Denying Hamas violence against Jewish girls and women during the October 7, 2023 terror attack in Israel is akin to denying the Earth is round. The evidence, after all, comes not from Israel itself, but from Hamas terrorists who filmed their atrocities. To tolerate denial on university campuses, foreign ministries, and in UN agencies is to fail to understand the lessons of how atrocities against women signal intent to genocide.
Scholars acknowledge the Ottoman-era Turkish genocide against Armenians to be the first modern genocide. Turkish officers and Kurdish irregulars massacred up to 1.5 million Armenians in a preplanned and deliberate campaign of murder. Ottoman forces systematically killed men but often raped and trafficked women and children. Trauma led women to take their own lives.
Sexual violence also characterized the Holocaust, though both shame and the subsequent killing of witnesses suppressed much academic awareness of the issue of rape, forced prostitution, and sterilization until recently. Forensic evidence includes sexual mutilation of women akin to what occurred during the Armenian Genocide and subsequent genocides, and that which characterized Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks on Jewish women.
In Bosnia, the systematic rapes of between 20,000 and 50,000 Bosniak women and girls shocked the West. Serbian perpetrators meant not only to terrorize the Muslim population, but also to ethnically cleanse by forcing Muslim women to carry Serbian babies. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecution set a standard for modern prosecution of crimes against women.
During the 1994 Anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, the Interahamwe Hutu militia targeted women with rape, torture, and sexual mutilation. In Sudan, the Sudanese government in Khartoum has orchestrated systematic sexual violence against non-Arab ethnic groups. The Janjaweed, an Arab militia, target African women to weaken tribal ethnic lines. The father’s lineage determines ethnicity in Sudan and so Janjaweed uses rape to Arabize the indigenous populations.
In 2014, the Islamic State used rape as a weapon in its genocide against Iraq’s Yazidi. As during the Armenian Genocide, they slaughtered males but raped and trafficked women and girls.
The international community should see the premediated and systematic sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, 2023, and on a continuous basis to the hostages they took, in the context of past genocides.
Diplomatic reports, contemporary newspaper accounts, and archival documents expose the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust. News footage and victim testimonies document the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. Refugees and rescued victims revealed the Islamic State’s gender-based violence. The Hamas attacks on Israel, however, are perhaps the most documented atrocity in recent history, with the perpetrators themselves filming and broadcasting their crimes in real time. If systematic sexual violence reflects genocidal intent, never before has this stepping-stone to genocide been so clear. Not only feminist groups that ignore these realities for their own political reasons but also genocide awareness groups undermine their own credibility if they embrace a Jewish exception to their human rights work.
