[News] Restoring fear, that’s why Israeli soldiers use rape as a weapon of war

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Restoring fear, that’s why Israeli soldiers use rape as a weapon of war
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Wednesday 14-August-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/restoring-fear-thats-why-israeli-soldiers-use-rape-as-a-weapon-of-war/

Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News on
25 October that, “Muslims are not afraid of us any more.” It might sound
odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s
well-being, if not its very survival. In fact, the fear element is linked
directly to Israel’s behavior and is fundamental to its political discourse.

Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political
strategy in mind: to create fear sufficient to drive Palestinians off their
land. Deir Yassin, Tantura and more than 70 other documented massacres
during the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, are cases in point.

Israel has also utilized torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault to
achieve similar ends in the past, not least to exact information or to
break down the will of prisoners. According to UN-affiliated experts in a
report published on 5 August, “These practices are intended to punish
Palestinians for resisting occupation and seek to destroy them individually
and collectively.”

Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has manifested all of these horrific
strategies in ways unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread
application and frequency. In a report entitled “Welcome to Hell”, also
published on 5 August, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem said that in
Israel’s detention facilities, “every inmate is deliberately subjected to
harsh, relentless pain and suffering” so that they “operate as de-facto
torture camps.”

A few days later, the Palestinian rights group Addameer published its own
report, with “documented cases of torture, sexual violence and degrading
treatment,” along with the “systematic abuses and human rights violations
committed against detainees from Gaza.”

If incidents of rape, sexual assaults and other forms of torture are marked
on a map, they would cover a large geographical area in Gaza, in the West
Bank and in Israel itself, mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.

Considering the size and locations of the Israeli army, well-documented
evidence of rape and torture demonstrates that such tactics are not linked
to a specific branch of the military.

This means that the Israeli army uses rape and torture as a central
strategy.

Such a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir,
Israel’s far-right national security minister. His aggressive statements,
including, for example, that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the
head instead of being given more food,” are aligned perfectly with his
equally violent actions: the starvation policy of prisoners, the
normalization of torture and the defense of rape.

However, Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They predate
him by decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners,
who are granted few rights compared with those enshrined by international
law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale? The occupation
state’s wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: material
and psychological. The former has manifested itself in the ongoing
genocide, the killing and wounding of tens of thousands and the near
destruction of Gaza. The psychological factor, however, is intended to
break the collective will of the Palestinian people.

Legal advocacy group Law for Palestine has published a database of over 500
instances when Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, incited genocide in Gaza. Most of these references seem to be
centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For example, the 11 October 2023
statement by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, that, “There are no innocent
civilians in Gaza,” was part of the collective death sentence that made the
extermination of Palestinians morally justifiable in the eyes of Israelis.
Netanyahu’s own ominous Biblical reference, where he called on Israeli
soldiers to seek revenge from Palestinians, telling them, “Remember what
Amalek has done to you,” was also a blank cheque for mass murder.

While choosing not to see Palestinians as humans, as innocent, as worthy of
life and security, Israel has granted its army carte blanche to do as it
sees fit to those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant,
“human animals”.

The mass killing, starvation and widespread rape and torture of
Palestinians are all a natural outcome of these shocking dialectics.

The overall purpose of Israel is not simply to exact revenge, although the
latter has been quite important to Israel’s desire for national recovery.
By trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture,
humiliation and rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of
deterrence, which it lost on 7 October.

Failing to restore military or strategic deterrence, Tel Aviv is invested
in psychological deterrence, as in restoring the element of fear that was
breached on 7 October. Raping prisoners, leaking videos of the gruesome
acts and carrying out the same horrific deed again and again are all part
of the Israeli strategy to restore fear.

Israel will fail, though, simply because Palestinians have already
succeeded in demolishing Israel’s 76-year matrix of physical domination and
mental torture. The Israeli war on Gaza has proven to be the most
destructive and bloody of all Israeli wars, and yet Palestinian resilience
continues to grow stronger, because Palestinians are not passive; they are
active participants in the shaping of their own future. If legitimate,
popular resistance is indeed the process of the restoration of the self,
Palestinians in Gaza are proving that, despite their unspeakable pain and
agony, they are emerging as a whole, ready to clinch their freedom, no
matter what the cost.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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