In June 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective and Progressive International released a landmark report, A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (referred to in this article as the Report, which is also the source of all page citations). The Report deconstructs the history of sexualized and gendered violence in the development of the Israeli Zionist state from the Nakba in1948 up through the current period of full-scale genocide. Rigorously researched and referenced, the Report makes clear that sexualized violence is not an episodic add-on to occupation and genocide. Rather, it is a foundational, legalized aspect of the Zionist project which has continuously relied on barbaric methods to erode the resistance of Palestinians. Sexualized violence against Palestinians is normalized by Israeli society, allowing egregious acts against Palestinian women and men to be ignored or condoned—a morally warped response, especially as the violence has increased exponentially since October 7, 2023. The Report cannot be siloed off as a “feminist” exposé, but needs to be read and responded to by all those involved in anti-Zionist Palestinian solidarity.
I was honored to be part of a panel at the Bay Area launch of A Predatory State, hosted by the Middle East Children’s Alliance. In addition to being a Palestine solidarity activist for years, I am deeply involved with the struggle against sexual and gendered violence in California women’s prisons and jails as part of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. The Report points to the many ways in which Israel has constructed its methodologies of violence based on the sexually violent, repressive and genocidal strategies used throughout U.S. history against indigenous, Black, and imprisoned people. As part of the panel, I was able to speak to some of the significant intersections between the carceral use of sexualized violence in the United States and Israel.
The use of Zionist sexualized violence against Palestinians since the beginning of the settler-colonial project is not a new revelation. However, The Report’s extensive compilation of oral history testimony and declassified documentation exposes the embedded and comprehensive character of this facet of occupation. Beyond the infamous 1948 Deir Yassin massacre and rapes, the Report details other incidents in that period where rape was weaponized against Palestinian women as part of the forced displacement of the Nakba. Using declassified documents from the Israeli army and oral history testimony by Palestinians, it enumerates numerous incidents of sexual violence during the establishment of the Zionist state and throughout its history.
In his diary, unsealed in 2003, the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, coldly describes the abduction of a teenage Bedouin Palestinian girl in August 1949, “It was decided and carried out: They washed her, cut her hair, raped her, and killed her” (31). A survivor testifying about the Safsaf massacre of 1948 states, “As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them” (32).
After the 1967 war, when Israel illegally expanded its territories, the Palestinian resistance to occupation grew, and the sexualized torture of political prisoners expanded. One of the most revealing stories is that of Rasmea Odeh, who was captured in 1969 under allegations that she was involved in a Jerusalem supermarket bombing. She was interrogated under torture for twenty-five days. After her release in 1979 as part of a prisoner exchange, Odeh testified to a UN committee investigating Israeli torture practices that she was “stripped naked, chained and beaten with sticks and metal bars, on her head and on her body, therefore causing her hearing problems for over one year” (37). Rasmea also testified that she was raped while alone with Israeli soldiers and also in the presence of her father. Shamefully, they also tried to force her father to have intercourse with her.
Over the years, in response to increased scrutiny by international human rights bodies, Israel developed legal modifications to sanitize its use of torture. However, the new laws always included a loophole for exceptional cases where torture would be necessary. In the past three years, all of these minimal legal restrictions have been abandoned. “Since October 7, 2023, a staggering number of Palestinian men, women, and children—from all ages and parts of historic Palestine—have reported enduring or witnessing sexual violence, including rape, committed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)” (4). Physical and sexual violence has also been flagrantly used against international activists acting in solidarity with Palestinians, such as those in the Global Sumud flotilla.
Some of the most compelling sections of the Report lay out the sophisticated structures of gendered violence that have been built into the architecture of occupation and impact multi-dimensional facets of Palestinian life. As the Report puts it, “Systemic gendered violence encompasses more than the destruction of bodies and lifeworlds; it is an attack against all infrastructures that make collective survival possible” (163). It has been systematically used to undermine Palestinian reproductive capacity, fracture social cohesion, and sabotage resistance to Zionist control. Some of these measures include:
- The pervasive use of a military strategy known as Esqat, which uses details of Palestinians’ private and intimate lives to blackmail them into cooperation with the Israeli Occupation Forces as informants.
- History of using honeytraps and “sexpionage” against its non-Palestinian political opponents.
- Reproductive genocide or the deliberate use of strategies that erode Palestinian ability to bear children, nurture families, and sustain future generations.
- The use of domicide (the intentional and systematic destruction of living spaces) to undermine human intimacy.
- The expanding use of AI to map, categorize, and gather data on Palestinian life in order to refine their systems or repression, including the automation of arrests, bombings, and strikes.
- The blatant demonization of Arab and Muslim men as sexually and physically dangerous in order to spread false narratives about rape atrocities against Israeli women, while ignoring or denying the constant rape and assaults against Palestinian women by Israeli men.
- The weaponization of Western feminist narratives and slogans, such as #MeToo and Silence Is Violence, to support a Zionist form of feminism and erase the realities of colonial violence.
It must be emphasized that Israeli systems of sexualized violence against Palestinians build upon the brutal settler-colonial model pioneered by the United States. Sexual violence was a key instrument of genocide against indigenous peoples in the United States. Rape and sexualized violence were embedded practices in African slave trafficking and the institution of slavery. They were used to destroy family structures and social cohesion among Black slaves. The impact and continued legacy of such practices on Black community in the United States has been extensively exposed and challenged by Black scholars and activists.
Today sexual violence continues as a systemic tool of repression and control in U.S. women’s prisons, whose population is disproportionately made up of Black and other women of color. Although the methods may not be as extreme as those currently used in Zionist prisons, gendered violence in U.S. women’s prisons is pervasive and serves to terrorize incarcerated people and fracture communities of color. The exposure of forcible sterilization in California women’s prisons; the uncovering of a “rape club” among staff at Dublin federal prison, which ultimately led to its closure; the recent Department of Justice investigative report about rampant sexual abuse in California state prisons; and ongoing exposures of all point to a throughline between the U.S. and Zionist practices of carceral gendered violence.
In the United States, public opinion currently leans against sexual violence against people in prison when it is exposed. In Israel, meanwhile, 65 percent of Jewish Israelis were against the prosecution of soldiers responsible for sexual atrocities against a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman detention camp in 2024. After a leak of closed-circuit television footage exposing the torture, five of the soldiers were charged with criminal activity, but due to the backlash, political and military attention shifted heavily toward targeting the Israeli military official responsible for the video leak. In March 2026, all criminal charges were dropped against the accused soldiers who are now suing the state of Israel, the military, and journalists for wrongful arrest, defamation, and malicious leaks of investigative materials.
The Report extensively chronicles the propagation of the false narrative of mass rape of Israeli women by Palestinian men on October 7, 2023. These allegations, which immediately dominated global media platforms, amplified the Western demonization of Palestinian/Arab/Muslim men as violent, dangerous, and sexual aggressors. As the Report points out, “For decades, the international community and Israel have remained silent about the rape of Palestinian women” (167). Yet the alleged rape of Israeli women caused an international outcry before any of the accusations could be verified. Even after the original stories claiming mass rape were debunked by multiple international investigations, that narrative has continued to played a key role in manufacturing social consent among Israelis and others for the genocide in Gaza and the egregious physical and sexual violence against Palestinians that has taken place since then.
In the United States, racist allegations of rape against Black men have historically been grounds for lynchings and legal lynchings through the state administered death penalty. There has been a fierce struggle within the U.S. feminist and anti-rape movements, led by Black women, against racist and carceral politics that align with the criminalization and incarceration of Black and other men of color. In this context, it is critical for feminists in the U.S. to take a stand against the manipulation of feminist principles to perpetrate false narratives that help drive Zionist violence against Palestinian/Arab/Muslim men.
With A Predatory State, the Palestinian Feminist Collective have excavated the breadth of Zionist sexualized violence, exposing how it fuels genocide. They have steadfastly uncovered decades of traumatic content to motivate the global community to bear witness and take action. It is up to us to read and study the Report, circulate it and speak out about the truths it exposes. As the executive summary of the Report concludes, “The only way to ethically and effectively achieve justice for Palestinian survivors of sexualized and gendered violence requires ending the genocide, the Occupation, and the siege of Palestine securing the immediate release of all the political prisoners, and achieving an indefinite closure of all detention and prison facilities.…THE TIME FOR URGENT ACTION IS NOW!”
FREE PALESTINE!