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
I have read it. Again, why are you posting this? It is not recent news.
Honestly, I posted it because (a) it was news to me; it was a detailed explanation of a news event which enhanced my understanding (b) I felt it was needed perspective to add the “IDF translation was wrong and so nothing to see here” narrative which as we are learning is pretty popular © I checked and it was within the 30 day window according to the sub rules
I suspect that the hostility is because people are interpreting it as anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist. Which is a fair conclusion, I get it, but not why I posted it. Israel’s crimes are objectively 10 times worse than anything Hamas has been doing, but I don’t see a need to proceed from there to “and therefore anything Hamas does is okay and any attempt to criticize them is probably a lie and I need to support them.”
Not that I’m saying you’re doing that, but like I say, I suspect some of the hostility to this story lies somewhere on a continuum which does include that at one end.