On March 13, 2025, the
Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report based
on evidence of incessant incidents and Israeli strategic bombings to the UN
Human Rights Council. “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive
and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader
effort to undermine their right to self-determination,” Chris Sidoti of the
Commission stated.[1]
This statement is oriented to particular incidents, albeit recurrent; the report
goes on to charge the Israeli government with genocidal methods targeting the
ability of the Palestinian population to sexually reproduce itself. Ironically,
such methods may bring to mind the methods used in Nazi Germany, including
those used by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” to wantonly kill and
strategically sterilize undesirables. It need not be a truism, however, that
the descendants of victims become victimizers, though I suspect that studies on
intergenerational psychology attest to the phenomenon. Also ironically,
culpability with an intergenerational cause is also a theme in the Hebrew
Bible. Thirdly, it is ironic too that Yahweh may have the last word on the
Israeli transgressions, as this too is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible’s
faith-rendering of the history of Israel. It would be odd indeed were Yahweh behind
a sort of rendering of justice against the Nazis by having Israel inflict
severe pain on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Put another way, that justice
did not catch up to every Nazi aggressor does not mean that excessive, and thus
unjust, harming of innocents can complete the cycle of justice. In fact, both
the literal “overkill” by Israel and Russia’s war crimes in invading Ukraine—both
with impunity—raise the question of whether omnipotent Yahweh gives a damn, or
even whether it is actually sheer fiction.
In the Commission’s report released
to the UN on June 14, 2024, whose coverage includes the Hamas attack on October
7, 2023 and does not excuse Hamas for its atrocities against Israelis. Even so,
the Israeli government ignored the Commission’s requests for information even
on those crimes. That the UN had created the state of Israel must also be
considered in assessing the refusal. The report also states that the attack by
Hamas “and the subsequent Israeli military operation in Gaza must be seen in
context. Those events were preceded by decades of violence, unlawful occupation
and the denial by Israel of the right of Palestinians to self-determination”.[2]
The “unlawful occupation” is especially relevant, as it attests that the
political and military “playing field” was hardly level. The Israeli government
had taken advantage of this macro advantage for decades, and the Commission’s
report on the genocidal sexual and reproductive crimes against humanity
following October 7, 2023 should be put in this context. In other words, those
crimes were not part of an even “tit-for-tat” between two equal adversaries.
Moreover, 45,000 to 55,000 killed or starved for 1250 Israelis killed on October
7, 2023 is so extremely one-sided that the slant in the underlying
geo-political and military paradigm can be reckoned as being culpable, as well
as the party enforcing it.
Therefore, it is vital to go
beyond particular instances of the crimes. Even as the March, 2025 report
includes incidents, the macro-level of genocidal sexual tactics is not ignored.
Of the former, “two days of public hearings held in Geneva . . . featuring
victims and witnesses of sexual and reproductive violence and medical personnel
who assisted them, as well as civil society representatives, academics, lawyers
and medical experts” went into the report.[3]
The report asserts that “forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment
including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault” were “standard operating
procedure” of the Israeli Security Forces in Gaza.[4]
Furthermore, the report maintained that “forms of sexual and gender-based
violence, including rape and violence to the genitals, were committed either
under explicit orders or with implicit encouragement by Israel’s top civilian
and military leadership.”[5]
From a human standpoint, it is only natural that the anger of Gaza residents
towards Israelis and Israel going forward must be such that any proximity,
such as is an aspect of military occupation, is itself problematic and
essentially infeasible. That such anger can be expected to be intergenerational
also rendered continued occupation unfeasible. This is not to say that the
residents of Gaza should be moved; a coalition of the willing globally could
step in to see that no Israeli enters the territory, which, fortunately, shares
a border with Egypt.
The report on the sexual and
reproductive tactics also covers crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza,
and this also renders continued occupation untenable. Specifically, the Commission
reported “that Israeli forces had systematically destroyed sexual and
reproductive healthcare facilities across Gaza, including Gaza’s largest
fertility clinic, Al Basma centre, in December 2023.”[6]
Additionally, it was no accident, according to the report, that “(t)ank
shelling destroyed about 4,000 embryos at the clinic that reportedly assisted 2,000-3,000
patients a month.”[7] According
to Sidoti, “certainly, their commanders knew and the commanders would have
known that there were tanks operating within that vicinity and firing on
buildings and fired on a healthcare facility that was clearly marked.”[8]
To be sure, it is possible that the Israeli government had intel that Hamas was
using the clinic as a shield. Even if this were so, the report includes other
instances of tactics of reducing the number of Palestinians in Gaza, such as
direct attacks on maternity wards, “combined with the use of starvation as a
method of war,” that have negatively “impacted all aspects of reproduction.”[9]
Imagine the reaction were such a design and intent applied by an occupying
power on Israel; it would not take long at all for the Israeli government to
charge such an occupier with committing Nazi atrocities on the Jews. The asymmetry
itself points back to the tilted playing field.
From its collection of
evidence, the Commission could detect a systemic pattern. The report “finds
that the destruction amounts ‘to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome
Statute and the Genocide Convention, including deliberately inflicting
conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians
and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”[10]
The very notion of collective justice (and injustice) is based on the fallacy that
there are no innocents in a population. Immediately after the Hamas attack, the
president of Israel commited this fallacy and connected it with his stated
determination that every resident in Gaza should suffer as a result of the
Hamas attack. The reaction of governments around the world was to step back and
let this fallacious reasoning be implemented on the ground in Gaza by
embittered Israeli leaders and soldiers. It is as in Hobbes’ Leviathan
in that a sovereign power can do whatever it wants. Yet even in Hobbes’ political
theory, even though a country’s sovereign power has the last word in
interpreting scripture, everyone is subject to God’s judgment.
The doctrine in Jonathan
Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in Zion,” is that the “time will come when fearfulness
will surprise the sinners in Zion, because they will know that they are going
to be cast into a devouring fire, which they must suffer forever ad ever, and
which none can endure.” Edwards’ most famous (or infamous) sermon, “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God,” is based on Deut. 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in
due time.” This can be said of the Israelis who are culpable in ordering or
committing genocidal acts well in excess of reciprocal harm in an eye for an
eye. The Palestinians are largely if not all Muslims, so it cannot be believed
that Yahweh would be in favor of the killing, starvation (e.g., blocking
humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in 2025), deprivation of utilities (e.g.,
cutting off electricity), and reproductive abuse. It is not as though the deity
were saying to Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu, Go and rid the Land of
Israel of those people who worship other gods, as is the biblical story of Yahweh
directing the Hebrews to circle Jericho seven times and kill even the women and
children who worship Baal because they do not worship Yahweh. Rather, it seems
that Yahweh would eventually punish Israel (i.e., collective divine justice)
for having violated the Commandment against killing, especially if the magnitude
is well beyond tit-for-tat.
For a God-fearing Israeli, and the rest of us, Yahweh
once again punishing Israel for its transgressions is not something that any person
can or should take on as if delegated by that deity to enforce divine justice.
Indeed, such a horrendous assumption renders theocracies dangerous. We are all,
human, all too human, and thus we don’t have the omniscience to be God’s
enforcers. This is not to say that governments cannot or should not act to enforce
international law, especially given the impotence of the United Nations, but
absent this, there is faith that Yahweh will have the last word in holding Israel
accountable here rather than only in the hereafter. Instead of willful
arrogance, humility, self-restraint, and contrition are the appropriate
attitudes of people of faith who have so violated divine (and international)
law. It can even be said that serving rather than attacking one’s enemies
unlocks the door to the kingdom of God, but even this is subject to willful
intransigence out of jealousy and spite.
1. “Rights Probe Alleges Sexual
Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN
News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
2. “Report of the Independent
International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
including
East Jerusalem, and Israel,”
Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Reports
of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General, The United
Nations. June 14, 2024.
3. Rights Probe Alleges Sexual
Violence Against Palestinians by Israeli Forces Used as ‘Method of War,” UN
News, United Nations, March 13, 2025.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
