Atrocity Propaganda

Mass Rape Allegations Weaponised to Demonise Palestinians

View of an area of Gaza City flattened by Israeli bombs and missiles in recent days. Photo credit: Belal al Sabbagh

On 7 October, a surprise attack on the Israeli military was launched by Hamas and other militias based in Gaza in protest of the essential imprisonment of 2.1 million Palestinians in the small patch of land known as the Gaza Strip and the continuing attacks on Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli response has involved not only the indiscriminate bombardment of neighbourhoods in Gaza, killing 2200 so far, but in addition a propaganda offensive in which the Palestinian resistance is accused of atrocities against civilians, such as supposedly having decapitated 40 babies and engaged in mass rape at a music festival, that there is thus far scant or no evidence they committed. That is not to say that war crimes against civilians were not committed; there is evidence that both sides have committed them. Rather, the point is that allegations of war crimes by combatants are weaponised against Palestinians but not against Israelis. Below, I take a detailed look at these claims and the evidence base for them, their use by the Israeli government and others as a means of smearing the Palestinian people as a whole, and the extent to which they have been accepted uncritically by constituencies that otherwise stand for justice. The blind acceptance and propagation of these claims has been particularly widespread among feminists.

First, I will briefly summarise what led up to this historical moment, as understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is necessary to contextualise these claims and their impact.

A Brief History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Long before Israel’s founding in 1948, there was conflict between Jews who settled in Palestine and its native Arab inhabitants. What is at the heart of the conflict is the same today as it was in the early 1900s when European Jews began immigrating to Palestine: Many settlers who moved there from Europe didn’t simply want to live there; they wanted Palestinians to not live there any longer. In other words, they wanted to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs. Predictably—for much the same happened in what is now the US and Canada many years earlier—the result was violent conflict between the settlers and the natives that continues to this day. And, much as in the US and Canada, the vastly greater military might of the colonisers meant a steady shrinkage in the amount of land allotted to the natives.

These maps show the increasing shrinking of Palestine from the creation of Israel, to include the massive fragmentation of the West Bank by illegal Israeli settlements since 1967.

The Israeli regime has been described as an apartheid state by several human rights organisations, given that, much like the South African apartheid regime during the 20th century, it enforces a system of ethnic segregation between Jews and Palestinians. This has translated into the geographic isolation of these groups of Palestinians from one another in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the increasingly fragmented and shrinking—as a result of expanding illegal settlements— West Bank. Israeli apartheid has also involved the theft of resources such as water, denial of Palestinian citizenship in Israel or a future Palestinian state, economic oppression such as the blockade of Gaza and the destruction of farmers’ crops, control of Palestinians’ movement through widespread military checkpoints (machsom) and, above all, the use of systematic violence and repression in an attempt to maintain Israel’s iron grip on the Palestinians. Moreover, to maintain public support from both Israelis and Israel’s backers in the US and other Western countries, Israel continually demonises Palestinians, characterising them as “terrorists” or subhuman (whereas, on the contrary, Jews are portrayed as the “chosen people,” superior to Palestinians), and conversely portraying Israel as the victim, an instance of the “DARVO” (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) tactic often employed by perpetrators of domestic violence. Let’s now examine the specific employment of these propaganda tactics over the past week.

The “Mass Rape” Allegation

One claim made about the past week’s events was that, during a battle between the Israeli military and Hamas and allied fighters that took place around Re’im military base near the border with Gaza, the latter raped several Israeli women at a nearby music festival. This claim first appeared in an article in Tablet, a conservative Zionist publication based in the US.

The article describes the alleged incident as follows:

I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies.

The author of this article, Liel Leibovitz, provides no additional information about the alleged rapes beyond this choppy narrative of  “one survivor,” but goes on to say “Several of these rape victims appear to have been executed.” He provides no explanation of what it was about their appearance that made him believe that they had been executed. It is hard to imagine a rape allegation more vague or lacking in detail and, although any rape victim is entitled to anonymity, the lack of any information about this person (e.g., was the person a witness or a victim, or male or female?) seems odd. It was this article which set off a social media domino effect after Jewish-American actress Amy Schumer recounted and commented on the article’s description of the incident to her 13.1 million Instagram followers.

The account of this alleged incident in an Israeli newspaper, the Times of Israel, asserts that videos showing a woman with blood on her shorts and another woman, identified as Shani Louk, “stripped down to her underwear” constitute evidence of sexual assault, but provides no other information pointing to sexual assaults having occurred. The article characterises the Palestinian men as “terrorists” 11 times, with 11 other mentions of the words “terrorist” or “terrorists” on the web page where it was posted. Other accounts regarding Louk claim that she was executed. Although she was badly injured, later reports, including from her mother, indicate that she was alive and in critical condition in  a Gaza hospital. The claim went viral on social media and is still being bandied about. However, one news outlet, the Los Angeles Times, has retracted its report of the alleged rape.

Much remains unclear about what took place during the battle that occurred in the vicinity of the music festival on 7 October. Although a Human Rights Watch report and various media articles quote eyewitnesses who suggest that many people were killed, and the rescue agency Zaka reported having found approximately 260 bodies, whether any rapes occurred and, if so, how many, is difficult to say—the Israeli military has stated that it does not yet have evidence that rapes occurred. My point, however, is that regardless of whether or not the rape allegations are true, they have served as weapons in the ongoing propaganda campaign to demonise Palestinians and make harm done to them politically palatable to Western audiences, including feminists.

The Los Angeles Times has retracted its report of the alleged rape.

The “40 Decapitated Babies” Claim

Another claim that went viral, first made by Israeli reserve soldier David Ben Zion to Israeli reporter Nicole Zedek and subsequently reiterated by the Israeli government and by US President Joe Biden, was that 40 infants were killed, many of them ostensibly beheaded by Hamas fighters. Of course, the claim quickly became that 40 infants were beheaded, according to many social media users. Yet, shortly thereafter, the Israeli military and the White House said that the claim could not be confirmed. Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released three photos claimed to be “babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters,” two of the figures shown in the photos were not recognisable as human infants, the infant shown was not decapitated, and there have thus far not been any reports of beheaded or burned infants by reporters who visited the site of the alleged killings, Kfar Aza, nor has there been  any evidence regarding the allegedly beheaded or burned infants’ identities or who had killed them.

Atrocity Propaganda is Nothing New

Should these allegations remain unconfirmed or prove false, they would be just two more instances of a propaganda tactic deployed countless times by Western nations, wherein a false claim of some atrocity is used to demonise an entire nation or group of people, serving to further justify military violence against these people. I remember the false claim made before the first Iraq War in the 1990s by the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, Nayirah al-Sabah, that Iraqi soldiers were pulling Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. More recently, during the Syrian Civil War, it was falsely claimed that Syria had used chemical weapons even though international weapons inspectors had verified that Syria no longer had any. Evidence-free rape allegations have also been used as propaganda tools before: In 2011, just prior to the NATO-led overthrow of the Qaddafi government in Libya, it was claimed that Libyan troops had been given Viagra and encouraged to rape women. Amazingly, the exact same outlandish claim was recently recycled by Western officials during the Ukraine War, as Russia was accused of giving its troops Viagra and encouraging rape.

Of course, real atrocities occur during wartime and armed rebellions, even on the part of forces fighting against genuinely evil institutions such as apartheid, fascism, or slavery. Allied military forces committed many atrocities against the Axis powers during World War II, most infamously the firebombing of German and Japanese cities and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; during slave rebellions such as the one led by Nat Turner in Charleston, South Carolina, mass murders of entire slaveowner families took place. Yet, virtually no one would argue today that the occurrence of those atrocities somehow meant that the struggles to overthrow slavery or fascism were unjust, or throw up their hands and say “Both sides are bad.” Similarly, neither real nor invented atrocities by the Palestinian side should cause those who care about justice to abandon support for Palestinians’ freedom. We can condemn any documented atrocities against innocents that occur without adopting a “both sides are bad” perspective.

Feminists Take the Bait

As a longtime women’s rights advocate, I follow many feminists on X (formerly known as Twitter). While it is understandable that, given the limited free time people have, those who are dedicated to activism on one issue may not be very knowledgeable about, for instance, the situation in faraway lands such as Palestine, I was taken aback when I saw how many women’s rights activists uncritically accepted the above claims about mass rape and baby beheadings by Palestinian forces or who stood squarely on Israel’s side, completely indifferent to the documented longstanding oppression of Palestinians by Israel.

J.K. Rowling is one of many feminists who uncritically accepted unconfirmed media and social media reports.

Ironically, some of these feminists even misrepresent protests in support of Palestinians’ struggle for liberation as celebrations of rape or the killing of civilians by Hamas, somehow momentarily forgetting that they are called “bigots,” “fascists,” or “Nazis” for advocating the preservation of female-only spaces such as locker rooms, women’s shelters, and women’s sports. Moreover, some of them have argued that protesters should be censored or fired from their jobs, fates that women themselves have suffered. Meanwhile, there is scarcely any mention of well-documented Israeli human rights violations such as the rape of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers or in Israeli prisons, or the current collective punishment of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents by completely cutting off supplies of food, water, electricity, and fuel and carpet-bombing their neighbourhoods. Some even justify the blockade and bombing, claiming that Palestinians as a group hate Jews or that they deserve whatever is coming to them because they elected Hamas as their government.

Many feminists misrepresent statements in support of Palestinians’ struggle for liberation as support for violence while others blindly support Israel because they falsely believe that “Free Palestine” means taking over the state of Israel.

Conclusion

That so many Western feminists readily adopt the consensus view of their governments and corporate media regarding the conflict and also uncritically accept the atrocity propaganda and parrot it on social media, even as they harshly condemn those same governments for their failures to protect women’s rights, is shocking and disturbing. The extent to which this has occurred over the past week has surprised me, although it can be readily explained: Even among people who are highly informed about certain issues within their own society, such as the problem of sexual assault and domestic violence, few are well-informed about foreign affairs. For instance, most Americans can’t find Ukraine on a map.

This sort of issue-driven tunnel vision makes it all too easy for false claims or biased perspectives—pervasive within corporate media and social media echo chambers—to make their way into people’s belief systems. Thanks to a continual propaganda onslaught, more than 90% of Americans polled in late 2002 believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the majority accordingly supported the US invasion of Iraq. Controlled experiments have found that the more frequently false claims are repeated, the more they are believed to be true (a phenomenon known as the validity effect, or illusory truth effect). Buttressing atrocity propaganda or other false claims is the use of language to bias the way people view a situation.

For instance, in Western mainstream media, Palestinian soldiers are regularly called “terrorists,” while Israeli forces are virtually never described in this way. Palestinian soldiers, or Palestinians  as a whole, are referred to with dehumanising terms such as “Nazis” or “animals,” and the killing of Israelis by Palestinians is described as just that, whereas neutral or passive language such as “people have died in Gaza” is used when Palestinians are killed by Israelis, absolving Israel’s military and government for their crimes.

However, that it is understandable that well-intentioned people can harbour and propagate such views does not mean it is excusable. People have a moral duty to, time permitting, seek out and carefully consider information about important political issues on which they intend to express their opinions and reflect on possible biases in the sources of information they encounter or within their own views. Absent that, it’s almost inevitable that their readings of these issues will be incorrect, and may inadvertently contribute to a political climate that encourages harm to innocent people or where the mass support for propaganda leads to armed conflicts.
It would behoove us all to have a little more humility about our knowledge of world events and, in matters such as the 75-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine, we must bear in mind who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed.