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While you're canceling, ask NCTE what they plan to do with the $4.6 million of members' dues and fees that they held as recently as March 6, 2026, in CCCC reserves, $500K more than was in those same reserves in 2024, according to the Executive Secretary Treasurer's report.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention how indebted I am for this piece to the ingenuity, talent, and care of my main editor on this, Paul Hamilos. Paul worked absurdly hard on the piece, made it what it is, and taught me so much about writing, in the process.

OK. This was a hard thing to work on for the last many months. Pretty much every week, new facts overwhelmed me. It is an HONOR to have been commissioned by @sarayasin.bsky.social to do the research and contribute to The Key. May the piece, inh'allah, speed in some small way the defeat of Zionism.

The more I looked into the history and present of Zionism, the more it struck me: it is all about *raping against rape.* At the very least, today, please understand that a system that films itself, jokes about itself, and defends itself on the floor of parliament has moved past denial into avowal.

It is somehow no contradiction to desire anti-Zionist feminists to share the hell-world inflicted upon Gazans in the name of feminism, predicting that our anticolonialism will be raped out of us (in reality, we have tended to receive warm welcomes from Palestinians, but rapes from the Israeli army).

In the worldview of many Zionists, it is no contradiction to threaten rape in the name of gender equality and as a contribution to a global women’s war on rape. It is no contradiction to wish queerphobic Islamist murder or executions on queer activists for Palestine in the name of LGBTQ+ values.

These threats (you know the ones: "go to Gaza," et cetera...) are not only the ambient misogyny of public life; they also carry geopolitical freight, expressions of a tradition in which rape functions as territorial assertion.

On the day I began drafting this essay, defenders of the genocide were posting detailed rape wishes against Hannah Einbinder and Greta Thunberg. Eight months later, I find myself confronted with headlines such as “11 Harrowing Video Testimonies From Westerners Tortured and Raped by Israel.”

This is what it looks like when a society has settled the question of who counts as rapeable – which is to say, who counts as human. It also makes clear who has protection from sexual violence under the law and who has the government backing to commit it.

Permissive callousness with regard to rape in the context of occupation leeches back into domestic conduct, coloring Israelis’ treatment of their “own.” A recent poll by an Israeli think tank found that a majority of all Israelis oppose crim investigations into soldiers accused of abusing detainees.

Ha’aretz reported in 2011 that 61% of Israeli men do not regard forced sex with an acquaintance as rape, a view shared by 41% of Israeli women, according to that report. In 2020 [amid the Eilat scandal] Israel National News itself pointed to a newly emergent “rape culture” among the nation’s youth.

Sexual violence also boomerangs back into settler society – as colonial fascisms are wont to do – taking on a banal ubiquity within/among Israeli communities. An estimated 230 sexual assaults take place per day in Israel – 10% above the OECD average – w. a shockingly low relative rate of indictment.

A patriarchy-only account of rape cannot metabolize this fact. An account of rape as a technology of colonial rule absorbs it easily – which by no means precludes us from understanding these machineries, staffed by women as they often are, as themselves inextricable from patriarchal domination.

One measure of why the standard framework of “rape culture” fails: Much of this violence is nowadays carried out by women. Testifying in Geneva in 2025, the Palestinian feminist organizer Kifaya Khraim stated that “rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects inside genitals.”

A 2026 medical paper on 517 male Palestinian detainees echoes the study’s finding that one of the effects of raping men (specifically) is often a “vicarious” torture inflicted upon them and their families members via the humiliation of Palestinian masculinity, the symbolic shattering of its honor.

The pattern has never broken. In 2015 – nearly a decade before the current wave of the genocide – a study analyzing cases of prison abuse collected by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel concluded, in a peer-reviewed journal, that “sexual ill-treatment is systemic.”

As the Palestinian feminist scholars Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif have argued: “The logic of sexual violence attempts to fragment Palestinian family and communal life, as it severs the connection to the Palestinian homeland.”

Rape invades and occupies corporeal territory. It terrorizes, and thereby disciplines, the underemployed Palestinian workforce. And even as it forces contact, it distances: it “others” its victims, inscribing the native-settler line on the body itself.

How should we understand this? Not just the rape itself, which armies have committed everywhere, but the celebration of it? In settler-colonial contexts, sexual violence is a governmental multi-tool. In Zionism, raping the precarious indigenous population does several material things at once. ...

The obsessive framing of Palestinian men as rape-obsessed monsters is designed to shield Israel from criticism, and to distract from the barely hidden, monumental scale of Israeli sexual brutality – which does not pause while the narrative is being managed.