Opening The Rift
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DOGS TRAINED TO RAPE; Sodomised Bodies, Lynch Law, and the White Supremacist Hegemony: From Willie Lynch to Zionist Colonialism.
The sodomising dog is the lynching tree updated for the age of the security contractor. It says: your body is not human.
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The body has always been the first colony. Before land was stolen, before language was outlawed, before the name was erased from the birth register, the coloniser had to learn how to break the body. Not merely to kill it, killing is too clean, too final, but to humiliate it, to invert it, to make it a theatre of terror for all others who dared to look. This is the oldest technology of white supremacy: sexual brutality as governance, rape as policy, sodomy as a weapon of counter-insurgency. We see this in our own caste bias feudal stories, in our own land, in our own country, it is archaic; it has no civilizational impact, and hegemony is embedded into so-called ‘Civilization’. As much as the brutal act persists through colonial agendas, one should never forget the intelligence and thought invested in it. The ontology of war and terror and de-humanization is far beyond evidence and excavation.
Frantz Fanon understood this in, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) when he argued that decolonisation is not a polite negotiation but a violent confrontation with a system that has made the colonised body a site of permanent inferiority. “The settler has only recourse to force,” Fanon wrote, because the colonial world is a Manichaean worldDualistic WorldviewA worldview characterized by a dualistic perception of reality, dividing everything into opposing forces of good and evil, light and darkness, or human and animal, often used to justify colonial distinctions and dehumanization. divided into good and evil, human and animal (Fanon, 1961). The settler does not simply occupy land; he occupies the body, and he does so through torture, humiliation and sexual terror. To understand Palestine today, it is not about 1948, nor the 1967. One of the ways to understand Palestine today is to start with the emergence of slave ship, the plantation, in the lynching tree in Mississippi, in the Belgian Congo, in the British concentration camp in Kenya, in the French torture chamber in Algiers. The start can be with the so-called Willie Lynch document. Scholars are clear, there is no credible archival evidence that a William Lynch delivered a speech to Virginia planters in 1712. Historians such as Manu Ampim and others have demonstrated that the text first circulated in the 20th century and is almost certainly a fabrication (Ampim, 1994; Fears, 1998). Yet as cultural theorist Patricia Hill Collins argues in Black Feminist Thought, (1990), the power of such a text does not depend on its authenticity as an event, but on its accuracy as a description of a system. The Lynch text named the method that slavery actually practised: divide, degrade, feminise, and make the oppressed police themselves through shame, whether Lynch said it or not, the plantation did it.
That method is central to Angela Davis’s analysis in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Women, Race & Class (1981). Davis shows how the US carceral system inherited slavery’s sexualised punishment: the stripping, shackling, and sexual humiliation of Black men and women as a means of social control. “The prison,” Davis writes, “is a direct descendant of slavery,” not metaphorically but institutionally (Davis, 2003, p. 22). The prisoner’s body becomes state property, available for violation. This is not history. This is a blueprint. And Zionism, as a settler-colonial project born in late 19th-century Europe, learned that blueprint fluently, because it was born inside the same white supremacist hegemony that produced it.
Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979), located Zionism firmly inside European imperialism. Said argued that Zionism did not simply borrow colonial language; it adopted the entire Orientalist imaginary: the Arab as backward, fanatical, sexually deviant, incapable of self-government, requiring European tutelage. The Palestinian was constructed as the Oriental Other against whom the civilised, European, modern Zionist could define himself.
Zionism did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in the salons of Vienna and Basel, in the age of high imperialism, when European Jews themselves victims of vicious European antisemitism were offered a devil’s bargain by empire, become white. Become European, Become civilised, Become colonisers, and we will forgive you for being Jewish. Theodor Herzl understood this perfectly. As historian Ilan Pappé documents in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Herzl did not go first to the Palestinians. He went to the Kaiser, to Cecil Rhodes, to the British Colonial Office. He offered them a loyal European outpost in the Arab East, a wall against barbarism, a garrison for empire. In return, the empire would give the Zionists a state. This is the foundational betrayal that the left must name without flinching: Zionism solved the Jewish Question not by destroying white supremacy, but by joining it. It internalised the racist logic of Europe and turned it outward onto the Arab, the Palestinian, and the brown body. As Maxime Rodinson argued in his classic Marxist essay “Israel: A Colonial Settler-State?” (1967), Zionism must be analysed not as a religion or an eternal identity, but as a settler-colonial movement structurally comparable to French Algeria and South African apartheid.
From that moment, the Palestinian body was marked for the same treatment as the Black body under slavery, the Congolese body under Leopold, the Algerian body under France. The Palestinian man must be feminised. The Palestinian woman must be violated. The Palestinian child must be made to watch, so that the lesson is inherited.
Look at the archive. It is not a secret archive. As documented by B’Tselem in its 2024 report Welcome to Hell, by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch, and by the UN Special Committee, Palestinian prisoners testify with devastating consistency to stripping, beating on the genitals, rape with objects, forced nudity, and the use of dogs. B’Tselem concluded that Israeli detention facilities had been transformed into “a network of torture camps” (B’Tselem, 2024). The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR, 2024) likewise reported systematic sexual violence, including forced nudity and threats of rape, against Palestinian detainees. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is essential here. In Necropolitics (2019), Mbembe argues that sovereignty is fundamentally the power to decide who may live and who must die, and who may be exposed to living death. The Palestinian prisoner is the perfect figure of necropolitics: kept alive, but stripped of all legal protection, made available for torture, for sexual humiliation, for slow destruction. The prison is not a deviation from Zionist sovereignty; it is its purest expression.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, said it plainly before the Irish parliament in November 2026, Palestinian prisoners are being raped, raped by dogs trained in European countries, while European people profit from selling dogs that will rape people. Liberals gasped at the language. The left should not gasp. We should ask: why are we surprised? What did you think white supremacy would look like in the 21st century? The dog is not an accident, In the American South, slave catchers used dogs to hunt runaways and tear their flesh, a practice documented by historians of slavery such as Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told (2014). In South Africa, apartheid police used dogs to terrorise Black townships. In Nazi Germany, dogs were used in the camps. The dog is the perfect colonial weapon because it allows the coloniser to say: it was not me, it was the animal. It allows sexual violence to be outsourced to a beast, while the human master watches, films, laughs. The sodomising dog is the lynching tree updated for the age of the security contractor. It says: your body is not human. Your body is meat for animals and Europe profits from this as well, of course Europe profits. Europe has always profited from the brutalisation of brown bodies and non-white bodies, they are assumed as disposals. It profited from slavery, it profited from the Congo. it profited from the partition of India. Now it profits from selling surveillance technology, crowd-control weapons, attack dogs, and moral cover to Israel. As Antony Loewenstein documents in The Palestine Laboratory (2023), Israel has turned occupation into an export industry, testing weapons, surveillance systems and carceral techniques on Palestinians and then selling them globally as “battle-tested.” Europe is not a bystander. It is a customer, an investor, and a co-conspirator.
Willie Lynch as myth, as metaphor, as accurate description taught that you must keep the oppressed divided: old against young, dark against light, male against female, house against field. Zionism has applied this with scientific precision. Fatah against Hamas. West Bank against Gaza. 1948 Palestinians against refugees. Palestinian citizens of Israel against Palestinians under occupation. As Patrick Wolfe, argued in his foundational work on settler colonialism, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006), settler colonialism is not an event but a structure, and its logic is elimination: elimination by killing, by expulsion, by assimilation, and by fragmentation. Sexual violence is one of its most intimate tools of fragmentation. When a man is raped in prison and returns home in shame, the family breaks. When a woman is threatened with rape at a checkpoint, she is made to understand that movement itself is sexualised.
This is why the left cannot treat Palestine as a humanitarian issue. It is not about aid trucks. It is not about a two-state solution. It is about the structure of global white supremacy, and Zionism is one of its most brutal front lines. Consider the language of the Zionist state. Palestinians are called “animals,” “human animals,” “cockroaches,” “terrorists,” “savages.” This is not accidental rhetoric. This is the language of every colonial regime that needed to justify sexual and physical torture. As Fanon warned, the coloniser first declares the native to be an animal, and then treats him as one. The British called the Mau Mau “savages.” The Americans called the Vietnamese “gooks.” Dehumanisation is the precondition for sodomy. You cannot rape a human being in front of cameras and expect applause unless you have first convinced your own population that the victim is not human.
And the Zionist left, the liberal Zionist, is no better. He weeps for the Palestinian child in Gaza while insisting that Israel must remain a Jewish state. He condemned the settler who burns an olive tree while defending the army that protects the settler. As Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), liberal discourse decides in advance whose lives are grievable and whose are not. Palestinian lives are rendered ungrievable, so that their violation can be mourned in the abstract while their liberation is denied in practice. There is no humane way to sodomise a body. There is no moral way to maintain a state based on ethnic supremacy. Liberal Zionism is white supremacy with a human face, and the left must reject it as firmly as it rejects fascist Zionism.
The harsh truth the left must speak is this: Israel is not an aberration. Israel is white supremacy functioning exactly as designed. It is the logical conclusion of a world order built on the idea that some bodies are white, civilised, and entitled to land, while other bodies are brown, barbaric, and available for violation. The United States understands this instinctively, which is why it gives Israel billions without conditions. The US knows what Israel is doing, because the US did it to Black people, to Native people, to Vietnamese people, to Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. As Jasbir Puar argues in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), the US war on terror produced a new bio-politics in which Muslim and Arab bodies are marked as queer, perverse, and available for sexual torture. Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. The photographs of naked Iraqi men piled in pyramids, forced to simulate sodomy, leashed like dogs, that was Willie Lynch in digital form.
The continuity is undeniable. The same European companies that trained dogs for apartheid South Africa now train dogs for Israel. The same American police departments that learn “counter-terrorism” in Israel bring those tactics back to Ferguson, to Minneapolis, to Standing Rock. As Robin D.G. Kelley notes in Freedom Dreams (2002), the struggles against anti-Black racism and against colonialism are not analogous; they are interconnected, part of a single global system of racial capitalism. Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) is crucial here: capitalism was never colour-blind. It was born from slavery, from colonialism, from the racialised division of labour. Zionism is racial capitalism in its settler-colonial form.
What then is to be done? Not reform. Not dialogue. Not another peace process that asks the raped to negotiate with the rapist over the terms of the rape. The left must demand dismantlement. Dismantlement of the Zionist state as an ethno-supremacist project. Dismantlement of the American empire that arms it. Dismantlement of the European arms trade that profits from it. Dismantlement of the liberal discourse that calls resistance “terrorism” while calling state sodomy “self-defence.”
And we must centre the body. Not the abstract nation, not the flag, but the body that has been sodomised, beaten, stripped, caged. The Palestinian prisoner who returns home cannot speak about what was done to him. The Palestinian woman who was strip-searched at a checkpoint and told to smile. The child who watched. Their testimony is not just evidence, it is a theory, As Saidiya Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection (1997), the archive of slavery is also an archive of terror written on the body, and we must learn to read that terror as theory. Palestinian testimony is the theory of the highest order.
Willie Lynch said: break the body and you will control the mind for 300 years. The Palestinian resistance says: you broke our bodies, but you did not break our minds. After 75 years of occupation, after massacres, after prisons, after sodomy, after dogs, Palestinians still resist, they still marry, still have children, and still name their children after villages that were erased, still refuse to disappear. That refusal is the greatest defeat white supremacy has ever suffered. The left must learn from that refusal. We must stop asking Palestinians to be perfect victims, to be non-violent, to be respectable, and to be polite while their bodies are being violated. We must stop asking them to condemn Hamas before we condemn the state that rapes prisoners. We must stop demanding that they prove their humanity to us. Their humanity is not up for debate. It is the Zionist state’s humanity that is in question.
History will judge this moment. It will judge the politicians who funded the sodomy. It will judge the journalists who called it “alleged” while showing photographs of the victims. It will judge the academics who wrote about “complexity” while prisoners were being raped. And it will judge the left — whether we had the courage to name white supremacy, to name Zionism as its colonial child, and to stand, without qualification, without both-sides, without cowardice, with the sodomised bodies who refuse to be broken. The body remembers, the body resists, and the body will be free. From the plantation to Palestine, the chain is unbroken. Breaking the chain was the task yesterday; breaking it is a task now, and breaking it is a task ahead. Finding various ways and means is called the liberating politics with social obligations.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Rift.
*Zionist ColonialismHuman RightsNecropoliticsPalestineRacial CapitalismSettler ColonialismSexual ViolenceWhite Supremacy
