Two insights from The Investigation by Peter Weiss: Auschwitz, Gaza, and rape
A response to "radical feminists" who believe Zionist atrocity propaganda against the Palestinian resistance
Ten years ago, I read The Investigation by Peter Weiss, a verbatim play entirely composed of actual testimony from survivors of the Auschwitz death camps at the Frankfurt Trials. My PhD thesis was about the link between art and annihilation, and I thought Holocaust studies would have answered the question about "the limits of representation". Reading it at a time that I was already depressed (partly because I was living in a very racist part of England during the hostile environment policy) pushed me into active suicidal ideation. This also happened around the time of the last worst genocidal massacre Israel perpetrated on Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge”, when they killed around 2,500 people including 500 children in less than two months. After praying for strength and patience, I found the will to stay alive because my death would not have helped the people I love, but being alive, I could do something, even if small, to try to prevent the things I was seeing, the things I had read about, from happening again.
One thing that horrified and saddened me in that play, which I kept thinking about after I became (or realised I was already) a radical feminist, was that one of the witnesses - a Jewish Auschwitz inmate - said that he and others dreamed of breaking free from the death camp and raping German women as revenge for what the Nazis did to them. (This description is from memory. I think everyone should read or watch the play when they are feeling stable.) It made me acutely aware that oppressed men are not immune to sexual violence, that men retain their sense of masculinity/misogyny in unbearable conditions of oppression, that they might even be linked - as this man implied, some see rape as resistance. However, I continue to believe that men from oppressed communities are less prone to committing sexual violence against women from oppressor community, due to (1) their lack of power, (2) the severe punishment that would follow, (3) internalised oppression: belief in the supremacy of the oppressor, and (4) some level of immunity from the self-dehumanising effects of power. These are my own observations of different communities in which I've lived (where I have been a woman from an oppressor community among oppressed men, and vice versa); I would be interested to test this hypothesis by looking at evidence.
Gaza has been a ghetto since 1948, a crowded refugee camp whose population consists of Palestinians forcibly expelled from the rest of occupied Palestine. It has been a concentration camp since 2007, when Israel (with collusion from US-controlled Egypt) instituted a blockade of Gaza, which disallowed the exit of cancer patients and the entry of children's colouring books and cement for rebuilding after the numerous bombings to follow (which they called "mowing the lawn," that is, trimming the Palestinian population of Gaza, whom they see as a "demographic threat"). Senior Israeli officials openly said that they tightly regulated the inflow of food to the miminium caloric requirement to "put the Palestinians on a diet", to keep them at the edge of starvation without noticeable mass deaths. When I lived in Gaza in the summer of 2003, before the blockade, 95% of the drinking water was already unfit for human consumption.
Gaza became a death camp - became Auschwitz - in the winter of 2008-9, autumn of 2012, summer of 2014, 2018-19, 2021, and now the final stage of Israel's extermination policy since October 2023, as punishment for the uprising. The world closed its eyes for all these years, and now the Holocaust happening today is due to that indifference, that inaction, that tolerance and giving of impunity to what Ilan Pappe calls Israel's 75-year-long "incremental genocide" of the the Palestinians; as well as the promotion of Zionist use of the "anti-Semitism" smear against people - including many Jews - opposing the genocide. Everyone who ignored this, who allowed the Zionists to practise DARVO or Accusation in a Mirror, who believed the Zionist smears due to racism and white supremacy, is deeply complicit and has blood on her hands.
I didn't believe any of the cartoonish atrocity propaganda - such as the beheaded babies - for a second. I had seen the dignity, humanity, kindness and courage of the Palestinians for myself, and I know they teach their children and the world - and me, personally - love and life, courage and compassion, not hatred and death. In Ramallah, I volunteered at the Friends School and taught little girls and boys with the purest hearts, sobbing while reading their stories, in which one child expressed pity for injured Israeli soldiers. Anyone who has experienced the overwhelming generosity and love of Palestinians knows that their cause is just and their conduct is unimpeachable (or at the very least, understandable).
The Palestinian resistance tactics that are condemned and demonised by imperialist and settler-colonialist countries are tactics that have been used by every oppressed group in the face of intolerable oppression, the only option they were left with when they exhausted all non-violent options (which were suppressed by the occupying entity in the most brutal ways) and when they were pushed against the wall, facing imminent annihilation. I don't know of any decent person who opposes violence for the purpose of self-defence, individual or collective. It is truly an indecent thing to do.
As every resistance leader notes: the rules of engagement are determined by the oppressor. Israel wrote the playbook that Palestinians are forced to abide by. They take Palestinians hostage, even children, and hold them captive indefinitely under "administrative detention", imprisonment without charge or trial. What are Palestinians supposed to do about this? Let their people languish in prison? Humbly petition the Zionists to release their people and accept their refusal? Use the judicial process, appealing in unjust occupation and secret military courts? The only tactic that has ever worked is taking Israeli soldiers captive to exchange for Palestinian hostages in Israeli dungeons. It is not only right and justified, but their duty, to use any means necessary to rescue their people from torture and unjust captivity.
Every argument of this sort is used by Zionists to paint themselves as the victims rather than the aggressors. But of course, they can have their captives released by meeting the demands of the resistance, and releasing Palestinians from captivity. There have been many prisoner exchanges of this sort, such as when they agreed to release 1,027 Palestinian hostages in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. The difference in the way the Palestinians treat Israeli captives (vs. the Zionists' torture and killings of Palestinian hostages) also shows the nobility of their conduct:
Israeli P.O.W./captive testimonies:
Yocheved Lifshitz
Danielle Aloni
Vetoon Phoome:
Israeli woman’s testimony:
Released captives:
Palestinian hostage* testimonies:
Beyond Male: Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War; Israeli State Sexual Violence against Palestinians
Behind enemy bars: Palestinian and Israeli prisoners
Freed Palestinian Prisoners Say They Faced Torture and Rape in Israeli Jails
B’Tselem: Torture and Abuse in Interrogation
(and so on)
As for the suicide bombings, plane hijackings, assassinations and other acts of "terror" from the past, we should remember the context of these acts and compare them with other such acts by other resistance groups during history: slave uprisings where women and children from slave-owning families were killed, indigenous resistance which targeted other settlers stealing their lands, and, as feminists should particularly keep in mind, the violence perpetrated against civilians by the Suffragettes.
In all these cases, the resistance groups were demonised as monsters, terrorists, barbaric, pure evil, inhuman demons that must be eliminated, whom it was OK to kill and torture since they abdicated their human rights by their monstrous, incomprehensible acts. The victims of such acts were also turned into martyrs for the supremacist, slave-owner, settler, and male dominance cause. These acts were used as proof that the cause of abolition, decolonisation and feminism were wrong and evil, proof that people from oppressed groups are indeed subhuman and irrational, impossible to negotiate with, as the supremacists have been saying all along. Liberals or reformists of the time would attack the resistance, saying that they have set back their cause with their violent indefensible tactics (the only ones open to them, after non-violence failed!), and saying they are responsible for the brutal, disproportionate reaction, the collective punishment visited upon their community from the oppressor.
Modern-day liberals and reformists say the same thing about the Palestinian tactics. For moral consistency, they must also condemn slave uprisings, indigenous resistance against settlers, and (especially in the case of imperialist "feminists", some of whom have taken to using the Suffragette colours) Suffragette violence. The suicide bombings have the same logic as the terror campaign by the WSPU (including the infamous suicide of Emily Davison) - they are to draw the world's attention to the cause, which would otherwise be ignored. Can anyone say that violent tactics don't work? Did the world pay attention to the Palestinian cause before the armed resistance operation on October 7? Now every Western leader, even the staunchest Zionists and pro-Israelis, are calling for a Palestinian state (when they were prepared to tolerate the gradual ethnic cleansing and de facto annexation of all of Palestine on October 6!).
How many reformist feminists who misidentify as radicals try to escape the moral trap by condemning Suffragette violence? We see through that transparent ploy, sisters. Either remove the Suffragette ribbon from your profile picture and condemn them as "terrorists", attack those who defend them for "glorifying terrorism", as you do to people supporting the Palestinian resistance, or let us treat the Palestinian resistance the same way you treat the Suffragettes - as heroes, martyrs, freedom fighters fighting a just cause, and the hope of the world. Give up your right to vote while you're at it!
So I know from living in Palestine, witnessing the oppression of the Palestinians, and experiencing Palestinian culture, that Palestinians teach their children compassion, even towards their enemies, and I would never believe of the cartoonish atrocity propaganda that tries to paint them as monsters and demons. I knew from my own experience and from documented fact after fact, story after story, that it is the Zionists who behave like monsters and demons, who commit acts of the most incomprehensible brutality, just like the Nazis. It is a crime in many places to deny the Holocaust. I am fully against Holocaust denial and will not associate with anyone who engages in it (though I am ambivalent about legislating against it). This, despite the fact that no decent person could bring herself to believe that human beings could commit the crimes that the Nazis committed. Zionist crimes are equally incomprehensible, from the point of view of empathy. But it can and must be understood because we have to believe the evidence of our eyes, we have to believe the documented facts, we have to understand the chain of causation that leads to self-dehumanisation in people indoctrinated with supremacist ideology, because we could very well do the same things that the Zionists and the Nazis do - especially relevant in my Hindu fascist society today.
That is another insight I received from Peter Weiss's The Investigation, one I think about often. One of the witnesses said that (1) political prisoners were able to survive and resist the horrific conditions at Auschwitz better than ordinary, apolitical people, who had no framework for understanding what was happening to them, and (2) he believed that Jews could very well have been Nazis if the situations were reversed, that good and evil are products of circumstance rather than essential characteristics of different groups. (Again, I'm describing my understanding of what he said from memory. Please do read the play, understanding when you go in that it is an extremely difficult thing to read; it will turn your mental world upside down.) This is such an essential insight!
The Western liberal ideology of individualism posits a moral equality among all individuals, denying context, denying upbringing, denying power differences, denying classes, denying oppression. Its ideologues say they believe that all human beings are capable of good and evil, regardless of whether they are from the oppressed or the oppressor class. This ignores the facts. One of the most evil acts on Earth, child sexual abuse, is overwhelmingly committed by men. Although there are women who sexually abuse children too, they are a tiny minority. Some 97-99% of child sex abusers are male (note for the maths-blind: this does not mean that 97-99% of men are child sex abusers), only 1-3% are female. Oppression, material power, supremacist ideologies, brainwashing, dehumanisation, socialisation, social tolerance of violence, social impunity, entitlement to domination, privilege, class and (sex) caste matter.
The statistics are almost as imbalanced when it comes to sexual violence against adults, physical and emotional abuse, and violence in general. Women are not equally likely to commit violence as men, though this idea of moral equality underpins liberal individualist ideology. They don't "see sex". They will point to anecdotal evidence of the rare cases of female violence to suggest moral equality between oppressor and oppressed. They will fabricate incidents, practise DARVO, accuse abused women who fight back of being abusers (female prisons are full of victims of male violence who fought back), spin and massage the statistics, use their power in the media to exaggerate female violence, and do everything in their power to "prove" that women are as violent as men - or even more violent, as men's rights activists argue: that men are the oppressed and women are the oppressors. This denies the real statistics, but it also denies all our experiences, common sense, the evidence of our eyes and ears. Individualism obscures reality. It is gaslighting on a massive scale. The fact that liberal individualists turn into raging male supremacists, misogynists, and anti-feminists so easily shows that when you scratch liberalism's surface, you find fascism waiting underneath.
It's the same when it comes to Israelis, Palestinians and atrocity. It matters who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. People who immediately believe Zionist atrocity propaganda against the Palestinian resistance, just on their word and without any evidence, and disbelieve Palestinian claims of Israeli atrocities, despite the ample documentation of said atrocities or documentation of past atrocities of the same kind, and exposure of the long history of Zionist lies, slanders, smears and libels, claim to be individualists, not racists. They make a distinction between "innocent" Palestinians who don't resist annihilation or defend their children (or who are children, as long as they are too young to have the motor skills to throw a stone), and "Hamas terrorists who just happen to be Palestinian"! They think that believing in the cartoonish atrocity propaganda** doesn't make them a racist. They think the onus is on us to debunk every wild claim and violent rape fantasy cooked up by the Zionists. The onus is never on them to provide a shred of evidence for their claims.
Scratch the surface of an individualist, and you find a racist. They see white people, Western people, settler-colonialists and imperialists, as "just like us". They see Palestinians in the same way that Zionists see them: potential terrorists, demographic threats, human animals, monsters and demons. Not human beings like them. The kinds of people who could potentially juggle severed heads while raping women and literally butchering them, using their severed breasts for hackysacks, driving nails into their groins, committing necrophilia and laughing and laughing while they do it, beheading babies, stringing them up on clotheslines, tying up families at dinner tables while they eat the family's dinner and cutting off their fingers every so often while their baby burns in the oven (and leaving no evidence, not even bloodstains, headless bodies, or baby corpses - Palestinians truly have demonic powers!).
The reality is that they were "scared, young men" whose leaders told them they must treat their captives with utmost gentleness, orders which they followed, making sure they got enough to eat and drink, letting them go out into the garden to cool off, acting in such a way that even young children were not afraid, asking politely if they could have a banana from the bunch that was left on the counter, and reassuring the captives not to worry, "we are Muslims, we won't hurt you", which set their minds at ease. Oh, my heart! These are truly the orphans of the previous massacres, their development arrested, suffering from CTSD (constant traumatic stress disorder), these are no different from the children we see on the news today (that some racists have some sympathy for until they grow up), barely grown up and giving their lives for their people. To demonise these men by spreading Zionist propaganda is just unforgivable. To allow people to make these claims and disclaim their racism is an unbearable assault on decency and truth. There is literally nothing more racist than blood libel and atrocity propaganda against some of the most oppressed, generous, kind, brave people on Earth, whose decency is well documented, as well as the evil lying character of their oppressors.
What the second cited witness quoted in The Investigation said is what we know, about Germans, about Israelis, about Palestinians. It is circumstance, power, socialisation, that creates good and evil. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are essentially good. Neither Germans nor Israelis are essentially bad. But good and evil do exist, and we must confront their reality.
This doesn't mean that it is impossible for indigenous men to rape settler women, or enslaved men to rape women from the slave-owning class, or Jews to rape German women in Nazi Germany, or Palestinian men to rape Zionist settler women in occupied Palestine - as we saw from the Auschwitz inmate who spoke of wanting to rape German women specifically in order to get revenge on the Nazis who brutalised him and his people in the death camp. The point is that when we read his testimony, we understand what creates this desire: he was victimised, humiliated, degraded, by German society and he wanted to experience the power of degrading a German woman, over whom he could claim male power (though she had power over him by virtue of her race). He wanted to be an oppressor and not the oppressed, a victimiser, not a victim, powerful, not powerless.
Could we women, we feminists (especially radical feminists who understand that male violence is an effect of socialisation), not understand where that desire comes from? Not justify it, never justify it. We always stand with the oppressed and not the oppressor, even if the oppressor comes from the oppressed. How could we ever fight male violence if we don't understand where it comes from? How masculinity/misogyny works, if we act like rapists are demons without understandable, human motivations? When we look at the context, suddenly, this wannabe rapist looks very human, not a cartoonish over-the-top demon from hell.
In the same way, if we bear witness to the reality of Palestinian suffering, oppression and overwhelming injustice that they face, could we not empathise with them, the religious character of their resistance (especially as most secular groups were demolished by the Zionists), with their desire for revenge, with their hate for the oppressor, with their delight when they turn the tables and achieve a resistance victory?
Screenshots from Tears of Gaza, documentary about “Operation Cast Lead”, the Zionists’ genocidal massacre of Gaza in 2008-9
Can we not see that they are human beings and realise that we might very well act the same way if we were in their shoes? How would you act if your children were murdered? If you actually look at what the resistance fighters did - the truth, the facts, not propaganda - it is admirable, understandable and completely justifiable. There is no evidence of rape or targeted killings of children whatsoever (there is plenty of evidence that the Zionists killed their own people, including children, with some amount of deliberation - see the Hannibal Directive).
Of course, the testimony from the first cited Auschwitz witness was just a man's fantasy - there is no evidence that Jewish men ever did rape German women for revenge, though it is not impossible. If we found cases of this happening, then how would we react to that? By demonising Jews (or Jewish resistance fighters) as "terrorists"? By repeating claims we find in mainstream Nazi publications that Jewish resistance fighters engage in mass rape and torture campaigns of innocent German women? By condemning, shaming and silencing people talking about the Holocaust or who admire and support the Jewish resistance??
Feminism is doomed if we don't understand that men are human, that rapists are human, and try to understand where rape comes from. Palestinians also know very well that Zionists are human, despite their barbaric and incomprehensible, actually monstrous and demonic acts. As the second cited witness from Auschwitz said, good and evil are about circumstance, not essential characteristics. Men commit atrocities against women because of male socialisation - if women were socialised in the same way, and had the same power over men that men have over us, it is possible that we would act act like men do. Ursula K Le Guin's short story "The Matter of Seggri" illustrates such a gender-flipped world, where women have power and run society, and men are segregated and kept imprisoned to be reproductively exploited by women.
Zionists, racists, and Jewish/white/Western supremacists don't understand this. They believe Jews (white, Western people) are eternal victims because they are essentially good, and non-Jews (indigenous, colonised people) are eternal oppressors because they are essentially evil. Bertolt Brecht reminded us that we are not oppressed because we are good, but because we are weak.
Second wave feminists were social constructionists who rejected biological essentialism or biological determinism. Gail Dines and Sheila Jeffreys are two feminists who continue to argue for social constructionsm (though Jeffreys organises with biological determinists). The online movement that self-identifies as radical feminism has jettisoned this principle, with many of the dominant women arguing that male violence is innate to men and, in the case of extremists like 'Black Pill Feminists', that female subordination is innate to women (these 'feminists' argue that 'feminism is a scam' because 'women are wired to be pick-mes'). Those who argue that male violence is innate point to the sexist pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology, ignore all criticisms and debunkings of those studies, and then when pressed, claim that they never argued what they argued, that they're only 'questioning feminist dogma' and that those who debunk evo-psych are anti-science. Ultimately, however, I believe the shift is complete. Those who self-identify as 'radfems' are, on the whole, biological essentialists who have the exact same opinions as male supremacists (both believe that male violence and female subordination are 'natural'). That's because they are the same; these are conservative women, some of whom are self-aware - they identify as both 'right wing' and 'fully radfem' - and some of whom believe that radical feminism is conservatism but do not realise their opinions are conservative. They often become more self-aware with time and try to rehabilitate conservatism as the real feminism, attacking radical feminists on the ridiculous charge of being 'responsible for transgenderism and queer theory'.
Biological essentialism is a feature of identity politics. The best examples of identity politics, in my opinion, are men's rights activism, white nationalism, Hindu fascism and Jewish supremacy (Zionism). Men's rights activists support men because they are men. White supremacists support whites because they are white. Hindu nationalists support Hindus because they are Hindu. Jewish supremacists (Zionists) support Jews because they are Jews. They all claim to be oppressed victims, but this is delusional and at some level it is a deliberate ploy. They know they are defending power and supremacy, and that they are not really oppressed by their victims. Their definition of 'oppression' is any reduction in their privilege, any resistance to their total power and entitlement.
But actual oppressed groups can also engage in identity politics. The biological determinism of the conservative 'radfem' movement shows it is an identity politics movement. It is hard to know what these women are fighting if they believe that sexism is natural and innate to men and women - nature? Just like the groups I mentioned above, these women support women because they are women (adult human females). However, actual feminists do not support women because we are female. We support women because we are oppressed. We are not against men because they are male. We are not pro-women because we are female. We are against oppression, we are against violence. It just so happens that we are oppressed on the basis of our sex!
Zionist-sympathising feminism always devolves into identity politics. They only support women because we are women, not because we are oppressed. Actual feminism - being against oppression, being against violence - would oblige them to support not just women, but all oppressed groups, for the sake of moral consistency. (Though they say they focus on women and children because there is no one else fighting for them. I wonder what they think Palestinian women and children are? Men? Animals? Objects?) There is no way that an actual feminist, who supports women because she is against oppression, could ever be a Zionist. Zionist feminism is a clear case of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy. It is because of the domination of white, Western women in the movement who are more attached to their white, Western privilege (their imperialism and racism) than women's liberation as a sex caste. This is why they see anti-racist and anti-imperialist Third World women of colour as enemies or a fifth column, and when they say "women", they mean only white, Western women.
Just like Zionists, for these ‘feminists’: women can only ever be victims, men can only ever be oppressors. A slave-owning woman is a victim, a settler woman is a victim, a woman in a genocidal army, a woman defending genocide is a victim. It is the enslaved men, the indigenous men and the men resisting genocide that are the oppressors. She is never responsible for violence. As for enslaved women, indigenous women, and women resisting genocide along with their brothers? They are invisible, they don't exist, they are victims not of imperialism but only of their comrades in arms. It's easy for them to disbelieve in the existence and agency of women resisting genocide and colonialism; they've banned us from their spaces long ago because our presence reminds us that the above narrative is just a fantasy. This is one reason they are desperate for and simultaneously suspicious of tokens.
To sum it all up: if you believed the atrocity propaganda against Palestinian resistance fighters without evidence, if you believe Zionist claims without evidence, if you believe the US-Nazi and Zio-Nazi publications and their smears against the Palestinian resistance, if you spread that blood libel, you are racist.
The reason you do this is believe you any claims made by white, Western people against indigenous, non-Western people without scepticism and you disbelieve the truth about settler atrocities despite the mountains of evidence; you have the same victim complex as Zionists where you cannot accept that you may be a perpetrator of violence; and you are not a good feminist either.
You don't understand good and evil because you are part of that same evil system from which Zionism sprung: imperialism, settler colonialism, neo-colonialism. You’ve been raised in that evil from generations before your birth. You don't see indigenous, non-white, non-Western people as human beings. You only have empathy for your own kind, for colonisers, for evil. You don't have empathy for all human beings.
You would have believed the atrocity propaganda against enslaved men, against Black men and boys in the Jim Crow era, against indigenous men resisting settler-colonialism, and even against Jewish men fighting Nazism. It would not have been OK for someone in the 1930s to support a genocide (explicitly or implicitly, through inaction and silence) because they believed the blood libel in Nazi publications. It is not an excuse that you trust imperialist publications like the New York Times.
The sooner you accept the truth, the sooner you can start unlearning it and become both anti-racist and a good feminist.
* I know there will be imperialists coming at me for using the word “P.O.W./captive” for Israelis and “hostage” for Palestinians, but I do it very deliberately - to highlight the hypocrisy of mainstream media’s double standards, and well as to tell the truth: there is no moral equivalency between the oppressor and those resisting oppression.
** which is seriously equivalent to blood libel, the Nazi propaganda that Jews would mix up the blood of Christian babies into the bread they used in religious rituals, or even the monstrous accusations against women accused of being witches in the mediaeval and early modern period in Europe: “I’m not sexist! I'm against evil witches, who just happen to be women! Where’s your compassion for the babies they boiled alive in their cauldrons?! It’s in the Malleus Maleficarum and the Witchfinder Times!”
Wow! This is so well articulated. I agree with you entirely. Thanks for writing it.
In sisterhood, Kate