Hamas Projection: Genocide and Rape

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It’s called “projection”: ascribing to others behavior or beliefs that are one’s own. Of the two major weapons in Hamas’s arsenal, projectiles and projection, the latter has been markedly the most successful.

Hamas projectiles – rockets, missiles, mortars – have over the years, including over the five Hamas-initiated wars between 2008 and 2023, forced tens of thousands of Israelis into bomb shelters. And the group’s targeting of civilians is a war crime. But the actual toll of the projectile assaults by the terror group, in terms of lives lost and property damaged, has (unlike Hamas’s gun, knife and grenade invasion of October 7, 2023) been much less than that to which the organization aspired.

In contrast, projecting onto Israel, ascribing to the Jewish state, Hamas’s own genocidal agenda – as explicitly declared in its charter and demonstrated in its 10/7 massacre – has been a worldwide success. It is parroted by government leaders on every continent, including members of Congress; by faculty and students on prestige and not so prestige campuses wherever such institutions exist; and by know-nothing but always in-fashion and morally compromised major media. The claim of Israelis committing genocide has become their “truth.” They regurgitate it even as they ignore Hamas promises to continue pursuing what it characterizes as its religiously mandated goal of ridding the world of all Jews. They dance to the Hamas tune of a Gaza genocide even as Israel’s efforts to eradicate a truly genocidal organization have, in fact, yielded a proportionally far lower civilian toll than any other war against forces imbedding themselves in urban populations and using those populations as cover.

The Hamas leadership’s genocidal antisemitism and its projection of its genocidal intent are both characteristic as well of other Palestinian leaders. For example, since creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the context of the Oslo Accords, PA leaders have used their media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians in the necessity of dedicating themselves to killing Jews and have rewarded and lionized those who have done so. As to projection, PA president Mahmoud Abbas, among his many other claims in the same vein, infamously declared during a visit to Germany that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

But, as in the context of recent events, the world is largely silent on the Palestinians’ genocidal agenda, while, again, with sickening hypocrisy, parroting the Palestinians’ projection of that agenda onto the Jews.

The mutilation and rape – both before and after their murder – of victims of Hamas’s October 7 invasion, including that of parents in front of children and children in front of their parents, were, like the genocidal assault, reprises of acts that have a long history in Palestinian attacks on Jews. Such atrocities were, for example, a significant part of the anti-Jewish progroms in the Mandate in 1929 and were a recurrent feature of the fate of Jews that fell into Palestinian hands in the 1947-48 war.

Not surprisingly, Hamas has sought to project its own perpetration of rape, like its policy of genocide, onto Israel.

It has also sought to deny its extensive and apparently pre-planned and systematic rape of Israeli women on October 7 and its subsequent sexual abuse of kidnapped Israelis. For example, an in-depth New York Times report on the rape of Israeli women during the Hamas invasion elicited this response, as reported by Michael A. Cohen in the Atlantic: “‘We categorically deny such allegations,’ Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, ‘and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.’”

Others attacking and attempting to discredit the Times piece and related stories and denying the October 7 rapes include pro-Hamas leftist publications like the Intercept and The Nation, and Hamas supporters, including political figures such as Congressman Jamaal Bowman (who subsequently reversed his stance) and far-Left entertainment types like actress Susan Sarandon.

As the Atlantic article notes, numerous left-leaning groups sympathetic to Hamas, including groups supposedly opposed to the abuse of women, essentially ignored or downplayed the abuse of Israeli women: “Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation…. Others have accused the Israeli government of ‘weaponizing’ accusations of rape to justify Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.”

But beyond the denials of Hamas rapes there rose, once again, the use of projection by Hamas and by its Palestinian and non-Palestinian cheerleaders: diverting public opinion from the truth by falsely claiming that it was, in fact, Israelis who were sexually abusing Palestinian women.

For example, at a March 2024, conference at Rutgers entitled “Palestine is a Queer Feminist Struggle Against Imperialism,” Nadin Naber, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, asserted that, “… the methods of rape and sexual assault documented during the establishment of the State of Israel and continuing today are not exceptional in colonial violence… They are part of the logic and practice of Israel’s white colonial settlers who combine violence against women with the land and nature, assuming that to control the land, one must control the bodies of Palestinian women and their reproductive capacities, from 1948 until today.”

As one would expect, the projection of Hamas’s acts of rape onto Israelis was trumpeted as well by agents of the United Nations. An article in The Guardian by Julian Borger stated: “The panel of [UN] experts said there was evidence of a least two cases of rape, alongside other cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape. Reem Alsalem [the only member of the ‘panel’ named and quoted in the piece], the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said the true extent of sexual violence could be significantly higher. … ‘We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are,’ said Alsalem.”

Media articles on the UN “panel” and on Alsalem’s comments appeared some days before the anticipated release of a report by a UN envoy supporting allegations of Hamas sexual crimes. Alsalem referenced the upcoming report, and her accusations against Israel may have been at least in part intended to counter the impact of the envoy’s findings. Those findings were described in an Associated Press article of March 4 by Edith M. Lederer:

“The U.N. envoy focusing on sexual violence in conflict said in a new report Monday that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Hamas committed rape, ‘sexualized torture,’ and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women during its surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

“There are also ‘reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing,’ said Pramila Patten, who visited Israel and the West Bank from Jan. 29 to Feb. 14 with a nine-member technical team.

“Based on first-hand accounts of released hostages, she said the team ‘found clear and convincing information’ that some women and children during their captivity were subjected to the same conflict-related sexual violence including rape and ‘sexualized torture.’”

The vile projection of Hamas acts of rape onto Israelis has even been echoed in the State

“IDF Brig.-Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi met with the holder of the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio at the US State Department…  Recounting his meeting, he explained, ‘It was a meeting that shook me. We sat there, talked about the situation, and suddenly she accused Israel of systematically sexually abusing Palestinian women.’

“Avivi described his reaction.

“’This is absolutely disconnected from reality. But without hesitation, she said, ‘The UN presented evidence to the Israeli government.’ I told her, ‘Does it make sense that this phenomenon would exist and the media would never have reported on it?’ I wanted there to be greater awareness… about what is really happening in the US State Department…”

And, of course, Hamas itself, and its funder and fellow Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, Qatar, through its international media mouthpiece, Al-Jazeera, likewise claimed Israeli abuse of Palestinian women.

But in an unusual twist, following assertions to this effect in late March which cited supposed Israeli attacks on women at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, both Hamas and Al-Jazeera recanted their claims.

As noted by Ohad Merlin in the Jerusalem Post (March 25): “Al Jazeera columnist and former director Yasser Abuhilalah also tweeted, admitting that ‘It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Al-Shifa Hospital was fabricated… The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood…’”

But there is an obvious problem with this explanation of the retractions. Neither Hamas nor Al Jazeera has ever allowed facts to interfere with their fabricated calumnies against Israel and Jews.

Other information in the Jerusalem Post article points to a more plausible explanation for withdrawal of the claims of sexual abuse in Al-Shifa. “Israeli news blogger Abu Ali Express… reported that the viral fake testimony also had unexpected reverse ripple effects, leading many Gazans to flee their homes in the northern Gaza strip southwards…” Hamas has, of course, consistently opposed the Israel-encouraged movement of Gaza civilians out of areas of military activity, and the retraction of the rape claims were no doubt aimed at stemming civilian flight from northern Gaza.

Both the claims and the reason for their retraction have echoes in earlier events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just as the rape of Jewish women has been a recurrent phenomenon in Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel’s Jews since the earliest years of the conflict, so also has the projection of such acts onto Israelis, and so has, as well, the backfiring of the tactic.

In the wake of a number of battles during the 1947-48 war, false Arab claims of massacres and of the rape of Arab women, claims intended to increase the fervor and determination of Palestinian and other Arab forces (much like the intentions of the woman apparently responsible for the recent Al-Shifa Hospital fabrication), had consequences that were catastrophic for the Arab side.

The most significant was the propaganda around the battle of Deir Yassin. While Arabs and others at the time claimed a massacre of Arab villagers, and Palestinians generally continue such claims, serious scholars on both sides have largely converged on their assessment of what happened there, including the number of dead, which differs substantially from the anti-Israel assertions.

With regard to the Arab propaganda and its impact in the wake of the battle, a BBC series marking the fiftieth anniversary of the war interviewed Hazem Nusseibeh, who was editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service’s Arabic news at the time and who spoke of a meeting in Jerusalem with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders, among them the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) Hussein Khalidi. (The AHC – the leading Palestinian Arab political organ – had been founded by and was then chaired by Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini.) Nusseibeh states. “I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story…. He said, ‘We must make the most of this.’ So he wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities.” A Deir Yassin survivor tells the BBC, “We said, ‘There was no rape.’ [Khalidi responded]: ‘We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.’” Nusseibeh then states: “This was our biggest mistake. We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror. They ran away from all our villages.”

According to Daniel McGowan, at one time director of the New York-based Deir Yassin Remembered association, the panic marked “the beginning of the depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and the beginning of the exile of roughly 700,000 Palestinians.” The false story of Jewish rape was a major factor in generating the Naqba.

The catastrophic consequences for Palestinians of past anti-Jewish lies of the sort that are constantly uttered by Palestinian leaders – leaders who know they are lies and often know how they have backfired in the past – have never led to any significant change vis-a-vis the promoting of such lies.

This may be in large part because Palestinian leaders believe that overall the lies, like that of Israeli genocide, have served them very well and those successes have outweighed the negative impact of some fabrications. Also, reflecting the psychological foundations of projection, it may be that – just as many Jewish leaders cannot believe that their Palestinian neighbors don’t ultimately want what they want, peaceful coexistence and a better life for themselves and their children (a delusion that contributed to the disastrous Israeli failures of October 7) – Palestinian leaders cannot believe that the Jews don’t want what they want, the annihilation of their enemies. And so, they can’t get past the conviction that the ultimate Jewish aim must be, like their own aim, genocide. And that the Jews must be as inclined to slaughter, mutilation and rape of their enemies as they are. But whatever the precise mental calculus that underlies the Palestinian projection of their own exterminationist agenda onto the Jews, that projection – both as propaganda and as conviction – and the world’s indulgence of it, will remain a major obstacle to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.