The end of rape is the end of empire
By Y. Cessna
Here in the imperial core, the cascading circumstances of world imbalance ask of us not to turn away. We must, as a point of beginning, bear witness. As such, this piece does include descriptions of acts of sexual violence.
It’s been circling in my head for a long while, I’m pulling down the words. What I choose to place here will be incomplete. Perhaps like many of us, I have read some of the reports of sexual abuse emerging from survivors in Palestine, particularly those outpouring from detention sites, and I am reminded of the necessary work that awaits the movement to end sexual violence. This piece aims to examine how sexual violence is woven into the logic of empire and genocide in the occupation of Palestine, and pose a call that echoes that which has endured throughout resistance movements in and outside of Palestine: to envision the end of rape, we must envision the end of empire itself.
Sexual violence has emerged as one of the focal points of the morality politics of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. As news cycles place sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women and girls on October 7th above the fold, heads of state in Israel and the United States alike have pointed to these acts to garner support for armed retaliation against Palestinians. Widespread reports of acts of sexual violence committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian men, women, and children, however, have received asymmetrical attention in the media.
Andrea Smith perhaps phrased it best. Colonialism “is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.”1 The history of rape is intertwined with the history of colonization; this understanding has been obscured by its characterization in the antirape and public feminist movements. Dominant discussions of rape, particularly those in the US, which exports its feminisms worldwide (a la “#MeToo”), typically center discussion of rape as an act of the interpersonal, as the realization of patriarchy’s most extreme possibility. Solutions to harm usually turn around a carceral feminist call for rapists to be locked behind bars, a line of thought that falls in line with long-held understandings of rape in a criminal-legal framework. From a historical perspective, rape, for the most part, for most of recorded time, has existed in a legal context; some of the earliest surviving written laws contend with what punishment awaits should an act of rape occur. Such analysis is incapable of contending with the central relationship between rape as a tool of war, as a tool of genocide, as such acts rarely enter the courtroom.
Militaries across context, across time have historically considered rape as a legitimate consequence of war.2 One of the first major examinations of rape to gain mainstream attention that dealt in part with this was Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will, which for our purposes here has two useful takeaways: rape was first conceived in the criminal-legal context as a property crime, usually against the survivor’s father; and rape has long been a tool of warfare that typically escapes documentation but has been regarded as a necessary byproduct of conflict, an act of aggression from the “winning” side against women.3 Angela Davis, in Women, Race, and Class, pushes beyond the limitations of Brownmiller’s work, which has long been critiqued as racist and essentialist, to draw connections between militarized conflict, perceived racial inferiority, and the situating of the rape of women on the other side of conflict as a “necessary military duty.”4 It was the U.S. military’s “unwritten policy” to impose a systematic campaign of rape, as rape represented an “extremely effective weapon of mass terrorism.”5 Increasingly, rape during armed conflict is understood not as a consequence of war but as a deliberate military strategy.6
The question of sexual violence in armed conflict is one that tangles threads of national identity, conceptualizations of property, and enforced ideas of gender forged through the legacies of settler colonialism. But more than one of the mere “spoils” of war, rape is a tool of genocide, and has been deployed as such in countless campaigns of elimination. Sexual violence is employed as an instrument of terror as part of the forced dispossession of lands, as a tactic of abuse against civilians of all genders, and further as an act meant to limit the reproductive potential of a particular group of people, all hallmarks of a deliberate operation of destruction aimed at a particular group of people.7 As stated by Palestinian scholar and advocate Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who this year was arrested by the Israeli police for her public condemnation of the ongoing genocide, “our efforts — as feminist activists and as global and local activists — must begin with an examination of global, imperialist, economic power.”8
Decades before the state of Israel was founded, Palestinians organized an “overt and explicit” movement of resistance that continues to this day.9 When considering the history of anti-rape and sexual violence response work in Palestine, an examination that too deserves a much more spacious examination than provided here, such advocacy has often been tied to women’s movements in some way, which in Palestine date back to at least 1929.10 While historians differ on exact timelines, national liberation and social liberation have been an intertwined force within the Palestinian women’s movement and anti-rape and sexual violence response work for decades, with organizers pushing for the understanding that the women’s and feminist movements “could not stress national liberation while divorcing it from social liberation.”11 The movement began to more openly deal with sexual abuse beginning in the late 1980s, with more resources routed to support and document instances of sexual violence against Palestinians; the first crisis line to support Palestnian survivors of sexual violence, the Al-Aman hotline, was started by Palestinian women in 1994.12 While anti-rape work extends beyond the lens of gender to encompass an anti-violence framework, it is crucial to recognize the ongoing legacies of resistance, both within and external to the women’s movement, that have shaped active struggle against the Israeli occupation.
[CW: the following paragraphs contain descriptions of graphic violence.]
The Israeli military has waged a continuing campaign of sexual violence as part of the colonization of Palestine since the Nakba in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, one of the founding leaders of the state of Israel, called for the rape of Palestinian women and girls as part of the process of colonization, and documented such acts by Zionist paramilitaries in his diaries.13 The archive corroborates such acts of violence. An eyewitness to the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9th, 1948 later reported that “women were raped before the eyes of their children before being murdered and dumped down the well;” Zionist paramilitaries shot a pregnant woman and ripped her unborn baby from her womb with a butcher’s knife.14 An investigation spearheaded by the British concluded that at Deir Yassin “sexual atrocities” were commonplace during the process of ethnic cleansing, documenting that “many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered.”15
Many such acts have been documented by Israeli soldiers themselves, though these records are beginning to disappear from state archives as the state of Israel seeks to minimize evidence of the Nakba.16 Such documents persist, such as this unmarked, undated excerpt that describes the Safsaf massacre, which took place on October 29th, 1948. 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.
The above are fragments of what was a systematic deployment of sexual violence during the Nakba; rape and the threat of rape were used to dispossess indigenous inhabitants of their homelands and contributed to the mass killings and forced exodus of Palestinians in the years surrounding 1948.
In the decades since, the campaign of sexual violence has been unceasing. There exist extensive oral history archives that document a continuing deployment of sexual violence.17 Israeli soldiers during and after the First Intifada (1987-1993) used rape or the threat of rape to extract “security information” from Palestinian women, a process that has been named Isqat, the “downfall.”18 Such abuses exist in all corners of the occupation, from checkpoints to house raids to jail visitations to detention sites, and have prompted Palestinians to orchestrate networks of care in response, including crisis lines and shelters to support survivors of sexual abuse. In the commonplace practice of detaining Palestinians, particularly Palestinian men, the Israeli state regularly subjects detainees to a systematic campaign of sexual abuse and humiliation, a practice that stretches back decades.19As hundreds of Palestinian children are imprisoned in Israeli detention centers, a 2014 report estimated that nearly 40% are thought to experience sexual abuse at the hands of Israeli authorities, with many forced to strip naked while detained.20 At the Moscovia Detention Centre in West Jerusalem, reports emerged that in 2018 an Israeli guard raped a 15 year-old boy with an object before interrogating him for four hours.21
In the past year, in the Sde Teiman military base, where thousands of Gazans have been imprisoned, detainees have reported repeated sexual abuse at the hands of prison guards. A group of nine Israeli soldiers raped a Palestinian man, as shown in security footage that circulated in August 2024; another video circulated of a rabbi blessing one of the same Israeli soldiers involved in the group rape. The detainee was hospitalized with lung damage and ruptured bowels, among other injuries.22 Sexual abuse is part of a systematic campaign of violence in sites of detention; at Sde Teiman alone, Palestinians detainees have reported that Israeli soldiers have forced them to strip naked, grabbed and beaten their genitals, and committed anal rape and acts of group rape.23 An unreleased UNRWA report revealed Israeli guards have raped multiple Palestinian detainees using an electrified metal pole, killing at least one man.24 Such accounts are pouring out of Israeli detention sites. For just as many that have been documented, there remain countless others.
Such violence has continually been justified as necessary for the creation and preservation of the Israeli state; to give a complete account necessitates a far larger footprint than the scope of this article. Such violence continues to be justified in those ways now. The head of the IDF’s military rabbinate, Rabbi Iyal Krim, has claimed that the Torah permits rape against non-Jewish women in times of war.25 Hanoch Milwidsky, lawmaker and member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, has defended the abuses at Sde Teiman: when asked if it was legitimate to rape detainees, he responded that against the Palestinian resistance, “Yes! Everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”26
Empire is empire; empire is global. The state of Israel is the largest cumulative beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving more than $310 billion from the pockets of the U.S. government, the majority of such aid taking the form of US-produced weaponry and military equipment.27 The United States and Israel have been in lockstep for decades, becoming more intertwined particularly after 9/11, with U.S. president Bush and Israeli prime minister Sharon publicly aligning to counter “terrorism.”28 While the U.S. military and the Israeli military are distinct in many ways, namely that the U.S. military is a voluntary, professionalized force and the Israeli Defense Force is draft-based, the two entities regularly ally to train together. This enduring partnership has yielded exchange of tactics from long-range airstrikes, electronic attacks, maritime strategy, and use of force; some tactics of brutality employed by the cops in the U.S. stem directly from the IDF.29, 30Particularly since 2022, there has been a strategic focus within U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the linchpin of U.S. military operations in southwest Asia & North Africa, to maintain the “longstanding, ironclad partnership with the IDF,” as stated by U.S. CENTCOM commander Michael Kurilla.31 The largest US-Israeli joint military exercise, Juniper Oak 23.2, was completed in January of 2023, with approximately 6,400 U.S. service members training together with 1,500 Israeli troops.32
The United States and the state of Israel have a distinct but shared history of apartheid and often share logics of control. Both state apparatuses have deployed rape as a tool of genocide since their founding, and continue to enact such abuse on scales encompassing international conflict and as a cornerstone of the domestic carceral systems. The pitfalls of the movement to end sexual violence in the United States merit, and have received, separate examination; still, it is these shortcomings, namely a narrow focus on rape as an act between individuals separate from systems, omission of discussions of rape in the prison system, in which at least 200,000 inmates are sexually assaulted each year behind bars,33 and the U.S. military, in which U.S. soldiers both rape civilians during armed conflict as well as assault their fellow servicepersons, that prevent us from mobilizing a legitimate vision of the end of such abuses on a global scale. Many have called upon the movement to expand its analysis for decades; this work only grows more pressing.
At time of publication the Israeli state is continuing its operation of atrocity and terror at Sde Teiman with no sign of ceasing. The detention camp has drawn comparison to the horrors of Abu Ghraib during the U.S.-led genocide in Iraq, where detainees too faced a campaign of sexual violence, including forced stripping and rape, among other abuses. Too often, here in the United States, rape is considered an act between individuals separate from systems. It is this myopia that prevents the movement to end sexual violence from legitimately staking a claim into a liberatory future. As emphasized by many, to end sexual violence on a global scale we must move beyond an engrained sense of violence as only interpersonal; such thinking obscures the role of the state. Crucial is the adoption of the long-held understanding, as stated and theorized by advocates across time, across the world, in and outside of Palestine, of rape as a key tool of settler colonialism and genocide.
As I write this, it has been 27,866 days – 76 years – of a systematic campaign of elimination waged by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people. A world in which sexual violence ends (such a world must be possible, we must believe it to be so) must be in turn a world without empire.
1 Andrea Smith, “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 70
2 Women2000, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict: United Nations Response Published to Promote the Goals of the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action (United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1998),
3 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Simon & Schuster, 1975), 27.
4 Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1981), 177.
5 Davis, Women, Race and Class, 177.
6 Amnesty International, “Lives Blown Apart: Crimes Against Women in Times of Conflict,” (2004), 15.
7 Jonathan M.H. Short, “Sexual Violence as Genocide: The Developing Law of International Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 8, no. 503 (2003): 509-510
8 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109.
9 Ibid., 8.
10 Ellen L. Fleischmann, “The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1929-39,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 3 (2000), 16.
11 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence, 11.
12 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence, 71.
13 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al., “Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” Jadaliyya, November 17th, 2014
14 Ibid.
15 State of Palestine Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, “Gender Based Violence,” The Arms Trade Treaty, n.d.
16 Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs,” Haaretz, July 5th, 2019.
17 See: Lynd, S., S. Bahour, and A. Lynd (eds) 1994. Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch.
18 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence, 15.
19 Daniel J.N. Weishut, “Sexual Torture of Palestinian Men by Israeli Authorities,” Reproductive Health Matters 23, no. 46 (2015): 71.
20 International Middle East Media Centre, reported via Middle East Children’s Alliance, “Israel: 240 Palestinian Children ‘Sexually Abused’ in Jersualem Detention Centres, Group Claims,” December 2nd, 2014,
21 Defense for Children International Palestine, “Israeli interrogator sexually assaults Palestinian child detainee,” February 10th, 2021.
22 Lisa Hajjar and Basil Farraj, “State Secrets and Crimes — Rape at Israel’s Sde Teiman Prison,” Middle East Research and Information Project, August 14th, 2024.
23 B’Tselem, “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps,” B’Tselem, August 2024, 44-62.
24 Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, “Inside the Base where Israel has Detained Thousands of Gazans,” New York Times, June 6th, 2024.
25 Ferdoos Abed-Rabo Al Issa and Elizabeth Beck, “Sexual Violence as a War Weapon in Conflict Zones: Palestinian Women’s Experience Visiting Loved Ones in Prisons and Jails,” Journal of Women and Social Work (2020): 4.
26 Deborah Patta and Tucker Reals, “Israeli lawmaker defends alleged rape of Hamas prisoner as far-right protestors rage over IDF troops’ detention,” CBS News, July 30th, 2024.
27 Johnathan Masters and Will Merrow, “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts,” Council on Foreign Relations, May 31st, 2024.
28 U.S. Department of State, “President Bush Discusses Middle East Peace with Prime Minister Sharon,” July 29th, 2003.
29 David Vergun, “Largest U.S.-Israeli Exercise in History Concludes,” U.S. Department of Defense, January 26th, 2023.
30 Jewish Institute for National Security of America, “Law Enforcement Exchange Program Conferences,” (2009).
31 U.S. Central Command, “Press Release: U.S. Central Command Engaged with Israeli Defense Forces,” November 16th, 2022.
32 Vergun.
33 Allen J. Beck et. al, “Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011-12,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2013.