Celebrating Palestinian Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence

This presentation examines the role of gendered and racialized violence in Israeli settler colonialism, situating it within broader historical patterns of colonial domination. Drawing on the case of Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza, I analyze how state policies, military practices, and public discourse have normalized the dehumanization of Palestinians through racial and sexual violence. Using historical comparisons, I place Israel’s settler-colonial project alongside white supremacist regimes in the United States, South Africa, and other colonial contexts, demonstrating the ways in which gender and sexuality are instrumentalized to maintain colonial rule.

I argue that Israeli military and social narratives employ Islamophobic and Orientalist tropes to justify extreme violence, including depictions of Palestinian suffering in celebratory military culture, such as T-shirts mocking the deaths of Palestinian children and soldiers posing with blindfolded prisoners. This phenomenon reflects a long-standing pattern in settler-colonial regimes, wherein the destruction of Indigenous communities is accompanied by the sexual humiliation and racial subjugation of the colonized population.

Additionally, I explore Israel’s strategic use of “pinkwashing” and “feminist-washing,” tactics through which the state presents itself as progressive on gender and LGBTQ+ rights while simultaneously weaponizing gendered violence against Palestinians. This echoes historical precedents in which colonial powers have co-opted feminist and civil rights discourses to justify their oppressive rule.

By tracing these historical parallels, this presentation challenges dominant narratives that frame Israeli settler colonialism as unique or exceptional. Instead, I demonstrate that its reliance on racialized and gendered violence is part of a broader colonial framework. In doing so, I call for an intersectional and comparative approach to understanding settler colonialism, arguing that the struggle for Palestinian liberation must be viewed within the larger history of anti-colonial resistance worldwide.