Sexual assault and the Jewish state

It's good to have time away from the news occasionally. You get to miss unpleasantries like this one. It's from last year but has only just been drawn to my attention:

[C]omments made by David Landau, editor of the Israeli daily, Haaretz, to Condoleezza Rice about Israel needing to be "raped" by the U.S. to achieve a Mideast settlement caused quite a stir among the 20 or so attendees at a confidential briefing with the secretary of state on a recent visit to Israel.
.....
[Landau] was said to have implored Rice to intervene, asserting that the Israeli government wanted "to be raped" and that it would be like a "wet dream" for him to see this happen.

This man is the editor of Israel's major liberal newspaper! Can he, after saying that, still be in the job? Perhaps he'd like to contemplate for future usage some other jolly figure of violent assault - like Israel being in need of a pogrom against it. Or, then again, perhaps not.

In other rape-related news from the same country, there's an academic research paper claiming that Arab women aren't raped by IDF soldiers because they [the women] are... de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes. Isn't that a brilliantly novel insight, when it's more or less standard to see rape as itself a mode, or manifestation, of the process of dehumanizing others? (Thanks: HG.)