The sisterhood’s sickening silence over Hamas’s sexual atrocities

I waited, and waited, for a peep from my non-Jewish sisters. Finally, last Friday, a statement; the time lapse exposed a deep and silent antisemitism. 

In my first year at university I read Tilly Olsen’s seminal book Silences, which exposed the historical censorship of women’s literary voices. That’s when I understood my life’s work was to speak into the denials, omissions, absences and struggles for women’s existence under patriarchy.

Systematic gender-based violence, along with poverty and denial of education, are the cornerstones of women’s inequality. But of these, it is the violence that knows no privilege or grants any exemptions – it cuts across all divides. Our rights to self-determination are always up for grabs by the next wave of male-controlled silencing, which has at its core, the impulse to femicide.

American feminist Andrea Dworkin named it “the universal religion, contempt for women”.

Yet, this held a strange optimism for me, because it meant that no matter our intersectionalities, women could stay connected to one other. We all know what it is to fear male violence, despite the walls erected by patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and other paradigms we have had no part in creating.

I worked for many years as a women’s rights advocate in South Africa. I set up Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to end violence against women. I sat on a Law Commission to draft new domestic violence legislation and participated in the focus group that worded the clause in the South African Bill of Rights enshrining every person’s right to freedom from violence.

I indentured my life to the “sisterhood” – every flicker of it - and have lived in its timeshare my whole life.

For me, there is no woman or child who falls outside of this line of safety. Since then, I have stood sentinel at the gates of this imaginary City of Joy, which also happens to be a real place in the Democratic Republic of Congo where  survivors come to rebuild their lives.