday (28th October) it was reported she had died. As per the Financial Times:

The incident stoked fears of another wave of social unrest in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini.

Amini was taken into custody outside a Tehran metro station for allegedly breaching hijab rules in September 2022. She collapsed at the morality police station and died in hospital three days later.

Her demise triggered anti-government protests that led to hundreds of deaths. Iranian officials insisted she had died of a heart attack and accused foreign provocateurs of spreading false reports that she had been beaten.

In Geravand’s case, officials have also denied claims she was assaulted by police.

4) Iceland’s women go on strike over pay gap and gender violence

On Tuesday women in Iceland went on strike for a full day over the gender pay gap and violence against women. Women and non-binary people were encouraged to do no work, whether paid or unpaid. Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir also joined the strike. When Iceland’s last full-day strike happened in 1975, 90 per cent of women took part.

The organisers of this year’s strike explicitly linked the undervaluing of women’s work with sexual violence. As per The Guardian:

“We are now trying to connect the dots, saying that violence against women and undervalued work of women in the labour market are two sides of the same coin and have an effect on each other,” said [Drífa Snædal, who is on the executive committee of the women’s strike and is a spokesperson for Stígamót, a counselling and education centre for sexual violence].

5) How South Koreans view gender discrimination

South Korea has the biggest gender pay gap in the OECD, and a widely reported backlash against feminism (see past editions of this newsletter). A new survey of South Korean attitudes to gender discrimination shows that the public is fairly evenly split on how common such discrimination is. Interestingly, the poll results indicate that:

…younger South Korean men are more likely to believe gender discrimination exists – but that is likely because more men in this age group believe that they themselves have experienced discrimination, not because they believe women face structural barriers to equality.

Thank you for reading. See you next week.