While the media uncritically accepts Israeli claims, a UN report found no evidence of Hamas 'mass rape' but confirmed Israel's systematic sexual violence - a practice dating back to 1948
Joseph Massad
This is hardly an exceptional occurrence.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, has just released a report on systematic Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023.
The chair of the commission asserted that the report, entitled "More than a Human Can Bear", provides such incontrovertible evidence of Israeli crimes that "[t]here is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination."
Yet despite the extensive accounts of Israeli rapes and sexual abuse of Palestinians since 1948, the western media remains filled with stories of Israeli allegations of Palestinian rapes of Israelis.
The Israeli army has, in fact, systematically used physical and sexual torture against Palestinians since at least 1967, as human rights groups revealed years ago.
How, then, does this reality square with Israeli and western propaganda?
The answer often lies in the foundational anti-Palestinian racism that informs these accounts, which are premised on the understanding that Palestinians, unlike white Europeans - including Israeli Jews - are barbarians.
This is especially the case when it comes to the alleged sexual lasciviousness of the predatory Arabs, particularly Palestinians, and the supposed necessity of protecting Israeli Jewish womanhood from them.
Rape allegations
Following 7 October, the Israelis swiftly alleged mass Palestinian rape of Israeli Jewish women, alongside outright fabrications about the decapitation of babies and their bodies being baked in ovens - pictures of which former President Joe Biden claimed to have seen - an assertion the White House later denied.
To date, not one Israeli woman has come forward to allege she was raped on 7 October, and despite the existence of hundreds of hours of video footage of the operation, not one video has surfaced.
Western media readily adopts unverified Israeli claims as fact while neglecting verified Israeli and UN reports on Israeli sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinians
Nevertheless, the UN issued a report last year claiming that sexual crimes were committed on that day, despite acknowledging the lack of video evidence and the absence of claimants who came forward to make allegations to the UN mission.
While Hamas denied that any such rapes had occurred by its fighters, the Israeli government's claims remain unverified to this day.
This does not mean, of course, that cases of rape did not occur on 7 October. It means that Israel has not provided incontrovertible evidence to prove it.
Yet the allegations have been readily accepted as incontrovertible truth in Israel and western capitals, to the extent that any attempt to question the Israelis on these allegations renders one complicit - either in denying that these presumed atrocities occurred or in exhibiting a sexist failure to believe raped women, even though not one Israeli woman has come forward claiming to have been raped on that day.
Zionist anxiety
The western media's readiness to adopt unverified Israeli claims as factual should be contrasted with its neglect of verified Israeli and UN reports on Israeli sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinians, which are often unreported or underreported in the western press.
Israel's allegations of mass rapes of Israeli women on 7 October are informed by decades of anxiety about the supposed threat of Palestinian manhood to Jewish womanhood. This preoccupation has perturbed many Zionists since the inception of Jewish colonisation.
Analysing this Zionist anxiety, Hannah Arendt described its manifestation after Israel was established in 1948 as follows: "Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage [between Jews and Palestinians], and it is chiefly for this reason… that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out," relying instead on rabbinical and religious law to protect against it.
Arendt found it ironic that in the context of the 1961 Adolph Eichmann trial, "the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the [newspaper] correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports".
Zionist opposition to miscegenation increased measurably after 1948, reaching an apoplectic level in the 1970s with the rise to political prominence of the American Jewish settler rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League.
The American-born Kahane, an FBI consultant and convicted terrorist who moved to settle in Israel in 1971, was horrified by Jewish-Palestinian miscegenation, echoing American white racist society's laws against interracial marriage, particularly between white women and Black men, which clearly impressed him while growing up in the white supremacist USA.
These racist directives were not confined to the Nazi Nuremberg laws, with which Arendt compared them, but were also standard across most European colonial settler societies, which also banned interracial marriages.
In the US, it was only in 2000 that Alabama repealed its anti-miscegenation law, the last such law on the books.
Myth of the predator
But the rapacious desire that Palestinian men are said to have for Jewish womanhood is so deeply ingrained in the Israeli imagination that even when they do not commit rape, it seems that they do.
This was made evident in a 2010 Israeli court case in which a Palestinian man was convicted of "rape by deception" for allegedly pretending to be Jewish in order to engage in consensual sex with a Jewish woman. When the woman discovered his identity, she sued him, and an Israeli district court found him guilty of rape.
Meanwhile, multiple Jewish lynchings of Palestinian men in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel - based on mere suspicion that they were dating or seeking to date Jewish women - have been on the rise over the past two decades.
At the same time, organisations dedicated to preventing miscegenation and "protecting" Jewish women from the so-called depravity of Palestinian men have proliferated.
Angela Davis explained decades ago in the US context that the myth of the Black rapist "has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications".
Israel's rape allegations amid its genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza fit the pattern Davis describes perfectly.
What went unreported in the US was that the rape of Black women by white policemen was a common occurrence alongside the myth of the Black rapist in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond - a legacy of the white masters' rape of enslaved Black women that survived abolition - especially in the form of KKK gangrapes of Black women after the Civil War.
History's horrors
The anti-Palestinian Israeli historian Benny Morris details many instances of Israeli rapes of Palestinians from 1948 and beyond.
Among the cases he recounts: "Four soldiers of Carmeli's Twenty-second Battalion raped an Arab girl and murdered her father." In Safsaf, "52 men [were] tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape... A girl aged 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed [sic]."
Despite this horrific record, Israeli perceptions of the war were shaped by widespread racism and a sense of western superiority over Palestinians
At Jish, "a woman and her baby were killed". In Deir Yassin, where "[a]ltogether some 250" Palestinians, "mostly non-combatants, were murdered; there were also cases of mutilation and rape".
Despite this horrific record, which only increased exponentially in the following decades, Israeli perceptions of the war were shaped by widespread racism and a sense of western superiority over Palestinians.
According to Morris:
"The Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterised by 'purity of arms' is…undermined by the evidence of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages. About a dozen cases - in Jaffa, Acre, and so on - are reported in the available contemporary documentation and, given Arab diffidence about reporting such incidents and the (understandable) silence of the perpetrators, and [Israeli military] censorship of many documents, more, and perhaps many more, cases probably occurred. Arabs appear to have committed few acts of rape. Altogether, the 1948 War was characterised, in relative terms, by an extremely low incidence of rape."
The right-wing Morris adds:
"After the war, the Israelis tended to hail the 'purity of arms' of its militiamen and soldiers and to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses. This reinforced the Israelis' positive self-image and helped them 'sell' the new state abroad; it also demonised the enemy. In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948."
Systematic strategy
Morris's accounts of rape during the 1948 war are hardly exceptional, as rape remained standard practice for Israeli soldiers against Palestinian refugees expelled by Israel during the 1948 war attempting to return to their homes inside Israel between 1948 and 1955.
For example, in August 1949, Israeli soldiers captured two Palestinian refugees. They killed the man, and 22 soldiers took turns raping the woman before killing her.
In March 1950, Israeli soldiers abducted two Palestinian girls and one boy from Gaza across the new border. They killed the boy and then raped the two girls before killing them.
In August 1950, four Israeli policemen raped a Palestinian woman picking fruit from her family's orchard across the West Bank border.
After the 1967 occupation, the use of rape and sexual abuse became increasingly systematic.
Last year's scandal of the gang rape of Palestinian male hostages in Israeli dungeons was merely the latest instance of this ongoing savagery.
What the latest UN report demonstrates yet again is that Israel's sexual crimes against Palestinians of both sexes are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic strategy to humiliate, abuse, and, principally, "dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part".
Yet western and Israeli racism and superiority remain impervious to these facts.
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