Instrumentalizing rape to boost support for Israel

Pro-Israel protesters in Calgary act out their imagination of a rape scene, for some godawful reason.

I was recently having dinner with a friend of mine, someone who many of you know, and she said to me, this: “The worst thing that can happen to a white woman is being raped by a Black or brown man. I don’t mean the actual worst thing but that’s how society acts. Until we change this, we are never going to end misogyny.”

We were talking about how prevelent sexual violence is within Western society. Sexual violence, and it’s easy solution, disposability. Rapists are the scum of the earth, irredemable and purity must be protected at all costs. Conveniently, this dovetails with our need to lock up as many Black and brown man as we can.

My friend and I were not talking about Israel. We weren’t talking about rapes that Hamas likely undertook when they launched their offensive on Oct. 7. We weren’t talking about how Israel has used these rapes to try and make sure that a single day in October is more important than the 62 days thereafter, death toll be damned. We weren’t talking about any of this.

The worst thing that can be done to a white woman is rape at the hands of a Black or brown man. And that rape justifies retaliation. Emmett Till, a boy of 14, lost his life to this violent logic. Rape is worse even than murder. A body must be alive to be pure, and that purity must be protected at all costs. Rape is certainly worse than the occasional moments that a man loses his temper and murders his wife. It’s orders of magnitude worse when a horde of terrorists do this to several hundred innocent white women.

Our conversation wasn’t about Israel but also, it is about Israel. Acts of rape have been a key justification for Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza. While Israel buried the victims’ clothing, effectively tampering with the evidence and Reuters has not been able to verify all of the reports of rape, I don’t think anyone should doubt that there was sexual violence on Oct. 7.

The reality is that none of the this debate matters. Rape goes hand in hand with war and atrocity. Where there is violence, there is always also sexual violence; always and everywhere.

When 276 girls were abucted in Nigera nearly a decade ago, rape was a key tactic to force the girls into being kidnapped. Ninety-eight girls remain captured. But I don’t recall their kidnapping being used to justify obliterating Boko Haram and everyone in their neighbourhoods, and also local civil infrastructre and historical monuments (and schools, offices, mosques and churches, etc.)

But remember: Boko Haram’s victims, the school girls, weren’t white.

The worst thing that can happen to a white woman is rape at the hands of a Black or brown man. Israel has long ago lost popular support and so I can imagine, high up in an office tower in Manhattan, a PR firm is being paid in crazy amounts of money and young women and drugs, floating this as a strategy — guys, should we pivot back to the rape narrative? Maybe that’ll help boost our support. It’ll be impossible to challenge!

This is a tale as old as time so to update it, we must add things like, “We believe Israeli women,” in the words of Canada’s foreign affairs minister on Twitter. Mélanie Joly, a white woman, has never once tweeted the word “Palestine.”

We believe Israeli women and, as a few people have said to me, you are a fake feminist and an antisemite if you believe all women except for Israeli women. See how all of this works? Rape as a pissing match. Rape as justification for murder.

Or, rape as a justification for more rape. Because what’s far more sure — if we’re measuring the likely “amounts” of sexual violence — is that the side that has murdered more than 17,000 people are, statistically speaking, more likely to have committed more sexual crimes than the side that has murdered 1200. The side that has undertaken a brutal campaign of violence, driven by racist humiliation tactics and engaged in a ground invasion, has surely committed more rapes than the side that had less than 24 hours to commit its massacre. Hell, to say nothing of the rapes that even children endure while held in Israeli prisons.

If we’re being honest, and far too many people cannot be honest because honesty here is a liability to genocide boosterism, we can say with certainty that the sexual violence being perpetrated right now is not wholly the domain of Hamas.

Indeed, even the photos that Israeli forces have posted of Palestinian men stripped out of their clothes, would violate Israel’s own sexual violence criminal law. From Reuters: “In Israeli criminal law, sexual violence includes rape, but also indecent acts, harrassment and sexually demeaning a person – including forced nudity – among other offences.”

But this is all justified because in the fight of light against the darkness, the worst thing that can be done to a light woman is for a dark man to rape her. It forms the foundation of Canada’s colonial laws, it’s over-incarceration of Black and Indigenous men, the millions of daily humiliations that racialized men must endure in our society — but at least, our colonial country hasn’t invaded anyone in the past seven weeks.

Not so for Israel. And so I’ll be accused of denying rape, minimizing rape, justifying rape — all lies that must be spoken so that the logical infrastructre of Israel’s genocidal, murderous and horrifying campaign remains in tact. Because if we can’t believe Israeli women, we can’t claim to be feminists. And if feminism is on their side and not ours, well, it’s clear which side is on the side of light.