This post is also available in: العربية (Arabic)
There is an inexhaustible force of propulsion compelling us to stay involved around the clock, driven by the beyond-horrific crimes the Israeli occupation is committing in Gaza. We are directly exposed to these crimes through our phones which, if they had mouths of their own, just might spit out and overflow with the sheer quantity of blood they’ve swallowed.
The intense momentum is sustained by loud voices, militant movements, and transnational solidarity networks that do not despair of building bridge after bridge to facilitate the meeting point between, on one hand, people living through enduring colonialism or those surviving colonial scars, and on the other, white supremacist standards and capitalist and patriarchal systems that are relentlessly crushing every marginalized person made marginal by the systems themselves. These movements are what have created the sense of community we feel despite the exhausting reality. We wait for this to bear fruit—we say it must bear some fruit, inevitably, right?
We owe these movements a great deal, especially the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which from the get-go didn’t hesitate to declare its support for Palestinians. We will touch on BLM further below.
In the same context, it is difficult to ignore the role of feminist activists who are part of these groups or who operate adjacently to them. Specifically those whose realities are compatible with their convictions, whose understanding of the intersectional nature of different types of oppression is harmonious with their activism and is not restricted to the library shelves and ivory towers of academia. The stances they take are in line with what they call for, unlike other feminists who claim to be radical while simultaneously being sympathetic to Israel, expressing understanding of its position, or yielding to the pressure exerted either by the colonial entity or its ally, the United States.
A glimpse into the most prominent supportive feminist stances
We are all facing a number of challenges that prevent us from being able to write or think in these times of livestreamed death. But even the documentation of important pieces of content scattered here and there across social media platforms is an important exercise in the preservation and classification of memory. It allows the acknowledgment of the stances taken by feminists who confront racist thought, who paused for a moment to write, and raise their voices.
Had it not been for them, the likes of Ursula von der Leyen, German President of the European Commission, would have monopolized the discourse, going on and on about “Israel’s right to defend itself” and the need to empower women and girls in one sentence, these concepts somehow positioned in the same value system.
Had it not been for them, von der Leyen would have probably tweeted that sentence unchecked, without being held to account. She would not have been confronted with genuine and assertive objections from within the very corridors of the European Union; Irish Member of the European Parliament and activist Clare Daly condemned and continues to condemn the position taken by European Parliament.
Had it not been for these feminists, had they not gathered, thanks to the Syrian Female Journalists Network (SFJN), at the Shaping Feminist Foreign Policy Conference 2023, Bashar al-Assad would have continued, unperturbed, to tie the importance of defending Palestine with that of defending his regime. There would have been no clear Syrian feminist response to refute this shameless lie, and the Dutch government, which abstained from voting on the ceasefire resolution in November, would have continued to carry its glorious legacy forward completely unruffled, in the name of a white feminism that sings the praises of an internationalism that has benefited none but itself.
When it comes to challenging the agenda of European governments and their skewed value system, there have been hopeful statements emerging from the Global South, such as the model statement released by the Feminists In Kenya (FIK) movement reminding Western governments proud of their feminist achievements that “a true feminist foreign policy is inherently anti-imperialist and prioritizes demilitarization and de-escalation of war.”
The FIK’s statement re-explains the value of cross-border feminist solidarity, and in so doing proves how all such movements adhere to the same concepts by their very nature, without any deliberate intention or coordination. It opens with the following: “Grounding ourselves in transnational feminist solidarity and guided by our feminist responsibility to name and confront oppression whenever, wherever and however it happens, we Feminists In Kenya (FIK) stand in unwavering support and solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
The open letter from recipients of the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights is worth noting: the prize honors a number of feminist activists from the Global South, activists who at the beginning of the war on Gaza denounced the French and German states’ support for the occupation and questioned the validity of these awards when they come from countries that continue to deprive Palestinians of freedom and security.
Also worth mentioning is the statement by Mama Cash, which offers support to feminist activists and initiatives. The very first lines of the statement reveal a frank and unequivocal acknowledgment of the history of occupation and genocide that Palestinians have had to suffer for decades. There is also the moving letter from young feminists from Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and other countries in South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), in which the young women assert that “there is no peace without justice and no justice without return.”
In addition to the above, an important statement was issued by COFEM, the Coalition of Feminists for Social Change. COFEM is an international coalition that includes feminists of different nationalities who together confront anti-feminist campaigns and bring to the forefront the importance of putting an end to violence against women and girls. Their statement is uncompromising in its support of the Palestinian cause, its introduction—like that of Mama Cash—opening with a reminder of the past 75 bitter years: how long it’s been since the Israelis occupied Palestine, not since the Hamas operation.
On an individual level, Judith Butler, American philosopher and member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, a movement that is leading a pivotal battle against Zionist policies in the United States, has directed harsh criticism at Israel.
Butler, whose theories have been criticized by many feminists—and that’s a whole other discussion—thankfully condemned the deployment of anti-Semitism claims as a weapon against Palestinians and as justification for the occupation’s crimes. They refused to describe what is currently unfolding as a “conflict” between two parties because it is the result of “violent dispossession that dates back to 1948, if not before, and constitutes not a new Nakba, but the continuation of one that has never stopped for millions of people.” Butler is not the only one having to pay the price for their positions, as important meetings in which they were scheduled to participate were cancelled, like the meeting that was to be held in Paris on December 6, 2023.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that the above positions stem from the same belief shared by all these feminists: the belief that injustice needs to be rejected in all its forms and that we must refuse to discuss patriarchy as a separate, stand-alone system that just hovers in space, unconnected to anything—it is a deep structure that is intertwined with structures of oppression and the tools of colonialism, occupation, and racism. At a minimum, their positions stem from a clear rejection of the double standards that prevail in our world and that were exposed by the gaping wound of Gaza, as Palestine has indisputably become the worthiest unmasker of the world’s awful face.
Their positions of solidarity stem from a clear rejection of the double standards that prevail in our world and that were exposed by the gaping wound of Gaza, as Palestine has indisputably become the worthiest unmasker of the world’s awful face.
Shameful stances: “Radical” feminists indifferent to the effects of occupation
What was laid out above is, simply put, a minimum of what is expected from feminist thinkers and movements in particular, even those whose discourse we might disagree with in some places. Standing for anything less than that is a disgrace—it would be a disgrace, for example, to accept the positions taken by Iranian women who became known for their inspiring struggle against the compulsory hijab and the system of gender segregation but who then chose to stand by Israel and the apartheid regime, describing Hamas as a terrorist movement. Or to accept the tone taken by a group of feminists in the United Kingdom in their statement; despite their demands for a ceasefire and their rejection of the crimes being committed, they made the decision to open their statement with first condemning the Hamas operation.
J.K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter, did the same thing and devoted her X account to perpetuating the “both sides” narrative, even tending to focus a great deal on the barbarism of Hamas, the suffering of the hostages, and the fragile situation of Jews in the West.
This is the bottom line, the essence of the distinction between a supportive and a disappointing statement, like the British statement mentioned above or the discourse of famous Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy, who claims to be radical and proud to tirelessly defend women, mothers, and pregnant women—all while whitewashing Israel, ironically the entity responsible for the genocide of these women and their families.
The question of the starting point of one’s position is the basis on which to determine where we stand as feminists when it comes to the condemnations that are made in the name of feminist groups. The disparities that we are witnessing today are the natural result of profound differences between feminist trends and their political visions. But they are also the result of there being a broad chunk of feminists who are influenced by Zionism, who also exhibit tangible signs of reverting to a white identity that seems to still be the most supreme when it comes to determining the right attitude towards any massacre or event that takes place in Arab countries.
“I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
Against the relentless laughter of evil”
Black liberation is connected to Palestinian liberation
In sum, there are still scores of statements and declarations in solidarity with Gaza that are free of any mentions of “but”s and “had it not been for”s. Among them are the stances taken by employees of some donor agencies or program beneficiaries (especially German programs in Tunisia), the initiatives taken by port workers in Belgium and the United States to stop arms exports, and the answered calls for a global strike on December 11, 2023. They are solid in their standing for the truth, generous in ways these lines cannot fully describe. But this article cannot be concluded without devoting some space to the link between “Free Free Palestine” and “Black Lives Matter”, whose chants have been intertwined for years.
The world may remember the 2020 murals in memory of George Floyd in Palestine, or the posts that came out in the spring of 2021 (during the events in East Jerusalem and then Gaza) and the fall/winter of 2023 (the Gaza genocide) in which Palestinian flags were raised—knowing that raising this flag is considered a revolutionary act in the West—on the pages of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After the October 7 attack, the Chicago Black Lives Matter organization posted a graphic of a paraglider that they soon had to take down.
But the solidarity between the Black liberation movements in the United States and the liberation of Palestine is neither new nor surprising. Both parties are fighting the racism of this world, each in its own context and time. Both parties have suffered from a lack of solid support or a lack of support altogether from feminist and human rights movements when it comes to their struggles.
You only need to go back a few decades to recall the history of connected struggle. Malcolm X supported Palestine and called for the right of its people to liberation and return to their land, and he visited Gaza himself in 1964. James Baldwin wrote in 1979 that “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” June Jordan, in one of her poems, said: I was born a Black woman/ and now/ I am become a Palestinian/ Against the relentless laughter of evil.
We can also go back a mere few months to what political activist and thinker Angela Davis said. She stands with us today in confronting the Zionist propaganda machine; she spoke of Palestine in her 2022 visit to Berlin; she and Judith Butler were indirectly banned from speaking about Palestine in Paris in 2023.
The list goes on. Many people from both movements have linked their struggles, specifically over the past two decades, which have witnessed the emergence of new horizontal and grassroots forms of resistance against the roots of racist, colonial, and patriarchal violence.
Today, we rely first and foremost on these decentralized organizations that build bridges and dialogue among themselves, challenging the major institutions that preach to us night and day about things that they themselves have no regard for whatsoever. We count on them not to get tired of persevering in their transnational solidarity, in hopes that those forced into isolation not remain so isolated.
Today we wait for this to bear fruit—we say it must bear some fruit, inevitably, right?