The sexism underlying women’s exclusion from security and military leadership has found expression in some particularly troubling statements by senior officials and commentators. Moshe Feiglin, a member of Israel’s legislature, or Knesset, recently reprimanded lawmaker Aliza Lavie for discussing a bill on sexual violence, saying that wartime is no time to be “talking about things like flowers and sexual assault.” Bar-Ilan University professor Mordechai Kedar argued on Israeli radio that the only way to stop terrorists is to threaten to rape “their sister or their mother.” The implications have not gone unnoticed. “Women are sexually assaulted every day,” Amalia Schreier, a Lavie aide who had a hand in writing the sexual-assault bill, told Feiglin. “The comparison between ‘flowers’ and ‘sexual assault’ and the delegitimization of this issue has the effect of hurting and placing at risk 50 percent of the population.”

In the current conflict, all Israeli combat casualties have been men, since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) does not allow female soldiers to operate in positions “over the border.” On the Palestinian side, virtually all Hamas fighters are men, and more than 80 percent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza have been male (a New York Times analysis on Tuesday found that Palestinian men ages 20 to 29, the population most likely to be militants, was most overrepresented in the death toll). But women suffer gravely too—among other things, they perish in homes, schools, and hospitals that come under Israeli attack and occasionally double as Hamas strongholds, and grapple with the psychological scars that constant conflict leaves behind.

For the purposes of this article, I will mainly focus on the status of women on the Israeli side of the conflict. But the question of how gender dynamics play out on the Palestinian side is a subject no less pressing and deserves its own treatment. And in fact, the experience of exclusion among both Israeli and Palestinian women could potentially facilitate connection based on shared values—a commodity so rare in this conflict.

The assumption that “real” soldiers are men is widespread in Israel. Army announcements and news stories about military recruitment routinely refer to “soldiers and their wives.” Volunteers and businesses have been preparing care packages for the troops fighting in Gaza that include razors and men’s underwear (last week, a mother of a female reservist issued a request for women-oriented care packages that include bras and tampons).

The conflict in Gaza has stoked broader sexism and misogyny, too. One Orthodox group in Israel set up a 24-hour “modesty hotline” and posted large, colorful signs telling women and girls that they could “stop” Hamas rockets by wearing long skirts, long sleeves, and thick stockings. (The sentiment has spread to Crown Heights, New York, where the Chabad community launched a competition among girls to see who could cover their bodies the most in order to “protect” Israel and win free ice cream.) Others maintain that women should uncover their bodies to save soldiers. The latest hostilities spawned a new Facebook group called “Standing With the IDF—Maintaining a Protective Edge” (literally, a “firm cliff,” another double entendre), the purpose of which is to show women disrobing with pro-IDF paint on their bodies—and to “boost morale.”