Israel weaponizes rape culture against Palestinians

Lawmakers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition are trying to deflect attention from sex crime scandals involving the highest echelons of Israeli society by making false allegations against Palestinians and other non-Jews.

In recent months, a long list of senior Israeli officials, including members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s inner circle, have been investigated and, in some cases, convicted for sex crimes against women and girls.

But rather than acknowledging the problem in their own ranks, right-wing members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, are renewing their efforts to paint Palestinians as the prime perpetrators.

At a December 2016 session of the Knesset’s status of women committee, legislators from parties in the ruling coalition – particularly the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu – alleged that there was a pattern of Palestinian men and boys preying upon Jewish women and girls.

Yulia Malinovsky, a representative of Yisrael Beiteinu, started off the session by asserting that in the Jerusalem area in the previous nine years, there have been 800 cases where Jewish Israeli women were sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by Palestinian men “based on nationalist motives.”

“Why are we forbidden to talk about the phenomenon of sexual harassment by Arabs? Because it’s not politically correct?” Malinovsky queried.

Her party colleague Oded Forer argued that any sex crime “motivated by religion or nationalism is a terror attack in every possible way.”

The lawmakers lacked evidence to back up their allegations. That much became clear when Ayelet Orenstein, head of the department for sex crime victims in the Israeli police, testified to the Knesset committee.

Orenstein told the committee that, according to police statistics, the number of sex crimes in mixed cities where Israeli Jews live in close proximity to Palestinian citizens, has not increased in recent years. Rather, it has decreased.

Orenstein explained that the decrease applied both to sex crimes in general, and specifically to sex crimes in which a non-Jewish person was the perpetrator.

The right-wing legislators grew agitated when Orenstein would not corroborate their claims of a plague of Palestinian-on-Jew sex crimes. She was then asked to explain the disparity between her own statements and the aforementioned statistic of 800 sex crimes, which Malinovsky insisted had also been provided by the police.

After examining a document handed to her by Malinovsky, Orenstein explained that the 800 cases referred to included all assaults committed in Jerusalem in the past nine years, regardless of whether or not they were sexual in nature.

Orenstein’s “rough estimate” – her words – was that the number of relevant reported sex crimes in Jerusalem during this time period was around 200 – a quarter of that claimed by Malinovsky.

This was not the first Israeli effort to portray Palestinians as sexual predators – and it was unlikely to be the last. In fact, the committee meeting bore great resemblance to another Knesset session held just over five years earlier.

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