The liberal Zionists equating support for Palestine with rape apologia
Dana Bash claimed "Hasan Piker is excusing sexual violence” because he rightly questioned Zionist propaganda. This line of attack is all that supporters of Israel’s genocide have left.
This contains some excerpts from my forthcoming book, Playing the Victim: How The Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide.
Last week, I wrote about the lunacy of centrist Democrats’ meltdown over Hasan Piker, igniting a coordinated smear campaign to frame him as not just anti-Semitic but “anti-women.” At first I wasn’t sure what to make of the nebulous “anti-women” accusation, but I’ve since learned it’s not just the “anti-Semitism” smear—the “anti-women” claim also relates to Piker’s criticisms of Israel. At issue are his correct statements that “if” Palestinian fighters perpetrated acts of sexual violence on October 7, this wouldn’t justify genocide and collective punishment against the population of Gaza:
“I said sexual violence does take place in situations like this… But that doesn’t change the dynamic of Israel committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and my opposing that genocide.”
Because I guess there isn’t anything importance (like, say, the threat of nuclear war) worth talking about right now, CNN’s Dana Bash was still talking about Piker on Wednesday: “Hasan Piker is excusing sexual violence by Hamas terrorists,” she said. “He also claims Hamas is, quote, ‘a thousand times better than Israel.’” (This claim is based on Israeli officials’ own calculations: they proudly estimate that they’ve killed well over 70,000 Palestinians since October 7.)
Bash’s attempt to equate Piker’s support for Palestine with rape apologia isn’t anything new from Zionists. It’s the same argument The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell made against Democrats platforming Piker just last week. This line of attack is all that supporters of Israel’s genocide have left at this point.
Since 2023, the claim that Palestinians perpetrated a “mass rape campaign” on October 7 has been Zionists’ most salient talking point to manufacture consent to the genocide in Gaza. The talking point is so salient precisely because it allows Zionists to portray those who oppose the genocide, or correctly dispute that there was a coordinated “mass rape campaign” on October 7, as rape apologists and misogynists.
But there is no evidence of a coordinated “mass rape campaign” on October 7. And, in addition to justifying genocide, this bad-faith smear campaign has actually emboldened Israeli settlers and soldiers to escalate sexual violence against Palestinians across the occupied territories. I’ve spoken to legal advocates for Palestinian victims of sexual abuse who warn that pervasive media coverage of a “mass rape campaign” has yielded heightened sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers in retaliation.
That is to say: references to an October 7 “mass rape campaign,” often enough made by progressive politicians to compromise with or appease Zionists, aren’t fair, or neutral, or harmless. These claims encourage horrific sexual violence against Palestinians.
Some context on how this narrative of “mass rapes” took hold: In December 2023, the New York Times published a lengthy report that made sweeping claims about supposedly systematic, planned sexual assaults perpetrated by Hamas fighters against Israeli settlers on October 7. The story heavily catered to the West’s most deeply held, violently racist fantasies, framing the events of October 7 not as a series of strategic goals to facilitate exchanges for thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, but as a senseless spree of raping and killing committed by bestial, subhuman terrorists.
In 2024, The Intercept published a lengthy report that detailed a range of serious holes in the Times reporting—not the least of which include that there is no evidence for its claims beyond the testimony of extremist political voices who have repeatedly been caught lying. The article importantly states that “the question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7,” as “rape is not uncommon in war.” But pervasive media coverage of a “mass rape campaign” remains unsubstantiated and deeply rooted in racist beliefs about Arab men.
This has always been a tactic of colonizing powers: painting colonized men as barbaric rapists who must be brutally punished, and can’t be entrusted with freedom and self-determination. Yazan Zahzah, a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, told me for my reporting in Prism last year that throughout history, we’ve seen Black and brown men broadly smeared as rapists who pose an innate threat to white or Western women, justifying lynchings and executions by colonizing forces and white supremacists. All the West hears from mainstream media, Zahzah said, is “trigger words” about “how Islam oppresses women, about sexual violence, how Israel is trying to defeat this.” Thus, Israel is constructed in the public imagination as Western, civilized, and the perpetual victim of scary, incurably bloodthirsty brown rapists.
As Drop Site News notes, “no major human rights organization—including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory—has published findings confirming a single verified rape case from October 7.” In 2025, an Israeli prosecutor conceded there were no documented rape reports associated with October 7. Around the same time, the Israeli government itself blocked a request from United Nations sex crimes experts to probe alleged sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the October 7 attack—because, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported at the time, the Israeli government feared such an investigation would lead to Israel, not Hamas, being added to the UN’s sexual violence blacklist.
Nonetheless, lies about a horrific, organized rape operation have taken hold and gone entirely unchallenged—lest you risk being smeared as a rape apologist. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in December 2023.
Over the course of her failed presidential campaign, Kamala Harris’ central talking point to justify and implicitly sanitize Israel’s genocide, which she simply referred to as a “war,” was her go-to line about “horrific rapes” by Hamas. With this language, even if one did regard the genocide in Gaza as some sad, distant, “humanitarian disaster”—as unpreventable as a hurricane or earthquake, with no specified perpetrator—Israel’s actions could still be treated as reasonable, as an understandable response to “horrific rapes.”
Harris used this language over and over. This was a highly manipulative, deliberate rhetorical tool: Anyone who questions the nonexistent evidence of a coordinated “rape campaign,” or questions why anything should justify genocide, is smeared as a misogynist or rape apologist. In reality, if you selectively invoke rape to push racist narratives about imagined, barbaric Palestinian men, but never to address the decades of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian children and political prisoners committed by the occupying force that holds all power over their lives, you’re obviously not concerned with sexual violence at all.
The Zionist project itself, like colonization writ large, is a fundamental act of gender-based violence; it creates the sharply unequal power dynamics that lead to systematic sexual violence against Palestinians with impunity. Colonization and occupation create innate, inescapable vulnerability to sexual violence for Palestinian children, women, and men, who are routinely terrorized, detained, and abused by Israeli forces, within a system that totally normalizes all of this behavior.
Zionists regard rape atrocity propaganda as their best option to obscure how Israel itself is a perpetrator of mass sexual violence, like all colonizing forces throughout history. For years now, we’ve seen horrific video recordings and heard horrific testimony of Israeli guards raping Palestinian prisoners—only for guards to be exonerated and honored in Israeli society. We’ve seen crowds of Israeli settlers protest and riot over a law against raping Palestinian prisoners in “right to rape” rallies.
In 2025, I spoke to a legal advocate representing Palestinian women—across all occupied Palestinian land, not just Gaza—who say they’ve experienced increased sexual violence from the Israeli military since October 2023, as “mass rape” propaganda emboldens Israelis. These women recount bring routinely detained by Israeli forces without cause and immediately sexually violated upon detainment via strip searches and other abuses; this mistreatment, in jails and at checkpoints, has been happening for decades.
Kifaya Khraim of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), based in Ramallah in the West Bank, works with Palestinian women and girls who have faced sexual assault, sexual torture, and rape by Israeli soldiers for years. From dozens of women across the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, many of the stories are the same, prompting Khraim and her colleagues to conclude there is a “higher directive” for soldiers to violate and threaten Palestinian women and girls, since the acts of sexual violence are so uniform across different places and different Israeli army units.
Because of the prevalence of “mass rape” propaganda, Khraim told me, “Soldiers feel more compelled to retaliate and take revenge, because that’s what they believe happened.” Israelis even feel comfortable “posting [their abuses] to social media, talking about it so freely and casually,” she said, because Western media reports alleging mass sexual atrocities by Palestinians have further convinced so much of the world that Palestinians are “not human, they’re animals”—as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put it in 2023.
In 2023, I spoke to sexual violence researcher Dr. Nicole Bedera about how Zionist propaganda mirrors the strategy of domestic abusers known as DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.) Under the framework of DARVO, reactions and resistance to abuse are regarded as abusive, rather than the actual acts of abuse. As she put it: “Victims are not allowed to defend themselves from the abuser.” When they do, they’re “cast as the aggressor, especially by the criminal justice system,” and often face charges for acts of self-defense:
“Aggressors will try to make themselves look like the victim, to make any violence from them ‘self-defense,’ and any violence from their victim into an act of aggression. There’s only one group that’s permitted to be violent and aggressive.”
Consider the very refrain that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” upheld as sacred in the canon of American politics. This is the pretext for billions of dollars in weapons the United States sends to Israel annually. We’re told that funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, the security system that intercepts missiles, is “defensive” spending, that even if you don’t support Israel’s illegal occupation and the Gaza genocide, surely you support the defense of Israeli civilians. Not only are “defensive weapons” an oxymoron, but as Dylan Saba wrote for Jewish Currents in 2023, by “depriving Palestinians of even the most limited means of military deterrence, the U.S. has given Israel a blank check to massacre Gazans.” And “by funding a system that guarantees their acts of resistance are of almost no consequence to their oppressors, we are consigning them to death.”
The irony is bone-chilling. Israel co-opts the tactics of abusers to justify endless genocide, yet, to Zionists, criticism of Israel is inherently “anti-women.” To decline to waste your time condemning Palestinian resistance is “anti-women”—worse, as Bash put it, you are “excusing sexual violence.”
This particular strategy of Zionists is fundamentally misogynist, wielding the playbook of abusers to unilaterally frame the colonized as oppressor and the colonizer, Israel, as victim. Further, to condemn this or condemn that, in the context of condemning resistance to colonial oppression, inherently evokes victim-blaming: When someone critiques the behaviors of victims or the oppressed, the insinuation is that under those same conditions, you would be better—to condemn something is to say you wouldn’t do it. But no one who was born free from occupation, free to move from one place to another freely, to go to a hospital without being bombed, could possibly say what they would or would not do, what measures they would or would not take under those circumstances to try to be free.
I am a survivor, I’ve reported on gender-based violence and advocated for survivors my entire adult life. It’s devastating and infuriating to watch Zionists attempt to co-opt and weaponize the language of survivor justice, and threaten to smear anyone who questions the lies they’re wielding to justify genocide as a rape apologist or misogynist. But we can’t let those threats silence us. We have to call out dishonest atrocity propaganda for what it is.
To vocally oppose Israel and support Palestinian liberation isn’t “anti-women,” or “excusing sexual violence”—it’s feminist and morally imperative.
You can learn more about my forthcoming book, Playing the Victim: How the Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide, here. <3