On March 13, 2025, the
Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report based
on evidence of incessant incidents and Israeli strategic bombings to the UN
Human Rights Council. “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive
and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader
effort to undermine their right to self-determination,” Chris Sidoti of the
Commission stated.[i]
This statement is oriented to particular incidents, albeit recurrent; the report
goes on to charge the Israeli government with genocidal methods targeting the
ability of the Palestinian population to sexually reproduce itself. Ironically,
such methods may bring to mind the methods used in Nazi Germany, including
those used by Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” to wantonly kill and
strategically sterilize undesirables. It need not be a truism, however, that
the descendants of victims become victimizers, though I suspect that studies on
intergenerational psychology attest to the phenomenon. Also ironically,
culpability with an intergenerational cause is also a theme in the Hebrew
Bible. Thirdly, it is ironic too that Yahweh may have the last word on the
Israeli transgressions, as this too is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible’s
faith-rendering of the history of Israel. It would be odd indeed were Yahweh behind
a sort of rendering of justice against the Nazis by having Israel inflict
severe pain on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Put another way, that justice
did not catch up to every Nazi aggressor does not mean that excessive, and thus
unjust, harming of innocents can complete the cycle of justice. In fact, both
the literal “overkill” by Israel and Russia’s war crimes in invading Ukraine—both
with impunity—raise the question of whether omnipotent Yahweh gives a damn, or
even whether it is actually sheer fiction.
