Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi (left photo) was the Israeli army’s top lawyer. She briefly disappeared, but was later found on a beach in Tel Aviv. Now she is behind bars. Her crime? She approved the leak of a surveillance video that showed the rape of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli soldiers at the notorious Sde Teiman military prison.

After she was found, far right TV personality Yinon Magal, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X with a winking-face emoji: “We can resume the lynch.”

The soldiers who assaulted the Palestinian prisoner allegedly sodomized him with a knife. A medical staffer said, on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, that the victim had life-threatening injuries from blunt trauma to the abdomen and the chest and fractured ribs. He had to undergo emergency surgery for a perforated rectum. The victim was returned days later to the prison where he was assaulted.

There were protests in Israel, but not to decry what those soldiers did. They were to defend them. They were enraged by the arrest and prosecution of the soldiers. Several members of the Knesset joined in these demonstrations, which often became violent.

The prime suspect at the centre of this heinous crime is soldier Meir Ben-Shitrit (pictured on the right). But instead of being vigorously questioned by journalists, he has been celebrated by Israeli media, doing a plethora of softball television interviews where he and the other suspects are treated as the real victims.

Recently, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, released a report on systematic Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023.

The report, entitled “More than a Human Can Bear”, provides such incontrovertible evidence of Israeli crimes that “[t]here is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorize them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.”

None of this is new. Israel has long used rape and sexual abuse as a weapon or form of collective punishment, as documented by Israeli human rights organizations. Yet this is rarely reported on in the Western press.

Instead, they run stories of “mass rape” on October 7th, along with blatant lies about “decapitated babies,” without ever providing a shred of evidence. Even former US president Joe Biden repeated these lies, saying he saw the photos. The White House later denied the president saw any such photographs. Thus far, not one Israeli woman has stepped forward to allege rape on October 7th.

None of this is to claim that no sexual violence occurred on that day. It is simply to point out that no evidence has been presented by Israel thus far. While there is ample evidence that attests to Palestinians, including child detainees, suffering from abuse.

Colonial projects have long used sexual violence to suppress and demoralize the populations they wished to subjugate. But in tandem with this was a racist claim that the colonized men presented a threat to white women and their purity.

Black men and boys in North America were routinely brutalized, tortured and killed for even the mere hint of sexual impropriety with white women. The tragic and horrifying case of Emmett Till is a testament to those dark times.

Israel is no different in this regard. Anti-miscegenation sentiment has been a pernicious thread through Israeli society since 1948. Even today, Israeli (and some Western political leaders) openly talk about the supposed “demographic danger” of mixed marriages.

Israel is not uniquely racist. It merely echoes the European colonial settler “civilized vs savage” narrative. Politicians like Netanyahu unashamedly repeat this myth by calling their state a “villa in a jungle.” The obvious implication being that Arab cultures and societies are barbaric and backwards.

This latest chapter is a bleak one in the long history of the Zionist project, with genocide being the natural culmination of the supremacist ideology. But it provides us insight into how movements subvert the truth and human decency to advance a mythology of dominance over those it subjugates.

Kenn Orfanos, November 2025