Israel & Sexual Abuse
Dispatch 5: What is truth?
Warsan Shire, the renowned and extraordinary poet, has been a lighthouse for many of us through the last few weeks, as she’s surfaced some of the best video archives to the masses via her Instagram, as many of us have been tasked to become teachers, curators, and educators of information about Palestine, Sudan, Congo, in the last few months. She interweaves histories of information that truly astonish and educate me with each viewing, as I realize, more and more, there is so much I didn’t know about this planet, about human suffering that’s occurring right now, and how prevalent and far-reaching colonial violence still is. And with that, with each passing day, it’s wild to bear witness to how many of our histories of aggression, separation, and mass migration are the same. Our stories mirror each other because the tactics of annihilation overlap.
I try not to let it overwhelm me anymore, this lack that I have often felt, in not knowing more about the world around me. What this time has done to me, personally, is that it has stripped away any artifice that existed, leaving me completely raw and open, unbridled and devotional. I show great respect to Indigenous knowledge keepers, and in this instance to our Palestinian brethren, who while being mass eradicated, tortured, and murdered in an ongoing genocide, are showing us the immense resilience instilled in the human spirit. By watching Palestinians on the ground show each other care, love, devotion, protection, even in the face of total collapse, I’ve understood something deeper about this Earthly plane. The people who you love and who love you, there’s something powerful in that relationship. Nothing is more profound than kindness, community, and fighting for liberation. Because they are the things that will free you, money, corruption, lying, land grabbing… these things won’t.
It has been humbling to watch people who are being denied their very dignity, who refuse to give in, who simultaneously show us, through their perseverance that nobody can strip away your true soul; who you are to the people around you, and how much you care for the people in your life, is what will always matter. Palestinians are making us remember our greatest quality amongst humans is our resilience, which is sourced from love (love of oneself and one’s people) and it’s also our reliance on one another that has allowed us to evolve to our highest state. For when we love, that is when you see our real strength.
What this time is also showing us is that there is power in numbers and that people have always had power. I knew this distinctly as I wrote Who Is Wellness For? and so much of that book’s research helped me prepare for what’s inevitably about to come, a people’s revolution. With every moment that they kill another child and we are forced to bear witness on our phones, something clarifies and clicks within us. We know the United States government does not give a fuck about its people, and neither does the Israeli government - which is why so many Israelis are protesting Netanyahu right now, as they were earlier in the year. Yet, fighting against fascism is the bare minimum, what we need is for people to concede their land, their power, and their money for the good of all people. This is what the Land Back movements speak to on all colonized land, the term “land back” is quite explicit. The times when mass people can disregard truth because they have their truth, a truth they created, is coming to an end. We are facing extinction, now the Earth speaks, and we must listen.
No amount of materiality will protect you from death. This is why whiteness and capitalism are such a scam, as Aimé Césaire, the great writer, once wrote in Discourse on Colonialism, “At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.” That’s the apex of white supremacy and capitalism: Hitler. And as the Netanyahu government constantly displays a weird allegiance and reference to Nazism, the metaphor is clear here as well. Yet we are still here, questioning if it is a genocide when we have the answers embedded in the Earth. According to Al Jazeera, “Israel says it has struck at least 12,000 targets across the besieged Palestinian territory from October 7 to November 1, marking one of the most intense bombing campaigns in recent history.” It should go without saying, that indigenous people of a land don’t bomb it. They respect the land, they tend to it. They don’t destroy it.
Yet all our separations are connected, which is why our connectedness is, too. We are finally beginning to see that. I know many feel the same way, but Palestine is freeing all of us because it’s making us face imperialism head on. We are understanding, maybe more than ever before, we are all we have, and that’s a lot, and it’s definitely something worth fighting for.
-
A few days ago, Warsan posted this Democracy Now video about the Tulsa Race Massacre:
Now, I had heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, though I didn’t know many of the details. I knew Tulsa was a bustling city of Black entrepreneurs (it used to be known as Black Wall Street) and thus had a concentration of Black wealth. Then one late Spring day, white supremacists took over the city, “some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials,”1 and attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses, demolishing more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood, killing almost 300 people.
The things I hadn’t known were the details. Like, the massacre started when a 19-year-old Black man, “Dick” Rowland went into a building with the only Black toilet downtown. He stepped into an elevator on the first floor and “by the time the elevator doors opened on the third floor, someone heard the white elevator operator, Sarah Page, shriek.”2 Take into account the time, then think about the power of the white woman’s voice, and how white fragility has always been used as a weapon of the colonizer.
While it is still uncertain as to precisely what happened in the elevator on May 30, 1921, “…the most common explanation is that Rowland stepped on Page’s foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream,” the Oklahoma Historical Society reported. Rowland was taken into custody immediately. Soon a white mob gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse. When word got out, dozens of Black men, “including World War I veterans, heard of Rowland’s arrest and rushed to the courthouse to protect him. A struggle ensued. A shot was fired. Then hundreds of white people marched on Greenwood in a murderous rage.”
The Tulsa Tribune newspaper even published a story with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” and ran the headline: “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
It was strange to see these details so clearly and to see that resounding reflection of what is happening in Palestine on so many different levels. But I begin here to speak to the white woman’s voice.
I had not known that this infamous massacre began with a white woman’s shriek, and that the very idea was panic enough to ensue a gang of white men ready to pounce. Why have white men been so ready to kill Black men all the time? Is that what superiority looks like to some people, a desire to kill? I’ve never understood that about whiteness, that obsession with domination and mass murder.
Whiteness is also a positionality anyone can adopt as I think it’s primarily a product of supremacy, and that’s exhibited in all kinds of people, but it’s the metaphor of what whiteness is and what it stands for and what white woman’s voice can rupture that is the most important point here.
-
A few days ago I was sent a video about how there was undisputedly rape that happened on October 7th and that anyone who doesn’t believe it and calls themselves a feminist is a hypocrite. I mean that was the essential message of the video. It’s a position I’ve heard a few times, and because I take accusations of rape seriously, it has made me pause to wonder and examine the evidence that’s being put on the table... Yet, I also hesitate, for a few reasons.
Israel has been systematically lying about everything (for years) from they don’t bomb hospitals to only bombing hospitals, fabricating Hamas combatants’ whereabouts (lest we forget Daniel Hagari pointing to a calendar with Arabic on it and saying that it was the shifts of terrorists… when it was just dates in a calendar…), or how we were told there were 40 beheaded babies, but as CNN reported, “Through hundreds of hours of media posted online attempting to corroborate accounts of atrocities committed by Hamas. But CNN has not seen anything that would appear to confirm the claims of decapitated children. CNN also visited the ransacked ruins of Kfar Aza on Tuesday and saw no evidence of beheaded youths. Israeli officials have not released any photographs of the incident either.”
Or how, according to France24, “Colonel Golan Vach, head of the military search and rescue service, told AFP he saw the body of a mother protecting a baby while searching debris at the Beeri kibbutz three days after the attacks. “When I pulled it over I saw a decapitated baby. I took it up with my hands and I carried it, and I put it in the body bag. I did it,” he said while on a media tour of another kibbutz organised by the military.” This was later discovered to be a lie. Clock the certainty though, “I saw a decapitated baby.”
Every news media in the world, including Israeli newspapers, like Ha’aretz and Times of Israel has similarly reported beheaded babies, including GI Joe our genocidal Zionist US president, with no proof… even saying there’s no proof in the article itself! But what kind of shady journalism is this? Similarly, with the accusations of rape, there’s been no real proof, but we will get to that.
Yet, despite this lack, what we do have proof of is that dozens of Palestinian men were stripped, blindfolded, and left to cower on the street kneeling just a few days ago. “We’re talking about military-aged men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated,”3 Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy explained, which frankly, sounds like a farce. What does “military-aged” mean? Any civilian can be taken off the street and be accused of being “military-aged”? This doesn’t sound right to me. These men look like uncles and babas. Not young men we know most Hamas fighters to be. According to the BBC, one man was even identified as a UNWRA worker.
According to a recent IOF spokesperson (on TikTok) these men were suicide bombers, which feels so odd and unlikely, and is definitely part of the ongoing Zionist campaign to deflect and obfuscate truth. If these men were terrorists, why would you strip and blindfold them? There’s only one reason for this and it’s humiliation. Just as former US marine Greg Stoker explains in this video. There’s no military explanation for actions like this, and in that sense, the degrading and the lack of respect displayed here directly translates to the existence and anger of an entity like Hamas. This humiliation has been ongoing for 75 years. How do you expect people to react to something like this?
The writer Zoé Samudzi aptly wrote on her IG stories “If we believe ourselves to be concerned with all kinds of wartime sexual violence no matter the identity of the target, could we please also talk about the very deliberate sexual humiliation and degradation of “insufficiently innocent” arab men as a kind of castrating imperial response to fabrications of the arab man as countercivilizationally unconstrained in their rapacious terrorism?”
Then just a few hours ago the below photo surfaced, Palestinian civilians captured and put into a ditch. By the time I send this newsletter, they may already be dead. I don’t know why else you round up anyone, other than to kill them. It’s interesting how the people who demand we care about the right-hand side image can’t even fathom caring for the left-hand side image.
Above all, to me, this has been the most shocking thing to witness; the continuous lack of humanity exhibited toward Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. How human life is a game to so many, just a mere accident of birth. Those with privilege believe it’s a game they’ve won, but a game of cruelty, trickery, and deception is never a game worth winning. Needless to say, people’s humanity shouldn’t be something waged against. No one people are all good, and neither is one side all bad… but here’s the real kicker: all are worth saving and protecting. I can’t believe in 2023, we are still here at this juncture. Hubris and a lack of self-reflection have only got us this far in human evolution, and every day I’m shocked to witness the denialism around me.
Yet Palestinians are showing us a different version of humanity. We are bearing witness to the resilience against the Goliath-like structure that is the state of Israel, fully equipped with the backing of the biggest Empire in the history of the planet ( the United States) and the full artillery of a highly advanced army, and still we see, the Palestinians demand dignity with a right to existence. That is what is so infuriating to Israel, the Palestinian refusal to die or disappear.
Juxtapose this against the annihilating spirit of Zionists who don’t value life or death. Watching the acceptance of Christian Zionists by large cohorts of Jewish people, while fully knowing why they, like our good ole Joe Biden, believe in Zionism is truly astounding… and it doesn’t make any sense that it’s just allowed and that nobody talks about why. It feels almost too Disney villain-esque, like can you not see the bad man in the costume? I guess it bothers me that Muslims and Arabs are almost cartoonishly villainized, and have been by the British and Christians for hundreds of years, the Muslim threat is omnipresent, yet here we have very obvious bad-faith characters act in, no surprises, bad-faith… and it’s just glossed over and even ushered in, welcomed and accepted. It truly shows you the power of white privilege, and how much danger it genuinely masks.
Anti-Semitism is deep-rooted, like anti-Blackness, and it has to be faced by all of us, this is what I believe. Not often, but I do see casual anti-Semitism wielded in front of me sometimes and it always makes me feel so uncomfortable, like seeing a mask come off; but that’s how I generally feel when I witness any kind of racism. The fact that some can accept that anti-Semitism exists but deny that anti-Blackness does (the Zionists’ continued blatant anti-Blackness boils my blood) … but how are you mad about one but not the other? I’m not really in the business of enjoying denigrating anyone, but I am in the business of wanting to protect all human life, and this means I am very suspicious of people who continue to implore us to care about their slaughter when they continuously contribute to the slaughter of not just Palestinians but also millions of other Black and brown people through the use of Israeli arms and weaponry. We keep being told to care about Congo and Sudan by Zionists, but when you dig a little deeper and see they have continued to armed genocides there, too… it makes you wonder, do they really not see us seeing them? Or do they not care? Do they simply think they will conquer and that will be the end of it? Do they not remember the Nuremberg trials, a mere few decades ago?
What kind of victim makes war machines? The Zionism project makes no sense.
It also needs to be said: Israel as an ethnofascist state is not the solution for the protection of Jewish life—being in community with people, no matter what race or creed, and creating real relationships and connections with people — that is what will save and protect Jewish life. And frankly, this is what will save and protect any of us. We need each other. I do think if given good examples, most people’s inherent nature is good. But I think the severity of the nature of Western European colonization was so barbaric that we had to accept a new normal, and that made space for all this evil. But whiteness is not normal, supremacy and ethnofascism is anti-nature, it’s anti-human nature. We are supposed to coexist with each other and we really should start to challenge the people who tell us that we can’t or shouldn’t; we must really pushback against those who are invested in us fearing each other.
What people don’t understand is believing in the cult of whiteness, white Christian nationalism, in particular, is all about severing, it feeds off of disconnection, and this is where I see this deep perversion that is almost catastrophically demonic, where there is no grace, no consideration of life or humanity, and the only thing that matters is power. Yet absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s also one defining characteristic of every Empire on Earth, the unnaturalness of the disconnection of white supremacy, and the obsession over hierarchy are unnatural and these are qualities we must let go of as we move toward the future. In Césaire’s words, at the apex of white colonial violence, which is capitalism, we have Hitler. And we have to understand that will be the case every single time, no charismatic white man who tells us to be afraid has any good intentions. And we better remember that a Hitler can always emerge, especially in places we are being told they aren’t so, and not to look.
Anna Fusco recently wrote in her incredible newsletter Unsupervised“I wonder if the very idea that we should be able to pick and choose when we give our attention to atrocity stems from the same sense of separation that makes us feel helpless to stop it.” We continue to pretend that some life is more important than others, when Never Again, should mean Never Again for anybody.
Back to the issue of rape.
In an interview last week between Josh Paul, a former State Department official, and Christiane Amanpour, Paul shared: “I was part of the human rights vetting process for arms going to Israel, and a charity called Defense for Children International - Palestine drew our attention at the State Department to the sexual assault, actually the rape, of a 13-year-old boy that occurred in an Israeli prison in the Moskobiyyeh.”
Seeing this immediately struck something inside of me. As I’ve written before, Israel has detained over 1,000 children (many more since Oct 7th) who have in most cases been put indefinitely in prison without trial. I knew and had a feeling they were sexually abusing “prisoners” after Aotearoa Liberation League reported sexual terror was being used on detainees.
According to The Electronic Intifada, “Palestinian detainees have also reported being “threatened with rape in retaliation for the attacks of 7 October. The UN said that testimonies it has collected “appear consistent with numerous pictures and video clips published in recent weeks on social media by Israeli soldiers, depicting abuse and humiliation of Palestinians.”4
They also reported the account of freed prisoner Ramzi al-Absi who said prisoners were getting beaten and sexually assaulted by prison authorities. “The detainees are being sexually assaulted, to the extent of rape. I’m not exaggerating. To the extent of rape,” he said.5
Rape by the Israelis of Palestinians is common and has happened throughout the last 75 years (there are actual many historic accounts) as these are usually the tactic of an oppressor, not the oppressed. In recent years there’s also the infamous story of the Israeli military officer who has been imprisoned since 2017 because he was convicted of raping a Palestinian woman, as well as committing sexual assault against other Palestinian women and a man and extorting them for sexual favors, among other crimes6 ending a years-long gag order on the case, according to The Times Of Israel. This makes me think there are many other cases that haven’t been convicted yet or are similarly under a gag order.
I bring it back to quote Zoé again, “Could we please also talk about the very deliberate sexual humiliation and degradation of “insufficiently innocent” arab men as a kind of castrating imperial response to fabrications of the arab man as countercivilizationally unconstrained in their rapacious terrorism?”
The other thing of note is, from what I understand through research, is that there have been no other (even supposed) accounts of Hamas ever raping Israeli women, let alone cases of Palestinians raping Israelis is almost unheard of. Why? Because stories of the oppressed peoples raping is rarely the case when it’s specifically a colonial tool used to portray an inherent savagery in the oppressed, mainly Black and brown men, that’s based on conjecture and not evidence. May I remind you that it took a mere shriek of a white woman to start an entire massacre of Black people, their homes and their businesses. This is the retribution whiteness brings even over a suggestion of sexual violence, it’s to remind us they are in control. That they are in power, and sexual humiliation can only ever be weaponized by the side with power. Never forget that.
Here’s the interesting thing about the rape allegations on October 7th, and I encourage you to do the research yourself, there are still no eyewitness accounts that have been named or confirmed by anyone other than Israeli authorities. Yet said Israeli authorities like everyone from Shari Mendes to Coachav Elkayen Levy (a supposed human rights specialist who works directly with Netanyahu’s advisors, Levy even used a picture of murdered Kurdish women claiming they were the Israeli women killed by Hamas just after Oct 7th) and Zaka are deeply embedded and invested in Zionism, which shows us clear bias. I mean Levy using the wrong images shows you how much (or little) she’s invested in truth. And, given the consistent lying and contorting of truth that the Israelis have shown us in these last few months (alone) proves, at the bare minimum, that we need proof … and yes, I do think it’s quite telling that we are being accused of not believing women when there’s no woman to believe. No woman has come out and said “this happened to me,” and how convenient to claim that the only women who could do that are dead.
One of the only eye witness reports we have is the story of the soldier who on CNN reported that he was apart of a special army unit on October 7th who went into a house to find two twin teenage girls who were raped and murdered, yet, according to the journalist Muna Hawwa (who breaks all of this down in the link) if you go onto Mondoweiss’ database of those slain on October 7th, there are no girls who fit the description. Even the soldier who claims to have seen this, by his own commanders accidental admission, his unit was not present on the ground during the day of October 7th… another lie unraveled.
What Israeli officials keep showing us is that they have no desire for morality or truth. There are no names of these raped women, no real explanation of how or what happened, and strangely no video documentation of any of these gruesome rapes we keep being told about and yet no pictures even of bodies, of these bodies with breasts cut off - nothing to verify these supposed claims of these supposed eye witnesses, except stories like this that keep getting debunked, just like claims of 40 beheaded babies. But we are supposed to believe it was brutal! And that Hamas carried out all these attacks!
I don’t believe that this is what happened and as more and more information comes out that the IOF opened fired on their own people on October 7th, I think it’s important we ask more questions about why we are so blatantly being lied to by Israel. Why is it that they are so afraid of truth?
This will be the enduring question we are left with. And no amount of propaganda will cover it up. When you can’t trust a people’s testimony what does that say about them? These are questions we should all be asking.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/21/hbos-watchmen-depicts-tulsa-race-massacre-that-was-all-too-real-hundreds-died/
Ibid
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-hamas-war-images-palestinians-stripped-blindfolded-gaza-rcna128685
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/released-palestinians-reveal-horrors-israeli-prisons
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/released-palestinians-reveal-horrors-israeli-prisons
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ending-censorship-idf-admits-officer-jailed-in-2017-raped-a-palestinian-woman/
Thank you. This topic - sexual violence - feels particularly brave to tackle head on. I appreciate your thoughtful, comprehensive, and steadfast words
Thank you so much