A video from a few months ago of Shoshana Strock, the daughter of Orit Strock—who is a minister in Israel’s Netanyahu government and is associated with the Religious Zionism party—has gone viral again after the U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran. She said “Jewish identity” and made remarks that appeared to defend or normalize sexual misconduct within certain contexts, the international reaction followed a predictable arc. Outrage. Condemnation. Demands for apology. The spectacle of a single politician held accountable for speaking the unspeakable.
Shoshana Strock accused that in her childhood, her parents and brother sexually abused her in the name of religious tradition.
But what if the unspeakable is precisely what needs to be examined? What if Strock’s real transgression was not creating a permission structure but articulating one that has long existed beneath the surface—not only in Israel but in any society organized around permanent war, existential threat, and the logic of collective survival?
The Exception That Proves Nothing
Every society that perceives itself under existential threat develops what might be called a logic of exception. Normal rules are suspended because normal conditions do not apply. The collective’s survival becomes the highest good, and other values—including the protection of the vulnerable—become negotiable. This logic rarely needs to be stated. It operates as an unspoken understanding, a wink among those who know how things really work.
The warrior must be granted certain privileges. The bonds of unit cohesion must be protected even when they protect abusers. The abuse of those outside the collective—or even those inside who are deemed expendable—is a price worth paying for information, for leverage, for the endless security that never quite arrives.
Strock’s error was not inventing this logic but stating it publicly, in terms that those outside her political community could hear. The outrage she provoked was not outrage at the logic itself but at its exposure—the violation of the tacit understanding that such things are not said aloud.
What the Record Shows
To understand what Strock was articulating, one need only examine the patterns that precede her. The Israel Defense Forces have faced decades of accusations regarding sexual abuse, and the most revealing cases are not those involving enemies—wartime atrocities can always be framed as the inevitable excesses of conflict. The revealing cases are internal: women soldiers abused by fellow soldiers, junior personnel abused by superiors, the vulnerable abused by those who are supposed to protect them.
A 2020 report by the IDF’s own mechanism for handling sexual assault found that over 50% of female soldiers who reported abuse faced negative consequences to their military careers. A 2019 investigation by Haaretz documented multiple cases of commanders accused of sexual assault being quietly transferred rather than prosecuted. The pattern is consistent: institutional knowledge, institutional tolerance, institutional protection of the structure over the individuals within it.
When a culture organizes itself around military values—around hierarchy, around male bonding, around the willingness to use force—it produces men who cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets. The same aggression cultivated for external enemies does not switch off at the camp gate. The same sense of entitlement granted to warriors in combat does not vanish when they return to base. The same devaluation of the vulnerable that enables killing the enemy also enables abusing one’s own.
The institutional tolerance of this abuse is not negligence. It is structural necessity. To seriously address abuse within the ranks would require questioning the warrior culture itself—the very thing a society organized around threat cannot afford to question. Better to deny, to cover up, to rotate abusers to new positions, to blame victims for disrupting unit cohesion.
The Global Network
The pattern extends far beyond Israel’s borders. The Jeffrey Epstein case, when examined without the fog of individual pathology, reveals the same logic operating at a different scale. Epstein’s network operated for decades with apparent impunity. It drew on figures with intelligence connections. It produced compromising material on powerful individuals—material with clear use value for those whose business is information and leverage.
The victims in the Epstein case were overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly vulnerable, overwhelmingly expendable in the eyes of the powerful. They were bodies from which something useful could be extracted. The fact that this extraction was achieved through systematic violation was not a bug but a feature: the more vulnerable the victim, the more total the control, the more valuable the material produced.
When patterns repeat across contexts—from the internal abuse of IDF women to the international exploitation of Epstein’s victims—they cease to be coincidences. They become evidence of a systemic logic. The same society that tolerates the abuse of its own female soldiers, that protects abusers within its most cherished institution, that treats the bodies of the vulnerable as resources—this society will also, inevitably, extend that logic outward.
The Monster as Decoy
Western societies have developed a reliable technique for handling revelations like Strock’s statements or the Epstein exposure: they manufacture a monster. A single figure is identified—Strock, Epstein—and onto this figure is projected everything that must be disavowed. The monster is condemned, punished, expelled. The system that produced and protected him remains untouched.
This is not a failure of response. It is a function. The monster serves as a decoy, absorbing outrage that might otherwise turn toward examination of the structure itself. By concentrating on individual depravity, the collective evades the question of its own organization. By punishing the figure who speaks or the figure who acted, it ensures that the underlying permissions remain unexamined.
Foucault traced this mechanism in his lectures on the abnormal. The monster is not discovered; he is manufactured. He is the screen onto which a society projects everything it cannot acknowledge about itself. His punishment serves as a ritual purification that allows the system to continue unchanged.
What the Abused Know
The women abused within the IDF, the children exploited in Epstein’s network—they know something that the outraged commentators do not. They know that the structure’s professed values are not its real values. They know that the collective’s survival logic operates through their bodies, that their suffering is the unacknowledged cost of privileges granted to others, that their voices are silenced precisely because what they might say would threaten the arrangement.
The abused IDF soldier is not only harmed by the act itself. She is harmed by the institutional response—the denial, the cover-up, the suggestion that she is damaging unit cohesion by speaking. She is harmed by the knowledge that her service, her sacrifice, her belonging does not entitle her to protection. She is harmed by the message that her body is less important than the bond between the men who abuse her.
The Epstein victim is harmed by the total erasure that followed—the inability to find justice, the knowledge that her abuser moved in circles where law did not reach, the suspicion that her violation became currency in transactions she would never understand.
This second wound is often deeper than the first. The first wound is the act itself. The second wound is the refusal to name it, to count it, to acknowledge that it happened. The second wound tells the victim that she does not exist in the eyes of the collective, that her suffering is not real because the collective has decided it cannot be real.
The Logic of Uncounted Cost
Every society that organizes itself around exception—around the suspension of normal rules in the name of survival—redistributes moral cost onto those who cannot fight back, whose voices do not carry, who can be sacrificed without the collective having to acknowledge the sacrifice.
The abused woman, the exploited child, the vulnerable person whose body becomes currency—these are the ones who pay. They pay so that warriors can have their privileges. They pay so that intelligence agencies can have their leverage. They pay so that the collective can continue to believe in its own exceptional virtue while practicing something else entirely.
And because the cost is not acknowledged, because the victims are not named, the collective can continue to believe in its own innocence. The gap between what is professed and what is practiced becomes not hypocrisy but the operating system itself—a structure that depends on not knowing what it does.
Strock’s Real Transgression
This is what Strock’s statements, however crude or disturbing, actually revealed. She gave voice to the permission structure that had always been there—the understanding that warriors are entitled to certain privileges, that some bodies matter less than others, that the collective’s survival justifies what would otherwise be unacceptable.
The outrage that followed was not misplaced, but it was incomplete. It treated Strock as a moral aberration, a deviation from healthy norms, when she was in fact an articulation of norms that were already operative. It focused on the words rather than the structure that made those words speakable.
A society that cannot examine this structure, that must manufacture monsters to avoid seeing itself, that treats the exposure of its logic as a scandal rather than an opportunity—such a society is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed. It is producing subjects who cannot afford to know what they do, who cannot count the cost of their own survival, who cannot see the goats on whose bodies their security is built.
The question is not whether Strock should be condemned. The question is whether condemnation can ever substitute for examination. The question is whether the victims—the abused women, the exploited children, the countless unnamable goats—will ever be seen as something other than the unavoidable cost of someone else’s survival.
The pattern is there. It has been there all along. The only question is whether we are willing to look at it without the comfortable decoy of manufactured monsters, without the satisfying ritual of condemning individuals while the structure remains untouched.
Strock spoke the structure’s name. The outrage that followed ensured that no one would listen to what she actually said.
