This post is also available in: Français (French) العربية (Arabic)
By Ghina Al Andari- Lebanese feminist activist and writer
The genocide that has been unfolding in Gaza since October 2023 has shown us a lot about the hypocrisy and insolence of the “developed” world, and this in turn has brought about many disappointments that stem from the weakness of political movements we had not thought were so passive.
On a personal level, I was most disappointed by Western feminists, particularly some I’d thought were radical but who then declared pro-occupation stances. I felt this more acutely because I consider myself to be a radical feminist—and I see in radical feminism, in radical feminists, brave convictions and unambiguous analyses of women’s oppression. It is precisely for this reason that I was so disappointed when some so-called radical feminists announced their support for an occupying, oppressive, heavy-handed entity. “Feminists” who were supposed to best understand the hardships of living under oppression.
I don’t think that this feeling of disgrace stemmed from these women’s supposed ignorance of what is happening in Gaza—their ignorance would either make them fools, especially if the truth is still unclear to them despite the senseless violence and spilling of blood that has filled our screens, or it would make them spineless cowards who are nowhere near as bold as they claim to be in their silence and neutrality. Most likely, though, they are racists who support this neo-Nazism that can uncontrollably commit atrocities with no accountability.
This article is no plea for pity, and it is in no way an attempt to pander to or convince feminists who support the entity that kills us. It is an expression of anger and resentment towards feminists who claim to be radical, who claim to analyze the roots of different types of oppression, who go on and on about their solidarity and sisterhood with women all around the world, but whose present stances ooze arrogance and condescension towards us wheat-skinned women.
White supremacy… once again
After October 7, Arab feminists criticized Western feminists of different feminist orientations. But I direct my rage against radical women in particular. We are the daughters of this land, but we have been met with contempt and continuous let-downs from all sides. I never thought I would witness this amount of contradiction and hypocrisy from the women who promoted themselves as being uncompromising in their truth-telling, unafraid to name and fight the oppressor. Radicalism, as the term suggests, requires that we trace the problem to its root. These feminists are supposed to understand that the root of all oppression of women is the patriarchal system and that women cannot be liberated under this system, and that it is therefore necessary to resist and dissolve it. I don’t see how they can grasp this and still have trouble understanding that the root of the problem today lies in the existence of a colonial entity based on racial and religious superiority—and that it is therefore our duty to resist it, not only to liberate the occupied land and its people but to dismantle the last clutches of the old colonial regimes.
I am a rational woman, and I understand that people make sense of things through their own intellectual systems that must at least be in harmony with themselves. I understand that the leaders of colonial countries committed massacres in support of the butchering colonizer based on their belief in their superiority over other peoples, based on their belief that they have a right to our land. But what I don’t understand is how some radical feminists could be aligned with the colonial military oppressor, they who call for liberation and the need to resist oppression, who claim that military colonialism and war are the creation of men and are thus tools that drive the patriarchal system forward.
This is what I was first taken aback by. I kept trying to make sense of it until I realized that the problem isn’t in their logic or capacity to understand. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have to give any weight to their opinions, lectures, or writings—because those who cannot understand the crystal-clear truth of what is happening in Palestine will not have the logical skills or intelligence needed to give opinions on any other issue. But this isn’t the problem here, as these women have proven their ability to logically think through sequences of other topics in their writings. So logic isn’t the issue. The problem is clear: it is their hypocrisy, their evasiveness, and, to put it simply, their hatred of us, we the peoples—and daughters—of the “Global South.”
This hatred was well-captured in a tweet by Julie Bindel, a British journalist whose work on the sexual exploitation of women I used to appreciate. “It’s time to take a stand for civilisation,” Bindel said in her tweet, to which she also added the flag of Israel. I don’t think this woman has any confusion as to what she wrote or its colonial undertones, but I didn’t imagine she’d be so impudent and condescending. Her tweet reveals that she, like the generals of the oldest colonial armies, considers us to be uncivilized peoples who must inevitably be colonized by the white colonizer who will bring them civilization and humanize them in his image, just like the United Kingdom and Europe did to the countries of Africa and the Americas, and to our own countries. Bindel’s tweet indicates that she believes that indigenous populations are barbarians, savages, when they defend themselves, and terrorists when they are Arab, Palestinian.
Hence, any discourse coming from this woman—and others like her—that women share a mutual oppression based on their similar experiences and gender, and that therefore they must be united by sisterhood, appears to apply exclusively to white, European, and American women. As for all the other women around the world, they are automatically relegated to the category of savage barbarians that need to be civilized.
We are definitely not going to build any bridges with them, these women who hate us, in the future. And we are definitely going to keep calling it Palestine, and Palestine will remain for its people, its daughters.
Amid all this disappointment in radical feminists, I found slight solidarity with Palestinian women on only two pages that I follow, but I must mention them: the Get the L Out page, which posted a petition calling for a ceasefire and poetry by Rauda Morcos, a Palestinian lesbian poet, and The Wagga Feminist page. Wagga is the name of a region in Australia in their indigenous language. This page also clearly expressed support for Palestine without dodging any points and shared multiple pro-Palestine posts, including a comparison between the use of “man-hating” and “anti-Semitism” as a way to silence any criticism of the oppressor in both cases. This shows us once again how feminists who come from the land and who are oppressed support others who are in similar situations, while feminist daughters of colonial and imperialist regimes easily abandon their principles in support of tyrants.
Perhaps what made these “racially superior” women lose their minds, what produced frantic waves of support for the criminal occupier—waves all characterized by terms like “terrorist attack” and “the horrific events of October 7”—was the audacity of the oppressed to stand against the oppressor. But they forgot the simple feminist analogy that they’ve long highlighted: when an abused woman defends herself by killing her abuser after many years of abuse, the world sees this as a violent act that makes her a criminal perpetrator of violence who needs to be severely punished. Indeed, the regime and those who benefit from it see her act of self-defense as more violent than the abuse itself. The victim’s audacity to stand up to their master is something that no oppressor can understand or tolerate because it breaks down the balance that allows the system of oppression to continue. As for the horror that these women are talking about, it’s their horror at the possibility that the resistance might lead to the disappearance of colonialism.
Claims of rape have become our bogeyman
Then they rebuked us—we who stand in solidarity with Palestine—for not sharing the issue of the rape of Israeli women, which circulated in the wake of October 7. Knowing that we did pay attention to the matter immediately after it was first reported, unlike their willful blindness to the testimonies of Palestinian women and female prisoners who told the world about the soldiers’ threats of rape, about being strip searched, about the direct assault they were subjected to. Not to mention the Israelis’ own confessions to raping Palestinian women and girls, which are recorded in a documentary about the Tantura massacre, as well as in other documented accounts.
On this topic, like many other women, I stick to the saying that we believe survivors, regardless of their origins or where they are located. I do not put myself in a position of justifying or defending any group of men or any religious and/or armed group, but that doesn't mean that this cancels my absolute support for their right to resist as a colonized and oppressed people. As a feminist, I continue to be aware of the ugliness of colonialism and what men are capable of committing, even if they are part of the oppressed group. How they are always able to inflict sexual violence and harm on women, even if the women are part of the oppressive group. Women, even those we hate, those who provoke us, belong to a group that is oppressed under the prevailing global patriarchal system.
But we still have yet to hear any Israeli women come forward with incidents of sexual assault. The only thing that has been reported is the occupation and its media machine’s pre-prepared statements. They have failed to find any evidence supporting the allegations of rape. It is not random that the occupation came out with these statements on the 8th or 9th of October—it was trying to deter the pro-Palestine left from its support of the cause. The occupation continued repeating the same old colonial song, in which the tyrant makes the rape of women into a bogeyman, using this trump card to continue promoting its superiority over the colonized, barbarian population. That’s what rape claims promote—they are not out of concern for colonizer women.
Skin color as a barrier to empathy
It is essential here to pause at the false victimhood, at the double standards of these women who are reprimanding us. While they wrote articles, issued statements, and preached to us about Israeli women, they failed to even once offer public sympathy to Sudanese women, for instance. Knowing that Sudanese women, despite all the difficulties and threats this entails, themselves told the world about the gang rape they were subjected to. They made a chilling call for help when trying to find contraceptives on social media—as they were expecting the inevitability of being raped.
But none of this is surprising, really. People’s ability to empathize with others comes from being able to imagine themselves in the other person’s shoes. In the case of Sudanese women, it seems that skin color was standing in the way of this process of imagination among some radical, racist women. They sympathized with the white women who looked like them and ignored the black and brown women. This racism, which is based on a difference in skin color, is yet more proof of which women are really the owners of the land, and which women are invading colonizers from Europe.
Our lot as people from this part of the world is that we are caught between a rock and a hard place—between colonialism and imperialism on one hand, and dictatorships and religious extremism on the other. But let us remember that what allows religious groups to establish themselves as being the sole resistance to colonialism is the hypocrisy and cowardice of Western liberation movements.
“The elephant in the room”
Before concluding, let us feminists confront the elephant in the room. Today, it’s an Islamic group that is actually resisting colonialism, in the flesh. Who knows, this reality may be what caused those who berate us to lose their critical thinking skills, to fail to understand the axioms of colonialism. But it’s okay, we must understand those who cannot understand. We, the women and feminists of this region, have witnessed the most oppression from religious groups, be they armed or not, and are the most affected by them. Because we have this firsthand knowledge and experience which, by the way, the feminists who criticize us do not have, we are not under any illusions that these religious groups will not be dangerous to women and all other marginalized groups, that they will not turn against them in the future. Hezbollah in Lebanon is the best example of a party that has declared itself our moral guardian and whose practice oppresses women in the areas under the party’s control—and sometimes in regions across the country.
Our lot as people from this part of the world is that we are caught between a rock and a hard place—between colonialism and imperialism on one hand, and dictatorships and religious extremism on the other. But let us remember that what allows religious groups to establish themselves as being the sole resistance to colonialism, and the sole supporter of the Palestinian cause, is the hypocrisy and cowardice of Western liberation movements—including radical feminism. Their hypocrisy pushes them away from standing for the truth, from creating a resistance space that confronts the evils coming from all directions.
Today, every woman who claims to be radical must closely reexamine her support for an occupying entity, an apartheid entity that promised itself a land it traveled a sea to arrive in, an entity that derives its racial superiority from religion. Doesn’t it end up looking a bit like a not-so-distant spiritual guide seeking to expand its influence? Did some of these radicals forget that virtually all religions are patriarchal tools? Or does oppression become halal when it comes from a religion other than Islam?
In conclusion, we will not forget, and we will not forgive. We will not forget that some women were in support of a bloody occupation at the expense of an occupied and oppressed people. Nor will we forget, when these women open up in the future about how men make wars, seize lands, and exploit women, that they once supported the most heinous killing machine in history. We will not forget, when they make their analyses about how women are oppressed on the basis of their gender, that they completely missed the point that the occupation is annihilating the female gender first, that which ensures the continuity of the Palestinian population, and the actual fighters it claims to be combating second. We will not forgive their willful blindness nor their complicity.
We are definitely not going to build any bridges with them, these women who hate us, in the future. And we are definitely going to keep calling it Palestine. Palestine will remain for its people and its daughters, and its name will not be changed at the whims of an occupying tyrant.