[News] Bombing Gaza Isn’t Fighting Sexual Violence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/16/bombing-gaza-isnt-fighting-sexual-violence/> 



  Bombing Gaza Isn’t Fighting Sexual Violence

Heidi Matthews – Tanya Serisier - January 16, 2024
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As the human catastrophe in Gaza deepens, Israel and its allies are 
mobilizing evidence of sexual violence committed by members of Hamas and 
other Palestinian militant groups on October 7 to justify continued 
military action. When the Security Council failed to pass a resolution 
demanding a ceasefire on December 8, Israel government spokesperson 
Eylon Levy tweeted 
<https://twitter.com/EylonALevy/status/1733239832288059428?lang=en-GB>: 
“Thank you to the United States of America for vetoing a UN Security 
Council resolution designed to keep Hamas’ rapist regime in power.” In 
the wake of its case at the International Criminal Court accusing Israel 
of genocide Levy accused <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FVsyq5CViA> 
South Africa of complicity with a “rapist regime.”

Israeli politicians are attempting to equate ending the war with support 
for rape, a position that appears to be supported, at least implicitly, 
by many liberal feminists in Israel and the West. Mobilizing hashtags 
such as #MeTooUnlessUrAJew <https://www.metoo-unlessurajew.com/> and 
#BelieveIsraeliWomen 
<https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1089725989107190>, Israel and liberal 
feminists have accused the international community, and particularly the 
United Nations, of silence in the face of sexual violence. This 
accusation was formalized on December 4, when Israel’s mission to the 
United Nations teamed up with the World Zionist Organization, Sheryl 
Sandberg, and others to host an event titled “Hear Our Voices”. 
<https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1u/k1u8mfvmcm> The campaign has 
continued, using the hashtag #UnitedAgainstRape 
<https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0joVWIOon0/>, to declare that “all 
humans everywhere” should “agree on one thing,” namely, that “rape is 
never ok.”

Our understanding of the extent of the violence, sexual and otherwise, 
committed on October 7 remains partial and incomplete. While there have 
been important questions raised 
<https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655054> about the evidence 
presented by Israeli advocates, and particularly by journalists from the 
/New York Times 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html>/, 
that is not a discussion we directly engage in here. Instead, we 
intervene in the logic that equates believing Israeli women and opposing 
sexual violence with justifying and supporting Israel’s disproportionate 
war in Gaza and increasing violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 
This logic does nothing to reduce sexual violence or to provide justice 
and accountability to victims of that violence. Instead, it mobilizes 
sex exceptionalism and selective outrage to further colonial and racist 
political systems designed to dispossess and destroy the Palestinian people.

*‘Believe women’: Ventriloquising Victims*

The #MeTooUnlessUrAJew campaign claims that UN Women is ‘actively and 
knowingly working to create a false and insidious narrative’ and 
ignoring the voices of Israeli and Jewish women due to antisemitic bias. 
However, it is not the case 
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence-hamas-israel/> 
that the United Nations and UN Women ignored the violence of October 7. 
UN Women first issued a statement 
<https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/statement/2023/10/un-women-statement-on-the-situation-in-israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory> 
on October 13 condemning attacks on Israeli civilians and noting its 
alarm at the ‘devastating impact on civilians including women and 
girls’. United Nations bodies collectively have continued to issue 
numerous statements warning all parties to adhere to international law 
and particularly to avoid violence against civilians, including sexual 
violence.

More significantly, while campaigners decry the alleged failure of the 
United Nations to respond to the violence, Israel is refusing to 
cooperate with United Nations bodies established to do this. While the 
Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has met with the families 
of Israeli hostages 
<https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-kc-concludes-first-visit-israel-and-state-palestine-icc-prosecutor> 
held by Hamas, Israel has declined to cooperate with the Court’s ongoing 
investigation <https://www.icc-cpi.int/palestine> into alleged 
international crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas since 13 June 
2014, including allegations of sexual violence. It has also refused to 
cooperate with the Independent International Commission of Inquiry 
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-israel/index> mandated to 
investigate all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and 
abuses of international human rights law in the occupied Palestinian 
territory and Israel ‘leading up to and since 13 April 2021’. While 
these investigations pre-date the events of October 7, they provide an 
internationally accepted path for the investigation of events on and 
after that date.

The charge that the United Nations is failing to listen to Israeli women 
elides the fact that, to date, no women have testified publicly about 
experiencing sexual violence. As Israeli advocates have correctly 
insisted, this doesn’t mean sexual violence did not occur. Many of the 
victims of violence on October 7 are dead and will never be able to tell 
their stories in their own voices, and others may not speak publicly for 
years, if ever. However, we do not honor the voices of those who may 
have experienced sexual violence by ventriloquizing them or claiming to 
speak on their behalf. This is especially true in a context where 
independent investigations are being intentionally frustrated, and where 
it is not at all obvious that victims of violence on Oct 7 desire a war 
of vengeance. As Israeli hostages being held in Gaza continue to die 
from violence there, many of their families are calling for a ceasefire 
<https://www.cbsnews.com/video/families-of-israeli-hostages-and-humanitarian-groups-call-for-cease-fire/>.

Historically, women have not only been silenced or disbelieved about 
sexual violence. They have also been spoken for and instrumentalized, 
particularly in conflict situations. For example, in 2011, claims that 
Viagra had been distributed to Mohammar Gaddafi’s soldiers to encourage 
mass rape were widely circulated, including by the then-United States 
Ambassador to the United Nations and ICC Prosecutor, despite an 
acknowledged lack of victim testimony verifying the claims. These 
rumours provided essential context 
<https://www.uclalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/securepdfs/2021/05/Fallah-Tzouvala-67-6.pdf> 
within which Security Council support for military intervention was 
generated. They were subsequently debunked 
<https://www.salon.com/2016/09/16/u-k-parliament-report-details-how-natos-2011-war-in-libya-was-based-on-lies/>, 
with an International Commission of Inquiry 
<https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session19/A.HRC.19.68.pdf> 
finding claims of an overall policy of sexual violence against civilians 
unsubstantiated, but only after the war was complete.

‘Believe Women’ does not, and cannot, mean ‘Believe the IDF’, the 
Israeli police or security force, or even those who claim to be feminist 
advocates. As Judith Levine has suggested, the actual victims of 
violence on October 7 ‘are disappearing into propaganda, becoming 
talking points to legitimize the pain of other women, children, and men 
in the killing field on the other side of the fence 
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/24/feminism-sexual-violence-hamas-israel/>.’ 
The dangers of propaganda are particularly pressing in a conflict that 
has already seen eyewitness testimony of atrocities, such as the 
beheading of over forty babies, being withdrawn only after being widely 
circulated and even repeated by United States President Joe Biden 
<https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-babies-false/>.

In contrast to calls for swift condemnation and authoritative statements 
of what happened, proper investigations that allow victims time and 
space to speak with adequate material support and protections take time 
and are almost impossible in conditions of active conflict. In the 
former Yugoslavia, for instance, the investigation conducted by a 
Commission of Experts took years and could only begin once peace was 
established <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2204144>. By refusing to cease 
hostilities and allow an independent investigation conducted in 
accordance with international standards of fairness, Israel is 
prioritising shielding itself from accountability for its own actions in 
Gaza. As a result, Israel is deferring and potentially denying its 
opportunity for justice and accountability as well as the opportunity 
for victims’ voices to be heard on the international stage.

*‘Rape is Rape’: Colonial Logics of Outrage*

In contrast to the work of investigation, advocates such as Hillary 
Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg 
<https://time.com/6342428/israel-hamas-sheryl-sandberg-oct-7/> infer 
that there are only two alternatives: denial or outrage. The modern 
history of Western responses to rape in conflict suggests otherwise. 
Denials and indifference have co-existed with selective outrage and 
moral panic, where allegations of rape have been used to justify 
military aggression. During World War II, Nazi propaganda stoked fear of 
rape by Soviet forces through racist rhetoric that portrayed Soviet 
soldiers as ‘barbaric hordes of Asiatics and their officers 
Jewish-Bolshevik rapists 
<https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137283399_15>.’

In colonial contexts, sexual violence is a frequent trope in ‘atrocity 
stories’ which justify the consolidation of colonial power by mobilizing 
oppositions between civilized Europeans and barbaric racialized others. 
For example, British media covering the 1857 anti-colonial rebellion in 
India repeatedly reported false, exaggerated, and sensationalized 
accounts of sexual violence against English women. These stories were 
used to justify widespread retributive violence against the Indian 
population generally. As Jenny Sharpe has explained, ‘[w]hen articulated 
through images of violence against women, a resistance to British rule 
does not look like the struggle for emancipation but rather an 
uncivilized eruption that must be contained 
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/allegories-of-empire>.’

Similar narratives have appeared in Western representations of conflict 
in Africa. As in India, these representations frequently rely on 
spectacular narratives of extreme violence including sexual mutilation. 
Critical feminist scholars have critiqued this process, for example, in 
relation to dominant representations of the conflict in the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo, as overly reliant on tropes of ‘barbarity, sexual 
mutilation and cannibalism 
<https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1594>.’

Israeli officials have repeatedly cast themselves as defending Western 
civilisation from barbaric Palestinians 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v64TVMo2vKw>, as documented in South 
Africa’s genocide case 
<https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf>. 
Addressing the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the 
war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of 
darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” As in the above 
examples, these depictions are buttressed through the repetition of 
spectacular stories, such as the unsubstantiated account of one 
eyewitness that a militant cut off a woman’s breast while raping her, 
and other militants played with it. Were this allegation to be proved to 
the criminal standard, it would undoubtedly constitute a war crime. But 
as United Nations experts have recently pointed out 
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/un-experts-demand-accountability-victims-sexual-torture-and-unlawful>, 
more investigation is needed to determine whether the contextual 
requirements for crimes against humanity were present on October 7. 
Rather than functioning as clear evidence of systemic violence, these 
stories both work within and reinforce the trope of civilization versus 
barbarism.

This civilizational discourse proceeds from a long history of 
Orientalist Western imaginings of Arab men as sexually perverted and 
rapacious, and contemporary tropes of Arabs and Muslims as sexually 
violent ‘terrorists’ preoccupied with white or Western women 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dangerous-brown-men-9781842778791/>. 
Yohai Hakak describes 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2015.1103877> how 
these stereotypes fuel an ongoing moral panic within Israel about sexual 
contact between Palestinian, especially Muslim, men and Jewish women. 
The far-right anti-miscegenation group, Lehava, has organized highly 
publicized semi-military rescue operations designed to extract Jewish 
women living in occupied Palestinian territory, and has successfully 
lobbied the National Service Administration to institute a policy 
forbidding Jewish women from volunteering during hospital night shifts, 
lest they develop relationships with Arab doctors.

The latest step in this campaign came in July 2023, following a 
high-profile case in which a Jewish Israeli woman was raped by a 
Palestinian man. In response, the Knesset passed a new law creating a 
special category of sexual violence: sexual assault and sexual 
harassment committed with ‘nationalistic motivations’. These crimes are 
now considered ‘sexual terrorism 
<https://jewishcurrents.org/israels-anti-miscegenation-law>’, 
prosecutable under the 2016 terrorism law, making the maximum sentence 
life imprisonment. These racially targeted laws were introduced despite 
vocal opposition from the survivor herself 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-19/ty-article-opinion/.premium/im-the-jewish-woman-sexually-attacked-by-an-arab-dont-use-me-to-feed-your-racism/00000186-f9e3-df62-adfe-fbf333960000> 
and from feminist groups who declared that the Parliament was in effect 
stating that Israeli survivors of rape by Jewish Israeli men were less 
deserving of justice and sympathy. As Dana Frank has argued in /Haaretz/ 
<https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/the-edge/2023-12-06/ty-article/.highlight/0000018c-3ee0-d826-ab9e-bfffb7260000>, 
the current mobilization of sexual violence allegations in Israel 
co-opts feminist language to advance the Israeli state’s militarist and 
racist agendas.

*‘Just One Thing’: Sex Exceptionalism and Israeli Exceptionalism*

Sheryl Sandberg 
<https://www.instagram.com/sherylsandberg/reel/C0jk3I_O_bB/> has 
declared in relation to this conflict: ‘No matter what you believe 
should happen in the Middle East, what marches you’re attending, or what 
flag you’re flying, there’s one thing we can all agree on: rape should 
never be used as an act of war’. In making these statements, she is 
mobilizing an increasingly common-sense position: that concerns about 
sexual violence in war should trump concerns about the wider politics or 
justice of conflict.

This is a militarized version of sex exceptionalism – ‘the idea that sex 
and sexualities are inherently different from all other human activities 
and topics of study’ 
<https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA496344217&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15334686&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ed6d2e3b8&aty=open-web-entry>. 
It is why we treat sexual offences as different and worse than other 
crimes, justifying intensely punitive responses. In the context of war, 
sexual violence allegations are used to bolster public support for 
hostility. Karen Engle notes that since the 1990s, ‘rape has come to be 
one of the most commonly invoked reasons for use of force 
<https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30534>’.

Sex exceptionalism facilitates Israeli exceptionalism, justifying 
Israel’s right to violently avenge attacks on Israeli women and girls 
without being limited by international law. Each reiteration that sexual 
violence by Hamas was ‘unprecedented in its cruelty 
<https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-oct-7-murder-sexual-violence-torture-45aab439>’ 
encourages the world to accept the scenes of devastation in Gaza. Sex 
exceptionalism insists that we agree on ‘just one thing’ while we agree 
to disagree on collective punishment, starvation, and the annihilation 
of the inhabitants of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Ironically, far from working to reduce sexual violence, this logic 
supports the production of more violence which disproportionately 
affects women and girls. As Janet Halley has warned, ‘the intensive and 
specific prohibition of rape can weaponise it… its special legality 
could power up another rape-driven, rape-repeating war 
<https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1683183/Halley.pdf>.” 
The fact that Israel’s siege on Gaza increases the already-heightened 
vulnerability of Palestinian women and girls to sexual violence was a 
key feature of the UN Women reports that Israeli advocates found so 
objectionable.

The focus on spectacular sexual violence also backgrounds the widespread 
sexual violence committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the 
everyday functioning of the occupation. Rather than occurring in battle, 
this violence takes place in “less visible spaces, such as prisons, 
courtrooms, and investigation rooms” 
<https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/conflict-and-society/9/1/arcs090105.xml> making 
it easier to ignore and erase. The case 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/ending-censorship-idf-admits-officer-jailed-in-2017-raped-a-palestinian-woman/> 
of an IDF Civil Administration officer convicted of repeatedly 
exploiting his position of power to rape and coerce sexual acts from 
Palestinians, made public in 2021, is only one example among many.

Even when these stories reach mainstream media, they almost never become 
the subject of international outrage. On December 4, Josh Paul, a US 
State Department employee who resigned over US arms sales to Israel 
spoke to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour 
<https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2023/12/04/amanpour-state-epartment-official-resignation-josh-paul.cnn>. 
He revealed that the State Department had received credible evidence 
from a Palestinian charity of the rape of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy 
in Israeli detention. According to Paul, when the State Department 
reported the allegation to Israel, the IDF declared the charity a 
terrorist organization, raided its offices, and seized its computers. 
Even in an environment of intense media attention on Israel/Palestine 
and the question of sexual violence, Paul’s account has not generated 
condemnation, or even much attention.

The failure to condemn or even register sexual violence against 
Palestinians persists despite extensive evidence, including numerous 
first-person testimonies of sexual violence in Israeli detention 
<https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/conflict-and-society/9/1/arcs090105.xml>. 
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 
reports that 
<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/flash-report-on-the-human-rights-situation-in-the-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem-7-october-20-november-2023-un-human-rights-office-ohchr/> 
between October 7 and December 27, 2023 the Internal Security Force 
carried out mass arrests involving sexual and gender-based violence such 
as genital beatings, forced nudity captured on video, sexual slurs, and 
threats of rape. Reports such as this are now accompanied 
<https://www.972mag.com/israel-torture-camp-gaza-detainees/> by an 
extensive photo and video archive circulated by Israeli forces of 
Palestinian men and boys tied up, blindfolded, and semi-naked. In some 
cases, the IDF has confirmed that the majority of these men are civilians.

As Israel stands formally accused of genocide at the International Court 
of Justice, we cannot allow select and spectacular allegations of 
wartime rape to be the ‘only thing’ we all agree on. Any feminism worth 
its name must refuse to accept the bombing of civilians, forcible 
transfer and denial of food, water and medicine to be justified as 
avenging sexual violence. Even more, we must seek to prevent further 
violence, sexual and otherwise, and this must mean reckoning with the 
everyday violence of occupation that preceded October 7.

/Heidi Matthews is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at 
York University in Toronto. She researches and teaches in the areas of 
international law, criminal law, and law and sexuality. She is currently 
leading an interdisciplinary research project studying colonial 
genocide. / /Tanya Serisier is a Reader in Feminist Theory at the School 
of Social Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London. She writes 
and publishes on the cultural politics of sexuality and sexual violence. 
She is the author of Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics 
<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-98669-2>./
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