West treats Palestinian men as guilty

Five Palestinian men seated or squatting with more people in background — Palestinian men released by Israeli occupation forces go for a medical checkup in Deir al-Balah in July 2024.
Omar Ashtawy ZUMAPRESS

Professing alarm at the suffering of Palestinian women and children is fairly common among Western politicians and the media, but public expressions of concern for Palestinian men are rare in such quarters.

Joe Biden repeatedly claimed – as US president – that he was worried about “innocent women and children” in Gaza, as if Palestinian men are inherently guilty of some unspecified crime.

But Yusif Zeino and Ahmad al-Madhoun, medics killed by Israel while trying to rescue 6-year-old Hind Rajab? Not innocent.

How about Hussein Mohammed Abu Jamei, a driver and father of three whose wife was pregnant, killed by an Israeli missile strike? Not innocent either.

Earlier in the Israeli offensive, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on Israel to stop “this killing of women, of children, of babies.” No need, evidently, for Israel to stop murdering people like 25-year-old Mahmoud al-Naouq, a writer and translator who liked Korean food and had gotten a scholarship to the University of Melbourne not long before his death.

In The New York Times, Bret Stephens wrote that, if Israel had a better prime minister, it would “create long-term safe zones within Gaza – at least while Israel remains in the territory – for women, children, the elderly and the sick.” Healthy adult males, it seems, belong in unsafe zones.

Mahmoud Hamada, a fisher and father of eight, reportedly tried to rescue a 9-year-old just as an Israeli sniper blew off the child’s head. Then an Israeli tank did the same to Hamada in front of his teenage son, Muhammad.

Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, was beaten and tortured and mysteriously found dead in Israel’s notorious Ofer military prison. No need to provide safety for the likes of Hamada and al-Bursh, in Stephens’ view.

Other US media outlets highlight the number of women and children Israel has killed without mentioning Palestinian men. Of no particular concern, it seems, is someone like Bilal al-Essi – a football-loving father of two girls – snuffed out in Israel’s flour massacre as he tried to get food for his hungry family.

To state what ought to be obvious: like women and children, Palestinian men deserve not to be wounded, murdered and tortured.

As should go without saying, what I am putting forth is no “men’s rights” or anti-feminist argument. Nor am I interested in such an unproductive exercise as trying to qualitatively or quantitatively measure the persecution of Palestinian men against that of Palestinian women and children.

Rather, I am arguing that it’s necessary to reject rhetoric that tacitly accepts or explicitly endorses terrorizing Palestinian men.

Gender persecution

Palestinian men are subject to gendered oppression that in some respects is identical to that which Palestinian children and women face – all three cohorts, for example, are routinely subjected to sexual violence by Israeli forces. In other respects, gender-based violence against Palestinian men has distinct dynamics.

These continuities and divergences are apparent in a report that the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel issued in May last year.

The commission found that Israeli soldiers subjected males and females to “sexual violence.”

“Men and boys were targeted in particular ways,” it stated. “Only males were repeatedly filmed and photographed by soldiers while subjected to forced public stripping and nudity, sexual torture and inhumane or cruel treatment. Palestinian women were also targeted and subjected to psychological violence and sexual harassment online, including shaming and doxing female detainees and drawing gendered and sexualized graffiti, including at a women’s shelter in Gaza that was directly targeted. Israeli soldiers also filmed themselves ransacking homes, including drawers filled with lingerie, to mock and humiliate Palestinian women, referring to Arab women as ‘sluts.’”

The document goes on to conclude that Israel has carried out “gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys.” A subsequent report from the commission also said that Palestinian men and boys are enduring gender persecution, noting that they are being subject to mass arrest “with little or no justifiable cause, in many cases apparently simply because they were considered to be of ‘fighting age’ or they did not follow evacuation orders.”

The commission finds that Israel inflicts “sexualized torture” on Palestinian males in detention, attacking their “reproductive organs, including violence to their genitals and anus” while forcing them “to perform humiliating and strenuous acts naked or stripped … Male detainees were [also] subjected to rape.”

Palestinian men who haven’t been captured by Israel are also singled out for specific types of deadly violence. For example, sources tell +972 Magazine that Lavender, the artificial intelligence program Israel uses to select targets, undergoes one human supervision protocol before bombing the homes of suspected low-ranking Palestinian fighters: double-checking that the AI-selected target is male rather than female.

Using this system, sources report, means that there is no mechanism for correcting the so-called “error,” when civilian men were marked for death by a so-called “mistake.”

Endorsing or tolerating such horrors is implicit in denying Palestinian men’s right to exist. The culmination of this logic was on full display in northern Gaza, where Palestinian men and boys were “being taken away by the truckload.” Torture, rape and death undoubtedly awaited.

Men-Exclusionary Palestine Support

Alleged concern for Palestinians that does not extend to Palestinian men of fighting age feeds into the well-worn trope that Arab and Muslim men are violent savages.

Arab and Muslim men, this line of thinking suggests, are barbarians from whom the West – including its Zionist colony in Palestine – must protect itself. Such conceptions legitimize imperial and colonial violence against Arabs and Muslims such as the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.

That few politicians and media sources consistently say that Palestinian men ought not to be harmed has a clear subtext: Palestinian men have some deficiency that makes violence against them acceptable.

Such messages operate in an ideological feedback loop with the unfounded atrocity propaganda that has been used to try to rationalize the US-Israeli rampage: if it’s okay to kill and maim Palestinian men, they must do unspeakable things like behead babies and conduct mass rapes; if Palestinian men behead babies and carry out mass rapes, then the wholescale repression and killing of Palestinian men is either tolerable, or understandable, or necessary or morally right.

The view that Palestinian men are unworthy victims wrongly implies that there are Palestinians that Israel has a right to kill. In practice, of course, US-Israeli military campaigns invariably slaughter Palestinians of all ages and genders.

In this regard, approaches that ostensibly prioritize the welfare of Palestinian women and children, while allowing space for lethal force against Palestinian men, invite violence that kills and maims the very groups with which this framework is supposedly concerned.

Moreover, among Palestinians in Gaza aged 15-64, the ratio of males to females is 1.01 to 1 and, in the above 65 cohort, it’s 1.05 to 1. Therefore, declining to support Palestinian men effectively signs off on killing the majority of Palestinian adults in the Strip.

In these senses, what one might call Men-Exclusionary Palestine Support (MEPS) is not Palestine support at all. That much is clear when one considers who traffics in MEPS: the pro-war propagandist Stephens, as well as the likes of Biden and Trudeau, two of Israel’s co-conspirators.

Furthermore, MEPS treats Palestinian women as passive victims. For pro-Israel politicians and media commentators, the only “innocent” Palestinians are those who are understood to pose no threat to Israel’s genocidal, colonial enterprise.

Characterizing Palestinian women in this way erases the many forms of resistance in which they engage.

The corollary is that, by reducing Palestinian men to the avatars of Zionist and imperialist nightmares, MEPS occludes how Palestinian men are grieving grandfathers and beloved fathers and sons.

Some have an intellectual disability. Muhammad Bhar, with Down syndrome, got mauled by an Israeli attack dog and then seized by Israeli soldiers before being abandoned by them and dying.

Others use wheelchairs, as did Izz al-Din al-Banna, who had paraplegia and was beaten by Israeli soldiers and medically mistreated before eventually dying in Israeli custody in a hospital to which he should have been transferred much earlier.

Many men, in accord with their legally-sanctioned right, are fighters.

Palestinian men are laborers and engineers, farmers and bakers, athletes and poets. None should a priori be presumed unworthy of the rights to live and to know joy, to struggle and to resist, to flourish and be free.

Greg Shupak is an academic who writes fiction and political analysis. He is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media.