The Systemic Sexual Abuse of Palestinians
There should only be one "side" when it comes to sexual violence, and that's opposition.
The systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians by prison guards, police officers, and settlers should come as no surprise, but I was glad to see New York Times columnist Nick Kristof cover it in a lengthy reported column this week. Stories of horrors visited in Palestinians, including children, are not new. But sexual violence has become a propagandized, weaponized accusation in the Israel-Palestine context, with both sides accusing the other of sexual atrocities, and both sides also claiming their men would never do such a thing. Hyper-partisans of the conflict — those who seem to believe that one side or other can do no wrong, while the other side is made up of people who are sub-human and unfathomably evil — are convinced that the only real sexual violence is that visited upon those they support, and equally as convinced that any accusations of sexual violence against those they support is nothing more than a rape hoax.
As a feminist and as a journalist who has reported on sexual violence in conflict for more than a decade, this is a depressing, devastating turn. In every conflict or crisis where sexual violence is used as a weapon of war, those using it deny it — you might be celebrated if you say you killed people, but it often remains shameful to admit to rape. Usually, though, observers hear testimony of mass rape and realize that, yeah, of course in a context of unfettered brutality, rape and other acts of sexual sadism happen, too. From the conflicts that brought rape as a weapon of war into the general conversation — primarily the war in Yugoslavia, in which Serb forces systemically raped Bosnian women, but also the Rwanda genocide — to more recent ones I’ve covered (conflicts in eastern Congo, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar), perpetrators have denied accusations of rape, but the international community put forward few doubts. I’ve never had anyone question the veracity of the rapes reported by women whose stories I’ve published when those women were Colombian or Honduran or Rohingya or Congolese or South Sudanese.
It’s a very different story when the sexual violence victims are either Palestinian or Israeli.
I wrote about the evidence and many allegations of sexual violence against Israeli women on Oct. 7, and still get accused of spreading “atrocity propaganda” and manufacturing consent for a genocide. There are many, many people who say they are dedicated to the cause of Palestinian liberation who seem equally dedicated to denying that Hamas committed any criminal acts on Oct. 7, and who are particularly vitriolic in their denial that Hamas and other militants committed sexual crimes. There are others who seem to accept that ok maybe some acts of sexual violence happened, but talking about it too much is “weaponizing” an Israeli narrative and giving cover to a vicious government intent on brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian people.
Kristof is seeing similar backlash. This is despite the fact that Israeli human rights organizations have documented cases of rape and sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, particularly in prisons. In one infamous 2024 case, five Israeli soldiers were charged with rape and other acts of violence against a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman prison, a notorious torture site. Medical records confirmed serious abuse: Broken ribs, rectal damage, a punctured lung. But right-wing Israelis rioted, the right-wing government backed them, and the IDF dropped the charges. Netanyahu claimed the charges were “blood libel,” and said that “The State of Israel must persecute its enemies, not its heroic fighters.”
Kristof is also being accused of blood libel, the idea that non-Jews falsely accuse Jews of unspeakable acts (originally, killing and drinking the blood of Christian children), which foment the kind of antisemitism that culminates in pogroms and the Holocaust. I am sympathetic to concerns about antisemitism, which is clearly rising, often in terrifyingly violent form; my line of work has me talking to a lot of different kinds of people, and I hear more absolutely insane conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis now than I ever have in the past. I am particularly worried about the antisemitism I see on the left, not because it’s worse than antisemitism on the right, but because too much of it comes from people I would otherwise consider ideological fellow travelers. I am regularly shocked by the level of conspiracy theorizing and blatant Jew-hate masquerading as anti-Zionism that I see on the left, and the straight-up embrace of Nazis that I see on the right. The years since Oct. 7 have been radicalizing and gutting for me in seeing just how antisemitic (and profoundly hypocritical) ostensible progressives and leftists can be.
But legitimate fears of antisemitism do not excuse a refusal to engage with the worst acts from the Israeli government, its agents, and those it protects. They don’t excuse using antisemitism as a tool for atrocity denial.
