Why Rape & Sexual Humiliation Are Central To US/Israel Genocide Strategy In Gaza
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 October 7.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (9/4/24)
I’ll give a warning that the Electronic Intifada story below is as intense as it is disturbing, though it does not describe individual acts of US/Israel sexual torture. I encourage all activists to take a deep breath and read it to better grasp the kind of twisted depravity of the US/Israel genocide in Gaza. I am labeling it ‘US/Israel’ because, as with every other aspect of this depraved genocide, it is all funded, armed and excused by the ZioNazi-dominated government of the United States … and your tax dollars.
When Israeli soldiers rape, we rape.
Of course, while the scale is mind-boggling, no well-informed American should be too surprised that our government and military would actively support rape and sexiual degredation. Such tactics were central to the unprovoked US war on Iraq.
On initial post I mentioned that all the images of violence I found on Google had been blurred. A reader, Gordon, wrote in below to point out a filter can be activated on Google to blur or show the original images. I followed his advice and got the images unblurred. I have yet to be able to find some of the more well known images at the time. I’ll continue to search and update if I find them.
I found this image in my initial search. It had been cropped…
This was a well circulated photo at the time of US war crimes in Iraq. The original un-cropped photo showed a pile of a half-dozen stripped naked, bound and blindfolded male prisoners in front of the grinning, thumbs-up US military torturers in Iraq. Nice to know DEI training is done for female psychopaths in our military.
While the edited image hints at our depravity, it does not show the true scale of what we did in Iraq and who we are as a nation.
Who we are is being carried out now, every day in Gaza and the Israeli torture concentration camps we fund.
FEAR IS THEIR ONLY STRATEGY: The US/Israeli Rape & Terror Campaign In Gaza
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 torture as a centralized strategy.
By Ramzy Baroud
MintPress News (8/15/24)
On October 25, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore.”
It might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s well-being, if not its very survival.
In actuality, the fear element is directly linked to Israel’s behavior and fundamental to its political discourse.
Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to instill the desired fear to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin, Tantara and the over 70 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, to exact information or to break down the will of prisoners.
UN-affiliated experts said in a report published on August 5 that “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 these horrific strategies in ways unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread application and frequency.
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 saw fit to those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “human animals.”
In a report entitled ‘Welcome to Hell,’ published on August 5, the Israeli rights group, B’tselem, said that Israel’s detention “facilities, in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering, operate as de-facto torture camps.”
A few days later, the Palestinian rights group Addameer published its report, “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 Israel itself – mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.
Rape as a centralizing strategy
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 torture as a centralized strategy.
Such a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister. His aggressive statements, for example, that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head instead of being given more food,” are perfectly aligned with his equally violent actions: the starvation policy of prisoners, the normalization of torture and the defense of rape.
But Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They have predated him by decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners, who are granted few rights compared to those enshrined by international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale?
Israeli wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: a material and a psychological one. 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 will of the Palestinian people.
Law for Palestine, a legal advocacy group, published a database of over 500 instances of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, inciting genocide in Gaza.
Most of these references seem to be centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For example, the October 11 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, stating “Remember what Amalek has done to you”, was also a blank check 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 saw 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 a natural outcome of these shocking dialectics. But the overall purpose of Israel is not simply to exact revenge, though the latter has been quite crucial to Israel’s desire for national recovery.
A different kind of deterrence
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 October 7.
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 October 7.
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 – that of restoring fear.
But Israel will fail 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. Yet, Palestinian resilience continues to grow stronger because Palestinians are not passive but active participants in the shaping of their own future.
If 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 the cost.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
“Welcome to Hell”: U.S. Silence On Israel’s Network Of Torture Camps
“Reports of alleged torture and sexual violence in Israel’s Sde Teiman prison are grossly illegal and revolting, but they only represent the tip of the iceberg.”
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Democracy Now! (8/8/24)
“When we got off the bus, a soldier said to us: ‘Welcome to hell.’” Those are the words of 45 year-old Fouad Hassan, a father of five from Nablus in the occupied West Bank, who was recently held in Israel’s Megiddo Prison. His words open a devastating report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, exposing Israel’s rapid conversion of Megiddo and eleven other prisons into a network of “torture camps” following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.
Fouad is one of 55 Palestinians interviewed by B’Tselem for the report, 30 from the West Bank, 21 from the Gaza Strip, and four who are Israeli citizens. Their searing testimonies are supplemented by news accounts and official reports, creating a shocking mosaic of systemic neglect, abuse, torture, and killings inside the Israeli prison system that have intensified since October 7th, all at the direction of Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
‘Eat Shit! Shut up!’
The accounts B’Tselem has brought to light are shocking. Sari Huriyyah, a 53-year-old real estate lawyer and an Israeli citizen, was arrested over a Facebook post on November 4th. He described what happened to Abd a-Rahman Mar’i, a 23-year-old man held in an isolation cell next to him:
“He screamed in pain constantly, begging for a doctor. The guard would come now and then and swear: ‘Eat Shit! Shut up!’ In the morning, the guards came to count us. One said, ‘Get up, you animal. Get up, you dog.’ They checked him and the whole place went silent. Finally, the doctor said, ’There’s nothing to be done.’ One of the guards said to them, ‘My condolences,’ and they all started laughing. They put him in a black body bag, and carried him out like trash.”
Firas Hassan, a 50-year-old Palestinian Authority official, described being beaten by prison guards and hearing that the attack was being live-streamed so Ben-Gvir could watch:
“We were ten Palestinians in the cell. The forces came in masked and beat us for 50 minutes. They laughed while they hit us, and livestreamed it all. I understand Hebrew and I heard one say, ‘We’re live streaming for Ben Gvir, directly to Ben Gvir.’ Then brought in police dogs, after they tied our hands behind our backs, and blindfolded us.”
Sarit Michaeli is B’Tselem’s international advocacy lead. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, she said the blame for the torture and abuse goes beyond Ben-Gvir:
“I think it’s certainly not the case that Minister Ben-Gvir is the only person responsible, absolutely Prime Minister Netanyahu, who gave him all of this authority, is absolutely responsible and culpable,” Michaeli said, continuing, “These are policies. They’re not the actions of rogue elements. They’re not the actions of individuals who are going against the grain. They’re dictated by the management of the Israeli prison system and by the government.”
It’s all okay with the US
Israel’s mainstream TV news outlet, Channel 12, aired a video showing a group of Israeli soldiers apparently gang raping a prisoner, leaving him with serious injuries to his rectum and with broken ribs.
While the U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller admitted seeing the video and acknowledged, “there ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee, period,” there are no indications what the Biden administration conveyed to Israel.
But without U.S. pressure, Michaeli explains, the abuses B’Tselem highlights in its report won’t change:
“We do not expect any Israeli investigations to fundamentally alter the situation. We’ve appealed to all nations and also to all relevant international institutions to look into the situation. Specifically, we’ve also appealed to the International Criminal Court, because these offenses that we list in our reports are war crimes. They also reach the magnitude of crimes against humanity. This is the responsibility of the international community, including the United States government.”
On August 5th, the United Nations issued a statement that began, “Reports of alleged torture and sexual violence in Israel’s Sde Teiman prison are grossly illegal and revolting, but they only represent the tip of the iceberg.”
Turkey has asked to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court is seeking indictments against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Palestinian solidarity activists are focusing on presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, who opted not to preside over Netanyahu’s recent address to a joint session of Congress. Activists disrupted her speech in Detroit on Wednesday, in the key swing state of Michigan, chanting, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide. We won’t vote for genocide.” Harris replied, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that; otherwise, I’m speaking.”
With Palestinian solidarity actions planned both inside and outside the upcoming Democratic National Convention, all eyes are on Vice President Harris, as demands for a Gaza ceasefire continue.
Link to story and 6-minute audio
“Welcome to Hell” is a report on the abuse and inhuman treatment of Palestinians held in Israeli custody since 7 October 2023. B’Tselem collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians held during that time and released, almost all with no charges. Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.
Finally, again, never forget, as the funder and supplier of weapons, intelligence collaboration and diplomatic cover for this genocide, the US is GUILTY of all this obscenity. — MT
Re: blurred photos on Google--when I went to Google via your link, none of the photos were blurred out. There was a button to blur the photos at the top of the Google image search page, but as I have set my search parameters to show everything (not just the SAFE option), I could see the horrific images. Blurred images can be useful for some mediums, but we must be willing to look at the full horrors of what our military (and the IDF) does if we want the truth. Thank you for an excellent post.
People must know that it is not just ben Givr and Netanyhu and the rest who are guilty of these atrocities. It is Israel, Israeli society. But more, this is all done at the direction and with the blessing of the USA. Not just Biden, Harris, Blinken, or even Trump, but of the USA, of American society. An society, and population that believes it is exceptional will do these things as of right, any such population is guilty as a group and as individuals. The leaders and those who actually carried out or enabled the torture should be held accountable (in all nations) while the general population needs to be deprogrammed.