Five IDF soldiers were recently facing trial for raping and filming a Palestinian man in an Israeli detention centre. The case was thrown out by the Israeli courts despite the evidence and international outrage surrounding the incident. This speaks to a system where sexual violence against men is used to dehumanise them; it is a defining feature of the Palestinian genocide and exposes the hypermasculine patriarchal violence inherent to zionism.
This article contains details of sexual violence, genocide, and human rights abuses – reader discretion is advised.
Last week, the Israeli courts dismissed a sexual assault case against five IDF soldiers who raped a Palestinian man in an Israeli so-called detention centre in 2024. The assault was captured on camera, and the footage quickly circulated online. This is one of the most publicised examples of a persisting trend of IDF soldiers sexually abusing Palestinian men and women in Israeli facilities. While it is hardly a shock that a nation brazenly committing a genocide against Palestine would dismiss this documented violent rape in a court of law, it is no less devastating. Israel’s actions in Palestine, which have been identified as genocide by numerous international bodies, have long included sexual assault and rape as key tactics to dehumanise and traumatise Palestinians.
Other reports in Israeli run detention centres and prisons of sexual assault and rape are very common. One of the most brutal cases was the alleged rape of Dr Al-Bursh, former head of Orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. Reports from HaMoked, an Israel-based human rights organisation that provides free legal aid and advocacy for Palestinians, cite that Al-Bursh was dragged into the main yard of Ofer Prison bleeding from the waist down and unable to stand. He died moments later. It is heavily suspected that Dr Al-Bursh was fatally sodomised by the prison guards entrusted with his care. No justice has been served for his death.
We cannot underestimate the inhumanity of these actions. A man who dedicated his life to heal the sick, working under the oppressive pre-genocide conditions in Gaza, before tirelessly digging graves for Palestinians Israel had murdered. Arrested under the pretence that he posed a ‘security risk’, he lost his life brutally and needlessly. He is one in a sea of thousands of Palestinian lives taken by a settler-coloniser state that continues to dirty its hands with more and more blood of innocent people. These reports are shocking, but they speak to a pervasive culture in Israel that sexual violence is a tool to dehumanise Palestinian men. Such tactics are deeply woven into the fabric of hypermasculine, homophobic, misogynistic zionism that rules Israel and continues to be the driving force behind some of the most egregious and well-documented crimes against humanity in recent history.
Why are the IDF doing this?
Inherently, the IDF do not have a moral compass. As the frontline soldiers of an extremely public genocide against the Palestinian people, we cannot try to rationalise their behaviour in relation to morality. They simply do not have any. Sexual violence is a persistent feature of genocide and conflict, and has been throughout human history. Reports coming from the ongoing conflict in Sudan have shown that rape is a defining feature of the war, and women have responded by taking their lives. Similarly, rape has been reported as a key tool used by Russian soldiers in the Ukraine war. Looking further back, it was used in the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Holocaust. The bottom line is that rape is an inherent part of colonial and genocidal assaults on people and their communities.
The IDF are using rape as a tool to dehumanise the Palestinian people. Rape is ultimately not about sexual gratification; it is about asserting power over the victim. Through the continued acts of sexual violence committed by the IDF in Gaza, the aim is to humiliate the honour of Palestinians. So innate to this is the idea that, particularly for men who are victims of rape, it diminishes their standing as a man or demonstrates an inherent lesser form of masculinity that allows or even warrants sexual violence. We know that this is not true, and it is the correct understanding that victims of sexual violence are in no way made lesser through the assault they have endured.
We need to talk about Abu Ghraib
As I read about the five men and the rape of the Palestinian man that inspired this article, I was reminded of a different story from the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq. Abu Ghraib is a name infamous to many people across the Arab world today because of what happened there. During the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib was a prison run by the United States to house individuals deemed to be high-security prisoners. The prison became a notorious facility associated with suspected human rights abuses. This would be confirmed when the Associated Press published a November 2003 report on the conditions and tactics used in Abu Ghraib and other American-run prison facilities in Iraq. While the report initially gained limited traction internationally, a 60 Minutes feature the following year, which included several images taken of the abusive acts performed there, raised the profile of the human rights abuses committed.
The nature of the abuse that the prisoners suffered included sodomy with inanimate objects, rape, forcing inmates to simulate sexual acts on one another, attacks from dogs, smearing inmates with human faeces, and homicide. All of these acts were captured on camera with American soldiers proudly posing next to their victims. Following the abuses coming to light, some of the individuals involved received short prison sentences in the US and dishonourable discharge from service. These acts were largely swept under the rug by the United States government, which was keen to skirt past the human rights abuses quickly, so as not to muddy the already murky waters of an illegal invasion in Iraq.
Abu Ghraib came to mind because, just like the gang rape of the Palestinian prisoner, the abusers in Iraq were brazen and smiling on camera. In both cases, the perpetrators did not, and have not, received punishments (if any) that match the severity and brutality of their crimes. In both cases, the privacy and the dignity of their victims have been totally dismissed, with the lowest and most painful moments of their lives projected across the internet, where they will live forever to be looked at again and again. Even now, over twenty years after Abu Ghraib, the images are infamous and well known to millions of people from the Middle East, where they were shown on national news platforms.
A secondary impact of the horrors committed by the US military at Abu Ghraib is the way it has framed homosexuality in Middle Eastern societies. LGBTQ+ individuals already face significant social barriers in most countries in the Middle East, but seeing this simulated homosexuality in the news, and seeing it used specifically to dehumanise the men in the images, furthers the idea that it is both shameful and a perversion. For many young queer men in Iraq and other countries, the images of Abu Ghraib were the first time they encountered a conversation about their identity as gay people. Not through love or desire, but through torture and dehumanisation.
Divorcing the horror of sexual violence from queer identity
Persistent discourse about the sexuality of the rapists in both Palestine and Abu Ghraib, amongst other examples of male-on-male sexual violence in war scenarios, is both misleading and damaging. As mentioned earlier, rape is ultimately not about sexual gratification; it is about the exertion of power. The act does not speak to the nature of sexuality of the attacker, but to their character as an individual. Historically, the Muslim world has had a complex relationship with homosexuality, specifically regarding how the Western world weaponises queer identities differently depending upon the context to dehumanise Muslim men and Muslim societies.
In the era of European colonialism, particularly when the Ottoman Empire was a significant economic rival to Christian Europe, the narrative was that Muslim men were sexually loose deviants who often engaged in ‘immoral’ gay sex. Muslim men were characterised in these ways to demonstrate a lack of civility and morals in contrast to the staunch heterosexuality of White European men. Regardless of the realities of queer identities, either in Europe or the Muslim world, the conception of Muslim men as homo-erotic was a key tool for the colonial powers to justify involvement in the nations to the east of the continent. In tandem, the long-standing and racist stereotype that Muslim men are inherently sexually violent, especially in relation to women, emerged at this time and still informs how people interact with Muslim men to this day. The orientalist view of Muslim sexuality has left a lasting impact on the position occupied by Muslim men in global society.
The pendulum now swings in the opposite direction when Western voices discuss queer identities and Muslim communities. LGBTQ+ rights are a lightning rod used to brandish the Middle East as a brutish and dangerous place, ignoring the nuances and actual challenges that face queer people in conservative Muslim nations. Particularly in relation to the Gaza genocide, Israel has consistently rainbow-washed their global presence to curry favour with the West. Utilising Israel’s more progressive stances on gay rights, they weaponise queer rights in the nation to demonise Palestine and their Arab neighbours. Israel has a long history of using gay rights as a site of division without actually having a meaningful conversation about how sending missiles to Gaza or Lebanon will do nothing to further the rights of LGBTQ+ people in these countries.
When we see Israeli soldiers using male-on-male acts of sexual violence to publicly and savagely dehumanise Palestinians, any façade about truly respecting the gay community is quickly lost. This is why we cannot allow the conversation about the IDF’s sexual crimes to be superseded by speculation or association with the perpetrators and queer identities.
Rape, Israel, and the Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt, upon observing the Nuremberg trials after the conclusion of the Second World War, identified the idea of the ‘banality of evil’, a theory that argues that in genocide, most evil acts are not committed by sociopaths but by thoughtless bureaucrats following orders. To expand on her idea, in Israel, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is so banal that it is near ubiquitous. The very nature of Israel as a state is predicated on a foundation of dismissing the Palestinian people as human beings. Through this structure, dehumanisation is the persistent message that Israelis are spoon-fed when discussing the people whose land they have stolen. Cultural chauvinism is the context through which the ongoing genocide in Gaza and systemic settler-colonialism in the West Bank are wielded. The violent rape of Palestinians is normalised and dismissed in the midst of this contextual scrubbing away of Palestinian personhood by the Israeli state.
While the men who are committing these acts of sexual and physical violence against Palestinians are entirely responsible for their own actions, and in a just world would be appropriately punished for them, the structures that shaped them have made their acts possible. Rape culture is a feature of human society in every single country around the world. It is one of the most deadly facets of patriarchy that women navigate every single day. Combined with a cultural framework of acute xenophobia, a history of weaponising queer identities to further political means, and the genocidal foundations upon which Israel is built, the rape of Palestinian men is not only normalised but is an eventuality.
The same is true of Palestinian women, who remain the most severely impacted victims of Israel’s acts of genocide and the wider apartheid of Palestinians by Israel. Under zionism the Palestinian woman is the embodiment of the Palestinian family, an institution that zionism seeks to dismantle. Women in Gaza are systemically being raped by IDF soldiers in Gaza, so much so that the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has identified sexual violence as one of the core tools used in the Gaza genocide. The report also identifies that the victims are not restricted by age or gender, with many instances of children being victims of rape. Zionism creates a world order that encourages this behaviour, free from legal implications and shielded from international condemnation by powerful allies in the form of the United States and its allies, who remain reluctant to even call the genocide in Gaza what it is.
When Arendt devised the concept of the banality of evil, she did so observing Adolf Eichmann, whom she described as terrifyingly normal. That is what strikes me the most about the IDF soldiers who are on the frontlines of genocide in Palestine. The rapists aren’t sexual deviants on the margins of society, drawn into Gaza and the West Bank to act out their perverse fantasies. They are average men and women who are the product of a nation state that predicates its entire existence on the banality of evil. So effective in normalising the dehumanisation of Palestinians that the gang rape of a vulnerable incarcerated man does not register as worthy of criminal prosecution. Rape has always been a manifestation of patriarchy; in Israel, it is also a byproduct of systemic racism. Though the evil is banal, it is not any less disgusting.
