With Israeli Survivors, Always: Honoring Gloria Steinem’s Legacy
This post was originally published on The Times of Israel Blogs.
September 3, 2026
by Susie Hess
As October approaches, so do two significant observances: the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre and Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the United States. Following the death of feminist leader Gloria Steinem, the convergence of these moments has me thinking about what happens when women communicate violence or warn of danger and are not believed.
Steinem’s work helped transform how the United States understands violence against women. In December 2023, while too many feminist voices remained silent, she joined women’s-rights leaders in condemning the sexual violence perpetrated during the October 7 massacre. Their statement affirmed the right of every woman and girl, regardless of nationality, religion, or community, to live free from rape and sexual assault.
Steinem’s response reflected a principle that should be foundational to feminism: condemning sexual violence cannot depend on the identity of the woman harmed or the political implications of believing her. Remembering her legacy should involve more than celebrating the progress she helped achieve. It should require us to ask whether today’s feminist institutions apply those principles universally.
This issue is both personal and professional for me. I have experienced domestic violence, and before teaching at USC, I spent two decades working in domestic violence agencies and shelters. Not being believed is a recurring theme among women who have experienced domestic violence.
Violence is sustained not only by the person causing harm, but also by systems that minimize danger, question women’s credibility, and fail to act when women communicate what they know.
When Belief Depends on Identity
Israeli women encountered this familiar pattern after October 7. Reports of rape and other forms of sexual violence were denied, minimized, or treated as politically inconvenient. Israeli men who experienced sexual violence also faced disbelief, but the public response to Israeli women exposed a painful contradiction within movements that had long insisted women should be believed when they came forward.
It took nearly five months for a United Nations mission to formally report that there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred during the October 7 massacre and clear and convincing information that sexual violence was committed against hostages in Gaza.
That delay communicated something damaging: Israeli women could speak, witnesses could provide accounts, and evidence could emerge, but their experiences would remain publicly contestable until an international institution validated them. Women should not have to wait for an institution to declare their experiences credible before they are believed.
Even validation by the United Nations did not end the denial. People continue to claim that the sexual violence did not occur, relying on false narratives, selectively dismissing evidence, or allowing political ideology to determine which women are considered believable. The standard of proof keeps moving because accepting what happened would disrupt a preferred political narrative about Israel.
When believing women depends on whether they are Israeli or Jewish, it is not a commitment to women. It is selective advocacy. The continued denial of sexual violence against Israeli and Jewish women cannot be separated from an antizionist climate in which hostility toward Jews and Israelis has made their words easier to dismiss.
Intersectionality and Institutional Disbelief
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality to explain how Black women could disappear within systems that treated racism and sexism as separate forms of discrimination. The framework asks us to examine how overlapping identities shape whether someone is seen, heard, and protected.
What happens when we apply that lens to Israeli and Jewish women?
Jewish women, Israeli women, and women who are both often experience gender bias alongside antisemitism, anti-Israeli bias, and the political meanings imposed upon their identities. Yet in some spaces that identify as intersectional, they are reduced to a category of presumed power or privilege. Once they are labeled Israeli or Jewish, their experiences as women can disappear.
Their reports of sexual violence are no longer treated as disclosures from women. Being Israeli or Jewish becomes a reason to question their credibility, exclude them from advocacy, or recast their pain as political propaganda.
A different expression of institutional disbelief occurred at Nahal Oz. As documented by Saviona Rotlevy, Ayelet Harel, and Shir Daphna Tekoah in Women Soldiers in War Rooms on the Gaza Front: A Study of October 7th, women monitoring the Gaza border identified unusual activity and warned those above them, but their knowledge did not lead to action. Through an intersectional lens, their gender, young age, military rank, and limited authority shaped how their expertise was received. The contexts may differ, but the pattern remains: women spoke, and institutions did not listen.
An intersectional framework that recognizes gendered violence only when women fit a preferred political narrative is incomplete. Intersectionality cannot be meaningful if Israeli and Jewish women are excluded from its protection.
Deny, Attack, and Reverse
The response to Israeli women also reflects elements of DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. First, the sexual violence is denied. Next, the credibility and motives of Israeli women and those documenting the violence are attacked. Finally, the women are recast as participants in propaganda or as extensions of the state.
In this reversal, the violence committed against Israeli women disappears, while speaking about it becomes the alleged offense. Research on DARVO has found that it can decrease the perceived credibility of the person disclosing harm while increasing belief in the person accused. Other research published in PLOS One found associations between DARVO, victim blaming, and the acceptance of rape myths.
The consequences extend beyond public debate. Israelis and Jews in the diaspora may become less likely to seek help when they experience violence or trauma if they believe institutions have already decided not to believe them.
Hamas filmed and circulated many of the October 7 attacks, yet Israelis and Jews watched the atrocities and accounts of sexual violence be denied or minimized. When recorded evidence is dismissed, people may reasonably wonder what would happen if they disclosed an experience that was not recorded. Institutional bias can become a barrier to asking for help.
From Institutional Betrayal to Institutional Courage
Disbelief is not passive. It delays intervention, protects existing hierarchies, discourages help-seeking, and allows danger to continue.
Domestic Violence Awareness Month must therefore be about more than encouraging women to speak. We have been speaking. The more difficult question is whether institutions are prepared to listen, respond, and examine the biases that determine whose knowledge receives attention.
Moving from institutional betrayal to institutional courage requires action. Organizations must create reporting structures that do not allow disclosures or warnings to disappear within a hierarchy. Leaders must remain accountable for how concerns are evaluated and what follows.
Institutions should provide ongoing implicit-bias training focused on how gender, Israeli identity, and Jewish identity influence whose testimony, expertise, and warnings are considered credible. Women, Israelis, Jews, and people with lived experience must also be meaningfully included in developing the policies intended to protect them.
Training alone is not enough. Institutions must examine their decisions, measure whether their practices reflect their stated values, and respond when bias leads to silence, exclusion, or harm.
Honoring Steinem’s legacy means defending women’s dignity even when doing so is politically uncomfortable. Her decision to stand with Israeli women after October 7 reminds us that feminist solidarity must be universal, or it becomes another system that determines which women deserve to be heard.
We do not need help finding our voices. We already have voices.
The question is whether we have built systems courageous enough to hear them and act.