Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye / August 12, 2024
Sadism has long characterized Zionist colonists’ treatment of Palestinians, rooted in orientalist views that Arabs only ‘understand force’ – including sexual violence.
The Israeli sexual torture scandal, whereby nine soldiers were arrested on 29 July for allegedly physically and sexually torturing Palestinian men, was depicted in western media as a deviation from Israel’s usual torture methods.
The idea is that Israeli torturers of Palestinian prisoners do not usually subject them to rape.
Four of the arrested soldiers were later released following widespread riots.
The US State Department, presumably appalled by such torture, described a video reportedly showing the alleged rape as “horrific” and insisted that “[t]here ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee, period… If there are detainees who have been sexually assaulted or raped, the government of Israel, the IDF [Israeli army] need to fully investigate those actions and hold anyone responsible accountable to the full extent of the law.
The White House, also presumably a stranger to the practice of abusing political prisoners held in US dungeons, remained calm but found reports of Israeli sexual torture “deeply concerning”.
The European Union followed suit and claimed to be “gravely concerned”.
But this is hardly a new development in the cruelty of the Israeli colonial-settler regime. The Israeli army has been systematically using physical and sexual torture against Palestinians since at least 1967, as human rights groups revealed years ago.
Indeed, sadism has been characteristic of the Zionist colonists’ treatment of Palestinians since the 1880s, as even Zionist leaders complained at the time.
This sadism and the sexual torture that often accompanies it are rooted not only in European colonial hubris but also in orientalist views that Arabs only “understand force” and are allegedly more susceptible to sexual torture than white Europeans.
Ordinary practice
The Israeli army’s arrest of the errant soldiers who allegedly gang-raped the Palestinian prisoner has precipitated outrage among right-wing Israelis, who make up a majority of the electorate.
Dozens of protesters, along with members of the Israeli Knesset, attempted to storm two military facilities and a judicial building where the soldiers were being held with the intention of liberating them.
Several Israeli government ministers have also defended the rape of Palestinian prisoners as “legitimate”.
On Israeli morning TV, presenters and analysts discussed how to best arrange the rape of Palestinian prisoners, criticizing only the “disorganized” manner in which it was conducted.
While such discussions may seem ordinary in Israel, western observers have feigned shock.
This reaction comes even though the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported that Israel has been following a policy of systematic prisoner abuse and torture since last October, subjecting Palestinian detainees to acts of violence – including sexual abuse.
One of the alleged Israeli rapists was invited, masked, on to Israeli TV Channel 14 to defend the rapes. He later posted a video on social media unmasking himself, expressing pride in his unit and its treatment of Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Israeli TV coverage has been calling for the head of whoever leaked the video of the rape to human rights groups, labelling them a “traitor” to Israel.
Racialized torture
Israel is hardly alone in such practices.
Following the 2004 revelations of American systematic physical and sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the notion that “Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq”.
According to Hersh, American neocons learned of such a “vulnerability” from Israeli orientalist Raphael Patai’s notorious 1973 book The Arab Mind.
Hersh quoted a source who referred to the book as “the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour”. The source further asserted that in the discussions of the neocons, two themes emerged: “One, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
Hersh continues his revelations:
“The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything – including spying on their associates – to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, ‘I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.’ The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.”
Such racialized torture is emblematic of imperial cultures, both in the present and throughout history. Here is one such report:
“The types of torture employed are varied. They include beatings with fists and [stomping] with boots… as well as using canes for beating and flogging to death. They also included… the penetration of the rectums of the victims with canes, and then moving the cane left and right, and to the front and back. They also included pressing on the testicles with the hands and squeezing them until the victim loses consciousness from the pain and until they [the testicles] get so swollen that the victim would not be able to walk or move except by carrying his legs one at a time… They also included the starving of dogs and then provoking them and pushing them to devour his flesh and to eat off his thighs. It also included urinating on the faces of victims…[Another form of torture included the soldiers’] sodomizing them, as it seems that this was done to a number of people.”
This report describes, in almost identical terms, what Iraqi prisoners experienced in 2003 at the hands of the Americans and what Palestinian prisoners have been experiencing since 1967 under Israeli custody.
Written in August 1938, it details how British and Zionist Jewish soldiers treated revolutionary Palestinians during the 1930s Palestinian anti-colonial revolt.
The author of the report, Subhi al-Khadra, was a Palestinian political prisoner detained in the Acre Prison. He learned about the torture of these prisoners, which had taken place in Jerusalem, after they were transferred to Acre. The prisoners recounted their experiences to him and showed him the physical signs of torture on their bodies.
With regard to the motives of the British torturers, Khadra concludes:
“This was not an investigation in which forceful methods are used. No. It was a vengeance and a release of the most savage and barbaric of instincts and of the concentrated spirit of hatred that these rednecks feel towards Muslims and Arabs. They mean to torture for the sake of torture and to satisfy their appetite for vengeance, not for the sake of an investigation nor to expose crimes.”
The report was publicized in the Arabic press and dispatched to British members of parliament.
A ‘uniform occurrence’
The mixture of sex and violence in an American (or European or Israeli) imperial setting characterized by racism and absolute power is a uniform occurrence.
During the “first” Gulf War, from 1990 to 1991, American fighter and bomber pilots spent hours watching pornographic films to get themselves in the right mood for the massive bombing they were to carry out in Iraq.
In Vietnam, US soldiers’ rape of Vietnamese women guerrillas was not only normalized during the US invasion and occupation of the country, but was even part of US army drill instructions.
The same orientalist and sexist paradigm that informs Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners reigned supreme in the eyes of the Americans in Vietnam.
Indeed, Israeli rape of Palestinian women was weaponized during the 1948 war and afterwards, driven by similar sadistic racism.
Israeli sexual torture and abuse of Palestinian men and women has also been rampant in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 10 months, as the United Nations and human rights groups have reported.
The pretence that the Israeli army is a “moral army“, let alone the “most moral army in the world”, as Israeli racism often claims, is no more than yet another public relations attempt to cover up Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people.
As killing and raping Palestinians and stealing their lands and country have been an ongoing Zionist strategy since 1948, there is very little that US State Department calls for Israel to “investigate” itself can do.
Israeli army findings regarding the recently exposed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner will likely reassert Israel’s right to defend itself while upholding the most noble moral and legal principles, the very same moral and legal principles that have allowed Israel since 1948 to uproot and oppress an entire people with impunity.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York; he is the author of among others Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism
