[News] Unknowability - “Israeli” Narrative Violence Propaganda & the Palestinian Verity of Sexual Violence and Rape

Sun May 24 11:20:39 EDT 2026

Unknowability
“Israeli” Narrative Violence Propaganda & the Palestinian Verity of 
Sexual Violence and Rape
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      “Israeli” Narrative Violence Propaganda & the Palestinian Verity
      of Sexual Violence and Rape

Story Ember leGaïe <https://substack.com/@storysstories>

May 24, 2026

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*Rashid Khalidi (From The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine):*

/“The modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: 
as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety 
of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people 
against their will.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I keep seeing people share a news story. It circulates with the steady 
confidence of something that is supposed to matter, supposed to signal 
accountability, supposed to demonstrate that a reckoning is underway. 
The story is about “Israel.” It reports that the IOF recorded 2,420 
cases of sexual misconduct within its own ranks in 2025. People post it. 
People repost it.

I want to talk about what that story is doing. Not what it says. What it 
does.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Frantz Fanon (From The Wretched of the Earth, 1961):*

/“Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with 
reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with 
greater violence.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To understand how deeply buried this reality is, we have to look at the 
severe attrition rate of sexual assault reporting even in “peacetime,” 
sovereign nations, and then watch the floor fall out entirely.

In the United States, roughly 33% of sexual assaults are reported to law 
enforcement, and approximately 8% result in indictment. In the US 
military, somewhere between 10% and 30% of sexual assaults are ever 
formally reported, and fewer than half of those receive any meaningful 
action at all. In “Israel” among its own civilian population, 
approximately 7% of sexual assaults are reported, with around 17% of 
those resulting in indictment. Inside the IOF, the reporting rate is 
estimated at around 12%, and approximately 2% of those complaints result 
in any charge being filed.

Those are already damning numbers. But they are the numbers that include 
a reporting mechanism. They are the numbers where, at least 
theoretically, a survivor can approach a body that is nominally distinct 
from the perpetrator. They are, in every case, the floor of a much 
deeper reality.

For Palestinians across Palestine, the reporting rate is zero. Not 
metaphorically. Structurally, categorically, deliberately zero. The 
occupier is the only authority, and the occupier is the perpetrator.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Aimé Césaire (From Discourse on Colonialism, 1950):*

/“Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that 
colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is 
based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, 
inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it…”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the problem with every percentage in this conversation, and in 
every conversation like it.

When researchers say 33% of sexual assaults in the US are reported, that 
33% is calculated from the assaults they know about, which is itself 
only a fraction of what actually occurs. The denominator is already 
wrong before the math begins. If 100 rapes happen and only 20 are ever 
disclosed to anyone, researchers build their baseline from those 20. 
Then they find that 7 of those 20 get reported to police and call it a 
35% reporting rate. But the real reporting rate, measured against what 
actually happened, is 7%. The invisible assaults, the ones never spoken 
aloud, never whispered to a friend, never told to a crisis center, do 
not exist in any dataset. They are structurally erased before the 
counting starts.

This problem compounds exponentially under occupation. For Palestinians, 
there is no safe person to tell. There is no institution that will 
record the violation without weaponizing it. There is no legal body that 
holds the perpetrator accountable rather than the survivor. So the pool 
of known assaults from which any percentage could be derived is already 
the tiniest surviving fragment of the actual reality. Whatever number 
appears in a report represents something that survived suppression long 
enough to be recorded. The rest is not a statistic. It is the texture of 
daily life under a genocidal occupation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Arab Canadian Lawyers’ Association / Majid Report (On the systemic 
structure of narrative exclusion):*

/“Anti-Palestinian racism is a distinct form of anti-Arab racism that 
silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes 
Palestinians or their narratives. It operates through colonial 
mythologies and erasures where the ongoing Nakba and violent 
settler-colonization are systematically denied, and where expressing 
Palestinian identity or documenting history is defamed as an inherent 
threat.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a further problem that rarely gets named directly.

Human rights organizations, even the best-intentioned ones, operate from 
frameworks built inside Western legal and humanitarian traditions. Those 
frameworks have a very narrow definition of what counts as documentable 
sexual violence. They were designed to process discrete, provable, 
individualized incidents, preferably with a named victim, a named 
perpetrator, physical evidence, and a clear timeline. They were not 
designed with occupation, settler colonialism, or genocide in mind.

What this means in practice is that an entire spectrum of sexual 
violence gets filtered out before documentation even begins. Routine 
strip searches that humiliate and expose Palestinians at checkpoints. 
The use of drones to film women inside their own homes. Forcing 
detainees into stress positions that are explicitly sexualized. Verbal 
sexual threats during raids at 2am. The filming and circulation of 
assault images among soldiers who treat it as sport. These things get 
categorized as “degrading treatment” or “humiliation” or “abuse” rather 
than sexual violence, even though for the survivors, the violation is 
sexual in nature and intended as such.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Dr. Muna Saleh (From Anti-Palestinian Racism in Schooling, 2026):*

/“Colonial mythologies and erasures actively penalize Palestinian 
presence. From classrooms to digital spaces, the institutional response 
to Palestinian trauma is enforced silence. The underlying structural 
logic dictates: ‘You are good, and you are tolerated, only as long as 
you remain completely silent.’”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organizations also self-censor based on what they believe they can prove 
to a legal standard, what funders will support, and what Western media 
will pick up. A pattern of checkpoint sexual harassment across hundreds 
of thousands of interactions over years is nearly impossible to package 
into a report. A single gang rape on video is. So the gang rape gets 
documented and the checkpoint harassment disappears into the noise, even 
though both are weapons of the same occupation, deployed with the same 
intent, producing the same kind of wound.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Saree Makdisi (From Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation):*

/“This is the invisible barrier which keeps life in Israel sharply 
focused and brightly lit, and turns the Palestinians into dark, inhuman 
figures in the shadows… A vast, rabid system, official Israel, sustains 
them and protects them, corrupting our minds and our language with vile 
rationalizations.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This means the documented record is not just incomplete. It is 
structurally skewed toward the most extreme, most visible, most legally 
legible incidents. That skew creates a false picture where sexual 
violence appears to be exceptional rather than what it actually is: a 
routine, ambient, deliberate feature of occupation designed to break 
Palestinian dignity, bodily autonomy, and collective resistance.

The undocumented majority is not missing because it did not happen. It 
is missing because the systems doing the documenting were never built to 
see it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*United Nations Human Rights Experts (Joint Statement on Gender-Based 
Violence and Displacement, April 2026):*

/“Israeli sexual violence has become embedded in Palestinians’ daily 
lives under occupation. It is intersecting, structural and systematic, 
and operates as a tool of control, subjugation and dispossession… 
Sexualised violence is deployed as a method of domination, to instil 
fear, punish, and fracture communities by exploiting stigma and shame to 
isolate survivors and erode social cohesion.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

And then there is what happens when the targets are not Palestinians. 
When they are Western journalists, filmmakers, medics, and activists 
carrying passports and legal recourse. When they are people whose 
governments could theoretically demand accountability.

The suppression of their testimonies is not incidental. It is proof.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Edward Said (From Culture and Imperialism):*

/“The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and 
emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes 
one of the main connections between them.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In October 2025, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition launched a vessel, the 
Conscience, carrying international journalists and healthcare 
professionals toward Palestine. Israeli naval forces hijacked the ship 
in international waters. What followed was documented in fragments, 
suppressed in the mainstream Western press, and forced into the open 
only months later by the survivors themselves.

On December 21, 2025, Anna Liedtke, a German journalist, publicly 
disclosed at an international solidarity conference what had happened to 
her in IOF custody after the Conscience was seized. She was subjected to 
a forced strip search. When she resisted, she was beaten and raped by 
Israeli female guards.

That detail deserves to be held carefully. Liedtke was assaulted by 
female guards, under the administrative cover of a routine security 
procedure. The state gave the rape a procedural name, assigned female 
perpetrators, and filed it under security protocol. The very frameworks 
human rights organizations use to identify sexual violence, a male 
aggressor, an obvious crime, no institutional authorization, are 
circumvented entirely. The assault disappears before it can be counted.

Surya McEwen, an Australian activist detained during the same mission, 
documented what was done to her directly: “/I was stripped naked and 
sexually assaulted by Israeli officers while being held hostage. One 
held a gun to my head, angrily threatening that he would kill me, while 
the other yanked and pulled on my genitals, perversely and almost 
gleefully./”

The word gleefully matters. This was not incidental cruelty in the chaos 
of detention. It was performed. It was enjoyed.

Vincenzo Fullone, an Italian journalist also aboard the Conscience, was 
subjected to repeated severe sexual violations amounting to rape while 
being unlawfully detained in an Israeli prison facility after the ship’s 
capture. Juliet Lamont, an Australian filmmaker who participated in both 
the October 2025 mission and subsequent maritime campaigns, stated that 
she was targeted and sexually assaulted by soldiers during her 2025 
detention, and noted that the systemic weaponization of bodily violation 
had grown more explicit over the course of the year.

These are not isolated testimonies. They are a pattern, from a single 
mission, across multiple nationalities, producing consistent 
descriptions of sexual violence as deliberate custodial practice. And 
they were suppressed. Not denied, not investigated. Suppressed.

Then, in May 2026, the scale escalated. On May 18 and 19, Israeli naval 
forces violently intercepted civilian aid vessels in international 
waters, including the Kyriakos X and the Lina al-Nabulsi, seizing 
hundreds of unarmed international activists from 45 countries. Medical 
examinations and testimonies upon their return documented widespread 
custodial violence: broken ribs, extensive bruising, taser injuries, and 
at least 15 distinct reports of targeted sexual assault and rape while 
in IOF custody.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition stated in response: “We reject any 
attempt to portray the abuse and degrading treatment witnessed by the 
world over recent days as isolated misconduct or the actions of 
extremist officials. The brutality broadcast across social media is a 
manifestation of the same system of settler-colonial violence and 
impunity that Palestinians have endured for decades.”

The suppression of the flotilla survivors’ testimonies and the 
circulation of the Knesset’s internal accounting are not separate 
events. They are two operations of the same erasure apparatus: one 
blocking what happened to internationals, the other amplifying what 
happens internally, both serving the single function of keeping 
Palestinian suffering permanently outside the frame.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Noura Erakat (Human rights attorney, from her statement to the UN 
Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace, and Security, October 2025):*

/“The systematic sexual abuse and torture of Palestinians in captivity, 
including rape of men, women and children; filmed forced nudity; and 
electrocution of genitalia, have resulted in mental and physical trauma 
that impede an ability to engage in sexual intimacy at all… Attacks on 
the reproductive capacity of Palestinian women and girls collectively 
aim to eliminate the possibility of a Palestinian future.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Erakat speaks of eliminating a Palestinian future, she is 
describing violence engineered to preempt the unborn. By targeting 
reproductive capacity and crushing the psychological possibility of 
intimacy, the occupation scales sexual violence up from individual 
domination to demographic warfare. The ultimate target is not the body. 
It is the lineage.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (On the intersections of territorial and 
bodily violation):*

/“The Zionist movement’s imaginary of conquering and settling the 
Palestinian body is inseparable from the project of conquering and 
settling Palestinian land, and erasing indigenous presence. Here, we 
build on native scholar Andrea Smith’s assertion that the logic of 
colonial sexual violence ‘establishes the ideology that Native bodies 
are inherently violable, and by extension, that Native lands are also 
inherently violable.’”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Dr. Afaf Jabiri (Feminist academic, addressing the biases within 
contemporary frameworks, 2025):*

/“Genuine solidarity demands rejecting colonial narratives that 
prioritize certain lives over others and addressing the racialized 
biases embedded within feminist frameworks. [This requires] centering 
Palestinian voices and experiences [against] well-documented sexual 
violence and torture against Palestinian women and men, not to mention 
the reproductive violence or ‘reprocide’ that is part of genocidal logic.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jabiri’s term “reprocide” names something that Western liberal feminism 
consistently refuses to see. Reprocide is not a metaphor. It is the 
deliberate destruction of a people’s reproductive future through 
sexualized violence: the bombing of maternity wards, enforced starvation 
that collapses gestational health, and the psychological obliteration of 
the conditions under which intimacy, family, and continuity are 
possible. When you place Erakat’s testimony alongside Jabiri’s framework 
alongside the documented reality of limoscide across Palestine, you are 
not looking at a crisis of military discipline. You are looking at a 
total war on the demographic denominator of a nation. This is what 
genocide looks like when it is waged through the body.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian 
Territories):*

/“The logic of colonial erasure, which started by denying political 
rights, is now culminating in the genocide being unleashed against 
Palestinians… Like all settler-colonial projects, Israeli settler 
colonialism carries in it seeds of genocide. The destruction is caused 
by Israel’s deliberate physical and biological devastation of 
Palestinians as a group in order to take control of the land.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In May 2026, Mehdi Hasan’s show Mehdi Unfiltered aired a segment about a 
New York Times investigation into the systematic rape of Palestinian 
prisoners by IOF soldiers. To discuss it, Hasan invited Ben Marmarelli, 
an “Israeli” human rights lawyer known for his criticism of liberal 
Zionism. When Hasan asked if the findings were shocking, Marmarelli 
shrugged it off. Of course not. It’s old news.

Hasan’s broadcast framed that moment as a journalistic win. It wasn’t.

Marmarelli’s criticism of liberal Zionism makes his dismissiveness more 
damning, not less. A liberal Zionist would at least perform shock. Shock 
is the currency of liberal Zionism, the carefully maintained pretense 
that these atrocities represent a departure from “Israeli” values rather 
than their expression. Marmarelli has moved past that pretense. He 
understands the occupation’s mechanisms clearly enough to reject its 
softer cover stories. And yet his response to documented mass rape, 
sexual torture, and the violation of children is casual indifference. 
That indifference is not a departure from the occupation’s logic. It is 
its clearest expression.

What actually happened in that broadcast: a man representing the legal 
infrastructure of the occupying state was handed the microphone to react 
to documented atrocity, and his casual dismissal was packaged as 
accountability journalism. Palestinian survivors did not speak. 
Palestinian lawyers did not speak. The people whose bodies this happened 
to were not in the room. The occupier’s lawyer was.

Hasan has not brought Palestinian survivors from Palestine onto his 
platform to anchor the story in their own words. His coverage routes 
through Western analysts, human rights commentators, and “Israeli” legal 
professionals. The range of voices he considers adequate to discuss 
Palestinian mass rape runs from liberal Zionist to critical “Israeli” 
human rights lawyer. Palestinian survivors remain outside that range 
entirely. The spectrum has shifted slightly leftward while staying 
entirely within the occupying group.

The people who survived the metal tables, the attack dogs, and the 
systemic torture are treated as subjects of a report rather than authors 
of their own history. When atrocities against Palestinians only become 
real after a Western newspaper publishes them, and only become 
discussable after an “Israeli” figure confirms them on camera, a clear 
message is delivered: Palestinian testimony does not count until the 
occupier validates it. That is not journalism. That is the occupation 
extending into the architecture of media, deciding when Palestinian 
suffering is allowed to enter the conversation and whose mouth it has to 
come from first.

Even on a platform explicitly marketed as alternative and unfiltered, 
the raw testimony of the colonized is bypassed in favor of narratives 
digestible to a Western liberal audience. Palestinian pain is processed 
through occupation-adjacent voices, packaged for Western consumption, 
and sold as critical coverage.

So. Back to the news story.

When “Israel” releases internal military sexual assault statistics to 
its own Knesset, and that gets picked up and circulated as news, the 
coverage positions “Israel” as a society capable of self-examination. It 
generates a story about Israeli women and soldiers as victims, which 
absorbs the available public attention and sympathy around sexual 
violence. And it does so at the exact moment when the documented record 
of IOF sexual violence against Palestinians, and against international 
activists whose testimonies are being suppressed in real time, is 
accumulating faster than Western media is willing to process it.

The framing of “Israel” grappling with sexual misconduct within its own 
ranks implies a society with the moral architecture to grapple. It 
implies the problem is internal dysfunction rather than deliberate 
weapon. It implies victims worth counting and perpetrators worth naming. 
Palestinians are structurally absent from that frame, which is exactly 
how the frame is designed to function.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Noura Erakat (Human rights attorney and scholar):*

/“In the aftermath of violence, a systematic propaganda campaign 
immediately starts, blaming Palestinians for their own deaths. It is a 
calculated lie, but it is a systemic one. The entire world stops asking 
questions the moment you say ‘terrorism’ or ‘Palestinian resistance.’ It 
is as if those words are expected to be a carte blanche to kill as many 
Palestinians as possible, a narrative that the rest of the world accepts 
because of how numb we have become to the loss of Palestinian lives.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The people posting these stories may genuinely believe they are sharing 
something important about accountability and sexual violence inside a 
military. But accountability for whom, visible to whom, and at the 
expense of whose erasure, those are political questions that the act of 
sharing answers whether the person sharing has engaged with them or not.

Every platform inch spent on IOF soldiers harassing each other is a 
platform inch not spent on Anna Liedtke, on Surya McEwen, on the 
Palestinian farmer who asked for paper to write a complaint after being 
raped with a metal baton while guards laughed, and was denied. That 
trade-off is not neutral. It is a choice. And it is a choice that the 
occupation benefits from, which makes it, functionally, work done on the 
occupation’s behalf. Not because the person sharing intended that. 
Because the frame they are operating inside was built to produce that 
outcome, to obscure the reality that the violation of the body is the 
primary path toward the liquidation of the land.

This is how narrative violence works at its most sophisticated. It does 
not require a directive. It does not require that every journalist, 
editor, or person who presses share consciously intend to serve the 
genocide. It only requires that the existing frameworks, what counts as 
a story, what counts as evidence, whose suffering is legible, whose 
testimony is credible, remain intact and unquestioned. When those 
frameworks are already built on colonial assumptions, people doing their 
jobs in good faith inside them will reliably produce coverage that 
serves colonial interests. The work gets done without anyone having to 
ask for it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*The Genospectra Lens (On Centering the Colonizer and Liberal Hijacking):*

/“Modern liberal discourse frequently hijacks the language of human 
rights to shift accountability away from systemic frameworks and center 
the feelings of the colonizer. This inversion turns the ongoing 
resistance of the occupied into an existential threat, while rendering 
the structural violence of the occupier entirely invisible.”/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Palestine is Palestine. The geography of the assault is the geography of 
the occupation, which covers all of it. The genocidal sexual violence 
being deployed by the IOF and illegal occupation settlers is happening 
across Palestine, in detention facilities, at checkpoints, during raids, 
inside prisons holding Palestinians from every part of their land, in 
homes demolished before dawn, in interrogation rooms built for exactly 
this purpose. It is not a crisis within a system. It is not a failure of 
discipline. It is the system. It is the architecture of occupation made 
flesh, made wound, made silence.

When you share the story about 2,420 IOF complaints, ask yourself what 
story you are not sharing. Ask yourself whose testimony is circulating 
and whose is being suppressed. Ask yourself who built the frame you are 
standing in, and what it was built to keep out of view.

The unknowability of the true scale of sexual violence against 
Palestinians is not an accident. It is a design of genocide. And every 
time we fill the available space with “Israel’s” internal reckoning, we 
participate in maintaining it.

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Restack 
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