Israel and rape
There is something extremely twisted about the Israeli society when it comes to sexual violence.
The resistance to the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza by the Palestinian groups in the enclave and by Hezbollah in northern occupied Palestine has forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis to flee from the homes they stole from the Palestinians in the so-called Gaza envelope (the areas bordering Gaza) and northern historic Palestine. Those who fled the bombardments of the resistance have been accommodated by the Zionist state in hundreds of hotels all throughout Israel.
But the seemingly dire situation of a forced evacuation and an uncertain future due to the ongoing genocide has not made the fleeing Israelis to come together in any sort of an amiable communion. Sociologists and anthropologists will tell you that outside threats usually bring people closer as they try to find comfort in each other. But as always the Israelis are an exception.
On February 6 this year, Jerusalem Post published a remarkable story, with the headline, “Sexual assault, violence, truancy: Hotels hosting evacuees are a ticking time bomb of crime”
The opening paragraph revealed widespread criminality among the displaced Israeli population:
Several cases of domestic violence, sexual offenses against women and minors, and truancy have been occurring at the hotels housing evacuees from the South and North, as was revealed Tuesday [February 6] at a special Knesset Committee session on the Status of Women and Gender Equality.
The article then went on to list some truly horrific crimes, ranging from domestic violence to pedophilia (with middle-aged men unable to control themselves in the presence of young girls), being reported at the over 300 hotels that housed the evacuees. From the Jerusalem Post article:
“One evacuee exposed himself and urinated in front of children,” she said. “Another person called and said she was raped by a man who was evacuated to the same hotel as her.”
She continued: “There are reports of sexual abuse in [the schools set up for evacuees] and we received a complaint about a security guard who harassed a girl.”
Testimony was also heard from Miri Frank, who helps Jerusalem hotels with the welfare of evacuees. She described a problem of young adults sexually assaulting younger girls. “A 23-year-old man was in a relationship with a 13-year-old girl, and her mother never knew at all because of all the chaos of the evacuation.”
Another case discussed was an eight-year-old boy who stripped a three-year-old girl naked.
“We are dealing with men in their 40s and 50s meeting younger women. The situation is very complex,” explained Liat Gal Cohen from the Center for Regional Government.
Yesh Atid MK Matti Sarfati Harkavi noted: “The level of reporting [of sexual offenses] during the war is going down. When the whole town evacuates to a single hotel, then these things often get handled internally. Every place hosting evacuees should have someone trained there.”
Yesh Atid MK Dvora Biton, who was also evacuated from her home in Sderot, described the situation in her hotel. “I witnessed 12-year-old children committing vandalism and drinking alcohol,” she said. “You can see scenes in elevators where a husband will tell his wife to shut up and you don’t know what goes on in their room... I see what’s happening. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
Two days later, on February 8, Israel’s leading liberal outlet, Haaretz, also covered the same event. It said that 116 separate cases, “including cases of sexual assault of minors and women,” had been reported among the displaced Israeli population:
Here are two important bits from the Haaretz story that highlighted the extent of criminality:
According to a report presented by the Israel Police representative, Deputy Chief Merav Shatz, 116 separate files have been opened including, “40 cases of domestic violence out of 380 hotels, including violating restraining orders, and some of these crimes are especially serious.”
“A female evacuee called us from the hotel where she is staying, in tears, saying that she had been raped by a man who was also staying in the hotel,” reported Maya Oberbaum from the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “They talked, he went up to her room and raped her.”
All of which paints an extremely sobering picture of a society that seems unable to curb its criminal behaviour even when facing outside threats.
This behaviour comes across as even more egregious when contrasted with the Zionist lies about the imagined acts of sexual violence attributed to the Palestinian resistance fighters during their October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation. These false allegations became one of the major pretexts for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
To date, the Israelis have been unable to produce a single victim of the alleged rapes by the Palestinian fighters, despite reams of disingenuous reporting by some of the biggest cheerleaders of the genocidal Zionist state in the Western mainstream media.
Rape sanctioned by religious authorities
In contrast to the stance of the Palestinian resistance, which disavows sexual violence in all its forms, Eyal Karim, the chief rabbi of the Israeli military has sanctioned rape of the Palestinian women by the Zionist soldiers. Karim, is not a loud mouth non-entity from Israel; rather in his role as the head of the Military Rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, he acts as the spiritual guru of the personnel of Israeli occupation forces.
The top-selling Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2016 reported about Karim’s belief that it was perfectly fine for Jewish soldiers to rape non-Jewish women. The paper wrote:
The rabbi gave a more shocking answer on the same site when asked if soldiers were permitted to rape women during war. Karim replied that, as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to “breach” the walls of modesty and “satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success.” [Emphasis added.]
When controversy erupted over Karim’s appointment to his current post (which he has held since 2016) despite holding such reprehensible views, 150 Israeli rabbis wrote in his support. They stated that “the attempt to disqualify the rabbi’s appointment due to his legitimate Torah positions is an attempt that will severely harm the entire Torah world in the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces.”
To emphasise: 150 rabbis were explicit that the rape of non-Jewish women by Jews is a legitimate Torah position. Or to put it another way: 150 rabbis were firmly of the belief that their faith permitted the raping of non-Jewish women by Jews during war.
Most armies have a rape problem, but there is no army in any country anywhere in the world where the highest religious authorities have sanctioned rape. Israel, as has been the case in so many other despicable things, is an exception here as well.
It should come as no surprise then that Karim’s protégé, the Israeli occupation forces’ terrorists, whom he serves as a spiritual guide, have gone on a sexual assault spree against the non-Jewish women of Gaza.
A UN press release from February listed all sorts of crimes specifically targeting the Palestinian women and girls in Gaza, including rape and threats of rape.
There have been numerous testimonies from the women victims of sexual violence throughout Gaza over the course of the last nine months of the Israeli genocide.
Even the pro-Zionist propaganda rag, The Guardian:
However, the western mainstream media, which to this day has been parroting fake narratives of mass rapes by the fighters of the Palestinian resistance, has been largely silent about the very real atrocities being committed by the Israeli military personnel in Gaza.
Rape culture in the Israeli military
The ongoing sexual violations by the Israelis in Gaza aren’t an aberration or a result of the fog of war. The Israeli society has an extensive record of sexual crimes that are often swept under the rug and justice usually denied to the victims. This criminality is specially prevalent in the Israeli military, war or no war.
The Israeli soldiers are not just raping Palestinians. Back in January, Israeli media reported that a reservist was arrested for raping a fellow IDF soldier in the Gaza envelope during the ongoing genocide.
This criminality in the Israeli armed forces follows a pattern.
In 2022, Haaretz reported that a third of the Israeli female soldiers were sexually harassed in the year prior. To further illustrate the criminality in the Israeli armed forces: In 2006, 17 soldiers (and five civilians) were accused for raping the same 11-year-old girl at an Israeli air base. In 2018, there was an infamous case of female Israeli soldiers being pimped by their superiors.
When they are not pimping their female counterparts, the male Israeli soldiers do the raping themselves. In 2015, nearly half a dozen Israeli soldiers were charged with raping their female colleagues. In 2018, Jerusalem Post revealed a “dramatic rise [91 percent] in number of IDF soldiers reporting sexual assault.” In 2022, one soldier was indicted for raping three of his subordinates. Such cases in the Israeli military are a legion.
In a damning indictment of the Israeli justice system, a vast majority of such cases go unpunished. The above cited Haaretz report from 2022, said that a stunning “70 percent of the complaints the women submitted were never properly addressed.” It stated:
A report by the State Comptroller found that less than half of the Israeli female soldiers who experienced sexual harassment filed a complaint, and out of those who did report, 44% said it was not handled properly and 26% reported that their complaint was not handled at all.
That same year, a report in Jerusalem Post said that there were only 31 indictments out of 1,542 IDF sexual assault complaints.
Some sexual assault victims kill themselves instead of waiting for justice that will likely never come.
To compound matters further, there is a culture of hiding unsavoury data by the Israeli forces. From the Haaretz report:
[T]he IDF bars the data of its own survey on sexual harassment from being made available to the public or lawmakers.
Rape in the Israeli society
Just like the military, sexual assaults against women in the Israeli society is rampant. In fact, the military statistics appear to neatly mirror the civil society numbers. In 2012, Haaretz reported that “every third Israeli woman falls victim to sexual assault.” Citing a report from the Public Security Ministry, the Israeli paper further added: “Violence against single women rises nearly twenty-fold since 2003.”
The same paper in 2019 reported from a study that a stunning 90 percent of the rape cases in the country were closed without an indictment.
A 2021 article published in the the Paris-based website on the Levant, OrientXXI, revealed shocking details of sexual crimes in Israel:
230 women are raped every day, i.e., 84,000 each year in a country whose total population is just under 9 million, which would put Israel in 32nd place in the world according to the statistics of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). One woman in five is raped during her lifetime and one in three suffers a sexual assault.
The article goes on to recount details of two horrific cases of gang rapes by Israelis, one in the occupied port city of Eilat in historic Palestine and the other in Cyprus.
About the Eilat rape of the 16-year-old by some 30 males, including some minors, the article shares:
A group of men took her to a room and started raping her. “A rumour spread down the hall that there was a naked girl who was getting fucked, and very quickly the flies began to gather to take advantage of the opportunity,” a source close to the investigation explained to Haaretz. [Emphasis in original.]
The victim of the gang rape in Cyprus was a British woman, who incredibly, ended up getting “heavily charged and actually convicted of false testimony” due to Israeli influence in the country.
Significantly, here’s how the perpetrators of the heinous crime against the British woman were received upon their return to Israel:
[O]n their return to Tel Aviv, the cohort of youths were met by families and friends with a triumphal welcome at Ben Gurion Airport, complete with Champagne and confetti, and such edifying slogans as “The Brit was a whore” and “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The people of Israel is alive”)—one of the far right’s favourite slogans… [Emphasis in original.]
If, according to Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives America meaning, then, going by the vile slogans of the Israelis cheering for rapists, rape is a force that makes Israel alive.
The far more prosperous and, if its Western backers are to be believed, a liberal democracy, Israel is the leading country when it comes to rape in the West Asian region. In terms of rapes per 100,000, Israel is well ahead of its neighbouring countries, which it consistently vilifies as Third World savages.
Israel, a “pedophile’s paradise”
Not just women, sexual crimes against children is an epidemic of sorts in Israel. The country has been widely described as a “pedophile’s paradise,” where Jewish fugitives from justice find safe heaven.
In 2021, Israel was rocked by a series of gang rapes against minors. A report by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) revealed that violent sexual offenses in Israel were 10 percent higher than the average for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries:
Recent reports of multiple gang rapes of minors, the youngest of whom was 10-years-old, have brought public attention to gang sexual assault in Israel, where the rate of violent sexual offenses is approximately 10% higher than the average for OECD countries, according to the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI), which cited information published by Israel’s Public Security Ministry.
A report presented in the Israeli parliament in 2021 revealed that over 50 percent of the “8,508 sexual abuse cases in Israel in 2019-20 involved victims aged 17 and under.”
A 2020 article in CBS News detailed how Jewish American pedophiles find refuge in Israel.
The story began thus: “A CBS News investigation has found that many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult.”
It went on reveal that the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew anywhere in the world — even those with zero connection to historic Palestine (but not Palestinians who still hold deeds to their centuries-old lands) — to go to the Zionist state and get citizenship, comes handy when the perpetrators of such evils evade justice:
JCW [Jewish Community Watch, an American organization that tracks accused pedophiles] says [Jimmy Julius] Karow [a pedophile] and other wanted men and women have been able to exploit a right known as the Law of Return, whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship.
The CBS News article further adds:
Since the small organization started tracking accused pedophiles in 2014, it says more than 60 have fled from the U.S. to Israel. Given its limited resources to identify these individuals, JCW says the actual number is likely much larger. [Emphasis added.]
Stunningly, the story revealed that “Karow has successfully evaded authorities by moving between communities in Israel for almost two decades, and he is not alone.”
This whole “successfully evaded authorities” shtick defies belief, considering Israel is one of the most surveilled countries on the planet and famously boasts about knowing what a Gazan had for breakfast. Despite this level of monitoring capability, it seems unable to track down the most notorious criminals within its own society.
Even the CBS News article couldn’t help but speak about this incredulous bit, albeit with a twist:
Israel is known as a nation on the cutting edge of technology, but [JCW’s chief operating officer] Shana [Aaronson] says that doesn’t trickle down to local law enforcement.
Makes one wonder why that would be.
A similar report in The Independent published in 2016 quoted a child sex abuse advocacy group founder as saying that the unique Israeli law was convenient for Jewish pedophiles anywhere in the world looking to evade justice:
“Israel is becoming a safe haven for paedophiles due to the unique opportunity available to all Jews from anywhere in the world to immigrate there,” said child abuse survivor Manny Waks, founder of child sex abuse advocacy group Kol V'Oz, speaking to The Independent.
“This provides a relatively efficient and effective way to evade justice from other countries. It also provides a sanctuary to those who have already been convicted.”
The incredibly low rates of indictments and conviction — 92 percent of rape investigations in Israel are closed without charges — ensure that there is nothing holding Israeli (or non-Israeli) Jews from committing acts of sexual violence.
Pedophilia and corrupt Orthodoxy
Israel’s Orthodox Jewish community isn’t free from the stain of sexual violence in its midst. In fact, the CBS News article cited above goes on to state that such crimes have their genesis in the religious communities before filtering down into the wider society:
JCW says the majority of its cases originate from modern Orthodox to Ultra-orthodox Jewish enclaves in the U.S., but that it happens across the wider Jewish community.
Although it talks about American Jewish society, the Jewish society in Israel is no different.
Vice published an article in 2013 under an extremely provocative title: “The Child-Rape Assembly Line.”
The story goes on to describe in graphic detail the kind of extreme sexual depravities prevalent in a Hasidic community of Orthodox Jews in America and Israel as seen by a rabbi from the same community.
The article begins with a rabbi named Nuchem Rosenberg recounting a horrific scene during a 2005 visit to “one of the holiest neighborhoods” in the holy city of Jerusalem:
On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She’arim. “I opened a door that entered into a schvitz,” he told me. “Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.”
Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: “This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face—fear. The old man [looked at me] without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn’t stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, ‘It’s a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy’s soul? You’re destroying this boy!’ He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen.”
Further in the story, Rabbi Rosenberg recounts another horrifying detail:
“I have children come to me with their parents, and the blood is coming out of the anus,” Rabbi Rosenberg told me when we met.
The Vice article lays out the pervasive nature of pedophilia in Jewish communities throughout the world, with the Jewish priestly class being the purveyors of such depravities:
In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant. The alleged abusers are schoolteachers, rabbis, fathers, uncles—figures of male authority. The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys.
More alarmingly, this abhorrent crime is so prevalent that two community elders said that 1 in 2 Jewish boys is sexually assaulted. One of those interviewed shockingly added that the practice has almost become “a rite of passage.”
Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world—have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher. “From anecdotal evidence, we’re looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage.”
Just like the non-Orthodox Israeli society, there is nothing to hold the Orthodox Jews to account for their reprehensible crimes, as the Vice article reveals:
Ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak out about these abuses are ruined and condemned to exile by their own community.
Rabbi Rosenberg, the whistleblower from the Satmar Hasidic community, isn’t celebrated for revealing the rot within. Instead, he is a deeply reviled figure. From the Vice article:
For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared. He receives death threats on a regular basis. In Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, advertisements taken out by the self-described “great rabbis and rabbinical judges of the city of New York” have denounced him as “a stumbling block for the House of Israel,” “a public rebuker and preacher of ethics” who “persists in his rebelliousness” and whose “voice has been heard among many Jewish families, especially young people in their innocence… drawn to listen to his poisonous and revolting speeches.”
In 2011, a rabbi named Elior Chen was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his extreme abuse of three children that included forcing them to eat feces.
Chen belongs to the Charedi community of Orthodox Jews and a report in The Jewish Chronicle quoted an Israeli official as saying that pedophilia was rampant in the community.
“Based on our experience and knowledge,” Dr Yitzhak Kadman, director of the National Council for the Child, told the JC, “child abuse exists in the Charedi community. We find all sorts of abuse, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, even sexual abuse.”
However, Rabbi Rosenberg’s Satmar and Rabbi Chen’s Charedi don’t have a duopoly over pedophilia in the Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel or other parts of the world.
A 2022 report based on data from Israel’s Welfare Ministry published in The Jewish Chronicle made the astonishing revelation that children in the religious Orthodox community are “more than twice as likely to experience sexual abuse.”
When the supposedly-religious Jews aren’t raping young boys, they turn their attention to the girls and women in their midst — assaulting them with the promise of paradise. It doesn’t get any more perverse than this.
Rabbi Chaim Walder was a celebrated author of literature for children, adolescents, and adults. In a 2021 story about Walder, Haaretz referred to him as “one of the most prominent children’s advocates in the ultra-Orthodox community” and “the founder of the Bnei Brak-based Center for the Child and Family” as well as “a recipient of the Prime Minister’s ‘protector of the child’ award.”
He wrote more than 80 books. The only thing that rivalled Rabbi Walder’s prolific literary output was his rape spree.
The Haaretz article from 2021 goes on to reveal his proclivity for young girls
52-year-old Walder, while maintaining an adored, beloved and accessible image for children and youth, allegedly sexually exploited girls for years. One of them was little more than twelve when the exploitation began, while two others were 15 and 20.
After his victims came out and a police investigation began, Rabbi Walder shot himself dead in December 2021.
The Haredi Jeffrey Epstein
But when it comes to criminality in the Orthodox community, no one holds a candle to Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. He is the founder of the supposed rescue group ZAKA, which was at the forefront of spreading some of the most egregious lies about October 7.
Fanciful tales of beheaded babies, babies cooked in ovens, babies hung on clotheslines, mass rapes, among other gorefest fables, were conjured out of thin air by ZAKA and its equally pernicious rival for pro-Zionist charity money, United Hatzalah.
None of these stories held up to scrutiny and have been thoroughly debunked over the course of these last nine months of the ongoing Gaza genocide.
Meshi-Zahav, the ZAKA founder, was a serial rapist of children, men, and women. His prowess as a rapist earned him the moniker the “Haredi Jeffrey Epstein.”
In 2021, Ynet spoke to an unnamed source who knew Meshi-Zahav from up close. He shed some light on the extent of Meshi-Zahav’s debauchery:
“Meshi[-Zahav] was a despicable man and everyone in Mea Shearim knew it,” he said. “Everyone’s been talking about it since I was born, and I personally know names of people who have slept with him. It's no secret. We're talking about loads of people.
“For him, everything goes – women, children, boys and girls, and if animals could talk and tell their stories, I’ve no doubt we would’ve found out he was playing around with them too. Everything that moves, essentially.”
“Everything that is surfacing now is just the tip of the iceberg,” he added. “All the things we know have yet to reach the media. Not only did he do things himself, but he also forced others. I remember a story where he went to a matzah bakery and groomed young boys who worked there ahead of Passover so they would have intercourse for his enjoyment. He was truly the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein.”
In a story published in the BBC, one of Meshi-Zahav’s victims, his student Shayli Tevel, recounted his encounter with the rabbi:
“Everyone gave him respect and I wanted to be around him,” Shayli says. One of 13 children, Shayli often craved attention and felt flattered to be singled out by Meshi Zahav.
Then, one day, Meshi Zahav offered him a free T-shirt. “When he put [it] on, he put his hand inside my pants.”
Meshi-Zahav ultimately committed suicide in June 2022, but not before being awarded the Israel Prize — the country’s highest cultural honour the year before.
Meshi-Zahav’s organisation, now led by Yossi Landau, made good use of the propaganda it helped create in the wake of October 7 to raise millions of dollars from benevolent Israelis as well as from the Zionist state’s benefactors in the West. One fundraising event in New York went on to raise upwards of $1 million.
Landau has gone on to acknowledge that he spread fake news. Even Israel’s very own liberal outlet, Haaretz, admitted in late January that ZAKA “spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground.”
The Israeli government, however, has been mighty pleased with the work ZAKA did to prepare the grounds for its Holocaust in Gaza. For their efforts, Israel issued postal stamps commemorating the supposed rescue organisation.
Sordid political culture
Thomas Jefferson once said, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Or to put it another way, the political leadership of a country is a reflection of its society.
It couldn’t be truer for Israel.
Moshe Katsav, Israel’s President from 2000 to 2007, was convicted of raping an aide in the 1990s, and sexually assaulting two others while he held the highest office in the land. He was jailed in 2011 for seven years, but was released after serving just five years in prison.
And it’s not just the President. Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, was a frequent flyer on Mossad agent and notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet. An article published in the Wall Street Journal provided some details on the Barak-Epstein relationship:
Mr. Barak said he often visited Epstein when he traveled to New York. He said he met interesting people at Epstein’s townhouse where they would discuss politics and other topics.
“In retrospect, [Epstein] seems to be a terrible version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but at the time seemed to be an intelligent person, socially well connected and of wide areas of interest, from science to geopolitics,” Mr. Barak said.
Interestingly, in the WSJ story, Barak revealed that he was introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres, who served as Israel’s Prime Minister (in three separate stints stretching from the 1970s to the 1990s) as well as its President (from 2007 to 2014).
[B]etween 2013 and 2017, Epstein planned at least three dozen meetings with Mr. Barak. They had appointments every month for 11 consecutive months starting in December 2015, the documents show.
Mr. Barak told the Journal he was introduced to Epstein in 2003 by Shimon Peres, another former prime minister of Israel, at a social event with U.S. dignitaries, and that he would regularly visit Epstein when he traveled to New York. “Quite often, I came to the townhouse with my wife,” Mr. Barak said. Mr. Peres died in 2016.
Mr. Barak also took flights on Epstein’s private jet, the documents show. In January 2014, he met Epstein at his Palm Beach mansion and then they flew together to Tampa, where Epstein dropped him off and continued on to New York.
“I flew only twice on his airplane, together with my wife and Israeli security detail,” Mr. Barak said. He said he remembers the trip in Florida was to visit a U.S. military installation in Tampa.
In a quip that stretches the boundaries of incredulity, Barak told WSJ that he “never participated in any parties or activities with girls or women.”
“I never participated in any party or any other improper event around [Epstein], and never met him with girls or minors, or even adult women in improper context or behavior,” Mr. Barak said.
British tabloid, Daily Mail, which has a penchant for long headlines, published an explosive story in 2019 about Barak’s dalliances with Epstein and his bevy of girls.
It even published a photo of the former Prime Minister entering Epstein’s townhouse with his face well covered:
Barak had vowed to sue Daily Mail for defamation when the report first came out in 2019, but there have been no developments on that front since then.
If male Israeli politicians have been alleged perpetrators of sexual crimes, the women leaders have been at the receiving end of depravities. In a story published in 2016, The Times of Israel, revealed that an astonishing 90 percent of the female members of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) were sexually harassed at some point in their lives.
The paper reported on an investigation by a Hebrew channel:
An investigative report by Channel 2 news, aired Sunday, found that 28 out of 32 — nearly 90 percent — female members of Knesset have experienced sexual harassment or assault.
The project, designed to raise awareness of sexual violence, included a series of filmed interviews with female MKs, who spoke candidly of their experiences.
The story goes on to quote several Knesset members who have been at the receiving end of sexual violence at various points in their lives. One such testimony — of Moscow-born Israeli politician Ksenia Svetlova — is very revealing:
Svetlova said there was a period of time, after she came to Israel from the former Soviet Union, when she avoided leaving the house as much as possible for fear of being harassed.
Israel projects itself as a First World country founded on the principles of western liberalism, contrasting itself with the countries in its neighbourhood who can claim no allegiance to such “higher” principles. In its narrative, Israel is surrounded by Third World savages.
But here is a politician who felt safe in Moscow, but was scared to step out of her house in Israel for fear of being sexually harassed.
Israel’s history of sexual violence against Palestinians
The Israelis, however, reserve special bile for the Palestinians. The history of Zionist barbarism against the Palestinian goes back a long way — right from the time in the late 19th century when their plan to occupy Palestine was first conceptualised and set into motion.
The 1948 Nakba, when the European Jewish squatters ethnically cleansed over 500 villages, pushed nearly 800,000 Palestinians out of their historic homes, and killed a further 15,000 natives, was also accompanied with rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Palestinian women.
Safsaf was one of the villages ethnically cleansed by the Jewish terrorists in 1948. It is one of the many villages which saw not just murder and pillage but also rape as a form of Zionist violence. Israeli historian Idith Zertal in his book Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, writes about the experience of a certain Yosef Nahmani, who was a terrorist in the Jewish terror group Haganah.
Zertal writes:
“Yosef Nahmani … was stunned by the cruelty of Israeli soldiers towards Arab villagers in late 1948, and the model he cited to describe it was that of Nazi troops during World War II.
‘He wrote in his diary after having seen the devastation wrought by young Israelis in Galilee:
‘In Safsaf, after . . . the inhabitants raised the white flag, they assembled the men and women separately, bound the hands of fifty or sixty villagers, shot and killed them and buried them in a single pit. They also raped several of the village women.’” [Emphasis added.]
In his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe — who uses UN and Red Cross records, Israeli archives, and oral history as his sources — describes the violence in Safsaf from oral testimonies thus:
The oral testimonies, unlike the Israeli military archives, tell of even worse atrocities. There is very little reason to doubt these eyewitness accounts, as so many of them have been corroborated by other sources for other cases. Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted. [Emphasis added.]
One of the rape victims in Safsaf was a 14-year-old Palestinian girl. She was subsequently murdered.
Pappe describes another horrific slaughter and mass rape in the village of Dawaymeh on October 28, 1948:
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.
During the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Tantura, the Jewish terrorists went berserk against the native women. The participants in that massacre shamelessly recounted their depraved acts from 1948 with great mirth in a documentary named Tantura (2022). Here’s a snippet from it:
Pappe’s extensive book makes clear that the scourge of sexual violence was widespread throughput historic Palestine during its ethnic cleansing, covering the length and breadth of the country.
The most horrific recorded massacre from 1948 Palestine, however, was committed by the Jewish terrorists in the village of Deir Yassin. on April 9, 1948. Over 300 Palestinians were massacred in the violence perpetrated by the Jewish thugs and many women were raped before being murdered.
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe describes the violence in Deir Yassin:
As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. 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. [Emphasis added.]
Benny Morris, another Israeli historian, writes a similar account of the Deir Yassin massacre in his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem:
Altogether some 250 Arabs, mostly non-combatants, were murdered; there were also cases of mutilation and rape. [Emphasis added.]
Moreover, atrocities committed in Deir Yassin also served as a great propaganda tool by the usurping Zionists in their campaign of terrorism against the Palestinians. The tales of their barbarism spread far and wide in the Palestinian villages and the terrorised natives often chose to flee from the impending Jewish barbarism.
Morris writes about the spread of fear among the Palestinians as a result of the massacre in Deir Yassin:
It promoted “terror and dread among the Arabs in all the villages around, in Al Maliha, Qaluniya and Beit Iksa a panic flight began that facilitates the renewal of road communications . . . between the capital [Jerusalem] and the rest of the country,” declared the IZL [Irgun] on or about 12 April. An IZL [Irgun] radio broadcast on 14 April repeated the message: the surrounding villages had all been evacuated because of Deir Yassin.
Proscribed terrorist, Irgun commander, and later Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, was pleased with the propaganda value of Deir Yassin massacre. Morris quotes from Begin’s writing from 1948:
“[T]he legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel . . . Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael . . . [It] helped us in particular in . . . Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa.”
Morris also records David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, as finding great value in the Deir Yassin massacre:
Ben-Gurion on 1 May reported that some Muslims had fled Haifa because of fear of a “Deir Yassin” befalling them.
In a 2022 film (attached below), two Palestinian women who survived the Nakba as children, recounted the horrors of the time. They made unmistakable reference to the Deir Yassin massacre and the impact it had on the Palestinian psyche at the time.
In the short film, one woman recalls:
“They destroyed the land and raped girls. My father urged us to stay, but we asked him, ‘Do you want what happened in Deir Yassin to happen to us?’
The other woman in the film had an eerily similar story:
“‘Stay, don’t leave,’ we were told. We said, ‘Do you want what happened in Deir Yassin to happen to us?’
“Everyone was worried that what happened to the people of Deir Yassin would happen to them. The village of Deir Yassin witnessed fighting, and they [the Jews] destroyed the land.”
Despite these records, however, Pappe notes that for various reasons the true extent of sexual crimes against the native women of historic Palestine during Nakba will still take some time before it is fully documented. He writes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:
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. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Sexual assault of Palestinian prisoners
Imprisoned Palestinians become easy prey for the perverted Israelis. The number of abducted Palestinians in Israeli dungeon hovered around 9,000 on October 6 and has since ballooned to over 21,000. (Israel’s prison capacity is around 14,000.) Before October 7, the captive Palestinians were kept in abominable conditions which saw many of them lose their minds. The women would be singled out for sexual assaults or threats of sexual assaults.
All those excesses have accelerated since October 7 and their is a concerted torture regime to break them physically and psychologically. Palestinian abductees — both female and male — have been sexually assaulted and dozens have lost their lives in the Israeli torture chambers.
Back in late November, when the Israelis agreed to a brief truce for prisoner exchange, some of the released Palestinian women recounted the horrific conditions in the Israeli dungeons.
In a February report Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, published testimonies from three Palestinian women released during the November exchange. According to B’Tselem, “The testimonies paint a picture of extreme violence against these women, from the moment soldiers barged into their homes and arrested them to the day they were released.”
Here’s Lama al-Fakhuri, 47, recounting stories of her abuse:
An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me “whore”. He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas-ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me, and threatening me and my family. Then a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: “Welcome to hell.” They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me “whore” again and again. I sat on the chair until about 7:00 A.M. I was very thirsty, but they didn’t give me water.
All three women in the B’Tselem report recounted being strip-searched multiple times during their time in captivity.
Another released Palestinian named Baraah Abo Ramouz testified that rape was common in the Israeli dungeons.
“The situation in the prisons is devastating. The prisoners are abused. They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.”
A February 19 report by a UN agency detailed rape and other forms of sexual abuses of Palestinians:
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said. They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online. [Emphasis added.]
In March, Middle East Monitor published an article titled ‘Women in Gaza are being raped and this is not being investigated or reported’
The article revealed a horrific case of rape:
The paramedic informed the physician that a woman was raped for two days until she lost her ability to speak. Another woman at the Nasr Hospital was stripped of her clothing by Israeli soldiers in front of her husband and brother, and when one of them took their clothes off to cover her the Israeli soldiers killed both her brother and husband.
Testimonies from released Palestinians make for a harrowing reading. Back in February, Al Jazeera reported that “testimonies from released prisoners reveal beatings, insults, and threats of rape.”
An article from May in Anadolu Agency, reported:
Several Palestinians released from Israeli custody have also narrated ordeals of beatings, sexual assault, starvation and all forms of harrowing abuse.
In June, the New York Times produced a detailed report that revealed the extent of abuse being carried out against captive Palestinians.
Here are some of the most horrific bits from the NYT report:
Mr. al-Hamlawi, the senior nurse, said a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with “unbearable pain.”
A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee who said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus. [Emphasis added.]
Sexual violence against Palestinians has exploded since October 7, but it wasn’t uncommon before that fateful day.
Just a month before October 7, a team of Israeli soldiers barged into a Palestinian house in Hebron and forced the five women in the house to strip naked. From a Haaretz report summary:
During a Hebron raid, five female family members were forced to undress while threatened by a dog from the canine unit and the soldiers’ rifles
In 2022, Mondoweiss reported on a case from 2015. In what the paper described as a “horrid case,” “a Palestinian woman was raped and sodomized by Israeli soldiers during a search for her SIM card.” The card was later found in her home. As is the norm in the Israeli society, no one faced consequences for their actions.
A former US State Department official, Josh Paul, recounted a stunning story of Israeli abuse, in which the Israelis downright declared a children’s charity a terrorist organstion just because it highlighted the case of a 13-year-old who was raped in an Israeli dungeon. Here’s a transcription of Paul’s interview on CNN:
A charity called Defence for Children International - Palestine (DCI-P) drew our attention at the State Department to the sexual assault, actually, the rape of a 13-year-old boy that occurred in an Israeli prison, in Al-Moskibiyya, in Jerusalem.
We examined these allegations, we believed they were credible, we put them to the government of Israel, and you know what happened the next day? The IDF went into the DCI-P offices and removed all their computers and and declared them a terrorist entity.
Sexual humiliation during the Gaza genocide
The Israelis have crossed all boundaries during the ongoing genocide. They have made it an intrinsic part of their campaign to raid women’s wardrobes and take perverted pictures donning their intimate clothes.
Just like their proclivity to shoot babies at their mere sight, the Israeli personnel in Gaza appear to have an insatiable appetite for photos in Gazan women’s lingerie. In a very conservative society like that of Gaza, revealing the most intimate details of the lives of women appear to be a deliberate attempt on Israel’s part to humiliate them.
A writer at The New Arab put it well when she wrote: “The underwear of Palestinian women has become a symbol of how Israel’s ethnic cleansing has permeated even the innermost sanctity of private, domestic life in Gaza”
Stretching her point further, it is apparent that the modest, pious Palestinian woman frustrates the Israeli coloniser. By ravaging her most intimate belongings and broadcasting them to the whole world, the coloniser is attempting to unmask her for his perverted pleasure. It is a form of conquest for him.
French anti-colonial philosopher and a member of the FLN — the Algerian resistance against French occupation — Frantz Fanon, in his book, A Dying Colonialism, distilled the French colonial doctrine as follows: “If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.”
He goes on to write of the Algerian woman: “This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself.”
If the colonising Israeli cannot get his dirty hands or eyes on the colonised Palestinian woman, he will make do with broadcasting her lingerie.
These attempts at sexual humiliation of Palestinians is nothing new to the Israelis.
Corrupting the Palestinian society
In what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to spread corruption in the Palestinian society, in 2002, the Israelis took hold of three Palestinian television stations and broadcast pornographic content.
An article published by AFP at the time, reported:
Israeli troops who have taken over three Palestinian television stations in Ramallah are broadcasting pornographic movies and programs in Hebrew, irate residents say.
Soldiers occupied the offices of three local television and radio stations on Saturday morning, and started broadcasting the porn clips intermittently on Saturday afternoon on the Al-Watan, Ammwaj, and Al-Sharaq channels, the residents said.
The Palestinian mothers instantly knew that such “disgusting tricks” of the Zionist occupation was meant to cause psychological damage to their young children.
“I have six children at home; they have nowhere to go with what is going on here and can't even watch TV,” Reema, a Palestinian mother, said.
“It’s not healthy really. I think the Israelis want to mess with our young men’s heads.”
Anita, a mother of three, complained about “the deliberate psychological damage caused by these broadcasts”.
“I am furious. These are the people who are shooting at us that also play this disgusting trick on us,” she said from her house in east Jerusalem, where the channels are also available.
“Luckily, there is no electricity in half of Ramallah.”
A stark contrast
One of the Haaretz reports cited earlier in this article contains an interesting paragraph that tries to explain why the Israelis have been behaving criminally in the hotels where they have been evacuated. The article says:
Alongside the trauma of the Hamas attacks, evacuees are dealing with cramped conditions, scarce resources, financial distress, and lack of structure. Shai Kahan, deputy head of the government organization for evacuees, called the situation a “pressure cooker.”
Back in November 2023, a native Gazan named Amr Abdul Latif — who at the time lived in London, UK — painted a picture of life in the Gaza Strip on a podcast appearance. Here’s how Amr described life in Gaza before October 7:
“I think Gaza is the safest place to be at outside of wars. In terms of, like, crime, we simply have none of it. We simply have none of it. Even though there is a dire economic situation you don’t hear about people — there is a few, like you do hear about some crimes like theft or something like that — but you never hear about like murder you never hear about burglary or like anyone going and stealing things and going into a bank then shooting people — all of these things, they simply don’t exist [in Gaza]. (Emphasis added.)
“Women can do whatever they want — obviously as an Islamic country there are some restrictions — but under an Islamic context they can do whatever they want. They can walk freely, they can even travel on their own, they can leave during the evenings. In some other countries, like Muslim countries, these things can have some restrictions on them, whereas women in Gaza were practically free.
It’s a stunning contrast between the Israeli and Gazan societies.
In the Haaretz article, the Israeli official tries to put the behaviour of his compatriots in the context of “cramped conditions, scarce resources, financial distress, and lack of structure.” However, all of these have been the reality of life in Gaza for decades, and more so since the Zionist blockade of the tiny enclave that began in 2006.
Let’s break down all the reasons cited by the Israeli and contrast it with Gaza.
All three of cramped conditions, scarce resources, and financial distress in Gaza have been addressed in this one neat little paragraph from a UN report published on January 31, 2024:
Socioeconomic conditions in Gaza were dire in 2022 and in the first half of 2023, with over two million Gazans confined to one of the most densely populated spaces in the world, suffering inadequate access to clean water, sporadic electricity provision and without a proper sewage system. Two thirds of the population lived in poverty, and 45% of the workforce was unemployed before the beginning of the latest military operation.
The fourth reason, “lack of structure,” is simply non-existent from the Gazan life. Gaza was being bombed at regular intervals since the beginning of the blockade. In these relentless attacks hundreds would be killed and thousands would be displaced; schools, hospitals, offices, civilian infrastructure would be destroyed and take years to rebuild — if they were rebuilt at all, depending on whether the Israelis permitted the necessary materials for reconstruction to reach the enclave.
When the Israelis were not indulging in wholesale slaughter, as a matter of state policy they would “mow the grass” — an inhuman practice through which they would drop bombs every now and then and skill scores of civilians and bring entire apartment blocks crashing down.
These consistent stream of depravities forced upon them ensured a consistent “lack of structure” in the life of Gazans.
If for all their conveniences and first-world liberal democratic privileges of a settler colonial life, the Israelis cannot curb their criminality, there’s no telling what monsters they would become if they lived in the kind of conditions they have imposed for years on the 2.3 million Gazans.
In a talk, Moroccan philosopher Abdurrahman Taha rhetorically asks, “Why do people say Americans have better akhlaq [loose translation: ethics] than Muslims?” He proceeds to answer: “Muslims contend with horrible social and political conditions around them in their lands. Yet, despite that, they still are ethical to themselves. If that zulm [injustice] was lifted, as it is for the Americans, we would see very differently.” Despite the mountains of injustices stacked against them, the Palestinians embody this ethical way of living more than any other community anywhere in the world.
A look at the Israeli society makes it abundantly clear that a community of criminals — which thinks of itself as superior to all other humans and is safe in the knowledge that it will never face consequences for its actions, no matter how reprehensible — will commit crimes no matter how privileged its living condition.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, demonstrate what it means to live a life of dignity, morality, and spirituality despite being persecuted and deprived of all material resources necessary for a good living.
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Israel needs a humanitarian intervention
If you had a typical Western upbringing, by which you went through the archetypal kindergarten to graduate school to a decent job cycle, and over these years, you learned general truths about things, either explicitly or by osmosis, things such as democracy being an ideal worth fighting for, enlightenment ideals that brought forth the modern West, acade…
I'm completely horrified. What to do about the depth of the evil we are witnessing...
Israel is pedophile Heaven! Israeli men have no moral qualms about sexually abusing young girls. The Old Testament allows it - and that’s all the green light they need. WHY DO YOU THINK THEY KIDNAP PALESTINIAN KIDS ALL THE TIME?
I am so glad this is all coming to light now, because Israel is a sick, sick disgusting place and its citizens know only one morality - and that is the FASCIST CREED OF ZIONISM. Zionism is a rapist and sexual sadists dream ideology as you can do whatever you want to any non-Jew because they are beneath you. Literally and figuratively, they don’t count.