The military machismo of Israeli soldiers in Gaza will rear its ugly head at home
Screenshot of video circulating social media showing IDF soldiers playing with undergarments found in a Gazan home
Yoana Gonen writes in Haaretz on 29 January 2025:
The event is already nauseatingly familiar: Israeli soldiers playing around with the underwear of Palestinian women. In the most recent video clip, which was posted Tuesday, seven soldiers are seen in a Palestinian home, one of them emerges from the bedroom wearing a uniform and under it a silk nightgown and a bra – probably belonging to the woman who lives there – and doing a comical striptease in front of his friends.
We’ve seen dozens of similar pictures and videos. Soldiers ridiculing the underwear of Gazan women who have become refugees or were killed. Some of the soldiers wear the items and wiggle with exaggerated femininity, others explain with a smile: “Arab women are the biggest sluts.”
What’s new about the latest video is that it takes place in the West Bank rather than Gaza. Like combat tactics, humiliation tactics are infiltrating from Gaza to the West Bank, and don’t be surprised if later they also leak over the Green Line, directly or indirectly.
Hundreds of men who have learned in the past year that it’s funny to use the sexuality and underwear of helpless women to humiliate them in public won’t suddenly forget that when they take off their uniforms. And a society that remains silent in light of these sickening sights isn’t a good society for women.
These war crimes aren’t just “mischievous behavior,” as some people call them. Throughout history, women’s bodies have always been used in wars as a symbol of the domination and humiliation of the enemy. In such situations, desecrating the personal body represents the desecration of the entire nation, and gender violence thereby becomes a tactical weapon, designed to terrorize the population and steal its dignity and humanity.
The mocking play with women’s underwear is fueled by the same toxic logic, and it’s not by chance that it has turned into a kind of rite of passage for Israeli soldiers in this war. The ability of soldiers to get to the underwear shelves of Palestinian women and do as they please with it symbolizes their total control of the lives and fate of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, even in the most intimate spaces, while the public trampling of privacy, as a means of entertaining the masses, encourages dehumanization of Palestinians and treating them as objects lacking rights and autonomy.
The contrast between female intimacy and military machismo is so blatant in the above-mentioned video that one could almost think a failed screenwriter wrote it and exaggerated the symbolism for the sake of the message. The video begins in a bedroom somewhere in the West Bank: a sparkling clean floor, a warm rug placed on it, a large mirror, a small radiator and a pink robe hanging on the door.
In this room, which is both foreign and familiar, stands an armed soldier, wearing a combat vest and knee pads. Scattered throughout the house there are signs of life, exposed to all: a tub containing unfolded laundry, a squeegee leaning against a wall, a serene bourgeois scene that was suddenly violated. A standard family living room, with a television and light-colored sofas, which was emptied of its family and filled with soldiers who are touching and filming the bras of the woman of the house.
In the wake of October 7, a question commonly asked in Israel was: “Where are the international women’s organizations?” and why aren’t they condemning the sexual crimes committed by Hamas? In the same way, we can wonder where the Israeli women’s organizations are, and why they have fallen silent at the sight of the underwear videos – which debase Palestinian women and women in general.
In this case, the indifference is even more surprising, both because the crimes of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers are our direct responsibility as Israelis, and because the gender violence to which they’re becoming accustomed is likely to rear its head at home, at work and on the next date, too. What did the chairwoman of the Naamat women’s organization say about a year ago regarding the international women’s organizations: “What a disappointment.”
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