So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:

  1. One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
  2. The IDF translated that as “women who can get pregnant”
  3. 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

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    5 months ago

    From the end of the article:

    Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

    So the answer to “why it matters” in the headline is that it doesn’t and I wasted my fucking time reading it.