How Israel's 'moral compass' justifies the rape of Palestinians

The gang rape footage of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli guards at the Sde Teiman detention centre in the Negev sent a shockwave across the world. However shocking, certain sections of Israel's society were prepared to defend the indefensible.

Following the arrests of ten reservists caught on camera sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman, far-right mobs, including government ministers, flooded the facility to protest the arrest.

"Gang rape is permissible for the security of the state," commented Security Minister Itmar Ben Gvir. Meanwhile, Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich was angered not by the act of rape, but by the footage having been leaked, demanding an immediate criminal investigation to find the leakers.

In an interview on Channel 13, one of the lawyers protested that there was an investigation to begin with. Likud Knesset members Hanoch Milwidsky and Tali Gotliv joined the campaign calling for a pardon for the rapists and justifying their actions as legitimate.

The very few voices of reason limited their comments to 'investigating', with no words on the incident(s) itself. A military court released five of the accused soldiers mere days later. One of the rape convicts brazenly revealed his identity and bragged about his actions online, possibly safe in the conviction there is enough societal backing to his deranged beliefs. 

Sexual abuse is an exercise of power and subjugation. It has been used by Israel to suppress and humiliate Palestinians. Palestinians, whose core value system is based on honour and shame, speak of it as "ways to break their gaze," as if to say, to break their spirit and defiance, so they will not look their oppressors in the eye.

However, the issue with Israel goes beyond systematic humiliation. And, no, attributing sexual assault to a group of unbridled, on-the-fringe, far-right extremists, however correct, does not explain the full picture. What is at stake, or rather what is under scrutiny here, is Israel’s moral worldview.

Israeli morality towards the Palestinians is typically filtered through two dynamics: first, the dehumanisation of Palestinians and, second, the augmentation of Israelis' self-image as a moral authority.

In the first case, Israel has applied colonialist narratives to Palestinians that strip them of their human worthiness, or at least apply to them human standards drastically inferior to those applied to Israeli Jews. With this negation, Palestinian moral agency becomes irrelevant or non-existent. 

Frantz Fanon once said that the colonised subjects are typically represented in zoological terms; that is, they are reduced to the status of 'human animals' — precisely how Israeli officials have described Palestinians. And, ironically, the more wretched and roughed up the colonised population is rendered by the coloniser, the less human they appear to the latter.

Israel's 'divine' supremacy

Israel has destroyed most of Gaza’s civil society and urban infrastructure, including every university, hospital, and library.  Palestinian doctors, professors, teachers, and manual workers alike, were indiscriminately made homeless beggars striving to find water and food. By reducing their lives to mere survival, they have been dumbed down to subhuman status, effectively not worthy of living, let alone deserving of compassion.

To justify dehumanisation, the coloniser must have already invested in augmenting its sense of superior morality. Besides the long-standing belief among many Israeli Jews that they are God's chosen people, with all the divine moral supremacy attached to it, Israel has got entrenched into the belief of possessing 'the world’s most moral army'.

The claim to morality in this capacity is based on ‘compliance with the laws of war’. And because Israeli troops are 'by default moral,' their use of lethal force against civilians is constructed as justified, ethical even.

Consider that Israeli mainstream media casually depicts the Israeli army's evacuation orders to Gaza’s population as evidence of its morality (moving them out of harm’s way).

Never mind this army has been pushing those civilians, hungry and dispossessed, in hordes into ever smaller so-called ‘safe zones’, now reduced to only 11% of the Gaza Strip’s already small geography, only to be targeted there.

"If they tolerate mocking dead children and soldiers engaging in perverted actions against Palestinians, justifying rape is merely a development"

To enhance this narrative further, Israel manipulates international law by framing Palestinians and their resistance purely as non-state actors, without the occupier-occupied context.

Those Palestinians, therefore, have no equal rights under international law, which favours states.

They cannot possess equal demands as a normal state either, certainly not against 'a democratic state' with allegedly supreme Western values.

As such, if Palestinian demands are not equally legitimate as those of a state, they lack the same moral relevance, or urgency (as a state).

This, among other things, explains why Israel’s exercise of violence against Palestinians is deemed 'self-defence', hence moral, while Palestinian resistance against Israel’s occupation is considered 'terrorism', and immoral.  And, for an army to fight terrorism is to engage in unquestionably moral endeavour.

What is more, on a slightly wider scale, the moral army narrative is given additional legitimacy — or shall I say, sacredness — with the belief that Jews must survive in the Middle Eastern jungle, which is inhabited by morally devoid states or groups itching to kill the Jews.

This is what Netanyahu meant when he said Israel must continue to “live by the sword”. That is, to survive, Israel must always be in a state of war. Better yet, when this war is a front to maintaining Western civilisation against barbarism, quoting Netanyahu again, is not only justifiable but also deserves world support. 

The elimination of Palestinian human worthiness and moral agency, overshadowed by Israel’s augmentation of its morality, has allowed many Israeli Jews to buy into the notion that their sectarian supremacy transcends the universal moral code to which natural and international law give expression.

No amount of evidence — be it an accusation of genocidal intents by the ICJ or bombing of civilians live on TV — is enough to lead to self-reflection, let alone compunction.

Here, morality is evaluated not on universal standards, but on what Israeli Jews approve or deem in line with their interests and worldview. If they tolerate mocking dead children and soldiers engaging in perverted actions against Palestinians, justifying rape is merely a development. Nothing is more dangerous than moral decay armed with an unwavering belief in its own morality.

Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.

Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.