The Palestinian liberation struggle has been a lightning rod for the Iranian left since at least the 1960s. In my book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, 2022), I wrote about the regional and internationalist vision of freedom that united Arab and Iranian leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. I focused on Arab and Iranian foreign student activists who made use of their time on US college campuses to organize rallies, marches, teach-ins, and cultural celebrations together (154–166). The student activists made the connections between Israel and the Shah as linchpins of US imperialism across West Asia and exposed the ways in which the US-Israel-Iran alliance was organized to promote authoritarianism, militarize the region, and undermine self-determination for Arab and Iranian peoples. Arab and Iranian students in the US faced violence from Jewish Defense League members attacking their demonstrations for Palestinian liberation and were targeted by the FBI and the INS for their activism. Members of the Iranian Students Association and the Arab Students Association in Northern California celebrated socialist holidays together, even learning to sing “The Internationale” in each other’s native tongues so they could perform in joint choruses to mark occasions such as May Day.
While the scattering of Arab and Iranian students across Western universities in the 1960s and 1970s created a diasporic space in which it was possible to organize collectively and openly for Palestinian liberation, leftists in Iran were dedicated to Palestine as well, despite intense repression under the US-backed Shah. One activist named Shokrollah Paknejad was put on trial in Tehran for leading the Palestine Group, which attempted to leave Iran and train with the PLO in 1969. At his sentencing hearing, Paknejad accused the Iranian government of “putting on trial the solidarity of our people and that of the world with the people of Palestine…” and proclaimed defiantly, “Palestine is a turning point in the anti-imperialist struggle in this region; and the secret of the final defeat of imperialism is to be found in these wars of liberation” (161). The overthrow of the Shah would remove one source of Palestinian oppression and, thus, the Palestinian and Iranian movements for freedom were understood as deeply intertwined.
I begin with this brief account of the historic legacy of affective and political solidarities in order to highlight the ongoing necessity of making connections between Palestinian and Iranian liberation movements and to continue to formulate a regional vision of freedom. These are vital practices, both for mobilizing the largest numbers of people possible against Israel’s genocidal, expansionist agenda and for the project of rebuilding internationalism from below. What other alternative to the deadly logics of states and empires do we have?
We were asked to speak about Palestine from our particular positionalities. In my case, as an Iranian American transnational feminist in the United States, living in this country has compelled me to spend my life organizing against American wars abroad—whether overt or covert, military or economic or both—and against the many domestic reverberations of US imperialism. While I grew up with the distant horror of the Iran-Iraq war preventing me from visiting my relatives in Iran, my own active commitment to anti-war organizing began in 1991, when I was in high school and the US invaded Iraq for the first time. Even though I am not Iraqi or Arab, it felt personal, like an attack on my people too. I found my way to demonstrations and to public events detailing US atrocities in Iraq, such as a report presented by the grassroots International War Crimes Tribunal in New York City in the winter of 1992. I felt an obligation to cut through the mainstream media and government propaganda and listen to the voices of people on the ground who had experienced the US invasion. The post-1979 virulent hatred of Iranians that I experienced in the US connected me to everyone targeted by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia and provided a basis for solidarity and organizing against US efforts to dominate the region through repressive proxy states, sanctions, and war. And indeed, the possibility of a US war on Iran has been an ever-present threat for more than forty years. Especially after 9/11, when I worked to build movements against US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was the sense that we who constitute what Nadine Naber has called “diasporas of empire” were in this together.
I also stand in the wake of a revolutionary feminist uprising in Iran that began in September 2022, after the police killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was detained in Tehran for improperly wearing her state-mandated hijab. Mobilized around the call for “women, life, freedom” (jin, jîyan, azadî), a Kurdish slogan articulating the capacious desire to dismantle all systems of oppression, this movement also galvanized the Iranian diaspora. I joined a new global network, Feminists for Jina, which formed to uplift this unprecedented intersectional feminist uprising and also to oppose imperialist and monarchist co-optation of the movement. The decolonial feminist analysis emerging from cities and towns across Iran was deeply influenced by the Kurdish and Bálouch struggles and offered a critique of ethno-nationalism, theocratic governance, and patriarchy as intertwined systems of domination.
From my vantage point, and after more than twenty years of anti-imperialist activism in the US and more than a decade of annual trips to Iran, I have come to understand decolonial feminism as the most vital conduit for twenty-first century internationalist solidarities, including between Iranians and Palestinians. My argument is that decolonial feminist frameworks can pose a challenge to top-down, state-centered geopolitical binaries, like Iran versus Israel, that create obstacles to solidarity in the region and in diaspora. For many Iranians, the repression of their rights by an Islamic Republic that champions Palestinians has led to hostility and resentment towards Palestinians, and sometimes even outright support for Israel. The alienation from the Palestinian freedom movement among wide swaths of Iranians from different religious backgrounds, both in Iran and in diaspora, is a tragic setback for solidarity and poses an urgent need to articulate an alternative to Iranian and Israeli state propaganda. Rather than allowing Iranians and Palestinians to be pitted against one another, we need a regional decolonial feminist vision of liberation, one that is attentive to the differences and disparities in our conditions and histories and that builds solidarity by placing our particular struggles in relation to one another.
The Palestinian feminist slogan, “No Free Homeland without Free women,” which was popularized by Tal3at in Israel/Palestine and also by the Palestinian Feminist Collective in diaspora, beautifully articulates a feminist approach to anti-colonial, anti-Zionist organizing. By refusing to counterpose national/land sovereignty to bodily sovereignty, these organizations have redefined the meaning of freedom beyond masculinist anti-colonial nationalist conceptualizations. “No Free Homeland without Free Women” resonates profoundly with the Kurdish slogan of the uprising in Iran, “jin, jîyan, azadî.” These slogans contain the wisdom of generations of women who have been part of national liberation movements in Palestine and in Iran. Their lived experiences have made clear the links between gendered violence in the home, in the street, in the workplace, at the checkpoint, and at the hands of state, colonial, and imperialist forces. These distinct and particular experiences and histories have led to similar conclusions about the need for a feminism that is not limited to advocating for greater rights within a fundamentally unjust system, but rather, a feminism that calls for the total dismantling of all structures of oppression—settler colonialism, ethno-nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, militarism, racism, and hetero-patriarchy—and that shows how they are interlocking obstacles to freedom and justice. Decolonial feminists in Palestine and in diaspora have bravely exposed the many ways that gender and sexuality are targeted sites of Zionist violence, regulation, and control. The statement on reproductive genocide issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective is a model of feminist analysis of catastrophic colonial violence.
Among Iranians, it is no coincidence that some of the most immediate and unequivocal expressions of solidarity with Palestinians have come from decolonial Iranian feminists, in Iran and in diaspora. I’ll share two examples. First, when the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, called Palestinians “animals” to justify raining bombs down on Gaza, the Bálouch Women’s Movement in Iran, drawn from the marginalized and oppressed ethnic Bálouch minority that had been active in the women, life, freedom movement, posted the following on their Instagram page: “The people of Palestine are not animals! No place for fascists in this world!” Beneath this they juxtaposed Gallant’s quote with the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader calling Iranian protesters “insects” and “weeds” to justify state violence against them. This is just one small example of what it looks like to make connections from the bottom up. Shared affective responses to unjust state power, what I have elsewhere called “affects of solidarity,” can mean that one instance of oppression resonates across different scales and contexts. Affects of solidarity have the potential to generate a broader opposition to distinct, or even counter-posed, forces of annihilation, from the genocidal Israeli state to the Islamic Republic that uses torture and executions to stay in power.
My second example is a statement, titled “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî as in Free Palestine,” that was written in in November 2023 by Iranian “individuals, groups and activists within the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî movement in Iran and its diaspora.” Now one of many similar statements written by various groups of Iranian activists inside and outside of Iran, it offers an example of how to enact one key piece of solidarity work—arguing with your own people, in this case with other Iranians who want to separate their freedom from that of Palestinians or who see our movements as counterposed. Taking on these arguments directly is one key part of the larger, necessary project of rebuilding internationalism from below.
Below I share excerpts illustrating how expressions of affective and political solidarities can anchor a decolonial feminist regional alternative to the current configuration of settler colonialism, imperialism, and authoritarianism:
We, the undersigned, who have been pleading for Jin Jiyan Azadî in the last year, demand an end to genocide, call for immediate ceasefire, and express our solidarity with the Palestinian people and their liberation struggle…
In addition to expressing our firm support for the Palestinian people in their quest for the fundamental right to “life,” and demand for “freedom,” the purpose of our statement is to extend an invitation to our comrades in the Jin Jiyan Azadî uprising to recognise and connect our struggle to that of the Palestinian resistance in its fight for the right to land, life, and belonging, and as such, a fight for self-determination and bodily autonomy which, as feminists, we must lend our voices and support to.
i) To our Palestinian comrades, we say:
As individuals who have lived in the political geography called “Iran” and under the yoke of the patriarchal and criminal regime of the Islamic Republic, within the broader racist capitalist world order, we know violence in its multifaceted depiction, from its plain to imperceptible forms. We, especially those of us who have been labeled as the “other” and dehumanized by state repression, are acquainted with the ways in which structural state violence renders us disabled. Those of us who have been labeled and dehumanized as the “other” in the diaspora, are familiar with the multiple and intricate forms of state repression and coloniality that govern and violate our existence. As feminists, we know that the struggle for women’s liberation is bound to the collective struggle against capitalism and imperialism, whether we are fighting from Iran, the Global North, or Palestine. We discern you as comrades and companions in our pursuit of “life” and “freedom.”
We believe that just as systems of oppression are intertwined, it is imperative that we link and unite our struggles. There is no liberation that only knows how to say “I” and there is no freedom unless it is for all of us. We have learned the lesson of resistance and solidarity against systems of oppression from those who take to the streets in Palestine under Israeli occupation, from our comrades in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and from our Kurdish sisters in Rojava. Generation after generation, we have learned resistance as a daily practice through the Palestinian struggle. We remember fondly that in the early days of the Jina movement, our feminist Palestinian comrades expressed their unwavering support , and recognised the Islamic Republic’s hand in exploiting the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom. These connections remind us that solidarity is not a one-way or selective path, but a true declaration of “none of us are free until all of us are free”.
We learn the lessons of “life,” “freedom” and “humanity” from you and your resistance, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder with you until Palestine is free.
ii) To our comrades of the revolutionary Jina uprising, we say:
“Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” was our call to reclaim life through reclaiming our bodies. A roar of anger from our violated and oppressed bodies in pursuit of “life” not as it has been dictated to us. An opportunity for imagining otherwise, continuing the legacy of those freedom fighters who came before us. In the past year, we have been able to reclaim “revolution” from the rotten and patriarchal “revolutionary” discourse of the Islamic Republic. We reclaimed “revolution,” embodied it through the depths of our collective voices and redefined it through our feminist values and desires.
Today, it is our obligation to walk a similar path in relation to the Palestinian struggle and to reclaim it from the discourse of the Islamic Republic. It is our duty to recognise the struggle for Palestinian liberation as part of the feminist and anti-colonial discourse and essence of the Jina uprising. Feminist solidarity and resistance with Palestine does not mean aligning with the constructed narratives of the Islamic Republic, but a rightful and necessary contemplation on the ideals of “freedom” and the fundamental commitment to “life.” It is a solidarity that, in opposition to the narratives crafted by states, from above, weaves us with the Palestinian people, from below. Let us not forget that the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, predates the Islamic Republic’s existence. The Palestinian struggle for freedom neither begins with nor is defined by the Islamic Republic. We must reject and free ourselves from the shackles of the Islamic Republic on the one hand, and the nationalist and far-right Iranian forces, especially monarchists in the diaspora, on the other, in relation to Palestine. Let us recognise our intertwined destinies and forge a path towards true transnational feminist solidarity with our dear comrades in Palestine.
We chant Jin Jiyan Azadî – in our thousands, and in our millions – for the freedom of our bodies, desires and destinies, until Palestine is free!
This essay is part of the series “Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond.” Read the introduction here. Read Zahra Ali’s essay “Transnational Feminism from Iraq to Palestine” here.
