After October 7, the issue of the rape of Jewish women by Hamas during the massacre was often cynically covered up for lack of evidence, but the facts can no longer be ignored. The work of Israeli associations has documented the way in which women’s bodies were deliberately targeted, desecrated and destroyed on that day. While a “feminist”[1], article dissolves the reality of the rapes into alleged Israeli propaganda, while activists armed with “MeToo unless you are a Jew” signs are thrown out of the demonstration against violence against women in Paris[2], Julia Christ’s article finally provides an answer to the real questions that matter. Why is it that international opinion and its progressive representatives, who are usually the most inclined to believe the victims, are doubling down on sexual violence with silence? What explains the apparent impossibility of gaining recognition for the specific nature of the crime against Jewish women?
The current situation fills our minds with raw facts, sterile debates and an overflow of emotions that are difficult to process and digest. Creativity is stifled, inspiration is lacking: this is Etgar Keret’s observation in the text he has offered to translate and publish this week. But reading this Israeli writer and filmmaker’s work makes it clear that writing, while almost impossible in times like these, is nevertheless a necessity. The need to bear witness to a reality, to make understandable what oppresses and divides us. But above all, to write to “briefly release the suffocating grip of rationality”, to give subjectivity a breath of fresh air, to imagine other thoughts and other, less gloomy possibilities. With lightness and precision, Etgar Keret offers us here a testimony to the “unfathomable reality” of his country, written both today and 22 years ago.
