In June 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective and Progressive International released a landmark report, A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians (referred to in this article as The Report.) The Report deconstructs the history of sexualized and gendered violence in the development of the Israeli Zionist state from the Nakba in1948 up through the current period of full scale genocide. Rigorously researched and referenced, the report makes it clear that sexualized violence is not an episodic add on to occupation and genocide. Rather it is a foundational, legalized aspect of the Zionist project which has continuously relied on barbaric methods to erode the resistance of Palestinians. Sexualized violence against Palestinians is normalized by Israeli society allowing egregious acts against Palestinian women and men to be ignored or condoned, a warped response especially as the violence has increased exponentially since October 7, 2023. The Report cannot be siloed off as a “feminist” exposé. As Lama Khouri writes in her moving Counterpunch article about The Report, More Than a Human Can Bear, “No one reading this should remain the same.”

I was honored to be part of a panel at the Bay Area launch of A Predatory State which was hosted by the Middle East Children’s Alliance. In addition to being a Palestine solidarity activist for years, I am deeply involved with the struggle against sexual and gendered violence in California women’s prisons and jails as part of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. The Report points to the many ways in which Israel has constructed its methodologies of violence based on the sexually violent, repressive and genocidal strategies used throughout U.S. history against indigenous, Black and imprisoned people. As part of the panel, I was able to speak to some of the significant intersections between the carceral use of sexualized violence in the U.S. and Israel.

The use of Zionist sexualized violence against Palestinians since the beginning of the settler colonial project is not a new revelation. However, The Report’s extensive compilation of oral history testimony and declassified documentation exposes the embedded and comprehensive character of this facet of occupation. Beyond the infamous 1948 Deir Yassin massacre and accompanying rapes,The Report details other incidents in that period where rape was weaponized against Palestinian women as part of the forced displacement of the Nakba. Using declassified documents from the Israeli army and oral history testimony by Palestinians, it enumerates numerous incidents of sexual violence during the establishment of the Zionist state and throughout its history.

In his diary, unsealed in 2003,........

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