Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War

Abstract

Israeli denials and classification of documents, alongside scholarly work (Nitsán 2007; Wood 2006), have all contributed to the perception that aside from the 1948 war and its aftermath, rape and other forms of sexual violence are missing from Israel's military toolbox. A spatial intersectional analysis of Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians finds that in the context of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), the wartime rape paradigm is doing a disservice. It further silences Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians and diverts our attention from the colonial nature of the Israeli control regime. These findings unearth (1) the risks of stripping rape of the specific context in which it materializes, (2) the importance of incorporating power structures that transgress the framework of conflict and war-related sexual violence and (3) the necessity of deciphering and attending to colonial and settler colonial- related sexual violence.