Central London

Students at the London School of Economics (LSE) have tried to cancel a private meeting to discuss sexual violence committed by Hamas during the October 7 attacks of 2023. The event went ahead last night with a heavy police presence as pro-Palestinian protesters chanted anti-Israel slogans outside the building. Inside, an Israeli lawyer spoke about the problem of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in several countries where women have been targeted by mass rape and other kinds of sexual assault.

Notably, one of the organisations calling for the meeting to be cancelled was a feminist society at the university. In an “open letter to LSE management”, they demanded that the “egregious” event shouldn’t be allowed to go ahead, claiming that it ignored “concerns expressed by experts and LSE staff”.

When it became clear that the meeting would take place as scheduled, an “emergency rally” was planned outside the venue. “Zionists off our campus,” a flyer proclaimed. “No platform for genocide apologists”. This is not a one-off: women with legitimate and long-standing concerns about sexual violence are suddenly finding themselves labelled as supporting “genocide” for demanding justice for victims who happen to be Israeli.

“Absolutely horrifying to see this attempt to shut down an event at LSE about 7th October sexual violence,” Professor Alice Sullivan of UCL responded on X. “I can only imagine how Jewish colleagues and students must feel about the unhinged levels of antisemitism we are seeing on campus.”

Students who had registered for the LSE event began emailing the organisers, saying they were afraid to come in person and would join online. Without any sense of irony, the groups calling for the cancellation claimed that allowing the meeting to go ahead “undermines academic freedom”.

Some may dismiss this as an inconsequential student event. But the stakes are extremely high. Hamas has attempted to portray itself as a liberation movement, and while many in the West seem to have imbibed the lie, reports of sexual violence from the attack on Israel two years ago tell a different story. That’s why there have been repeated attempts to deny that women were targeted.

Last night’s speaker, Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari of Bar-Ilan University, is a co-founder of the Dinah Project, which was set up to document the atrocities on October 7 and seek justice for the victims. She was instrumental in getting a team of UN experts to visit Israel in the aftermath of the attacks.

The subsequent UN report recorded that “several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered — mostly women — with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head.” It concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred…including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.” Horrific photographs of the body of a German-Israeli woman, Shani Louk, thrown in the back of a truck, became emblematic of the brutal treatment of female civilians.

Last night, Halperin-Kaddari addressed the denials made by Hamas supporters, who point to the absence of direct testimony from victims. This is not unusual in conflict zones, due to the fact that women are frequently murdered as well as raped. There is also the difficulty of collecting forensic evidence on a battlefield, as opposed to a crime scene, where retrieval of corpses — sometimes under fire — is the immediate priority. The same thing has happened in Sudan, Syria and Ukraine, accounting for the pitifully low number of prosecutions for CRSV.

Rape denial is common, but trying to prevent students in the UK attending a private discussion of sexual violence in conflict is a new low. Such behaviour is a travesty of the universal ideals of feminism.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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