I am my sister’s keeper

Liri. Daniella. Emily. Shiri. Doron. Romi. Naama. Amit. Noa. Karina. Agam. Arbel. Eden. Carmel. These are the names of the female hostages, the names that each Jewish woman can repeat in their sleep these past months. In the light, we stare back at their eyes. In the darkness, we wince as we imagine what they are enduring in captivity. In these moments we are their sisters, their friends, their aunts. We ache their pain, the pain of their families. Our paths have never crossed, yet we declare - I am my sister’s keeper.

Ten of these female captives may still be alive. One - Noa - was retrieved in a dramatic rescue. Two - Eden and Carmel - were executed on day 331 of captivity. They were found with point blank wounds, emaciated and in horrific underground conditions. The DNA of Yahiye Sinwar, head of Hamas, was found in their hellish den under Rafah. These women, together with four male captives, were kept as his human shields.

Early on I became attached to Carmel, 40, an occupational therapist - like me - who loved yoga, travel and family. I resolved to encourage our mutual professional peers within the global occupational therapy circles to advocate for her. Perhaps the World Federation could lobby the global health organisations and the International Red Cross, who - at that stage - had yet to stun us with their indifference and abrogation of responsibility to victims of war. It was also before we knew what awaited us in the global compassion stakes. I was stunned into a deep anger by the silence I encountered. In time I would connect with peers in the US, the UK and Israel, and discover that they too experienced the same blunt encounters.

On the street, something else was unfolding which would become emblematic of the times. A callousness so fierce, that saw regular everyday people tearing down hostage posters or scrawling “Actors! Lies! Propaganda!” across the faces of these people torn from their beds and from the sunrise set of a bush rave.

One day my daughter, aged 9, came across torn hostage posters outside our local playground. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she asked “Why would someone do that?”. In the world she inhabited there was no such thing as a world that doesn’t care, let alone wilfully dehumanises and blots people out.

But this is my daughter’s world now. A world which minimises and excuses our pain at best, or erases and denies it at worst. There is an old saying that the antisemite likes nothing as much as to watch the Jew turn his pockets out as he stands accused of stealing. Surely the feminist movement has a similar analogy for a woman violated and forced to defend herself against a chorus of deniers. October 7 brought these two analogies into a crossroads - the violated Jewish woman, a sacrificial lamb for the hate of these dark days.

Leading this movement of dehumanisation are the women’s and human rights organisations who have refused to tell the Israeli story. It has taken a full year for human rights organisations to minimally acknowledge the pain and fear of Israelis, the sheer horror wrought by Hamas on that black day in 2023, or meaningfully advocate for the hostages. The selective humanitarianism by organisations whose core business is advocating, with neutrality and impartiality, for victims of war and sexual violence has been especially disturbing.

These groups are storytellers - they give a voice to human suffering, they bank on empathy. How they represent conflicts matters. Yet not a single children’s organisation has shared the name and images of Kfir (1) and Ariel (4) Bibas, the redheaded boys abducted with their frightened mother, Shiri. Not a single womens’ organisation has hashtagged Shiri #sayhername. Nor will they ever validate the trauma of that day for women like 22 year-old Shirel Golan - a Nova music festival survivor, who took her life last month.

The unwillingness to acknowledge the sexual violence of October 7 has normalised this erasure, and the most basic concern for the female captives has been marginalised to avoid “politics”. Would support or empathy for Israeli women have detracted from the plight of Gazan women trapped in a horrific war? No. Rachel Polin-Goldberg, mother of Hersh who was executed alongside Carmel and four other young hostages, said it most profoundly, “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the [conflict]. In a competition of pain there are no winners”. The risk of inflaming or losing followers for the sin of humanising Israelis, has been deemed too great.

In the face of this abandonment, our sense of responsibility to the female victims of October 7 has brought Jewish women together in sisterhood and made us stronger. We have become one another’s keepers - bound by empathy and action. Yet we are also bound by this deep sense of betrayal, by a world we previously navigated with certainty and confidence. When our acquaintances and colleagues remain silent, we wonder if they would have chosen silence if it were our daughters. Therein lies the rupture of trust that October 7 created for Jewish women the world over.

As with all ruptures, they can only be bridged by reaching out. We need to reach out to our peers and colleagues and remind them - your voices count, your silence does too. Will you be your sister’s keeper? For the women who were brutalised and slaughtered on October 7, it is too late. For Carmel and Eden, executed in captivity - it is too late. We can not allow ten women who remain in captivity, amongst tens of men whose daughters, girlfriends, mothers and grandmothers desperately await their return, to be swallowed by the silence.