On This Day

1 July

ISRAELI ACADEMIC ON USE OF RAPE OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN
On this day in 2014, Dr Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, well known for his right wing views, told an interviewer on the Israeli Broadcasting authority how to deal with Palestinian “terrorists”: “A terrorist, like those who kidnapped the boys and killed them, the only thing that will deter them, is if they know that either their sister or mother will be raped if they are caught”. Kedar was a member of a secret right wing Facebook group with Nigel Goodrich, founder of Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland (COFIS).

اكاديمي اسرائيلي يدعو لاستخدام اغتصاب النساء الفلسطينيات

يوليو 1

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2014 ، أخبر د. مردخاي كيدار ، المحاضر في الأدب العربي في جامعة بار إيلان ، المعروف جيدًا بآرائه اليمينية ، أحد المحاورين في هيئة الإذاعة الإسرائيلية حول كيفية التعامل مع "الإرهابيين" الفلسطينيين: "إرهابي ، مثل من خطف الصبيان وقتلهم ، الشيء الوحيد الذي سيردعه ، هو إذا علم أن أخته أو أمه ستغتصب إذا تم القبض عليه ". كان Kedar عضوًا في مجموعة يمينية سرية على Facebook مع Nigel Goodrich ، "مؤسس اتحاد أصدقاء إسرائيل في اسكتلندا COFIS"

 Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, gathered testimonies from across Palestine for his 1992 work, All That Remains. Safsaf, to take one example of numerous crime scenes, was a scene of "mass murder" in the words of a former Head of the Haganah National Staff. Safsaf ('Willow' in Arabic) is near Safed in the north of Palestine:

"As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village’s spring and dumped sand on them."
All That Remains, Khalidi, p491

In 2015, Israeli daily Haaretz caused quite a stir when it reported that Israeli historian Tamar Novick had found a document in the archives describing another aspect of the 1948 massacre in Safsaf village:

“Safsaf – 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 same material had been published in All That Remains 23 years earlier. (All That Remains, p491)

Tom Segev is a winner of National Jewish Book Award for Israel, the National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish History. In his 1949 –The First Israelis. Segev writes that Ben Gurion “had been informed of murderous acts - or ‘slaughter,’ as he put it—and rape, which were committed by Israeli soldiers. Such reports intensified the panic and flight of the Arabs."

Ben Gurion’s Diary entry that “The situation in the army is very bad,” referred, according to Segev, to a range of issues, including “heavy losses and the defeats in battle, the looting, rape and murder, which had taken place in the course of the war”.

The rapes were discussed and seemingly tolerated at cabinet level when “cases of rape in Ramlah” were reported by Agriculture Minister, Aharon Cizling. He added that “I can forgive rape, but I will not forgive other acts which seem to me much worse", such as freelance looting."

Benny Morris is an Israeli defender of the Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign of 1947-49 who thinks it should have gone even further. He is also a professional Israeli historian. Palestinian-Canadian academic, Nahla Abdo, quotes Morris discussing ‘about a dozen’ cases of rape in 1948.

"In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her father. In Jaffa, soldiers in the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin two girls were raped and murdered. There were one or two cases of rape in Tantura; one case of rape at Qula; at Abu-Shusha, there were four female prisoners; one of whom was raped a number of times...Usually more than one soldier was involved [and the event] ended with murder. [We] have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported … are just the tip of the iceberg."
Morris quoted in Captive Revolution, Nahla Abdo, p 80

Israeli Government tolerance of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women is not a matter consigned to the past. Palestinian women still face the threat and reality of rape by Israeli soldiers after they are seized and imprisoned.  Nahla Abdo includes eye-witness testimonies in Captive Revolution of Israeli interrogators' political-sexual depravity in their violations of Palestinian women, including threatening and actually raping women in front of their father or husband. (Captive Revolution, pp 163-5, 173)

Perhaps uniquely across the world, in Israel prominent figures publicly condone the rape of Palestinian women. Reuters was one of many major world news outlets reporting in July 2016 that “Israel’s military has nominated a new Chief Rabbi who seemed to imply in a past religious commentary that its soldiers are allowed to rape non-Jewish women in wartime.” The army chief spiritual guide had written endorsing rape “during wartime out of consideration for the soldiers’ difficulties: 'And since our concern is the success of the collective in the war...[soldiers are] permitted to satisfy the evil urge'”. Eyal Karim apologised for his earlier advice - but only when the top job came along.

Ilan Pappe's ethnic cleansing of Palestine records 

"numerous cases of rape...Deir Yasin The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed...In Qaqun the UN claimed, and testimonies by Jewish troops corroborated, that the takeover had involved a case of rape...From 9 July...heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped...Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted."

"The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death. These were not reports delivered years later, but eye-witness accounts sent to the High Command within a few days of the event.

"Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949.

"Yitzhak Chizik [Military Governor of Jaffa] wrote to [Minister of Finance ]Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: ‘And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.’ In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how ‘a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.’"

"Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant, to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade Seven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed"
IDF Archives, 50/121, File 226, report by Menahem Ben-Yossef, Platoon commander, Battalion 102, 26 December 1948.

"Israeli archives...only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: ‘Rape Cases’."
(July 8) ...even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behaviour that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town..." Ben Gurion's Diary 15 July 1948

"The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl."

"Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine’s villages: from the village of Tantura in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about names and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell."

"Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewellery, to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape."