Crimes against humanity in the Jewish state: On the mass rape incident at Eilat

Something is rotten in the state of Israel. 

Crimes against women are crimes against humanity. Rape is a crime of hate; it is a hate crime. Crimes of hate against women and girls are genocidal; in Greek, 'genos' can mean gender as well as race. 

I actually feel deeply hurt by this news. I feel a curious mixture of both deep sadness and rage, an aching need to cry out. This reaction is a sickness that comes not from a fault in my own soul, but a fault in the world that not only can but must be healed. 

I was once almost gang-raped. Many men are, mostly in jails and prisons, where no one much cares what happens to them. I was never the same after that, and I was rescued by a righteous person before something far more violent would happen, as it would have, leaving me dead of AIDS months later (Oakland, California, 1982). The jail authorities decided I was gay (I am not) and that was why this happened; the word appeared in large letters on a traffic citation. 

My identity as member of a social group was supposed to make me special and warrant the protection of worldly or divine authorities. I can show that being a victim is no moral privilege, precisely because if it were, the oppression the victim suffers from would just be legitimated. If it were, the Jews should have stayed in Egypt. If it were, the Holocaust would "justify" Jews (who need such justification only for anti-Semites) in the way that Christianity said faith justified people, thanks to a sacrificial morality that we cannot believe in and that the existence of Auschwitz would make a horrible parody justifying evil. (That actually is what the term "Holocaust" means: the idea of a redemptive sacrifice that annihilates the victim.) If the city of Oakland thinks I am gay, that is not to offer me a pursuit of happiness and liberation, to identify me with the identity that they think they can best use to control what happens to people like me. But to be a victim because of an identity does not mean that having and affirming that identity is the alternative to being victimized. Evil justifies no one and nothing; the Shoah or Holocaust does not sanctify the Jews nor justify the wrongs to others committed by anyone. As Martin Luther King so effectively argued, violence does not beget justice or happiness, hatred is not a basis of love, just as death is not birth. God is holy and the good is possible not because of destruction, evil, pain, and death but in spite of it. (That is the Jewish position in this matter.)  In the face of evil, only our response to it can make or be just or holy.

Jews call moving to Israel and leaving "the diaspora," the condition of exile that increasingly is the human condition in the modern world, "aliyah," "going up." Is Israel a "higher" place morally, for Jewish girls and women, for any girls or women, for Jews themselves, or for anyone? Today I think moving there to live would be distinctly a way of "going down."

(I don't mean in the nasty sense of that expression in the English language, though it might be interesting to ponder its meaning in some related contexts, as it denotes an act that is identified instrumentally by preposition, and that uses the other person, ostensibly for that person's gratification. It denotes a mere use of bodies and their parts.)

The last bastion of capitalist colonialism, which officially belongs to a particular ethnic and religious group, whose government openly practices torture, that treats people in its principal minority worse that America treats the Blacks, the world's most militaristic society, a super-macho culture, a society of a people often identified with intellectual culture, but most of whom have only the army as their university, a state that in the name of the God of the Jewish people is openly identified with brutal domination --- A society that doesn't seem very exemplary in moral terms, especially right now. (Sorry, my friends; I guess I am in a bad mood.) 

I have faith and hope, however. The people of the Jewish state are capable of responding creatively to the crisis represented by this alarm, just as God himself enables creative responses to evil and tragedy. 

What must we "hear and do," as the people are reported to have all said at Mount Sinai? Just this:

End sexual violence now! Never again must this happen! Not in the "Jewish state," not in America, not in this world, not in the world to come (that of tomorrow). When we will be able to say about the crime of rape, “Never again!”? What kind of society would it be where this crime is rare? A society in which it could make sense to no man to want to do this to another person?