Tag: Rape

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Israel’s new far-right government: Unprecedented challenges and opportunities by the BDS National Committee

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Supporting the recent pogrom by fascist Jewish-Israeli militias against Palestinians in Huwara near Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territory and overtly inciting state terrorism, senior Israeli government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist,” said, “I think Huwara needs to be erased. The state should be the one to do that.” Smotrich, however, is not the first Israeli leader to publicly embrace or threaten genocidal acts against Indigenous Palestinians. Labor Party leader Matan Vilnai in 2008 threatened Palestinians with “a bigger shoah [Holocaust]” if resistance groups did not stop their armed retaliation to Israel’s criminal siege and violent attacks on Gaza. A recent error by Israel’s censors accidentally has revealed secret documents exposing David Ben Gurion’s support for “wiping out” Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, with a minister in his first government admitting, “Let us say that instances of rape occurred in [the ethnically cleansed Palestinian city] Ramle. I can forgive instances of rape, but I will not forgive other acts,” such as forcibly removing “jewelry from women.”

Continue reading at https://bdsmovement.net/israels-new-far-right-government-analysis

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How colonizers weaponize rape: reflections from the Palestinian case by Tamam Mohsen

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In the case of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the goal of acquiring land led to the use of brutal tactics aimed at the dispossession and elimination of the indigenous population. Colonizers embraced sexual terrorization as an instrument for achieving this strategy. Rape, though still under-documented, played a role in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and after. Many families fled their homes, in part due to their concerns over  their women being raped by Zionist forces. Indeed, it can be said that the conquest of land has gone hand in hand with sexual violence in the history of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2022/08/how-colonizers-weaponize-rape-reflections-from-the-palestinian-case/

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State Archive Error Shows Israeli Censorship Guided by Concerns Over National Image by Ofer Aderet

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It turns out that Israel’s first agriculture minister, Aharon Zisling, who was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, said in 1948… “Let us say that instances of rape occurred in Ramle. I can forgive instances of rape, but I will not forgive other acts.” The next statement, which was not blacked out, now gains additional significance, and explains what the minister considered an act more serious than rape: “When they enter a city and forcibly remove jewelry from women and from their necks – that is a very serious matter.”

…Twenty pages later, in the same discussion… Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who was speaking. In the censored version he said: “I am against the wholesale demolition of villages.” Now, the full statement is revealed. It turns out that he then added: “But there are places that constituted a great danger and constitute a great danger, and we must wipe them out. But this must be done responsibly, with consideration before the act.”

Continue reading at https://archive.fo/QUbil#selection-683.0-696.0

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Rabbi who urged Gaza genocide excused rape by soldiers by David Sheen

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A prominent Israeli rabbi known to have advocated genocide in Gaza also advised that soldiers may rape during wartime, it has emerged. Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad in present-day Israel, approved rape by the military in a 2002 article that has gone largely unnoticed.

Writing on Kipa.co.il, a popular Hebrew-language website catering for religious Jews, Eliyahu contended that Israeli soldiers would lose their motivation to wage war if they are not allowed to rape non-Jewish women.

The comments were made five years before Eliyahu recommended that Israel should use massive force in Gaza.

In 2007, he said that Israel “must kill 100,000, even a million” people in Gaza if that was necessary to stop Palestinian resistance fighters from firing rockets.

Continue reading at https://electronicintifada.net/content/rabbi-who-urged-gaza-genocide-excused-rape-soldiers/21566

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Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif

Sexual Violence and Palestinian Genocide Since the Nakba

Understanding the intensified attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies in times of heightened attacks by the settler colonial regime requires a feminist analysis. Such an analysis takes the Nakba as its analytical point of departure. Israel was built on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, on its land, pain, and displacement.  It was built on the destruction of our communal social ties, the violation and invasion of our homes and bodies.

Rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948. During the Deir Yassin massacre, for instance:

All the inhabitants were ordered into the village square. Here, they were lined up against a wall and shot.  One eyewitness said her sister, who was nine months pregnant, was shot in the back of the neck. Her assailants then cut open her stomach with a butcher’s knife and extracted the unborn baby. When an Arab woman tried to take the baby, she was shot…Women were raped before the eyes of their children before being murdered and dumped down the well…

Thus our struggle for indigenous sovereignty within anti-colonial activism as feminists is necessarily situated in the protection of Palestinian women’s bodily safety and sexuality, family, and communal right to life. It is a struggle against the hypermasculine Zionist military and settler apparatuses that frame Palestinian women as inherently threatening racialized Others whose bodies must be violated and destroyed as the internal enemy and “reproducers of Palestinians.” This logic is inseparable from the settler colonial logic of elimination.

Continue reading at http://profiles.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/19992/sexual-violence-women%E2%80%99s-bodies-and-israeli-settler

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