Israeli academia

A recent study has been published by the Hebrew University Shein Center for Social Sciences written by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan. (I have not read the paper myself, all following information is based on journalistic sources.) The thesis is called, "Controlled Occupation: The Lack of Military Rape in the Palestinian Conflict." Mrs. Nitzan recognizes the fact that Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women relatively less than soldiers in other occupations armies. For this she provides two possible reasons, none of which include any moral or religious values that absolutely forbid the act of rape. The first reason given is that the Palestinians are so intensely dehumanized that no normal soldier would ever consider raping a Palestinian, same as he would never consider raping a cat or a dog. The second answer that she gives is that Israel has such a demographic problem that if Israeli soldiers were to think of the consequences of raping Palestinian women i.e. that the children would be Palestinian, they would immediately remove all thoughts of rape from their minds.

Without entering the discussion of occupation vs. no occupation, and ignoring the absolutely ridiculousness of her first proposition (I was a soldier myself, and no such dehumanizing occurs), I would like to address her second supposed answer. The first problem is that not everyone agrees that Israeli is in the midst of a demographic crisis. Each demographic study has different standards of who to count-to include or not to include citizens abroad etc.-as well as different ways to interpret the numbers. Aside from that, in Africa, warring tribes serially rape the women of the other tribe. This is not done for sexual pleasure, rather they hope to impregnate the women so that they do indeed give birth to as many children as possible. This is done after all the males have been brutally killed off. The purpose of the rape is to bring about the complete destruction of the tribe in the worse way possible i.e. not by killing everyone, but by completely "contaminating" all the female members. What is ridiculous about Tal's proposition, is that she assumes that Israeli soldiers so dehumanize the Palestinian women, yet at the same time, they won't rape them because they are worried about the supposed demographic problem. If Israeli soldiers are indeed as brutal as she makes them out to be, they would be raping as many women as possible if only to produce Israeli kids. If Israeli soldiers are indeed so disgusting, they would not let the product of their rapes be Palestinian. She assumes the worse, yet at the same time holds the soldiers to a higher standard in that they would have to count the children as Palestinian and not as Israelis.

This is all aside from the ridiculous fact that she ignores any possible moral and or religious reasons for not wanting to rape. In her mind, its obvious that all "brutal" occupying soldiers should automatically be looking to rape those they are occupying and there must be some reason why Israeli soldiers don't. It doesn't even cross her mind that Israeli soldiers are not brutal, disgusting pigs and that we try to be good, moral, and some, religious, people.
So, now we are getting blamed for raping Palestinians (type in something to the effect of "Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women" at Google or Youtube and see what you get...) as well as for not raping them!

This points to the status of current Israeli academia where the Israeli Sociology Association even gave Nitzan's paper a mark of excellence. :(
Did you all know, that the British attempts last year to excommunicate Israeli academia was initiated or at least supported by an Israeli, Dr. Ilan Pappe, formerly of Haifa University?
Sorry to leave off on a depressing note.
Ayal