The humiliation of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers in the occupied city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) on 10 July was not the first such episode. Sadly it will not be the last.
Indeed the stripping of five women in front of their children parading them naked around their family home and then stealing their jewelry by an Israeli military unit was not a random act. It deserves deep reflection.
Palestinians rightly understood the event &ndash investigated at length by the Israeli rights group B&rsquoTselem in a report published on 5 September &ndash as an intentional Israeli policy.
Several attacks carried out by Palestinians in Jericho and Jerusalem have already been linked to the call for revenge made by Palestinian groups including women collectives.
We are expecting the Resistance &ldquonot to stand idly by in the face of this heinous (crime)&rdquo a spokesperson for a women’s group in Gaza said on 5 September.
The B&rsquoTselem investigation was damning. &ldquoDozens of masked soldiers with dogs&rdquo raided the Ajluni family in southern Hebron B&rsquoTselem said. They &ldquohandcuffed three family members&rdquo including a minor &ldquoseparated men from women and children and began an extensive search of them and their home&rdquo.
The humiliating episode was yet to follow as &ldquomasked female soldiers&rdquo threatened a mother with a dog and forced her to strip completely naked in front of her children.
The degrading treatment was repeated against four other women as they were forced to move naked from room to room. Other soldiers meanwhile were busy stealing the family’s jewelry according to the report.
Corporate Western media ignored the investigation although it enthusiastically reported on the retaliatory attacks on Israeli occupation soldiers by Palestinian youth in Jericho and Jerusalem providing little or no context to what they perceived to be &lsquoPalestinian terrorism&rsquo.
But the Hebron women and the Ajluni family are the actual victims of terrorism &ndash Israeli terrorism.
Though the Hebron incident is a repeat of numerous violations of Palestinian rights and dignity spanning many years there is still much we can learn from it.
Humiliating Palestinians is an actual Israeli policy and cannot be attributed to &lsquoa few bad apples&rsquo in an otherwise &ldquomost moral army in the world&rdquo.
This assertion can easily be demonstrated by a quick comparison of the behavior of Zionist militias during the Nakba (1947-48) to later episodes and eventually to the recent events in Hebron.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s &lsquoEthnic Cleansing of Palestine&lsquo provides illuminating although difficult-to-read passages on the rape of Palestinian women during those horrific years.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last year that sensitive references were purposely removed from unclassified Israeli military documents concerning the events that led to the Nakba.
It quoted Aharon Zizling &ndash the country’s first minister of agriculture &ndash as saying that although he &ldquocan forgive instances of rape (in the Palestinian city of Ramleh) &hellip I will not forgive other acts.&rdquo
Such callousness was entirely consistent with the violent behavior and attitude exhibited by the militias &ndash later to form the Israeli army &ndash and their leaders including David Ben Gurion who later became the first Prime Minister of Israel. In the document Israel’s founding father called for the &ldquowiping out&rdquo of Palestinian villages. This too was removed from the documents.
Most Israelis are unaware of this sordid past simply because the subject is banned in school. The so-called &lsquoIndependence Day Law&rsquo &ndash also known as the Nakba Law of 2009 &ndash &ldquooutlaws any mention of the Nakba or reference to the establishment of the State of Israel as a day of mourning&rdquo according to the legal group Adalah.
Though Israel has succeeded in deceiving its own people regarding their collective past the historical processes that produced such violence remain in place. This means that Israel continues to reproduce that same violence in different forms even though every generation is largely unaware of how their behavior is a continuation of the same legacy of previous generations.
It also means that soldiers who humiliated the Palestinian women in Hebron are likely unaware of the mass violence that accompanied the Nakba they might not even be aware of the term &lsquoNakba&rsquo itself.
Their behavior however is indicative of the culture of violence in Israel the rooted racism and this persistent desire to humiliate Palestinians.
This was equally true during the First Intifada the uprising in 1987-93. Back then sexual violence went hand in hand with Israeli violence against the Palestinian population.
The sexual abuse of Palestinian women during the Intifada especially in Israeli prisons was commonplace. The Israeli military used this tactic to exact confessions or to discourage female activists and their families from pursuing the path of resistance.
All of this falls into the realm of the &lsquopolitics of humiliation&lsquo a centralized political strategy that is used to establish control and dominance over occupied nations.
The Israelis have excelled in this field. We know this because of the numerous reports by Palestinians themselves and also because of the testimonies of Israelis. This was amply demonstrated in the reports provided by the Breaking the Silence group &ndash Israeli soldiers who either left or refused to join the Israeli military.
Many of these &lsquorefuseniks&rsquo who spoke out publicly have cited the dehumanization and degradation of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli soldiers as one of the reasons why they walked out.
All of this illustrates that such events are neither marginal nor isolated supposedly carried out by mentally fatigued soldiers who violated army roles. The exact opposite is true.
In fact the sexual degradation of Palestinian women is just one addition to the protracted and ongoing politics of humiliation in Occupied Palestine.
When Palestinians resist they do so to reclaim their land along with their basic freedom and human rights and also to redeem their collective honor trampled daily by the Israeli army.
Indeed resistance in Palestine is not a mere &lsquostrategy&rsquo to recover a stolen homeland. It is in the words of Frantz Fanon &ldquoa sense of freedom&rdquo from &ldquodespair and inaction&rdquo and a collective act of restoration of &ldquoself-respect&rdquo.
This explains why Palestinians continue to resist even if their resistance is often derided as ineffectual and futile and why they will continue to resist for many years to come.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is &lsquoThese Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons&rsquo. 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).
