RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United Nations is hardly known for fair or cool commentary on Israel. But its latest report really takes the biscuit. It comes from its Human Rights Council. It is titled ‘More Than a Human Can Bear’. It is a breathless account of all the ‘gender-based violence’ Israel has apparently visited on Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. ‘Gender persecution’ and ‘sexual violence’ have been rife courtesy of those monsters in the Israel Defence Forces, the report says. Guess what? It’s hogwash. This is without question one of the most dishonest official documents I have ever read.

The report made waves in the global media this week. And in the Israelophobic cesspit of social media, where there’s a voracious appetite for tales of Israeli evil. ‘UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and “genocidal acts” in Gaza’, said a BBC headline. The Washington Post wrung its hands over Israel’s use of ‘sexual humiliation’ as a weapon of war. These people should have read the report. They’d have discovered that many of the things these ‘experts’ refer to as ‘sexual humiliation’ and ‘gender-based violence’ are in fact normal wartime events, common to virtually every conflict in history.

Consider the report’s analysis of the IDF’s treatment of ‘men and boys’ in Gaza. There’s a whole chapter on ‘sexual violence against men and boys’. Apparently, men and boys were frequently ‘subjected to acts of a sexual nature’. It sounds awful, until you realise that the ‘experts’ include within this definition such run-of-the-mill activities as searching fighting-age males for weapons. The IDF, conscious that suicide bombings are a favoured military tactic of Hamas, sometimes requires arrested men to undress to their underwear. And the report refers to this as ‘forced public stripping’, violence with ‘sexual characteristics’. There’s no other way to put it: this is insane.

The idea that the IDF gets a kick from compelling fighting-age males to undress is at best misinformation, and at worst yet another defamation against the Jewish State, which is always seen as having uniquely nefarious motives. The report laments the ‘forced public nudity’ experienced by ‘men and boys’ in Gaza, as if the IDF were a gang of porn-sick voyeurs. Making fighting-age men remove their outer clothing is not ‘sexual violence’, you loons – it’s a means for the IDF to search for suicide belts. Hundreds of Israelis have been butchered by Hamas ‘men and boys’ wearing bombs under their shirts. To demonise Israel’s hunt for such weaponry as a perversion, as the sick thrill of ‘forced nudity’, is bad faith on steroids.

The usual double standards are at play. There are countless incidents from history of fighting-age men being rounded up in warzones to be thoroughly searched. Was that also violence with sexual characteristics, or is it only when the army of the Jewish nation does it that we’re encouraged to think, ‘What a bunch of degenerates’? Shockingly, the report describes the IDF’s very separation of young men from the rest of the population as ‘gender persecution’. Yes, you heard that right: to isolate fighting-age men for interrogation is oppression on the basis of maleness.

The IDF’s arrest of ‘men and boys… solely on the basis that they were men of “fighting age”’ amounted to ‘gender persecution’, the report says. It is yet further proof that Israel has committed ‘the crime against humanity of persecution based on gender’. Where do you even start with this? It is the grossest inversion of truth and morality. The reason the IDF – and other civilised armies – separate males from females is precisely to avoid ‘gender persecution’, to avoid inflicting stress on those who are very unlikely to be engaged in the war: women and girls. To depict the IDF’s sparing of women from the pressures of wartime interrogation as ‘gender persecution’ of men is doublethink taken to dizzying new heights.

Most unforgivably, the report castigates the young men of the IDF for wanting to punish Hamas for the crimes it committed against Israeli women on 7 October 2023. Some even refer to Hamas-run Gaza as a ‘rapist regime’, it says. They seem to believe that ‘[Hamas’s] assault on Israeli women harmed a collective honour that must be avenged’. It accuses these ‘aggressive’ soldiers of trying to ‘rebuild Israeli national masculinity’ through ‘retaliation for the attacks carried out by the military wing of Hamas’.

I’m struggling to recall the last time I read something as morally warped as that. Israel can’t do right for doing wrong. If it instructs a male suspect in Gaza to remove his outer clothing, that’s the war crime of gender persecution. Yet when it pursues the Islamists who visited real gender-based butchery on the women of southern Israel on 7 October, that’s masculinist arrogance. What is the Human Rights Council saying, exactly? That Israel should not search fighting-age males for suicide belts? That it should not ‘avenge’ its women who were assaulted, kidnapped and murdered? Tell me, UN: is the Jewish nation the only nation that is forbidden from protecting its soldiers from explosive devices and its women from rape?

Even when the report moves from ‘men and boys’ to ‘women and girls’, its accusations don’t stack up. One of its key examples of ‘acts of sexual violence’ against women concerns ‘the removal of the veil’. The IDF, at checkpoints and in the Gazan towns it has conquered, sometimes instructs women to ‘remove [their] veils’, says the report. And apparently this has a ‘particular negative impact’. Can we get real here? It is sometimes necessary in warzones to check people’s identities. Israel suspected at one point that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had disguised himself as a woman. It is not ‘sexual violence’ to ask a woman in an incredibly tense war situation to show her face to soliders.

The report discusses ‘reproductive violence’, too. It includes in this category women suffering from ‘vaginal infections’ due to a lack of clean water and lactating women struggling to breastfeed as a result of malnourishment. These are dreadful circumstances. No one doubts that civilians in Gaza, especially mums with young kids, have suffered terribly as a result of this war started by Hamas. But aren’t these things that happen in all wars? Hunger, declining hygiene, ill-health? The rebranding of such tragedies of war as conscious acts of ‘sexual violence’ by the IDF feels profoundly deceptive. It is vilification masquerading as analysis.

There are serious accusations amid the misinformation, including claims that the IDF verbally and physically abused Palestinian women and tortured Palestinian men. Israel says they’re lies, but some of it will need to be investigated. But it is not the aim of this report to establish the truth about Gaza. No, it’s about casting a black cloud of suspicion over everything Israel does. ‘Avenging’ 7 October, protecting its soldiers from attack, interrogating fighting-age men – to normal people this is ‘war’; to those drunk on the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, it’s a ‘war crime’. Listen, UN – it is not a crime for Jews to defend themselves against an army of anti-Semites that wants to kill them all.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy