Since the Gaza border wall was breached, we have observed a continuous flow of Israeli disinformation and propaganda being disseminated throughout all major Western news outlets, which has taken the form of wholly unsubstantiated lies and feeble attempts at “proof”, all aimed at diverting attention from the actual devastating violence and destruction of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, and at delegitimizing the Palestinian struggle for decolonization in the international political sphere.
Gender/sex/sexuality have been a major terrain used as part of a Zionist counter-terrorism strategy amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza today. Understanding how it was used is crucial in launching any challenge to the reductive framing of what I call the “womenandchildrenandqueers” within the context of Zionist counterinsurgency.
It is crucial because at the time of writing Israel has increasingly consolidated its weaponization of women’s and LGBTQ rights in its genocidal agenda.
Three key tropes have been deployed within imperialist feminism and the pinkwashing tactics by the Israeli settler colonial state in the past weeks especially: the Palestinian male as sexual predator, as inherently violent, and as homophobic monster-terrorist .
Mass rape allegations
Following the Alqsa Flood Operation on October 7, 2023, allegations accusing Palestinian fighters of mass rape circulated virally across media, including by several self-proclaimed feminists.
On October 9, the Southern California based Interim Revolutionary Feminist Committee released a statement – “Tear feminism out of the hands of the colonizer” – which directly debunked the support for claims of mass rape which even Israeli media sources had not confirmed.
Although the allegations may yet find substantiation, the question that many have asked is: How can the Hamas mass rape narrative circulate so successfully with little to no documentation or proof, and become a pretext for widespread bombardment and documented and live-streamed war crimes? And how is mass violence inflicted on countless innocents, including thousands of women, deemed an appropriate response to alleged sexual violence?
As of December 6, 2023, allegations and accusations of rape remain unsubstantiated given the lack of independent investigation; a CNN report on November 18 claiming sexual violence on October 7 relied on witnesses and “experts” either lacking in credibility or having ties to the Israeli government. For example CNN interviews Cochav Elkayam-Levy and identifies her as an “expert in human rights law who organized a civil committee to document evidence”. Elkayam-Levy has worked for the Israeli government’s Attorney General’s Office in the International Law Department, providing legal justifications for Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians. Elkayam-Levy went so far as to present an outdated image of dead female Kurdish fighters and falsely presenting them to be raped women at the Nova festival.
On December 4, the Daily Mail reported that Israeli state “investigators” – who come with their own trackrecord of outright lies – allege evidence that settler men as well as women were raped by Palestinian fighters who had broken through the Gaza border fence early in the day.
On November 29, a UN commission expressed its commitment to investigate instances of sexual violence by Hamas, to which Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, responded by accusing the UN commission of antisemitism and stating that Israel will not cooperate with it.
There is a historical context to these claims that can be found in a long history of colonial feminism. When colonial feminists like Hilary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg and Michal Herzog, address the causes and consequences of sexualized and gendered violence, they do so only as a means to advance their colonialist agenda, now rebranded as women-friendly. In the context of Palestine/Israel, this agenda hinges on assigning the category of womanhood exclusively to Israeli women, extending internationalist feminist solidarity (and its material benefits) to them only, and, concomitantly, excluding Palestinian women from the same category of womanhood and its residual scope of feminist solidarity.
This persists despite numerous verified, factchecked, reverified, substantiated reports that document extensive and pervasive sexual violence against Palestinian women dating chiefly from the 1948 Nakba to the date of this writing.
Even statements from an IOF chief rabbi, allowing Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian women, fail to alter this narrative. Notably, the dehumanization of Palestinians serves as a precursor to genocide, as underscored by Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant’s proclamation on October 9 during the announcement of a complete siege on Gaza, labeling Israel’s adversaries ‘human animals’.
The male Palestinian monster-terrorist-sexual predator
If Palestinian women are denied their womanhood, where do Palestinian men stand? Palestinian men are portrayed outside of the category of human-ess altogether. Not only are they consistently cast as perpetrators of rape, portrayed as monstrous figures, but they are also precluded from being recognized as victims of sexual violence. Numerous instances of sexual violence against Palestinian men and boys in Israeli captivity have been extensively documented. This systematic sexual torture and rape by Israeli Occupation Forces has been corroborated by accounts from Palestinian men and boys released during the recent exchange deal. Instances of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian men and boys by the IOF have also been documented in images that surfaced recently on December 7 showing Israeli soldiers stripping dozens of captured civilian men of their clothes and taking them to an undisclosed location.
Despite the absence of evidence thus far supporting allegations of mass rape on October 7, settler women and their feminist supporters in the West insist that we acknowledge their accounts, emphasizing the feminist principle of believing all women.
In fact, there is a long history of black and brown men being convicted and lynched based on white women’s false rape accusations. The CIA has left detailed documentation of their extensive anti-communist repression and disinformation campaigns throughout the past century. Some of these agency-fabricated media reports have weaponized false accusations of rape against colonized brown and black men, one of which was the accusation of raping Angolan women made against Cuban troops defending the Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1975—an accusation widely reported without scrutiny in Western media, and only later verified to be a full fabrication by the CIA. More recently in 2011, the US used unsubstantiated allegations of Viagra-fueled mass rape by Muammar Gaddafi mercenaries to sell its military intervention in Libya.
It is crucial here to recognize that anti-colonial history has taught us that sexual violence is often not talked about unless it can be located in racialized identities. The spectre of rape in conjunction with prevailing anti-Arab/Islamophobic stereotypes, falsely depicts Palestinian men as an omnipresent rape threat to Israeli women in order to further justify the settler colonial state’s efforts to control and subjugate them through incarceration and colonization.
The depiction of the Arab/Palestinian man as an imagined sexual monster-terrorist is a textbook case of imperialist feminism. First identified in queer feminist philosopher Jasbir Puar’s foundational work Terrorist Assemblages, the monster-terrorist-sexual predator axis is deployed to vilify Palestinian masculinities, equating them with savagery and unrestrained sexual impulses.
When the colonized are portrayed and represented as beasts and hypersexual rapists rather than as humans, it serves as justification for their elimination.
Manufacturing feminist consent for genocide
The Zionist state and its supporters employ the manufacturing of consent as their primary tactic. This involves utilizing media to generate support for the implementation of genocide, achieved through rhetorical strategies that transform falsehoods into perceived facts. This propaganda machine relies on perpetuating such unfounded claims, like the viral accusations of mass rape of settler women by Arab men, which easily resonate with Western audiences who are primed and prepped for this through decades of entrenched racist feminist depictions representing Arab men as savage sexually violent terrorists.
This weaponization of rape allegations has been revived in the past weeks in unprecedented ways. Such propaganda not only re-produces existing distortions, disinformation and lies, but it also serves to incite complicity and consent to the genocide of Palestinians, manipulating public opinion through distorted narration of events and the selective omission of historical facts, all of which further conceal the IOF’s proven trackrecord of rape over the 75+ years of occupation and colonization.
As, Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd stated on December 4: “The intense resurrection of rape allegations is meant to distract from the massive massacres the Israeli army is committing in Gaza right now. But the former are unsubstantiated tales and the latter is televised in real time, and one picture speaks a thousand words”.
Womenandchildren and dangerous men
On November 2, Israel accused Hamas of using over 100 women and children as human shields in Gaza, a claim frequently used by the IOF following every onslaught on the overpopulated strip to legitimize their bombardment of civilians, especially women and children. With the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardment on Gaza exceeding 17.000 according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, it is often the case that media emphasize the killing of innocent “womenandchildren” in distinction to the (justifiable) annihilation of Palestinian men.
In an article titled ‘Can Palestinian men be victims? Gendering Israel’s war on Gaza’, gender studies researcher, Maya Mikdashi draws on the notion of ‘womenandchildren’, coined by feminist international relations scholar Cynthia Enloe, and applies it to the Palestinian context. Here, she writes, “womenandchildren” accomplishes “[t]he massifying of women and children into an undistinguishable group… and the reproduction of the male Palestinian body (and the male Arab body more generally) as always already dangerous”. Importantly, “the difference between Palestinian womenandchildren and Palestinian men is not in the production of corpses, but rather in the circulation of those corpses within dominant and mainstream discursive frames that determine who can be publicly mourned as ‘victims’ of Israel’s war machine”.
The ‘womenandchildren’ trope often villainizes Palestinian/Arab men, perpetuating a patriarchal standard that presupposes colonized men are undeserving of qualities like sympathy, compassion, innocence, defenselessness, protection, vulnerability, or mournability when killed by the IOF. This view stems from the perception, described above, of Palestinian/Arab men as inherently violent and aggressive, and invariably categorized as combatants. In fact, Israel classifies all Palestinian males killed between the ages of 15 to 60 as combatants. This assumption operates on the premise that men are always potential insurgents, rendering them a justifiable target for killing/elimination or incarceration at any age.
Additionally, the trope reinforces flattened views of gender and sex, infantilizing Palestinian women by equating their agency and defenselessness to that of children, and erasing the existence of female combatants as well as the integral role that women always play in all resistance and liberation movements.
Certainly, in Palestine and the diaspora, every Palestinian, including womenandchildren, is regarded as a potential threat, treated as expendable combatants, and subjected to indiscriminate killings, targeted maimings and mass incarcerations, consistently depicted as a criminal or a terrorist underclass. The distinction though, between Palestinian men and womenandchildren, primarily lies in the hierarchy of mournable deaths and the shaping of gendered victimhood. Gendered victimhood, wherein femininity is linked with victimhood and masculinity with violence, has always been, and remains still, foundationally marked by racial, colonial, and class distinctions.
However, my appeal to incorporate (presumably cis-hetero) Palestinian adult males into the realm of compassion, grievability and inherent worth —especially as most Palestinian men are not active combatants in organized militias—does not imply an actual lack of empathy for Palestinian male combatants. In the context of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, the right to also mourn and honor male worthiness and militancy remains justified if not ever more important to the current terrain of Palestinian liberation.
It is, in fact, essential to recognize here that in every Palestinian body, every community, every home, resistance prevails. Avoiding the distraction and political pitfalls of always already distinguishing between the Palestinian resistance (men) and civilians (womenandchildren) is imperative. Every Palestinian is a civilian.
Pinkwashing and the Palestinian homophobic-monster-terrorist
On November 5, a sketch by an Israeli comedy show mocking queer and trans pro-Palestinian activists went viral; it depicted them as naïve supporters of their own oppression (under an apparently LGBTQ-unfriendly Hamas) and features two hosts of a fictional student news program at a US university who declare that “everyone is welcome right now: LGBTQH” (the H stands for Hamas), and that “Jews make the world dirty… I’m not antisemitic, I’m racist fluid”. The hosts then interview a masked Hamas representative, expressing admiration for him, unaware of the fact that he is using homophobic language towards them, even as the resident monster-terrorist states “We will throw you from the roof, you homosexual dirt.”
Pinkwashing is a global propaganda campaign aiming to divert focus from Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine by reshaping Israel’s image as a progressive and ostensibly “gay-friendly” nation, contrasting it with Islamophobic perception in Europe & the US that paints Palestinian, Arab and generic Islamic culture as inherently and undeniably homophobic.
Pinkwashing in human rights frameworks is rooted in an imperialist feminist tactic of equating the position of settler women with colonized Palestinian women, queer/trans settlers with colonized queers/trans people, both weaponized to obscure violence committed by settler women and queer/trans settlers against Palestinian women, children and cis-hetero men, and to manufacturing feminist and queer/trans consent from the West to slaughter Palestinians.
Leading imperialist nations like the US and Israel, as part of their collaborative ‘War on Terror’ doctrines, likewise operate homonationalist regimes that reproduce and disseminate their constructions of Arab men as sexually violent, always already homophobic, deviant perverted terrorists. As Queers in Palestine assert, in response to the disturbing images of Israeli soldiers holding the pride flag on the ruins of Gaza: there is no pride with genocide, and there is no pride in settler colonialism.
In this sense, the womenandchildren category of defenselessness and innocence can be extended to queer subjects, making it womenandchildrenandqueers.
Vilifying resistance
The portrayal of Palestinian men as rapists, homophobes, and distinct from womenandchildrenandqueers renders them inhuman subjects necessitating control and occupation. This dehumanization tactic operates in depicting the cis-straight Palestinian male subject, and particularly the hypervisible Palestinian resistance fighter, as always a violent terrorist.
The media’s fabrication of a sexual threat attributed to Palestinian resistance fighters serves to bolster the genocidal campaign conducted by Israel and the U.S. war machine, facilitated through media outlets. Hypersexualizing the bodies of male Palestinian resistance fighters to the extent of dehumanization becomes a strategic imperative for the advancement of the Zionist project.
For decades, mainstream media in both Israel and the West has consistently denied the characterization of any Palestinian resistance movement, a resistance that is guaranteed by international law, as a revolutionary anti-colonial force. Contrary to the narrative that establishes it as a ‘two-sided’ conflict, what unfolds on the ground is a unilateral aggression and totalitarian occupation by a heavily militarized and genocidal ethno-supremacist colonial state, sustained by Western support.
It is imperative, especially in the present context, to assert the anti-colonial nature of the Palestinian resistance movement. Drawing parallels with well-known historical movements like the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the Viet Cong in Vietnam, underscores the importance of revolutionary violence in anti-imperialist resistance.
The vilification of Palestinian manhood serves a dual imperialist agenda. On one hand, it aims to garner support for the genocidal aggression against Palestinians. Simultaneously, it functions as a strategy to undermine the legitimacy of any Palestinian armed resistance and its anti-colonial quest for freedom and liberation. In response to these tactics, our collective responsibility as queers, trans people and feminists, both regionally and globally, is to expose the Zionist propaganda, particularly its colonial feminist and pinkwashing dimensions. We must be steadfast in our commitments and material support of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
