The Right to Rape Prisoners and Other New Lows in the Nation of Israel

Many Australians may have missed the right to rape political prisoners debate, the rallying and the rioting in support of it that has occurred over the last month or so in the state of Israel, as it didn’t feature prominently in the Australian mainstream media.

Yet, then again, many matters relating to Israel haven’t made it to the press of late.

But crowds of Israeli protesters were captured demonstrating in a nonviolent manner in the West Bank’s Beit Lid, Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory, on 11 August, in support of maintaining “the right to rape” and to commit other atrocities towards Palestinian political prisoners, after legal action was taken against a number of Israeli soldiers who raped an inmate in the Sde Teiman base.

This was occurring a fortnight after several hundred Israeli settlers broke into Sde Teiman, which is located in the Negev desert in Israel, close to the border with Gaza, and they rioted on entry. These violent protesters broke into facilities inside the military base that’s currently being used as a centre to detain and torture captured Gazans, whose only crime is being a Palestinian who lives in the Strip.

The nine Israeli reservists who raped a male Palestinian prisoner using metal objects were being detained at the time of the riot and those demonstrating were seeking their release, as they were about to go before a military court to be questioned over allegations of substantial abuse towards a prisoner, which the lawyer for three of the soldiers confirmed were “acts of sodomy”.

And while these protesters busting into the base might have been hardline elements, certain politicians were stepping in to defend the right of the soldiers to rape prisoners in Israeli parliament, as the incident gained nationwide attention due to the detainee being rushed to hospital bleeding from his anus and then saw the nine Force 100 unit soldiers accused of sexual assault.

But as extreme as defending the right of soldiers to rape prisoners may be it may not be all that more obscene than supporting a nation that’s perpetrating a colonial genocide by referring to it as “having a right to defend itself” or any more heinous than denying fellow human beings asylum from the genocide or standing by as the right to rape debate rages and making no condemnation of.

Tainting their image

“I don’t give a rat’s arse what they do to that Hamas man,” Israeli journalist Yehuda Schlesinger told Channel 12 on 7 August. “The only problem I see is that it is not state policy to abuse detainees. Firstly, they deserve it, and it’s a great form of revenge.”

“Secondly, maybe it will act as a deterrent,” he said live on breakfast television, but has since gone on to distance himself from these comments.

On the day following Schlesinger’s outburst, Channel 12 aired leaked footage of the sexual assault, which was captured on surveillance camera. And the clip shows a room of prisoners lying naked face down on the ground and blindfolded, and Force 100 guards randomly selecting one of the men, whom they walk over to a corner, surround, hide themselves behind shields and then gang rape.

Ten soldiers were eventually arrested over the incident, and by 4 August, five of them had been released. And for some politicians serving in Israeli parliament, like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, the real crime was not the rape itself, which left the man unable to walk, but rather it was the release of the footage that was set to besmirch the reputation of the genocidal apartheid nation globally.

Colonial mindset

The International Court of Justice determined on 26 January that Israel is perpetrating a plausible genocide upon the Palestinians of Gaza, while in a further 19 July ruling, the court found that Israel is illegally occupying and operating an apartheid regime in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the occupied Palestinian territory, and it should immediately end its occupation.

Australian lawyers have warned the Albanese government that this latest ICJ determination warrants our nation imposing an arms and energy embargo upon Israel. However, after the ICJ ordered in January that aid into Gaza be restored, Penny Wong was one of the first foreign ministers to cut funding to UNRWA, which at that time, was the main aid channel into the Strip.

But Wong’s decision to cut aid funding to an area where 2.3 million Palestinians are being purposefully starved to death is in keeping with the Albanese government’s general attitude towards the colonial slaughter that’s been transpiring in Gaza, as is the fact that over the last month, while the right to rape has been debated in the Israeli parliament, Albanese has looked the other way. 

Indeed, not only has our government complicity continued regular ties with the Netanyahu regime, as it’s been killing off of an entire group of people, but it has denied that same group of people the means to escape the barbarism that Israel has unleashed upon it, as it’s denying Gazans humanitarian visas and only offering visitor visas, which are rarely, if ever, granted.

Department of Home Affairs figures show that over the initial 10 months of the genocide, 7,111 Palestinian visa applications had been rejected, with only 2,922 applied for having been approved. So, the government has only extended asylum to one-third of those obviously fleeing persecution in their country of origin: where an occupying force could take them to a torture camp for raping.

“We unequivocally condemn the racism that Australian political leaders and authorities have shown towards Palestinians, particularly to Palestinian visa applicants from Gaza since October 2023,” wrote a group of over 200 Australian scholars of migration, refugee and statelessness studies in a 21 August open letter addressing the Albanese government, which was published in Overland.

“Australian political leaders and authorities have failed dismally to provide Palestinians with meaningful access to asylum and safety,” the academics added. “Offering visas to people fleeing persecution, genocide and war zones should be at the core of Australia’s humanitarian visa program, and the bare minimum that we expect of the Australian government at this moment.”

But in a sign that perhaps both sides of politics are playing to the same tune on the Gaza genocide, as Albanese was sustaining severe criticism for denying the “bare minimum” to fellow human beings in danger, his mate, opposition leader Peter Dutton did him a favour and flipped the equation.

Dutton told Sky News on 14 August that he sought a complete ban on all refugees fleeing Gaza from being given visas. And no longer, as the Greens had been suggesting, was Albanese being stingy with handing out lifesaving visas, but rather he’d been opening the floodgates to loads of potential terrorists, as the ex-Queensland cop quickly stepped in to intervene and explain to the nation.

Yet, Dutton neither found it necessary to comment on the right to rape debate that had been raging on breakfast television in Israel, just like his doppelganger in Israeli appeasement Albanese, as this is hardly a sign of terrorism, as the Liberal leader knows, rather its pure white settler colonialism.