The securitisation of Palestinian women marks them as permanently available for inspection, unveiling, search, surveillance and perhaps also penetration, writes Heidi Matthews [photo credit: TNA/Getty Images]
Since Israel began its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in October 2023, Israeli soldiers have circulated countless photos and videos on social media depicting themselves playacting sexualised scenes among the ruins of Palestinian life.
Much of , attracting millions of viewers. inside damaged or destroyed Palestinian homes , the owners either dead or wounded, missing or displaced.
They are seen displaying lingerie in the street, , or strapped to a tank; playing with semi-nude dolls and mannequins; .
In the early days after the ceasefire in Gaza, images are also emerging amidst “Operation Iron Wall” in the West Bank.
In reminiscent of scenes from 9 ½ Weeks, a soldier performs a lap dance while wearing a Palestinian woman’s lingerie, complete with stuffed bra, to the tune of Joe Cocker’s “Leave Your Hat On.”
These images have become so ubiquitous that it is fair to say a distinct genre of wartime imagery has emerged from the Israeli military, wherein soldiers take pride in creating and posting images that connect virtually unrestrained Israeli violence to eroticism, wartime humour and social media notoriety. I call this the ‘lingerie genre’ of wartime imagery.
Unlike the photos that emerged from Abu Graib prison in Iraq that pictured “”, the ‘lingerie genre’ has not garnered any public scandal.
Nor has it generated any meaningful consequences for the soldiers involved. While the Israeli military has said that the “”, it is unclear whether any soldiers have faced formal repercussions for participating in the production of this imagery. It is well-known that the Israeli military .
Whereas the Abu Ghraib photos were considered clandestine proof of some of the worst crimes committed by American troops during the Iraq war, Israeli ‘lingerie genre’ imagery has been largely glossed over by the mainstream media.
Despite the abundance and range of images, they are not understood to indicate anything other than a lack of discipline on the part of young soldiers operating under stressful conditions.
Israel’s ‘sexualised hatred’ of Palestinian women
This indifference, however, is morally, legally and analytically wrong. The new ‘lingerie genre’ can tell us a lot about how the Israeli military has conducted its operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
It both reveals and constructs how Palestinian women are thought of by Israeli society. The genre also raises important questions about the relationship of sexuality to the war effort more generally, including the effects these scenes produce in Palestine, Israel, and the wider global community.
There are many and competing narrative readings of this disturbing imagery. This essay offers only one set of possibilities that is informed by my positionality, writing as a white settler feminist in the global north, informed by Third World and postcolonial feminisms as well as specifically Palestinian feminist writers. The essay is intended to position the ‘lingerie genre’ as a phenomenon worthy of wider and richer discussion than it has received.
The Israeli military routinely advertises itself as the most moral and military in the world.
The ‘lingerie genre’ calls into question these claims, as well as the Israeli government’s attempts to and and its 57-year-long military occupation of the Palestinian territory by asserting that it will liberate Palestinian women and queer people.
As legal scholar Ardi Imseis has pointed out, ‘lingerie genre’ images likely violate the international law , as well as internal Israeli military protocols.
The genre may also run afoul of , which requires civilians to be treated with “respect for… their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs”, and specifically protects women “against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.”
However, feminists have long criticised protections designed to safeguard women’s ‘honour’, which were drafted generations ago, and risk “”.
On this worldview, the imagery of the ‘lingerie genre’ is morally wrong—and possibly illegal—because it violates Palestinian women’s privacy by invading the protected sphere of the family, and because the images pantomime sexual violence.
The common-sense understanding of wartime sexual violence — of which the ‘lingerie genre’ is one sub-category — typically explains it as “” In this account, Palestinian women in Gaza are violated just like other women are violated in war, but not as Palestinian women.
This theory of wartime sexual violation has significant contemporary traction. Catherine MacKinnon, writing about the war in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, understood the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbian soldiers in detention camps as , where rape was intended to have genocidal impacts.
For MacKinnon, genocidal rape was intended to “.” Much of this sexual abuse was also allegedly filmed, transformed into what MacKinnon called pornographic war propaganda, where “[w]hatever this rape does for the rapist, the pornography of the rape mass-produces.”
It will surely be tempting for some contemporary feminists to interpret the ‘lingerie genre’ in terms of a rehabilitated version of women’s honour, wherein Palestinian women — even where they are not directly pictured — are made into unwilling objects of pornography by virtue of Israeli soldiers’ violation of their private spaces and appropriate of their intimate clothing.
For example, Belén Fernández has described the genre as a “.”
The trouble with this narrative, however, is that it takes Palestinian ‘women’s honour’ as a given within ‘an overwhelmingly conservative society’. It posits shame as central to explaining how sexual violation can have genocidal effects by destroying a society from within.
with respect to the former Yugoslavia, this kind of feminist argument relied on the belief that “the rapes would cause the cause the communities to ostracise or stigmatise rape victims, which would harm the women and tear their communities apart.”
The danger with this narrative — let’s call it the pornography-as-shame-as-genocide narrative — is that it comes very close to blaming victim groups insofar as it is the shame that they produce and inflict on their ‘own’ women that produces the group’s genocidal destruction.
This sort of victim blaming lets colonialism off the hook far too quickly. As in the postcolonial Indian context, liberal feminist internationalist ideas about how to conceptualise harm to women and vindicate women’s rights can have the ironic consequence of reinscribing conservative sexual mores in a postcolonial context, where those mores were themselves developed in part as a mode of resistance to colonial domination.
Interpreting the ‘lingerie genre’ through the question of shame obscures how Israel’s occupation provides a specific Orientalist logic that produces the shame, stigma and humiliation that Palestinian women and society at large are presumed to suffer as a result of the acts of Israeli soldiers.
Through the ‘lingerie genre’, soldiers symbolically uncover Palestinian women to reveal the allegedly perverse and hypocritical sexual morality of Arab women and societies. Looking through the eyes of these soldiers, a global audience is purportedly given a glimpse into the .
This performance reifies harmful stereotypes about ‘sexually conservative’ Muslim and Arab societies and discounts the political agency of women in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Palestinian women have long played an active role in political struggle, .
, this has created a “dualistic perception of women”, with women being perceived as both “the sister of men” in terms of the national struggle, but also as particularly vulnerable to honour-based violations by virtue of their public positioning. In this story, “continuous political oppression has … sometimes even led to fear and paranoia of sexual abuse and rape.”
Viewed in this context, the ‘lingerie genre’ does have genocidal impacts, but not because of the humiliation and degradation of Palestinian women as women. Rather, the seeming obsession of Israeli soldiers with the intimate spaces and attire of Palestinian women is an act of violence insofar as it deliberately abstracts the imagined owners of the lingerie from their political position as Palestinian women.
The genre also functions as a sort of confession; these images reveal how Israeli society fears Palestinian women’s political and sexual agency.
The securitisation of Palestinian feminity
The absence of women from these scenes staged with objects provides the soldiers with a ‘safe space’ in which to play out sexual fantasy and the depoliticisation of the Palestinian feminine at the same time.
These images and their viral sharing are an attempt at creating, and controlling, the narrative around Palestinian women’s lives. In doing so they seek to neutralise the perceived threat that Palestinian women’s political and sexual lived realities pose to Israel, both physically and demographically.
In Israeli culture and politics Palestinian women are understood as .
But with fear also comes desire. Displaying lacey, erotic pieces of clothing is an exercise in both forcefully accessing Palestinian women’s sexuality, and ‘exposing’ these women as sexually — and potentially politically — deviant. They are both ‘not really Arab’ and also ‘like western women’.
By creating a certain sexual image of the Palestinian woman as sexually adventurous and available, even to Israeli soldiers, and exposing this fictional figure for all the world to see, these images aim to both deracinate women from Palestinian culture and society and to hold this figure up as something to be both desired and reviled.
The act of exposure is also politically useful to Israeli society insofar as it marks Palestinian women as deceptive, even fraudulent.
They are imagined as having ‘lied to us’ about their commitment to modesty; instead of figured in the racist stereotypes of religiously chaste, oppressed and asexual women, Palestinian women are now imagined as knowing flirts who will never ‘give it up’ to Israeli men. The fact that their Islamic dress might conceal either lingerie or a bomb—or perhaps both!—heightens desire by adding the titillation of risk.
Viewed through this lens, the ‘lingerie genre’ both creates and manages Israeli desire for the Palestinian Other. The images and videos reinscribe the Palestinian woman as a site of desire while, at the same time, they the sexual encounter.
What transforms the genre into genocidal filmic production is the fact that these images can only exist as an output of the Israeli state’s military dominance and colonial oppression.
The mocking tone that many of the photos incorporate functions as a flimsy denial of the anxieties on display, as though could hide that these same women are being marked for death not merely because of their constructed vulnerability, their reproductive capacity or their nationality, but also and perhaps more so because — through their political and intimate lives — they dare put up a mirror to the violence of occupation.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnThese imagined, conjured, play-acted encounters with Palestinian women’s sexuality reconstitute the Palestinian feminine as hypocritical and thus deserving of Western-Israeli discipline and punishment.
To expose the Palestinian feminine in this way is structured as an act of truth-seeking and justice; it confirms that these women cannot be trusted and must be penetrated in order to be sufficiently known to the enemy.
Part of the sexual dialectic sustaining the occupation and the genocide is the belief that the Palestinian feminine must be securitized and pacified while the need to do this is continually denied through Orientalist tropes that imagine Palestinian women as always already passive and domesticated.
In fact, one of the most shocking aspects of the war on Gaza has been how, using new AI-based targeting software, the distinction between the private (home) and the public (battlefield) has been collapsed.
Using a system called “Where’s Daddy?”, revealed that Israel “systematically attacked … targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity,” resulting in a disproportionate number of women and children as casualties.
The ‘lingerie genre’ securitises Palestinian women inside the home and makes it easier to think — and effect — this targeting of whole families and, thus, the capacity of the Palestinian group to sustain itself.
This securitisation of the Palestinian woman also marks her as permanently available for inspection, unveiling, search, surveillance and perhaps also penetration.
This availability is sustained by the idea that she has been revealed as duplicitous and whorish, even where this alleged whorishness takes place only inside the genocidal frame of the ‘lingerie genre’ photographer.
Heidi Matthews is an assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada. She researches and teaches in the areas of the law of war, international criminal law, criminal law, and law and sexuality. She splits her time between Toronto and rural Newfoundland and Labrador.
Follow her on X: @Heidi__Matthews
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.