Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Zionist Holo-Porn
Many reports of abuse of young Palestinian women at checkpoints suggest that IDF soldiers get a sort of sexual charge from such behavior.
In her web journal Kawther Salam (http://raph.levien.com/kawther/members.aon.at/hpkr/kawther/) has described IDF soldiers acting out sexual fantasies on Zohoor al Atrash and has reported the rape of the nine year old Sawsan Abu Turky. Salam's report is appended at the end of this article.
Harassment of adolescent Palestinian parochial school girls by IDF soldiers that expose themselves and threaten rape, murder and mutilation seems to be a regular feature of the occupation in al-Khalil (Hebron).
In a forthcoming book an adolescent Palestinian male recounts his experiences at a checkpoint. An IDF soldier apparently fondled him homosexually. The boy was so embarrassed that he makes a clumsy attempt to change the gender of the soldier, but the story only makes sense if the soldier was male.
One Israeli dramatic feature film describes an illicit relationship between a female Palestinian school teacher and an Israeli Jew. She requires him to wear his IDF uniform before they have intercourse.
In his February 7, 2003 article entitled "A Victory for Israeli Democracy," Gabriel Ash writes the following.
The fantasy of peace through Palestinian surrender and Israeli generosity is Israel's national fantasy of possession through rape, as in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew," in which Petruchio teaches Katherine to love him -- prefiguring the Shabak torturers -- by denying her food and sleep. The fantasy is part of the ideological complex that serves in Israel to erase questions of human rights and transforms Palestinians into extras in the narcissistic-machoistic drama of Jewish self-revival. Many Israelis, including among Sharon's voters, do dream of reconciliation and peace. But they imagine peace in roughly the same way rapists imagine love, as the belated recognition of the victim that he/she was never victimized, was in fact the one who started it all, who provoked the violence.
Of course, fantasies of rape and abuse of the women of conquered peoples are not exclusively linked to Zionism. US soldiers have acted out such fantasies in Iraq, and Isaac Babel authored a graphic short-story of the rape of a Russian woman by an ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet communist revolutionary. The asymmetry of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is conducive to Zionist sexual power trips, and the territorial self-fashioning1 associated with Zionism is a form of rape of the land both in terms of archeology by obliterating or digging through evidence of non-Israelite or non-Judean habitation and also in terms of reconstructing the land to correspond to the settler-colonist narrative and purposes by destroying abandoned Palestinian villages or by constructing the apartheid wall
Yet, in my experience and observation Zionists do not merely transform ethnic oppression into a sort of personal sexual aggression, for there is an intensity and ornateness to the sex-and-violence aspect of Zionist oppression that goes well beyond US military or Soviet crudity and that is reminiscent of Night Porter when it is superficially viewed as a Nazi sexploitation film.2 In their minds, Zionists seem to transform themselves into the Nazi protagonists of private holo-porn dramas, and I have wondered how such thinking entered the Zionist mentality until I saw the following article that appeared in the NY Times on September 6.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/world/middleeast/06stalags.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jerusalem Journal
Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.
"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film "Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel" had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how embarrassed we were."
Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the "yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust."
"Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?" she asked. "The answer is, we are."
The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, "I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.
The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.
Mr. Libsker's 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.
Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time, and questioned what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive.
In the movie, the publisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail, that gave momentum to the genre.
More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers learned a lot from him," Mr. Narkis said.
K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes, "Doll's House," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.
Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.
"It was fiction," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
Yet "Doll's House" and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high school curriculum. Mr. Libsker's movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block 24 and quoting from K. Tzetnik.
This approach to Holocaust education is being eschewed by an increasing number of Israeli academics. "The Holocaust was bad enough, without making things up," Dr. Yablonka said.
Sidra Ezrahi, a professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, "His books were so graphic and so barbaric." Maybe at first they had an important impact, she said. "But over time," she added, "if this is what they have chosen to leave in the Israeli curriculum, it's a scandal."
For many Israelis, the most dramatic part of the Eichmann trial was the testimony of K. Tzetnik. His true identity was revealed for the first time on the witness stand, where he passed out. Simultaneously, the Stalags were reaching the peak of their commercial success.
Yechiel Szeintuch, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University, rejects any link between the smutty Stalags and the writings of K. Tzetnik as "an original sin." He insists K. Tzetnik's work was based on reality.
But Mr. Libsker, 35, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that it is the same mixture of "horror, sadism and pornography" that serves to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to this day.
Israel's Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial
JERUSALEM, Sept. 5 — It was one of Israel's dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.
Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.
"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film "Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel" had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how embarrassed we were."
Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the "yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust."
"Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?" she asked. "The answer is, we are."
The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, "I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.
The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.
Mr. Libsker's 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.
Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time, and questioned what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive.
In the movie, the publisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail, that gave momentum to the genre.
More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers learned a lot from him," Mr. Narkis said.
K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes, "Doll's House," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.
Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.
"It was fiction," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
"There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz."
Yet "Doll's House" and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high school curriculum. Mr. Libsker's movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block 24 and quoting from K. Tzetnik.
This approach to Holocaust education is being eschewed by an increasing number of Israeli academics. "The Holocaust was bad enough, without making things up," Dr. Yablonka said.
Sidra Ezrahi, a professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, "His books were so graphic and so barbaric." Maybe at first they had an important impact, she said. "But over time," she added, "if this is what they have chosen to leave in the Israeli curriculum, it's a scandal."
For many Israelis, the most dramatic part of the Eichmann trial was the testimony of K. Tzetnik. His true identity was revealed for the first time on the witness stand, where he passed out. Simultaneously, the Stalags were reaching the peak of their commercial success.
Yechiel Szeintuch, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University, rejects any link between the smutty Stalags and the writings of K. Tzetnik as "an original sin." He insists K. Tzetnik's work was based on reality.
But Mr. Libsker, 35, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that it is the same mixture of "horror, sadism and pornography" that serves to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to this day.
| The Daily Life of Kawther Salam ..: Who raped Sawsan will not hesitate to rape again :.. November 30, 2002 |
Who learned how to practice tyranny in the Palestinian cities... He will practice it somewhere else... Who learned to harass Palestinian kids, women and men sexually... He will harass others somewhere else... Who learned to practice violence against Palestinians... He will use it against his own people... I wasn't astonished when Ronit Lev-Ari, the head of the Occupational Prime Minister's Office for the Status of Women declared on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 that one in every six women is Israel has been sexually harassed on the streets. She said, 30% of the victims were aged between 18-24. The harassment includes attempts to touch the women, obscene verbal proposal, prolonged staring, and efforts by men to press their bodies against them... In Hebron I used to hear obscene verbal proposals, such like, "whore, bitch, nice fucker..." In one case an IDF soldier pressed his body against me and touched my breasts in the public in Al Shuhada street. This happened on 25th April 2000 during the peace time. In another case I witnessed, the IDF soldiers were collecting the underwear and bed clothes of Zohoor Al Atrash, and exposed them in front of others. This happened during an operation to demolish Zohoors house during June 1998, during what was called peace. The soldiers were dropped Zohoor in a big ground hole after they ripped off her clothes, they then brought her alternative bed clothes, a "baby doll" to put on ... The soldiers then told her, "this will look nicer on you", the other soldiers laughed ... In yet a different case, I witnessed the IDF soldiers raising up their penis and exposing themselves in front of other Palestinian women, they were behaving in this way to prevent the women from passing through the border between area H1 and area H2 in the city of Hebron. Sawsan Abu Turky, a nine year old girl from Hebron was attacked by the IDF soldiers on her way back home on July 5, 2001. At a checkpoint, one soldier allowed Sawsan to pass, but the other one said no, you should return. When Sawsan tried to pass anyway, the soldier pushed her on the ground and kicked her head with the butt of his rifle. Sawsan was hospitalized for five days, but when she released she was still having pain. On September 6, 2001, Sawsan was arrested because she had tried to kill an Israeli soldier. Sawsan was raped twice at Israeli jail on the first day of her incarceration ... 1 See Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago University Press) by Nadia Abu el Haj of Barnard College. |
2 See http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=106471, and note that Palestinians do not reciprocate the perverted sexual fantasies of Zionists.
Sphere: Related Content
