Haaretz (Israeli Newspaper)
On October 7, Sexism in Israel’s Military Turned Lethal
There is no need to come up with a conspiracy to explain the catastrophic failures of October 7. Criminal levels of chauvinism and arrogance go unpunished all the time
Nov 20, 2023Get email notification for articles from Maya LeckerFollowShare in FacebookShare in TwitterShare in WhatsApp
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IDF spotters working at Nahal Oz.Credit: IDF Spokeperson’s Unit
Fifteen unarmed women soldiers were killed at the IDF’s Nahal Oz lookout base on October 7, in what is usually referred to as the “surprise” Hamas attack on the Gaza border communities. Seven others were taken hostage – with one of them subsequently killed by her kidnappers in Gaza.
Two surviving spotters (or field observers), Maya and Yael, have been through hell. Their friends were executed in front of their eyes and they had to pretend to be dead for hours, surrounded by corpses, before being rescued under fire. As they have since told Israeli investigative journalist Roni Singer on public broadcaster Kan, they are not only dealing with the loss of their friends, the trauma of that day and the physical injuries, but with something much worse.
For Maya and Yael, and dozens of other IDF women positioned on the Gaza border tasked with surveilling the Strip nonstop, collecting intelligence and knowledge about terrorist activity, the October 7 attack did not come as a surprise. They had a very good idea of how it would unfold from the second it started. Because for months, they had seen Hamas militants training for this very scenario: Training to drive the vehicles across the border, murder Israeli civilians in kibbutzim, take over army bases, dismantle the cameras on the border fence and even cross back to Gaza with hostages.
The young soldiers didn’t take this discovery lightly. Time and again, they told their commanders what they had witnessed. They were told by officers of every rank that their reports were meaningless. Some told the spotters that they didn’t understand what they were seeing – even when what they saw was very high-ranking Hamas officials briefing armed men meters from the fence. One high-ranking Israeli officer who visited Nahal Oz base this year was explicit: “I don’t want to hear another word about this nonsense,” he said. “If you nudge me again about this, you will stand trial.”
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Talia (not her real name), a spotter interviewed by Haaretz’s Yaniv Kubovich, said this was always the attitude toward the women soldiers on her base. “Nobody really pays any attention to us,” she told him. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s ‘sit at your screens’ and that’s it. They’d say: ‘You’re our eyes, not the head that needs to make decisions about the information.”
The stories about how these soldiers were so contemptibly and consistently ignored by older, more experienced men are so astounding that they are already the basis of some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the events of October 7. Because why would a high-tech military, an intelligence superpower, build sophisticated defense systems, spend billions on them, then train hundreds or thousands of young women to use them – just to then do absolutely nothing with the information they gathered? The mind boggles.
Unless, of course, you have ever been a woman in the military, or in a workplace, or in the world. Then you know there is no need to come up with a conspiracy to explain the catastrophic failures of October 7. Criminal levels of chauvinism and arrogance go unpunished all the time.
Law, Power, and Justice 
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