Sexual Violence as a Tool of Settler Colonialism in Palestine
by Christy Fujio, Synergy for Justice Executive Director and Co-Founder
In addition to working at Synergy, I teach human rights law, and this year it struck me, more than ever before, how Israel’s illegal conduct towards the Palestinian people can be a case study for almost every human rights and international criminal law topic that we cover in class. Starting with a people’s right to “self-determination,” - which is enshrined in multiple treaties and is a core principle of international law but is denied to Palestinians - to equality before the law, to freedom from torture, to freedom from arbitrary detention, we have countless examples of Israel contravening its treaty obligations and using brute force to subjugate and humiliate Palestinian people. Even the most foundational, the right to life, is denied to Palestinians in Gaza, under siege and relentless bombing for nearly two years now, as well as to residents of the West Bank who live in constant fear of violence from the extremist Israeli settlers and the Israeli military forces, all of whom act with impunity as they attack Palestinians and destroy property. Now, with the finding that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, my class has current, relevant material to analyse and understand the Genocide Convention.
For human rights defenders and others who follow the situation in Palestine, none of this is new information. In recent months Synergy has written about Israel’s ethnic cleaning of Palestinians as well as its practice of withholding the bodies of Palestinian people who have been killed or died in Israeli custody as part of its wider counterinsurgency programme. In regard to this, renowned scholar and human rights lawyer Dr. Diana Buttu, introduced the concept of “necropolitics” as “...the attempts to control not only Palestinian life, but Palestinian death and mourning…not simply another element of control over Palestinian lives, but a continuation of settler-colonial practices that attempt to erase our very presence.”
Buttu’s stark assessment of settler colonial practices in this context inspired us to learn more about what other settler colonial practices are destructively entrenched but under-reported. As always, at Synergy we see our role as listening to and learning from local experts and elevating their voices, their observations, and their recommendations for change. To this end, we visited the West Bank in February, commenced research in multiple areas, and began working closely with local Palestinian experts who have a solid track record of peer reviewed articles and are recognised for their contributions to decolonial theory. They shared with us their initial observations about the sexual violence that Palestinian people are subjected to every day by Israeli military and settlers, and we knew that we had to dig more and publish their findings.
"Sexual violence has long been recognised as a brutal and dehumanising instrument of domination, yet its manifestations under settler colonial regimes remain deeply under-explored and systematically silenced, particularly in the case of Palestine. In the context of Palestine, sexual violence is not incidental nor confined to moments of active conflict; it is structurally embedded in the Israeli settler colonial system, with its project deploying it as a mechanism of control, racialisation, and territorial expansion. This research critically examines how Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians functions within, is sustained by, and linked to the broader architecture of settler colonialism. The research contends that the violence inflicted upon Palestinians, women, men, people with non-normative genders and sexualities, and children, is deeply rooted in a settler colonial logic that targets Palestinians through racialised, classed, gendered, sexed, and age-based forms of domination and subjugation."
This is not easy reading. It is dark and deeply disturbing, but it demands our attention. As human rights defenders and people who care about humanity, we cannot allow these practices to continue without naming them and shaming the Israeli perpetrators who try to justify their depravity by claiming self-defence and counterinsurgency needs.
We are grateful to the authors of this report, who remain anonymous due to security concerns, and to the key informants, including survivors and other civil society members who took risks to participate in this research, share their experiences, and inform the observations and conclusions shared in the report. We deeply regret that we cannot share the names and credit with the people doing the real work, the hard work, and the most important work on the ground.