This is an updated version of my chapter for Race and the Question of Palestine, ed. Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin (Stanford University Press, 2025). The chapter was finalised during the Zionist genocide in Gaza which made the writing angrier and murkier – I make no apologies.
In 2018 the Zionist entity, a non-European member of the European Broadcasting Union, was represented at the Eurovision Song Contest by Netta Barzilai, whose song “I am not your toy, you stupid boy”, which, she said, was inspired by the #MeToo movement, won the contest. An unusual Euro star, Barzilai was much admired for breaking with accepted body and gender norms, but her performance and song were about more than popular music or gender stereotypes, and should rather be linked to three aspects of Zionism’s deeply racialised sexual politics. The first is the Zionist entity’s claim of equality for women and LGBTQ+ people, including its boast of being one of the only states with a mandatory military service for women and queers. The myth of equality for women and queers obscures the profound inequalities between Ashkenazi Jewish, Mizrahi Jewish and Palestinian women and between Jewish and Palestinian queers. The nexus of Zionist settler colonialism and Jewish patriarchal theocracy is premised on the racialised contrast between the view of the Zionist entity as a progressive Western society and of Palestinian society as backward, patriarchal, homophobic, lacking gender equality and needing rescue. The second aspect is the entity’s perennial refusal to be anyone’s “toy” by defying international law, UN conventions and accepted standards of morality, a refusal coupled with the assertion of Jewish supremacy. The third is the contradiction between Barzilai’s refusal to service patriarchy and the highly sexualised nature of the entity’s society, where gender-based violence, rape culture and pinkwashing are prevalent and normalised.
Four years before the 2018 Eurovision victory, Barzilai, then an Israeli Genocide Forces conscript, sang with the IGF navy entertainment troupe at the 2014 Independence Day celebrations, just two months before the 2014 “Protective Edge” assault on the besieged Gaza enclave that led to the IGF killing 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, injuring 11,231 Palestinians, including 3,436 children, and destroying 18,000 housing units. These figures pale by comparison to the extent of death and destruction wreaked by the Zionist entity during the ongoing Gaza genocide which, according to the most recent estimate at the time of writing, are assessed at 680,000 dead, including half a million children.
About a year after Barzilai’s Euro win, twelve Zionist entity teenage boys were accused by a 19-year old British tourist of gang raping her in the Cyprus resort Ayia Napa. Most significant was the mobilisation of support for the accused teenagers who were given a heros’ welcome when they returned home. The Cyprus rape case was a typical manifestation of the Zionist rape culture, of which more later.
I interpret these three seemingly unrelated occurrences – the recurrent Zionist genocidal assaults on the Gaza Strip, Barzilai winning the 2018 Eurovision song contest, and the 2019 Cyprus gang rape – as links in the Zionist colonialisation chain, characterised, inter alia, by the entity’s defiant refusal to abide by international law. At one end of the refusal spectrum stands Barzilai, a hyper-sexualized pop star whose performance expressed a gendered, perhaps even feminist, refusal to serve as patriarchy’s handmaiden, upholding the laboured image of “Brand Israel” as a haven of gender and LGBTQ+ equality. At the other end of the spectrum stands the Zionist genocide against Gaza, part of its ongoing permanent war against the Palestinians, and its refusal to be anyone’s “toy.” The Zionist entity’s exceptionalist refusal was explicitly stated by its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion who said already in 1955: “Our future depends not on what the gentiles will say, but on what the Jews will do.” This refusal has been reiterated in similar terms many times since, culminating in Prime Minister Netanyahu insisting in his joint press conference with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 15 September 2025 that the ongoing genocide is a war of (Zionist, white, European) “civilisation” against (Palestinian and Hamas) “barbarism.” Between the two are, first, the Cyprus gang rape, a clear manifestation of the entity’s rape culture, which, according to Natasha Roth, is a direct consequence of the colonisation of Palestine and the Zionist belief that “something is there for the taking simply because one covets it.” And second, the debates surrounding the false accusations of Hamas of raping Jewish women during its 7 October 2023 act of resistance.
Read more: Zionist racialised sexual Politics and Palestinian refusalFrom Zionism’s masculine “new Jew” to Israel’s rape culture
The Zionist entity, a.k.a. the racial state of Israel, controls women’s gender roles and positions while also feminising racialised and colonised men. The entity’s racialised sexual politics are exemplified by its reproductive regime that incentivises childbearing in Jewish families and actively works to reduce Palestinian, but also non-white Jewish procreation, as illustrated by the administration of the controversial contraceptive Depo Provera to Ethiopian Jewish women while in transit camps on their way to the entity.
According to Alana Lentin, race is a “technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy,” and should be understood in terms of what it does, not what it is. Likewise, gender too is a performative rather than an identity category, as argued by Judith Butler who theorises gender as a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo and residing in bodies. While conceptualising gender as performative is useful, bear in mind that in the case of Palestinians, gender and race are co-performed – made visible and permissible – by the fact of being colonised and racialised. Moreover, the Zionist entity’s claim to be a haven of gender and LGBTQ+ equality rests on the premise of heteronormativity that is rooted in white/European supremacy, which uses the state regulation of sexuality to designate which individuals are “fit” for the full privileges of citizenship, as argued by Eithne Luibhéid. This resonates with the regulation of sexuality, reproduction and childbearing that differentiates between (fully human) European Jews, (not quite human) non-European Jews and Palestinian citizens, and (non-human) occupied and colonised Palestinian subjects.
The Zionist entity’s sexual exceptionalism also involves what Jasbir Puar terms “homonationalism” – a form of national homosexuality – which racialises Palestinian queers who are excluded by the colonising state from the remit of LGBTQ+ equality. Strategies of pinkwashing are employed by the Zionist entity’s use of its supposedly stellar LGBTQ+ rights to deflect attention from, and to justify the colonisation of Palestine. Pinkwashing, Puar further argues, functions dually, “as a form of discursive preemptive securitisation that marshals neo-orientalist fears of Palestinians as backward, sexually repressed terrorists, and as an intense mode of subjugation of Palestinians under settler colonial rule.” And, I would add, also as deflecting attention from and as part of the discursive justification of the Zionist racialisation of the Palestinians.
Theorising women as key to reproducing nations is apt in the case of the racial construction of the Jewish state, where Orthodox Judaism’s edict, that only being born to a Jewish mother makes a person Jewish, and hence entitled to the wages of (white) Jewishness dictates belonging and citizenship, as legislated for in the 1950 Law of Return. This assumes that Jewish people are “returning” to their historical homeland rather than colonising Palestine, fixating the entity’s foundation on racial discrimination. Challenged as racially discriminating against Palestinians born on the land and not allowed the right of return, the Law of Return was amended in 1970 to include the children and grandchildren of Jews. Both the original law and the amendment have racial implications: including children and grandchildren of Jewish people was reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. In 1991 the Law of Return was further relaxed to admit non-Jewish relatives of Russian Jewish settlers, but members of the current right-wing government want to eliminate the “grandparent clause” which, they argue, works against the entity’s Jewish majority. Racialised sexual politics is played out in the Zionist entity where the ruling European Ashkenazi masculinity controls Palestinians but also Jewish women and Arab Jews.
Raphael Falk argues that not unlike the antisemites, Zionism constructs Jewish people as a biological race-nation, that, according to Zionist ideologues, required its own homeland which was to be a replica of Europe away from Europe, and, I would add, where European Jews would overcome their racialisation and become white, consolidating their racial supremacy over Palestinians but also over non-European Arab Jews. Already in the late 19thcentury, Zionist leaders, Falk argues, committed Zionism to a concept of race as colonial nationalism and invented the “new Jew”, Max Nordau’s “Jewry of Muscle,” the active, warlike antithesis of the feminised, “degenerate” diaspora Jew. Escaping from Europe, Ashkenazi “new Jews” became akin to European gentiles, whose antisemitic contempt for diaspora Jews is replicated in Ashkenazi Jewish contempt for Palestinians, but also for Arab, Mizrahi, and black Jews.
Crucially, the Zionist “new Jews” were not merely a racial construction deriving from social Darwinism, eugenics and colonialism. They were also a masculine construction drawing on historical images of biblical and post-biblical male heroism and on internalised antisemitic stereotypes of diaspora degeneracy. According to Tod Presner’s Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, Zionist body ideals of masculinity and militancy, which shared fascist body ideals, posited women as reproducing the species and men as reproducing the state, a gendered dichotomy deeply embedded in Zionist culture, despite claims to gender equality. Ironically, though Palestine and the Palestinians were feminised in Zionist discourses in contrast with the hyper-masculinised heterosexual ideal type Zionist Jew, Laura Khoury et al posit the feminisation of Palestine through the metaphor “Palestine as a woman and women as Palestine” as found in popular Palestinian literature.
Though it is hard to imagine a time when Zionist Jews were not muscular and masculine and when homoerotic bonding was not central to Israeli militarism, the militarisation of the Zionist entity is the key, alongside its racialisation, to controlling vanquished, occupied and besieged Palestinian populations, as the Zionist genocide in Gaza evidences. Indeed, militarization and the Israeli military, where – despite the increasing active participation of women in combat duties, seen by Israeli feminists as a desirable accomplishment – sexual harassment in the IGF is rampant. Militarism facilitate the Zionist rape culture, and at the same time it is also weaponised against Palestinian men, often accused of sexually assaulting Jewish women for “nationalist motives”. The widespread belief in Palestinian men as sexual predators was evident in the debates regarding the allegations that the Palestinian insurgents engaged in a campaign of rapes of Jewish women during the October 2023 act of resistance.
Any discussion of rape culture in the Zionist entity must begin with the consistent denial of the prevalence of rapes of Palestinian women by Zionist soldiers ever since the 1948 Nakba. The statement by the left wing political activist Uri Avneri is telling: “I knew we committed nearly every human atrocity… everything apart from rape and sexual abuse… for racist reasons. Having sex with an Arab woman was considered demeaning.” In a 2006 MA thesis titled “The boundaries of the occupation: The rarity of rape in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” feminist scholar Tal Nitzan argues that her interviews with male IGF soldiers prove that rapes of Palestinian women were rare and that the soldiers “de-womanised” them as sexually unattractive, non-human, polluting and impure. However, and although the Zionist colonisation of Palestine did not entail mass rapes intended to alter the ethnic composition of the Palestinian population, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia where the Serbs engaged in mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women as part of their ethnic cleansing project, raping Palestinian women by Zionist soldiers during the Nakba was widespread. These rapes did not go unnoticed at the time, but their denial continues despite being documented widely. In 2005 journalist Aviv Lavie published an account of the brutal 1949 gang rape of a young Bedouin girl by a group of Zionist soldiers who later executed her; the case was also the subject of Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappe lists three sources for reports on rapes during the Nakba: international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross, the Israeli archives, and oral history testimonies by both victims and perpetrators. While the Zionists have always denied these rapes, the rapes were also denied by the Palestinians; tradition, shame, and trauma were the cultural and psychological barriers to gaining a full picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked in rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949.
Despite the ongoing denials, Palestinian scholars and writers argue that raping Palestinian women by Zionist soldiers was widely and tactically used during the Nakba and ever since. Though no statistics exist, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian told Al Arabiya News that Palestinian families she interviewed claimed they had fled their homes in 1948 because of the rapes; and that rape and the threat of rape remain relevant to understanding the position of Palestinian women under Zionist rule. Palestinian writer Salman Natour told me in a 2006 interview that just as the notorious 1948 Deir Yassin massacre was meant to be a “warning to all the Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight,” Palestinian women were afraid of being raped and “concerned about their honour.” Likewise, Isis Nusair writes that the first- and second-generation women Nakba survivors she interviewed told her of their fears of rape and the violation of honour. Although most of them chose to speak only indirectly about the rapes, “the gendered impact of these events was present at nearly everything the women said.”
Having interviewed Palestinian women in Zionist entity jails, Nahla Abdo argues that many, if not most, Palestinian women prisoners experience sexual abuse, molestation, threat of rape and even rape. The Palestinian Authority Prisoners’ Affairs Commission reports that Palestinian women prisoners continue to be subjected to abuse and torture in the special section of Hasharon prison called Al-Maabar, an isolation unit where they are often held for days and weeks. And, according to Kifaya Khraim, of the Ramallah-based Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, sexual violence, sexual torture and rape by Zionist soldiers against Palestinian women in the West Bank, Gaza and occupied Al Quds, have dramatically increased since October 2023. Furthermore, there is solid evidence of widespread sexual torture and rapes of male Palestinian prisoners in the notorious Sde Teiman detention and torture centre, established specifically to hold captives from Gaza after October 2023, as reported inter alia by Al Jazeera.
I propose that the prevalence of the rape of Palestinian women by Zionist soldiers illustrates the racialisation of the Palestinian gendered body whose inside, to paraphrase African American feminist theorist Hortense Spillers, has been turned outside by the Zionist colonial culture of violence. I also propose that the accusation of Palestinian men of sexually assaulting Jewish women forms part of the Zionist rape culture and of the desire to maintain the purity of the Jewish race as was evident following the October 2023 act of Palestinian resistance. In November 2023 the Zionist entity launched an international campaign accusing Hamas of engaging in a campaign of rapes of Jewish women and using rape as a weapon of war. These accusations were reported by major international media outlets and human rights organisations, without testimonies or verification of sources. Most of the accusations were repeatedly debunked, particularly, but not exclusively, by The Electronic Intifada, which showed that all the evidence of rapes by first respondents, particularly the orthodox Zaka organisation, was baseless and could not be substantiated. Despite the Zionist entity’s no-holds-barred propaganda campaign to push its 7 October rape claims, EI reported that the entity’s police could find no women to testify to having been raped on the day. It also reported that the International Criminal Court, which continued “to investigate reports of sexual violence committed on 7 October,” confirmed that the investigation had yet “to yield any evidence”. This is in contrast to the findings by the UN Commission of Enquiry of prevalent serious sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated against Palestinians since October 7 2023 in the Occupied Palestinian territory as part of the ISF (Israel Security Forces) operating procedures. Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abunima, who wrote that the Zionist entity’s campaign is based on “emotional manipulation, outlandish claims, distortion and an appeal to racist notions that Palestinians are inherently violence and crude,” argues that such allegations continue the long history of colonisers portraying Black, colonised and enslaved men as savage brutes predisposed to sexual violence against white and settler women.
Thanatopolitics: Killing the Palestinian (female) body
The debates regarding gender-based violence and the Zionist rape culture focus, inter alia, on the frequent murders of Palestinian women by their partners for so called family honour. Palestinian sociologist Manar Hasan, criticising Zionist feminists for attributing these murders to inherent Palestinian patriarchal structures, argues that the murders are bound up with the interests of the colonising state, that colludes with the heads of Palestinian hamulas, “a product of conscious social and political control whose price tag is minimal: no more than a few female corpses per year”. Such colonial collusion indicates the racialisation of Palestinian society as backward, patriarchal, and inherently violent.
Palestinian sociologist Honaida Ghanim documents the Zionist gender-based violence as expressed by the IGF detaining pregnant Palestinian women on their way to give birth at West Bank checkpoints. Ghanim argues that in order to understand population management under the Zionist colonial occupation we need to move beyond theories of biopolitics, proposing instead its opposite, thanatopolitics – the management of death and destruction – as a more appropriate analytical framework. Her analysis is supported by several reports, including by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, documenting the death of pregnant women and their new-born babies at occupied West Bank IGF checkpoints. Ghanim’s analysis is also upheld by the gender violence inflicted upon child-bearing women in Gaza during the genocide. Pregnant women in Gaza are forced to give birth in unsafe environments, often on the street, without doctors, hospitals, or clean water; many undergo unsafe C sections; mothers often cannot breastfeed due to hunger and have no access to baby formula, and are often forced to witness their babies die of hunger and disease. According to a UN spokesman in September 2025, “23,000 women are going without care, and about 15 babies are being born each week with no medical help.” According to a September 2025 UN report, there are 700,000 women and girls in Gaza who have no sanitary equipment or clean water to deal with their monthly period, another gendered means of killing the Palestinian female body. Clearly, the Gaza genocide has specific gender implications, as was evidenced by the degrading photographs posted by Zionist soldiers of Gaza women’s underwear on social media.
Extending the concept of thanatopolitics, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian uses the term “femicide” to describe not merely the murders of Palestinian women but also the placing of women who live with the permanent threat of being killed on what she terms “death row” in the context of Zionist racial settler colonialism. The violence of both poverty and the occupation means that “the more Palestinian men have suffered at the hands of the Israeli occupiers (e.g., beatings, incarceration, humiliation), the more they have been prone to vent their anger and feelings of helplessness”. Using the term femicide, she argues, enables exploring the process leading to the death of Palestinian women who often pay the highest price for the racialisation of Palestinians and the colonisation of Palestine.
Writing about the harm caused by the frequent publication of images of violence against Black people in the US, African American scholar Marc Lamont Hill argues that the ordinariness of these images forces Black people to engage with their most traumatic experiences of racialisation; at the same time it may undermine collective outrage. Black vulnerability, he adds, does not provoke the same sympathy, outrage, or political response as that of White Americans targeted by violence. As a result, “the more we see it, the easier it is to be unbothered by it.” Similarly, frequent media and social media reports and images of the Zionist entity’s violence against Palestinians augment Palestinian vulnerability yet often leave Zionists unbothered; indeed, during the Gaza genocide, they motivate many Zionists to ignore or actively support the slaughter: 76 per cent of them arguing that there are no innocents in Gaza. Moreover, despite ongoing protests and manifestations of Sumud (steadfastness) by Palestinians, such reports may risk undermining Palestinians’ collective outrage. However, Palestinians must not be seen as mere victims of the militarised, masculinised Zionist racial colony but rather as active agents of resistance, and representations of the relentless Zionist violence often mobilise Palestinian women, men and queers to rise against its colonial violence and Palestinian women have always been involved in resisting and refusing the colonisation of Palestine.
Sexual politics as refusal
The October 7 2023 act of resistance has been condemned by the entity and its imperial sponsors as “a crime against humanity.” Writing in the London Review of Books, and calling the attack a “vengeful pathology”, Jewish writer Adam Shatz displays, according to Palestinian political analysis Abdaljawad Omar, a “moral aversion to Palestinian resistance” and a “reductionist view of resistance itself, equating it to ‘primordial instincts’ and unchecked passions.” Instead, Omar argues that resistance “is and always was a hopeful pathology, even when it fails to snatch a victory.” In line with dismissing Palestinian men as savages and sexual predators, Omar argues that the profane Palestinian fighter remains an orientalist trope, confined “within legal constructs and liberal narratives of victimhood, which offers only a superficial treatment of agency, civil resistance and nonviolence, ignoring the harsh realities Palestinians face and the conditions that breed Palestinian liberation organisations.”
Resistance is a key to the anticolonial struggle, in Palestine as elsewhere. However, Black studies scholar Alexander Weheliyeh insists that concepts such as resistance, body, and gender binaries are not universally acceptable when race is positioned front and centre in analysing subjection and dehumanisation. Building on Spiller’s distinction between body and flesh, and on the writ of habeas corpus, Weheliye coins the term habeas viscus (“You shall have the flesh”) to signify political violence as using the flesh to sustain its brutality. The flesh, he argues, represents racialised assemblages of subjection that are unable to annihilate practices of freedom and liberation, which cannot be understood merely in terms of resistance and agency because this lexicon blinds us to real possibilities of freedom.
Unlike Spillers and Weheliye, however, Palestinians, including Palestinian feminists, choose to retain the lexicon of resistance, agency and the body. Palestinian women have always been an integral part of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation. They have always been partners in resisting and fighting the Zionist colonisation, as villagers, workers, teachers, trade unionists, activists, and armed freedom fighters. Khoury et al argue that Palestinian women’s embodied resistance “has redefined gender roles,” and that Palestinian women’s bodies become “trans-border bodies that cross territorial boundaries. While the occupation dispersed Palestinian bodies, their common refugee status and the representation of women in popular literature formed a collective gender identity.” Through the metaphor of “Palestine as woman” in popular Palestinian literature, they deconstruct gender binaries in “doing (invaluable) resistance,” and argue that while the hidden transcripts of resistance require the women to remain at home, in occupied Palestine the home itself becomes a site of resistance.
Resistance thus becomes an everyday act as argued by Shalhoub Kevorkian, who theorizes the bodies of Palestinian women becoming the occupation’s battlefield by describing inter alia how, when facing the threat of house demolition, Palestinian women often sleep in their clothes to avoid being caught by the soldiers in their night clothes. Militarisation, she writes, constructs Palestinian women as boundary markers and through Palestinian women’s narratives, the occupation itself assumes a gender, and Shalhoub Kevorkian describes the embodied, gendered, social blockages facing women in occupied Al Quds as the “politics of militarised dismemberment.” Though such blockages often “amputate” the women’s ability to access justice, Shalhoub Kevorkiam shows that for most of the women refusing the occupation is not about resistance but rather about survival and sumud.
As I watch with increasing horror the genocidal destruction of Gaza and the admirable heroic survival and resistance strategies employed by Gaza’s men, women, elders, and children, I reiterate my argument that just as Israeli sexual politics must be understood in the context of colonialism, part of which is Israel’s refusal to abide by accepted norms and international law, so refusal is a key component of the sexual politics of the colonised. On the one hand, Zionist sexual politics as refusal can be exemplified by Netta Barzilai’s “Not your toy” as rebuffing patriarchal domination, or by female IGF soldiers refusing to accept a military backseat, preferring to participate enthusiastically in the genocide and the colonisation of Palestine. On the other hand, Palestinian sexual politics as refusal is epitomised not only in continuing to hold the IGF at bay in Gaza, but also in the everyday acts of refusal by Palestinian women and queers opposing occupation and colonisation.
A poignant example of sexual politics as refusal is Palestinian queers opposing the Zionist entity’s homonational colonial regime and its pinkwashing strategies. Focusing on the struggle of the Palestinian queer (PQueer) movement that began organising in ’48 Palestine in the early 2000s, Lana Tatour’s PhD describes PQueer refusal as emancipatory in that it responds to both the violence of the settler state and the liberal politics of the global LGBTQ+ rights movement, that Joseph Massad terms “the Gay International.” In view of liberal humanitarian concentration on “women and children” as the main victims of the Zionist genocide, resistance and refusal become moot points, as the entity continues to annihilate and expel the population of the Gaza enclave regardless of age, gender, or location. Yet the fact that the resistance continues to deny the Zionists their desired victory, and as the emaciated, impoverished, bereft people of Gaza continue to refuse Zionism, the above examples of refusal, sumud, and resistance illuminate the gendered Palestinian refusal of the Zionist colonisation, which often overlooks the gendered dimensions of colonial domination and colonial refusal. They are useful illustrations of the role played by sexual politics in both the Zionist racialisation of the Palestinians and the Palestinians’ refusal of the Zionist colonial heteronormative performance of gender.
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