So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:
- One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
- The IDF translated that as “women who can get pregnant”
- Basically the whole world got up in arms about the translation, and rightly so
What was missing from the discourse IMO was the procession on to step 4: Someone comes in and explains exactly what the word actually does mean, and why even just bringing it up in this context was an important thing, neither of which are trivial questions.
This article does a pretty good job of that, hitting the high points of:
- IDF’s wildly inflammatory translation aside, it is a word with explicit associations to sexual slavery, which has been resurrected in the last 10 years after it had basically disappeared as the common practice of slavery had waned, and its use in this context is an important window onto Hamas’s rank and file’s mindset
- While of course bearing in mind that one random soldier saying one fucked-up thing isn’t indicative of anything other than that soldiers (especially ones deployed against civilian populations) sometimes do and say real fucked up things
Obviously the full article has lots more detail, but that’s the TL;DR
Hm
That’s actually a pretty good point. I added a body which explained what’s in the article and why I think it’s relevant.
I’m a little doubtful that that will lead to it being any more well-received, since as I say I think the issue is people interpreting it as anti-Palestinian and reflexively going on the attack, but yeah there’s no reason for it to be cryptic for no reason, so I fixed it.
Oh yes that’s MUCH better! Whether your original goal was to encourage people to read the article, or to encourage us all to have a conversation about the matter, either way this helps a ton to increase discoverability! I mean, as you say it’s probably too late now, but still it should help - I get people replying to my comments days to over a week later sometimes - and it is good practice for next time:-).
Thanks for the synopsis.:-)