Dershowitz unveils new hasbara claim: IDF has lowest rape rate

Alan Dershowitz is at it again. He recently was embarrassed when he bitterly complained that the Political Science Department’s co-sponsorship of the Brooklyn College BDS conference was an egregious violation of students’ academic freedom, only to have it revealed that he gave his own unopposed anti-BDS speech at UPenn last year, sponsored by two departments.

Now his target is the upcoming CUNY conference on “homonationalism and pinkwashing.” While the promotional material states that there will be 189 speakers discussing 32 countries, and that “the most obvious examples [of the subject] are in the Netherlands, Britain and Germany,” Dershowitz knows better. In a recent New York Post editorial, he denounces the conference as just “another hate fest against the Jewish state.” Apparently, the time and effort being spent on the other 31 countries are just a transparent cover for the real object of vilifying Israel.

Dershowitz blames the entire event on CUNY Professor Sarah Schulman, whom he condemns as the type of anti-Semite who blames Jews not only for financial depressions and wars, but also for their positive contributions, which must have a hidden malevolent agenda. Dershowitz focuses on Schulman’s 2011 op-ed in the New York Times, and claims that “she has argued that Israel’s positive approach to gay rights is ‘a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violation of Palestinians human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life’.” Actually, Schulman’s op-ed claims that various “tactics” employed by Israel to “manipulate… the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community,” and not “Israel’s positive approach to gay rights,” are to blame. Moreover, Dershowitz conceals the fact that Schulman’s op-ed identified four European countries – the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and the UK – as the origin of this unholy alliance between anti-Muslim fanatics and gay movements and says that the strategy “has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Dershowitz’s tirade, with its outrageous distortions of the CUNY conference and of Schulman’s position, is nothing new, but there is one striking sentence that appears to be a trial balloon fresh out of Hasbara Central:

And when news surfaced that the Israeli Army has the lowest rate of rape against enemy civilians, radical anti-Zionists argued that this was because Israeli soldiers were so racist that they didn’t find Palestinian women attractive enough to rape!

Of course, Dershowitz provides no link for this encouraging trend in modern warfare, so I e-mailed the professor for a source. Is there actually an authoritative ranking of sexual assault by various countries’ military forces, where Israel appears at the very bottom? That surely is what Dershowitz is implying. And who are these radical anti-Zionists who responded in so offensive a manner?

While waiting for a response, I continued to do research and am convinced that I found the source of this bizarre claim. It seems that in 2007, a grad student at Hebrew University named Tal Nitzan wrote a “prize-winning” paper claiming both that there was a low incidence of rape by the IDF against Palestinian women, and that such restraint had a political purpose: it “strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.” Regardless of the dubious merits of Nitzan’s thesis and the wisdom of awarding it a “teacher’s committee” prize, how did this rather obscure item morph from its modest origin to Dershowitz’s hyperbolic praise of IDF restraint and his indignant condemnation of radical anti-Zionists?

One person who helped is Professor Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa, a man with a despicable record of outright falsification (e.g. Hanan Ashrawi is a “long-time Holocaust denier”) and unapologetic racism. Plaut changed Nitzan’s theory of Jewish soldiers’ “restraint” from raping Palestinians out of respect for “ethnic boundaries” to one in which there was a total “absence of any history of rapes of Arab women by Israeli Jewish soldiers” and the soldiers “do not even regard Arab women as sexually desirable.” Dershowitz eagerly adopted these misinterpretations, then fabricated his own wild exaggerations: Nitzan’s claim of a low IDF rape rate became “news” that “surfaced” about the IDF’s “lowest” rate of civilian rape (lower than any other military); and Nitzan herself, an obscure grad student, became multiple “radical anti-Zionists.” And to cap it all off, note that both the source of the “news” and the offensive reaction to the news are the same person, Tal Nitzan. Read again Dershowitz’s outrageously inaccurate summary of this non-event:

And when news surfaced that the Israeli Army has the lowest rate of rape against enemy civilians, radical anti-Zionists argued that this was because Israeli soldiers were so racist that they didn’t find Palestinian women attractive enough to rape!

Does this bear the slightest resemblance to the actual source of a single obscure Israeli grad student’s questionable thesis?

Of course, if the incidence of civilian rape by the Israeli military really has been reduced to a level Dershowitz finds so praiseworthy, it would be a welcome change from the past. In its founding 1947-49 war, the Israeli military freely engaged in rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing. Israeli historian Benny Morris, in a 2004 interview conducted after his conversion to a Darth Vader political viewpoint, acknowledged:

What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. . . In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.

Israeli writer Amos Kenan added his personal recollection as an Israeli soldier in a 1989 article in The Nation: “At night, those of us who couldn’t restrain ourselves would go into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women.”  Then there is Amnon Neumann’s painful recollection of an incident in which a fellow soldier raped and murdered a 17-year-old girl.

Much more recently, as Yossi Gurvitz reports, a military rabbi named Eyal Qarim recommended rape of Palestinian women and girls if it serves the purposes of maintaining morale and the army’s fighting ability: “the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge, under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.” These are just a sample of the Israeli Jewish admissions that Dershowitz might be compelled to find credible. There is much more evidence of Palestinian documentation of rape that he no doubt would reject outright as Palestinian lies about their victimhood.

It’s always interesting to observe when dedicated purveyors of hasbara come up with a new claim of Israel’s superior morality contrasted with the depravity of its enemies. In Dershowitz’s view, the supposedly “lowest” rate rape is another feather in the cap of the “most moral army in the world,” while the “radical anti-Zionists” perversely attack this model behavior for their own nefarious purposes. Hasbarists struck gold with the claim that “We only kill civilians because Hezbollah/Hamas fires at us from behind human shields,” a line I do not recall seeing before 2006 but one which quickly gained traction and has had considerable staying power, largely through the efforts of Dershowitz and his ilk. I don’t predict as bright a future for this latest concoction. When you combine highly offensive, provably false, and strikingly dumb, the negatives don’t usually cancel each other out.