[Opinion. And you’re saying Israel is not committing crimes against humanity?]

How Israel has used sexualized violence as a weapon of settler colonialism from 1948 to today

Nada Elia and Noura Erakat

Mondoweiss:  21 July 2026

SOURCE: https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/how-israel-has-used-sexualized-violence-as-a-weapon-of-settler-colonialism-from-1948-to-today/

IN DECEMBER 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation. A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men. Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction. Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.

Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety. Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses.

Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, specializing in transnational, decolonial, and gender struggles, with a focus on Arab America and Palestine. A scholar-activist, Elia is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto, 2023), and has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies, including The Case for Sanctions Against Israel (Haymarket, 2020).

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the co-author, with John Reynolds, of the upcoming book Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew from Haymarket Books.

Applies also to the UK where rape is used by a certain demographic and ideological segment of the population to conquer and break the natives.

Thanks to a brave journalist with a funny name they got caught, even with the entire leftist hivemind claiming it was just racists making stuff up.

Are the left now concerned about weaponized rape but only in far flung nations? Bizarre.

Rape has been used as a weapon of war ,to terrorise both sides in

conflicts for 1,000 's of years , you would think as humanity advanced

it would not be so , but have we advanced ,I think we are even more

brutal today....at least some of us.

regards worgeordie