Post #4244344

❝ One measure of why the standard framework of “rape culture” fails: Much of this violence is nowadays carried out by women. Testifying in Geneva in 2025, the Palestinian feminist organizer Kifaya Khraim stated that “rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects inside genitals.” A patriarchy-only account of sexual violence cannot metabolize this fact. An account of sexual violence as a technology of colonial rule absorbs it easily – which by no means precludes us from understanding these machineries, staffed by women as they often are, as themselves inextricable from patriarchal domination. Nor is any of this an invention of the post-October 7 reality. Rape was used as a military tactic during the Nakba, as scholars such as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Ronit Lentin have amply documented. The Israeli historian Benny Morris found “many cases of rape” by Haganah paramilitaries, in the archive of 1948–1949 – and professed himself “surprised” by them. What could possibly make it surprising to a trained historian that armed settlers did what armed settlers have done everywhere in the world? The surprise is itself part of the apparatus: The finding must be registered as an anomaly, because to register it as a pattern would be to concede what the pattern means. ... This is what it looks like when a society has settled the question of who counts as rapeable – which is to say, who counts as human. It also makes clear who has protection from sexual violence under the law and who has the government backing to commit it. ... Nor is sexual violence confined to prisons. The West Bank – where everyday settler terror has recently accelerated via more land confiscations, settlement expansions, territorial annexations, and restrictions on local movement – is another major site of Zionism’s use of rape. The Norwegian Refugee Council-led West Bank Protection Consortium recently interviewed displaced Palestinians and found that more than 70% named the threat of sexualized violence from settlers and allied armed forces as their decisive reason for abandoning their homes. Its April report, “Sexual Violence and Forcible Transfer in the West Bank,” documents men and boys stripped, groped, and urinated on in front of their families; women and girls threatened and degraded by gesture and lewd touch; Israeli soldiers participating, or standing by. “Settler behavior is becoming increasingly sexualized,” one journalist observes in its pages. Over a decade ago, Sarah Ihmoud noted that “a feminization of the colonized man, or pathologization of his sexuality” was central to the “personification of the Palestinian collective as a single rape-able woman.” … Rape in the settler colony runs on a eugenic logic that polices the racial boundary from both sides – violating the native body while guarding the settler body against contamination. One reality that emerges from the archives of the Haganah in British Mandatory Palestine is that the colony had, from before the state existed, an official culture of eugenicist terror comparable to that of the U.S. South with its myth of the black rapist. In 1920s Tel Aviv, Jewish women who partnered with Arab men were surveilled, denounced, and tortured by paramilitary policemen – hot pepper poured into their vaginas as a matter of official “purity” enforcement – while their lovers risked being attacked. The body of the Jewish woman who crossed the racial line was not a private scandal but a national problem. … Already in 1961, observing the aftermath of the Shoah, Hannah Arendt uncomfortably registered the resonance between the Nuremberg Laws’ prohibition on intermarriage and Israeli society’s phobia of “race mixing.” Six decades on, the phobia is statute. In July 2023, the Knesset passed a law allowing harsher punishment of sexual assaults committed with “nationalistic motivations” – supposedly to address the threat posed by Arab men. But as Rachel Stomel, a spokesperson for the Center for Women’s Justice, told Jewish Currents: “this law does not see sexual violence as wrong because it’s a violation of women’s safety, autonomy, or personhood,” but because of the “impurity” of miscegenation. Meanwhile, Middle East Eye reports an uptick in Jewish attacks on Palestinian men in Jerusalem and elsewhere “based on mere suspicion that they were dating or seeking to date Jewish women” – Tel Aviv in the ‘20s, returned. ❞ https://www.thekeymagazine.com/p/israel-rape-sde-teiman-palestine-sophie-lewis #Gaza