Tragedy of Nova festival survivor Shirel Golan shows the harm of online hate

On Sunday, her 22nd birthday, Shirel Golan made the decision to end her life after struggling for a year with post-traumatic stress disorder.

After surviving the massacre at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, she suffered from disassociation and withdrawal, her family said, and was twice hospitalized with acute symptoms of PTSD-related stress.

The brutal atrocities committed that day — and specifically at the Nova festival — were beyond imagination. I do not know how anyone experiences these horrors and moves on.

And the festival’s survivors, in addition to the agony of witnessing their friends hunted down, tortured, raped and murdered by terrorists, face an online world that refuses to believe them.

Female hostages who have shared how they were sexually assaulted when in Hamas captivity have faced vicious denial and mockery on the Internet.

“She is lying through her teeth and reading through a script,” read one of the more charitable replies to Amit Soussana’s testimony of being groped and forced to perform a sexual act on her captor.

Other survivors see this. It makes healing — let alone sharing what happened — feel impossible.

In her December 2023 mission report on the situation in Israel, UN Special Representative Pramila Patten wrote that “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public hindered access to survivors of the attacks, including potential survivors/victims of sexual violence.”

Campaigns to deny systematic conflict-related sexual violence are as old as the use of rape as a weapon of war. And the modern ability to use social media to spread these messages to millions only compounds the spread of terror and suffering.

Even more insidious is the use of campaigns to reshape the narrative — to not only disbelieve the survivors, but to blame them — to justify “rape as resistance,” and claim it was deserved.

I have met with survivors who are dedicating their lives to sharing their story. They find meaning in speaking for those who no longer can — not only those who were murdered, but those, like Shirel, who were silenced by their mental agony.

These survivors share their stories over and over and over again, often screaming into the void, trying desperately to counter the lies with truth.

But who is listening? Whose minds are being changed?

More important: Why should they have to relive the most horrible day of their lives over and over again?

There is a reason those of us who work to end gender-based violence know that we must believe survivors, never blame the victim, and know that rape is never justified: Not doing so inflicts further harm.

I’ll never forget hearing what Miriam Schler, executive director of the Tel Aviv Rape Crisis Center, told me soon after Oct. 7: “What’s worse is that the world does not believe us.”

Oct. 7 was one of the most documented atrocities in history, thanks in part to the footage taken by the terrorists themselves, as well as video from survivors’ and victims’ cell phones.

There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of video and photo evidence, as well as survivor, eyewitness and first-responder testimony.

It’s easy to dismiss disturbing evidence as fake news. But one does not need to care about — or even support — Israel to care that women who were raped and traumatized are being silenced and humiliated.

International bodies tasked with bringing perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence to justice must include what happens online in their investigations. The spread of terror and anguish through online campaigns, if unchecked, can become a deadly weapon.

Survivor’s guilt is real. And it is compounded when everyday Israelis see online accounts that vilify their very existence and deny or even celebrate the atrocities they have endured.

The evidence should speak for itself. But without addressing the issue of toxic and deadly online rhetoric, survivors everywhere will continue to suffer.

I believe Israeli women. And this belief, and our commitment to support all survivors of sexual violence, means we must never let what happened to them be denied or erased.

Meredith Jacobs is CEO of Jewish Women International.