Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News on 25 October that, “Muslims are not afraid of us any more.” It might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s well-being, if not its very survival. In fact, the fear element is linked directly to Israel’s behavior and is fundamental to its political discourse.
Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to create fear sufficient to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin, Tantura and more than 70 other documented massacres during the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, are cases in point.
Israel has also utilized torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault to achieve similar ends in the past, not least to exact information or to break down the will of prisoners. According to UN-affiliated experts in a report published on 5 August, “These practices are intended to punish Palestinians for resisting occupation and seek to destroy them individually and collectively.”
Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has manifested all of these horrific strategies in ways unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread application and frequency. In a report entitled “Welcome to Hell”, also published on 5 August, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem said that in Israel’s detention facilities, “every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering” so that they “operate as de-facto torture camps.”
A few days later, the Palestinian rights group Addameer published its own report, with “documented cases of torture, sexual violence and degrading treatment,” along with the “systematic abuses and human rights violations committed against detainees from Gaza.”
If incidents of rape, sexual assaults and other forms of torture are marked on a map, they would cover a large geographical area in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Israel itself, mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.
Considering the size and locations of the Israeli army, well-documented evidence of rape and torture demonstrates that such tactics are not linked to a specific branch of the military.
This means that the Israeli army uses rape and torture as a central strategy.
Such a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister. His aggressive statements, including, for example, that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head instead of being given more food,” are aligned perfectly with his equally violent actions: the starvation policy of prisoners, the normalization of torture and the defense of rape.
However, Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They predate him by decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners, who are granted few rights compared with those enshrined by international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale? The occupation state’s wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: material and psychological. The former has manifested itself in the ongoing genocide, the killing and wounding of tens of thousands and the near destruction of Gaza. The psychological factor, however, is intended to break the collective will of the Palestinian people.
Legal advocacy group Law for Palestine has published a database of over 500 instances when Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, incited genocide in Gaza. Most of these references seem to be centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For example, the 11 October 2023 statement by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, that, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” was part of the collective death sentence that made the extermination of Palestinians morally justifiable in the eyes of Israelis. Netanyahu’s own ominous Biblical reference, where he called on Israeli soldiers to seek revenge from Palestinians, telling them, “Remember what Amalek has done to you,” was also a blank cheque for mass murder.
While choosing not to see Palestinians as humans, as innocent, as worthy of life and security, Israel has granted its army carte blanche to do as it sees fit to those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “human animals”.
The mass killing, starvation and widespread rape and torture of Palestinians are all a natural outcome of these shocking dialectics.
The overall purpose of Israel is not simply to exact revenge, although the latter has been quite important to Israel’s desire for national recovery. By trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture, humiliation and rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of deterrence, which it lost on 7 October.
Failing to restore military or strategic deterrence, Tel Aviv is invested in psychological deterrence, as in restoring the element of fear that was breached on 7 October. Raping prisoners, leaking videos of the gruesome acts and carrying out the same horrific deed again and again are all part of the Israeli strategy to restore fear.
Israel will fail, though, simply because Palestinians have already succeeded in demolishing Israel’s 76-year matrix of physical domination and mental torture. The Israeli war on Gaza has proven to be the most destructive and bloody of all Israeli wars, and yet Palestinian resilience continues to grow stronger, because Palestinians are not passive; they are active participants in the shaping of their own future. If legitimate, popular resistance is indeed the process of the restoration of the self, Palestinians in Gaza are proving that, despite their unspeakable pain and agony, they are emerging as a whole, ready to clinch their freedom, no matter what the cost.
-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).
