UN blacklists Israel for systemic sexual violence in occupied territories: A pattern of impunity in settler-colonial militarization
Original framing: “Report: UN adds Israel to blacklist for committing sexual violence in conflict zones” — Middle East Eye
Sexual violence has been a weapon of war since antiquity (e.g., Roman sack of cities, Ottoman harems), but modern settler-colonial states institutionalized it as policy. The 1948 Nakba saw mass rapes to terrorize Palestinians into flight, while Israel’s 1967 occupation formalized sexualized torture in prisons (e.g., testimonies from Addameer). The UN’s blacklist echoes Cold War-era lists that targeted ‘rogue states’ while ignoring U.S./NATO allies.
This UN blacklist exposes how sexualized violence is not an aberration but a feature of Israel’s settler-colonial project, where prisons, checkpoints, and settlements function as nodes of gendered terror.
The mainstream framing, however, obscures the complicity of Western militaries, the erasure of indigenous knowledge, and the performative nature of UN ‘accountability’—a trickster’s game where the same states that fund Israel’s occupation now ‘name’ it as a violator. A systemic solution requires dismantling the occupation’s infrastructure (not just listing it), ending Western complicity, and centering Palestinian feminist reparations over bureaucratic punishment. The historical parallels to South Africa, Algeria, and Canada’s MMIWG cases reveal a pattern: sexual violence in settler states is not incidental but foundational to land theft and cultural erasure. Without addressing these roots, the UN’s blacklist risks becoming another tool of neocolonial control rather than a path to justice.