The Collective Trauma and Resilience of the People of the State of Israel

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah Stern: Good afternoon and welcome to another topical and timely EMET Webinar. Sunday was an emotional day for Israel, the Jewish people, and the rest of the civilized world. We watched with bated breath and immense happiness as Romi Gonen, age 24, Emily Damari, age 28, and Doran Steinbrecher, age 31, were reunited with their families. Hamas held these four women for 471 days. Of course, we all have lingering questions about the deal that secured their release.

There are also other outstanding issues that are begging to be addressed. On October 7^th, Jewish Israeli women were abducted, tortured, murdered and raped. They were taken from their bedrooms or from a music festival. We have to ask ourselves where the international feminist groups have been. The International Red Cross and other so-called humanitarian organizations done nothing to help these women over the last 15 months.

Today, we have a double header. We are joined by Dr. Moshe Kaplan and by Meredith Jacob. Dr. Kaplan is a trained psychoneurologist who uses the integration of mind, body and soul for optimal healing. He is a co-founder of the Wellness Medical Clinic which focuses on translating wellness concepts to a practical reality. He is also the founder of the Be a Mensch foundation whose chairman was the late great Senator Joseph Lieberman. After completing Medical School, Dr. Kaplan received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Together with Naomi Remen, M.D. at Stanford Medical School, he wrote a curriculum for medical schools to use as a model for an ideal medical system. The system integrates professionals, paraprofessionals and laypeople. Dr. Kaplan is also the compiler of A Holy Life by Targum Press. Currently, besides being an author and an investment advisor, he is a medical director of Magen David Adom and lives in Jerusalem with his family.

After October 7^th, Dr. Kaplan compiled an outstanding book, Extreme Trauma: October 7^th as an outlier in the Rage of Human Trauma. The book describes the events of October 7^th and includes contributions from Dr. Miriam Adelson, Noah Tishby, Douglas Murray and others. Dr. Kaplan’s book addresses the trauma the Israeli people have endured since October 7^th but it also covers the Israeli and Jewish spirit of resiliency, strength, courage and hope.

Our second guest is Meredith Jacob, a new friend of mine. Meredith is the CEO of Jewish Women International (JWI), a 125-year-old nonprofit dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. Since assuming the role of CEO in 2020, Meredith has been an integral part of developing numerous Jewish women’s international initiatives. These include the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence in the Jewish Community, the Collaborative of Jewish Domestic Violence Agencies, the Women’s Financial Empowerment Institute, Restart Job Readiness for Survivors, the Jewish Communal Women’s Leadership Project, and many others. Meredith is an award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Washington Jewish Week. She has written several books and she was named one of the 50 most influential Jews of 2020 by the Jerusalem Post. Meredith is a sought-after speaker, moderator and writer. Her opinion pieces appear frequently in many different outlets.

Dr. Kaplan’s book, Extreme Trauma: October 7^th as an outlier in the Rage of Human Trauma, discussed the psychopathology of genocidal rape and the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. The book describes rape as a calculated strategic weapon used to terrorize, humiliate and destroy entire communities. According to the book, rape is not just an instrument of sexual gratification, it is about power and domination and it is a twisted form of warfare.

Meredith, can you please describe the initial response you received from feminist groups and major women’s rights organizations when you brought up the abductions, body mutilations, murders and the genocidal rapes of women on October 7^th?

Meredith: First of all, thank you for having me here and thank you to everyone on this call for making time for this important discussion. Thank you, Dr. Kaplan, for including the violence perpetuated against Israeli women in your book. We did not initially know the extent of what happened on October 7^th.

In addition to working in the Jewish community, JWI participates in mainstream coalitions dealing with domestic and sexual violence. We are among the few Jewish organizations that are part of those coalitions. My predecessor has told me stories of how difficult it was to have a Jewish organization be included in that space. Jewish women were seen as privileged. They were considered women who could not be victims or survivors.

JWI and the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) engage in weekly calls with the executives and CEOs of all the major feminist organizations. The young woman who moderates the call happens to be Jewish. After October 7^th, she reached out to me before our weekly call to ask if I would like to discuss October 7^th. I answered that I did not feel safe addressing October 7^th in that environment. I asked her to reach out to NCJW. She replied that he had and had received a similar response to mine.

To her credit, the young Jewish organizer still tried to give the Jewish organizations on the call, an opportunity to speak to the atrocities that happened in Israel. In any other case, the chat line would have been filled with love and support from all of the participants. In this case, there was an awkward silence. I finally typed thank you in the chat, and that was it. Some people took that moment to try and reach out and have conversations about October 7^th.  I saw they were not supportive and I was not prepared to have conversations with those not standing with me at such a time.

Prior to October 7^th, I had never experienced anti-Semitism. I grew up in communities with strong Jewish populations. I remember when I was selecting my college, my parents ordered the book from B’nai Brith to assess the Jewish population at my preferred colleges. I never had the feeling of being othered for being Jewish.

We will be talking more about this but the more we learned about what happened on October 7^th, the more we felt our bodies were not worth as much as others, because they are Jewish bodies. Plenty of non-Jews impacted on October 7^th, yet I think they are regarded as Jewish. So, anti-Israel sentiment is anti-Semitic sentiment.

Interviewer: Yeah. Meredith, can you discuss the response of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)? Have you reached out to them and have they been supportive?

Meredith: CEDAW and UN Women were silent. It was very strange. There was one day where a tweet popped up on UN Women that called out Hamas and that acknowledged Israel. It disappeared within minutes. It was as if it was taken down and shut down purposefully. These organizations spoke about what was happening to the women and children in Gaza many times but said nothing about the Israeli victims.

In December 1993, there was an event planned by our colleagues and partners at the Dinah Project, to talk about something else. It was an event that had previously been scheduled by some Israeli women. After October 7^th, they pivoted to discuss and highlight the sexual atrocities of October 7^th. They brought in Sheryl Sandberg and Amit Soussana and publicly shamed UN women.

We work with a former ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. She was an ambassador before UN Women was formed. She shared privately that UN Women actually blames Jewish women’s organizations for coming at them. There have been protests in front of their houses and they have received death threats. They consider us their enemy for calling out their failures. UN Women is set up to speak out on behalf of all women on all atrocities. Israel is not the only country to have experienced conflict-related sexual violence but it is the country for which it was not called out. Feminist organizations have to contort themselves to be able to deny what happened or justify the rapes as resistance. It is shocking to its core.

We were at the Knesset last May and one of the MKs held the launch of what she was calling the Global Coalition of Women against the use of Gender-Based Violence as a Weapon of War. She brought Yazidi, Ukrainian and other representatives to speak at the launch. We spoke to them, and they said, “Welcome to the club. The world does not care about women. The world is silent”. The more we learn, the more we have learned that this is true. Disinformation, denial, and distortion of facts is commonplace. There are reports that Ukrainian soldiers perpetrated violence against women. These reports probably originated in Russia. This demonstrates that there are some similarities relating reactions to gender-based violence that are common to women across the world. That said, I do not believe the justification of the rapes is something that has occurred outside of Israel. That is part of the dehumanization of Israeli women. It is a means to obtain retribution from Israel for whatever other narratives are being followed. Israeli women face a trifecta of hate. They are women, they are Israeli and they are Jewish. It is horrific that their bodies are being used as a means of retribution and righteous justice. I also want to acknowledge that Israeli men also faced horrendous sexual assault on and after October 7^th.

Interviewer: Yes, let’s talk specifically about the use of language. Can you explain these groups’ reluctance to call out what actually happened to Jewish women and men? Their proclivity is to generalize the situation, discuss warfare and express righteous indignation.

Meredith: These are narratives that have been peddled for as long as there have been Jews. I wrote an op-ed in the Forward in November of 2023. There, I included the line, “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” The Jew is considered a privileged colonizer and an oppressor. Evil Jewish oppressors, cannot be victims deserving of support, empathy and care. According to the narrative, October 7^th was a fight for freedom by the Gazan people and Israel deserved it. This means it could not have been a horrific attack on innocent civilians.

The Israelis who lived in Gaza’s envelope were people who chose to live there because they believed in peace. They believed in a two-state solution. They believed the Palestinians were their brothers and their friends and they were betrayed. Theirs were |innocent lives that were lost. What happened on October 7^th was a horrific attack on innocent civilians. Whatever has happened in Gaza is war and war is horrible but it cannot be compared to October 7^th. They are not the same.

As an aside, the Jew is both too white and not white enough. I understand the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs just canceled their Holocaust event because it’s considered a DEI initiative. That came across my email as I was logging in today.

Interviewer: Women who have experienced genocidal rape and violence, often need to create psychological boundaries. They do this to protect themselves from further humiliation and social stigmas. Right now, most of us are celebrating the return of three female hostages. What sort of cautionary tales do you have for us as regards how we should relate to these three women?

Meredith: Thank you for asking that. Pramila Patten, the UN special rapporteur, went to Israel to investigate the psychological impacts of rape and sexual violence. She did it on behalf of the UN. We thank her for her efforts because her report was as helpful as it could have been. Unfortunately, most of the Israeli women who were sexually violated were killed and their bodies were burned. Patton noted that the survivors did not come forward to speak to her. That may well be because the UN is not a trusted body in Israel. Also, survivors of sexual violence are not necessarily going to be able to handle coming forward to share their experiences. They need to reclaim autonomy and to control what is shared about their story. Sometimes sharing it or speaking about it publicly can be triggering, traumatizing and very painful. We need to respect that and recognize it is what they need. With respect to the survivors of the Nova Festival who were not raped, some cannot speak about the atrocities while others do nothing but speak about it. They each have their own way forward and their own way of healing.

At JWI, we held a webinar before the anniversary of October 7^th. We advised communities hosting survivors that they may not be able to get up on stage even though they may have thought they could. We advised them survivors may not be able to share their stories even though they initially thought they could. These are normal, expected reactions which should be respected. We cannot expect survivors to share. We may never know what happened to these people and we have to respect that.

It is important to be aware that conflict-related sexual violence is often committed in order to traumatize a community. When the stories come out about what happened to an individual, it impacts their family and their community. There is often a communal shame around what happened and that needs to be considered. These are complicated, nuanced issues.

I have had the privilege of viewing a lot of the evidence from October 7^th. I have viewed a lot of raw footage and I spoke to a roundtable of congresspeople and the IDF last year. The police who were in charge of investigating the sexual atrocities brought evidence with them. I had to sign a paper to say I would not discuss this evidence with others. I was also in Israel with the Israeli women delegation. We were able to meet with first responders and with the medical people who examined the bodies of the survivors. I have seen a lot and I believe my Israeli counterparts should share it publicly. People should be forced to know what happened. I do not think they could see what Hamas did and not have sympathy with the victims. We are fighting a public relations battle. We are fighting an online battle. Why are we not sharing images of what happened? We see pictures of dead babies in Gaza constantly. Why are we not showing what they did to us? Their answer is that Israel respects the victims and their families. They are not sharing the devastating, horrendous pictures out of respect. I think that the choice to protect the victims irrespective of the cost, says so much about the morality of the Israeli people.

Interviewer: It says so much about what is in our collective DNA. Meredith, please discuss what you have learned since October 7^th, 2023 in terms of handling this incredibly sensitive and delicate issue.

Meredith: It has been an unbelievable learning experience. On October 6^th, I was not even familiar with the term Conflict related sexual violence (CRSV). Initially, I condemned the world for staying silent and now I wish they had stayed silent. This is because what has been said has been so devastating. Amit Soussana was the only October 7^th rape survivor who has come forward. She spoke to the New York Times. In the very first paragraph of their article covering her testimony, the New York Times included a quote from a Hamas spokesperson. He contradicting her and stated that Hamas would never do such things. She also received a tremendous amount of online hate. She came forward and then had to face a barrage of global hate.

My sister’s community in San Diego brought over a group of schoolchildren from Israel over the summer to give them some relief. They held a welcome event and one of the little girls started to cry. When asked why she was crying, she responded that she thought everyone hated them. I spoke with colleagues of mine in Israel who run rape crisis centers. They say that the worst thing is that the world does not believe the survivors.

That said, I have seen unbelievable resilience and strength, especially among Israeli women. Soon after October 7^th, a group of women got together to form the Dinah Project. These women are all experts in international law and in gender-based violence and media. One of them, Dr. Ruth Halpern Kadari, formally co-chaired CEDAW. They were instrumental in speaking with Pramila Patten and convincing both the UN and Israel to allow her to come over to Israel and they are working to have her return.

I have learned that the UN Secretary-General releases an annual report on incidents of conflict-related sexual violence in various conflict zones around the world. The Secretary-General will not use information from a source other than that of the UN and so the information used to create that report can only be obtained by UN organizations on the ground. Such a UN body does not exist in Israel for reasons probably everyone on this call understands. The only way that the atrocities of October 7^th were able to be included in the previous report, was because of Pramila Patton. If she does not visit again this year, the sexual crimes against Israeli women will be omitted completely.

This year, there are allegations coming out of Gaza that the IDF has committed sexual crimes in some of their prisons. Regardless of whether they are true or not, the allegations will be reported and included in the report. There is a chance that Israel will be put on the blacklist and Hamas will not even be mentioned. The Secretary-General alone decides who will be on the blacklist and being on the blacklist could imply potential sanctions or other negative repercussions. That is what we are up against and it is ridiculous. I credit my colleagues at the Dinah Project, for their extraordinary and tireless work.

Interviewer: I credit both you and your colleagues at the Dinah Project. It seems as though there have been multiple instances of atrocities committed by the West yet tiny Israel has become the embodiment of the centuries of their crimes.

Meredith: JWI is the leading Jewish organization working on ending violence against women and girls. For this reason, the Dream Foundation reached out to us to partner with them. We brought over a delegation of women to Israel. They are all experts in gender-based violence, in law and in the media. The purpose was to learn, bear witness and then return and launch a global movement. We are focusing on how social media was used as a tool in the conflict-related sexual violence. Rape as a weapon of war, is as old as war itself and it goes hand in hand with disinformation. That said, the reach is completely different when you can pay for bots, when you can run campaigns and when you can embed messages in the images you show. Graphic images can further the terror and trauma or falsehoods can be spread to reshape the narrative.

Yesterday, I was on a call with the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council is a think tank and I spoke with their staffers who specialize in CRSV and in technology. They noted that even though Israel is a tiny country, it is a major media market. They mentioned that if I was an Arabic speaker, I may have heard about organizations like ISIS committing gender-based atrocities in other conflict zones. However, information about Israel, spreads much more quickly than information about any other conflict. The information is being spread in English which also increases its reach. The average person now has an opinion on Israelis and Palestinians. This is not true for the situation in Myanmar, for example. The average person has no idea there is a conflict happening there.

I think all of this led to the moment when the world woke up to CRSV and to the disinformation around it. We are trying to examine the way social media was weaponized by terrorists. We want to use that information to try and instantiate different protocols at the UN. When the UN investigates and reports on the perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence, we want their protocols to include an examination of what is happening online. They should examine  who is paying for the campaign, how are they weaponizing the campaign and how are they shaping the narrative. Terrorists are winning the communications war because information coming from Israel is viewed as propaganda.

Interviewer: It is very discouraging. Throughout history, antisemites have weaponized every propaganda vehicle they can. Corrupt institutions and malevolent players can obviously weaponize social media.

Moshe, can you talk to us a little bit about the premise behind your book? I was very moved and uplifted by some of these amazing chapters in your book. Please also address your Be a Mensch foundation.

Moshe Kaplan: Before I start, I want to reiterate or confirm what Meredith discussed. It was an excellent presentation and I appreciate her helping me out. Meredith has a lot more information and experience in this field than I do. I only became involved in this around October 7^th.

Before I get to the specifics, I want to remind our audience that the idea of the big lie was started by the Nazis and Goebbels and they use it as a propaganda tool. The principle was that if you tell a big lie often enough, people start to believe it is true. This is the approach followed by Hamas and the Arab world because their propaganda is not connected to truth. Truth is irrelevant to them. They will tell the lie enough times to get others to believe it. My father went to Harvard Law School in the 1930s. At that time, they taught Nazism at Harvard. The Jews have been the world’s scapegoat for the last 2, 500 years and what we see today is nothing new.

Semitism began when the Jews got the Torah. When we are wealthy, we are accused of controlling the world, including the banks and the media. On the other hand, when we are poor, we are considered useless parasites and are vermin who are a burden on society. So, we should begin with the idea that Jews are scapegoats, no matter what happens. Historically, Jews have contributed hugely to the countries in which they have lived. They have contributed in the arts, medicine, science and in technology. Their contributions did nothing to slow the antisemitism in places like Portugal, Spain, Europe and Germany. The same holds true today. There are more news reporters in Israel than any other country in the world outside of the United States. In my book, I mention a professor at Princeton who denied that October 7^th happened. This is outrageous and it is their modus operandi. It was one of the reasons I wrote my book. I wanted to document what actually happened. I have included the report from the rape center which it is documented with references.

Meredith discussed the psychopathology of rape. I coined a new term called political barbarism, because there’s no other way to describe their behavior. People have short memories and they forget quickly. Most people have moved on with their lives and consider October 7^th a Jewish event. Even President Trump, who is pro-Israel, mentioned in his speech that he is not responsible if we are not able to complete another stage of the hostage deal. He already stated that it is not the US’ war, it is someone else’s war.

Interviewer: Thank you, Moshe. I think it is really important that people understand what is going on in this arena.

This Friday, Reps Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer, and Senators Tim Scott and Jackie Rosen, will introduce the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. I have been working on this for almost a decade now. Its passing, will hopefully lead to protections for K-12 Jewish students and those on college campuses as well. Right now, the situation for Jewish students is horrific. As an example, students suspected of being Jewish at UCLA, are not allowed to engage in their student government organizations. Students with Jewish surnames are being told they may not join debating, tennis and other clubs on college campuses.

I went to Colombia and saw for myself how difficult it is to be a Jewish student there. I have a great niece who’s going to Colombia now, and it is very hard for her. She chooses to keep her head down and this is a choice she feels she has to make. Both faculty and students are guilty of making Jewish students ashamed to reveal their Jewish identities.

Hopefully, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act will be passed and help rectify the antisemitism we are observing on American college campuses. I know the situation in Europe is getting worse and worse. EMET is reviewing what is going on there to see what options we have to help using the American legal system.

I would like to thank you both for joining us today. I encourage you all to read Moshe’s book and to follow Meredith’s extraordinary work at Jewish Women International. Thank you all for joining today’s webinar. Bye.

Meredith: Thank you.

[END]