Moral Clarity part 13: Atrocities against women, a moral litmus test

Lately, the extent of the savagery and barbarism that Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israeli women on October 7th has started coming into full light. Fortunately (and unfortunately) we have a lot of it in graphic detail, not just because there were surviving witnesses, but because in many cases the perpetrators filmed and posted their heinously depraved acts on social media with glee and pride. Suffice to say that they involved rape and the worst imaginable forms of mutilation and degradation. 

Women were uniquely victimized on October 7th (as well as while they were in captivity), and it's been particularly disappointing, or better, reprehensible, that almost two months after the event not more has been said of this, not even by organizations that supposedly address, defend and promote the rights of women. Some commentators have taken the position that the silence by these women's rights groups is a result of good ole anti-Semitism. For others, it's more of a political issue, namely, that Israeli women are treated differently because to highlight the attrocities they've suffered is like siding with Israel, and for those people that feels like siding with the victimizer. And then it becomes a question of who has suffered more, the Palestinians or the Israelis, and ultimately a numbers game, ie. it must be the Palestinians because so many more of them are being killed compared to the Israelis. There is something undeniably crass and simplistic about reducing any conflict to such morbid calculations. It treats the life of each victim as a commodity, and just as bad, it makes no moral distinction between the acts of the perpetrators. 

Women and children hold special status in any conflict because they are the most vulnerable in society, and typically suffer the most during war. The way women (and children) are treated is particularly revealing about the nature of the combatants and what's at stake. For anyone trying to sort out the moral and political issues at the heart of a conflict, it behooves them to pay close attention to the way the respective sides treat women and children. It's a moral litmus test.

War is part of the accepted system of dispute resolution between international parties. It's a mechanism of last resort, when diplomacy and negotiations have failed, but one that we nevertheless acknowledge will occur. As such, we have decided that we at least need to create international norms, conventions and laws to 'govern' war, to keep it within acceptable moral boundaries of engagement. This is why we can refer to 'war crimes' when we talk about acts that fall outside those boundaries. Understandably, the most heinous and objectionable 'war crimes' are ones done to women and children. And of those, the acts that are pre-meditated are the most serious. In this sense, indiscrimate bombing that inadvertently hits a school is a different kind of war crime than the targeted bombing of a school. Likewise, there is a world of difference between the inadvertent death of a woman that was the result a bombing that targeted terrorists, and the vicious rape and mutilation of a woman designed to torture, terrorize and intimidate. The former is a terrible misfortune of war. The latter is an attack on the core values of our civilization not to mention basic human decency. Anyone, but especially a woman, unable or unwilling to grasp this moral distinction, is a special kind of tragedy of the current conflict.