Increasing attention has been paid to the horrible crime of rape during peacetime.

Recent focus has been on hierarchical rapes — that is, sexual assault committed by people in positions of authority over their victims. But the most common form of rape throughout world history has been as a weapon of war. Historically the victor in a battle had the power to “rape and pillage” the losers. Modern rules of warfare are now making rape a war crime if committed by soldiers under the direction of their commanders. This is because rape continues to be a weapon of war even today.

There are several kinds of rape that are used as weapons. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, enemy women were raped and deliberately impregnated in order to cause them to bear the children of the victors. During the Holocaust, the opposite approach was taken. Jewish women were raped and then murdered. I recently learned that a 16-year-old cousin of mine, who was very beautiful, was repeatedly raped by Nazi soldiers in Poland and then murdered.

Among some terrorists, rape is used as a prelude to turning the victim into a suicide bomber. She is deliberately raped, and thus, under the local culture, dishonored. Her family, too, is dishonored by her victimization. The only way to restore the family’s honor is for the woman to die as a terrorist martyr. 

Yet, despite these atrocities, the United Nations and other human rights groups have paid less attention than they should to the use of rape as a weapon of war. This is because human rights organizations generally apply a double standard: one for Western democracies and the other for less developed parts of the world. It is also because the United Nations and other human rights groups spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources on one Western democracy, namely Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council, for example, devotes more than half of its agenda to Israel’s disputed policies and almost none of its agenda to the serious issue of rape.

A related reason for this general neglect of rape as a war crime is the politicization of human rights in general and of rape in particular. Consider the following academic paper, written by hard-left doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She began her thesis by noting that Israel has one of the best records in the world with regard to their soldiers raping enemy civilians.

Rape is a crime of violence, as well as a crime of sexual gratification. The very notion that your victim has to be seen as humanized is preposterous.

When she could not find instances of rape by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Nitzan hypothesized that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.” Rape by soldiers, infrequent as it is, is taken very seriously and punished quite severely. As a result, it almost never occurs.  So that is the data point from which the thesis was developed.

It is her conclusion that is so remarkable. She argued that the reason Israeli soldiers do not rape Palestinian women is due to an Israeli government program which teaches IDF soldiers that Palestinian women are subhuman, inferior, and unworthy, and therefore not appropriate objects of sexual assault.

Nitzan wrote: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences — just as organized military rape would have done.”

This conclusion is so absurd that it does not warrant a serious response.  But if a serious response is to be given, it is only necessary to point out how frequently Nazi soldiers raped the Jewish women who they had dehumanized beyond the point of any recognition.

Rape is a crime of violence, as well as a crime of sexual gratification.  The very notion that your victim has to be seen as humanized is preposterous. Tal Nitzan’s thesis is a prime example of primitive anti-Semitism. The core belief of the anti-Semite is that if a Jew does anything good, it must be for a bad motive. If Jewish soldiers do good by not raping Palestinians, it must be because they are badly motivated by their dehumanization of potential victims.

The world must move toward zero tolerance regarding rape both in wartime and in peacetime. This will not be easy to accomplish, especially during wartime, because the use of rape as a weapon of war has such deep roots in world history. But we must do everything possible to eliminate this scourge from our planet.