Many of us are already aware of the fragmentation Palestinians have been experiencing topographically, geographically, familial-y over the past seventy-six years. Checkpoints and walls divide lovers and separate children from their parents. The arbitrary Bantustan system in the apartheid West Bank keeps my relatives who have known no other home from visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque, a mere twenty minutes from their homes, while foreign tourists from across the globe can peruse their way through Al-Quds/Jerusalem. These material fragmentations, the chopping up of Palestine, I argue, are paralleled with the discursive fragmentations required by settler-colonial discursive environments (and paralleled by white feminist settler-colonial epistemologies, even in self-titled “anti-occupation” feminist solidarity work). By discursive fragmentations, I mean the ways in which white feminist settler-colonial epistemologies fragment Palestinian histories temporally, geographically, and conceptually through their interrogatory and colonial questions. We are asked questions that chop up our historical narratives, our community foci, and our conceptual paradigms for living. Throughout this essay, I will offer old and more contemporary examples of this fragmentary questioning directed at Palestinian women.
An analysis of this fragmentation is crucial during times of so-called “exceptionality” (e.g., Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, the first intifada, the second intifada, etc.); that is, such analysis can offer an alternative to Israeli myths of times of “normalcy” and peace outside of these so-called events. Times of exceptionality mask the incredible violence exacted on Palestinian bodies daily, and Palestinian women have historically experienced systemic feminist-ally disappearances (feminist betrayals) during these times of so-called exceptionality, punctuated with ongoing feminist discursive interrogations.
For many decades, Palestinian women would comply with Israeli women’s requests in feminist solidarity; they would go to painstaking lengths to meet with them and discuss comprehensive liberation. But during these moments of exception, outlined above, Israeli feminists would often disappear, justifying their disappearances through narratives of Israeli self-defense, as narrated by prominent feminists of the Jerusalem Centre for Women and the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling in Ramallah and Hebron. Historically, these fractures in solidarity and communication would operate as a kind of erasure of disparate (structural) power relations, or rather, domination. However, this pattern of fracture would entrench the notion that there was a time of normalcy (e.g., the myth of normalcy on October 6th). This erasure operates to ensure that these feminist solidarities do not adequately take up the daily workings of occupation as extreme violence; the extreme became mundane. Interestingly, Palestinian women have historically remained committed to their transnational feminist solidarity work, continuing to meet with Israeli women through the 1990s and early 2000s, even when their kin were being obliterated on a daily basis. The feminist interrogations during times of the mundane (yet extreme) violence were often unidirectional and eastward. (Read more here.)
The fractures would articulate as presence (rather than absence) through white feminist questions about the role of resistance, nationalism, Palestinian motherhood, Palestinian culture, and feminist politics. These debates and interrogations would sometimes lead to the co-optation of activist momentum into distracting agendas or even colonial re-directions, e.g., “are you really a feminist?” Below, I outline the ways in which some feminist interruptions of solidarity after October 7th (which we witnessed publicly and in interpersonal relations) are part of a recognizable and repetitive part of this long legacy of feminist interruptions.
I offer these emotionally difficult reflections in the spirit of doing the work of what Sarah Ahmed calls “collective activism” (178), which might be formed “through the very work that we need to do in order to get closer to others, without simply repeating the appropriation of ‘them’ […] as a sign of difference” (180). I offer this reflection as a contribution to the continual work of recognizing the “other-others” and engaging in the struggle to decolonize our relations. Here my work leans heavily on racialized anti-racist and Indigenous feminist scholars who have documented in great detail the marginalization of racialized women in trans/international feminist organizing, academic or otherwise, over the past 150 years.
Writing about famous early examples of international feminist conferences throughout the twentieth century, racialized scholars note that “women from developing countries had to listen to Westerners talking to them about their own cultures,” and there was little time after the presentations for Third World women to correct the information or to discuss “incorrect […] interpretations of their culture.” (See El Saadawi 144.) There was an insistent request by women living in the “Third world” for “more discussion time,” and this was read by the organizers as “disruptive behaviour” (144) as well as “unruly behaviour.” El Saadawi argues that in this response the “clash” is explained as the “personality defects” of “unruly” individuals (149). She recalls a similar experience at the World Conference, held in Mexico City in 1975, at which women from Europe and North America ascertained that the women’s international movement had failed when women began “to forward political claims” (146) that were interested in structural issues of economic, racial, and political oppression as well as empire. Conversations about class and empire were considered extraneous to feminism, even a diversion from it. Indeed, women from Europe and North America suggested that “politics” were a “diversion from women’s issues.”
This extraction of the “too political” has newer, more recent iterations. It is in the erasure of the occupation.
In 2008, during Israeli-titled Operation Cast Lead, Islah Jad (a prominent and respected Palestinian scholar in women’s studies at Birzeit university and beyond) noted in interviews that “the whole pyramid is upside down.” (Read more here.) She wrote of her encounters with Israeli women allies: “it was so painful for me and most of the time, these encounters make me very emotional and angry from the type of questions we were confronted with as Palestinian women.” One of the classic questions at the time of the second intifada, she recalls, was: “how come you throw your little kids in the streets to be killed by our soldiers? How could you as mothers, you know, leave your children while Israeli tanks are firing in your areas?” Jad describes this discursive moment of “mother-blame” (see the work of Ladd Taylor), a paradigmatic settler-colonial mechanism on Turtle Island (see the work of Margaret D. Jacobs) and feminist interrogation of so-called “suicide cultures” as “the whole pyramid is upside down.” I take this metaphor to mean that power inequalities are invisibilized as the victims are questioned about their own deaths, while structural or “political” oppressions are erased. More recently, and in more seemingly critical solidarity spaces, these interrogations take different forms.
In the early 2000s, Palestinian women/activists/scholars/feminists began articulating a boycott of most feminist solidarity “dialogue” networks with Israeli women and other allies unless they met detailed criteria outlined by the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) campaign (which was co-founded by the BDS movement). The Palestinian activists created a “Women’s Brochure.” I cannot outline the whole brochure in detail here, but I will highlight a few points. According to the brochure, there was a call from Israelis and Westerners to overcome “national masculine identities,” and find “common feminist denominators.” However, the authors of the brochure argue that such feminist solidarity activities focused on “attracting active women in the national movement .… to focus on criticizing ‘nationalism and masculine chauvinism’” … “usually focused on the real-time [sic] or … the future.” Participants in feminist dialogues, according to the authors, are asked to “avoid the past ‘and its consequences.’” Moreover, the brochure outlines “false assumptions” upon which solidarity activities are often based. Some of these, the authors argue, included the following:
1. Women are the first to suffer from wars and their calamities. Israeli women lose their sons to the war while Palestinian women’s [lives are] destroyed by the “male dominated violence” from both parties in addition to losing their sons.
2. “Digging out history”—particularly the history of the Zionist movement—is useless; what is more feasible is focusing on the present to prevent the fall of more victims and to stop the suffering of the grieving mothers on both sides.
…
4. Nationalism, be it Jewish or Palestinian, emerged on the bases of oppressing women…. This “joint oppression” forms a common ground for women from both sides.
5. Women—all women—are one in both sides. Their sufferings are one and reasons of their oppression are one.
The Palestinian women authors go on to discredit these “false assumptions” in the brochure.
This brochure offers decolonial feminist analyses of the ways that feminist solidarities continually erase and de-prioritize the dismantling of the occupation and invisibilize unequal power relations (even with allies). The latter part of the brochure includes a flow chart for Palestinian women to follow if they are invited to participate in solidarity initiatives. The brochure centers the occupation.
This brochure was not received well by Zionist groups and white feminist allies, alike. Indeed, after I included these Palestinian feminist theorizations as a guiding framework (centering Palestinian women’s voices) in my own dissertation as a doctoral student, my committee member, a white feminist self-titled ally, wrote that she was not simply “disagreeing” on a “scholarly” point. But that she was “morally” opposed to this kind of ideological stance. She goes on:
Refusing to speak to Israeli feminists … unless they agree to certain statements or beliefs determined by the Palestinian women can hardly lead to further conversations with these women who want desperately to do something about the terrible, ongoing crisis.
This committee member interpreted Palestinian women’s complex feminist anti-racist theorizations and criteria for engagement (in fact the women’s desire for more ethical and productive dialogue, and my centering of the women’s voices) as immoral or perhaps anti-feminist “refusals” to dialogue. How dare Palestinian women screen their allies for anti-occupation foci and politics? Was this “too political”? A diversion from feminism? These are the charges laid against Palestinian feminists who seek to define their feminisms as primarily focused on alleviating the tentacles of occupation. Moralizing and charges of anti-feminism—it did not feel much different from what I had read about the days of the Mexico conference.
While the above discursive moments might appear extreme and we appear to have collectively moved to a different political moment, in which the occupation and disparate power relations are more readily acknowledged, I want us to consider this dynamic of the interrogation of Palestinian women today in relation to contemporary feminist betrayals. Today and in this current moment, I argue that these structures of tutelage and regulation between groups who belong to occupier and occupied, as well as the de-prioritization of the occupation, are replicated more subtly in self-titled anti-occupation work by ally feminists. We have witnessed this dynamic of Orientalist tutelage between Palestinian and non-Palestinian feminists in encampments, faculty affinity groups for Palestine, and even in present-day feminist conferences (academic and otherwise).
I would like to share important stories of epistemic resistance from 2009 (the first time that phosphorus gas was used in Gaza) that are model forms of whole-making amidst this discursive fragmentation; a case of epistemic activism that may appear as feminist refusal but is actually a proliferation of dialogue. And I am purposely choosing to share a story from 2009 for two reasons: 1) To make whole our Nakba story, refusing fragmentary and false starting points and 2) To manifest and demonstrate how redundant feminist questions are, even when they appear new after October 7th.
One woman I met working with the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC) on International Women’s Day in 2009 in Hebron, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke to me of a relationship she had created with a woman who worked at B’Tselem right up to 2009. She angrily recounts her sense of betrayal when, during Operation Cast Lead, this woman did not call out Israel as the aggressive invader:
One woman from B’Tselem that I was close to supported the war in Gaza and would only go so far as to say that both sides should stop the fighting, equalizing their positions. It wasn’t until the whole three week long assault was over, that she admitted to me that the attack on Gaza was wrong. But after what?
She goes on, with a tone of resignation: “Now when an Israeli woman approaches me to say let’s work together for peace, my answer is ‘I’m sorry.’ Because of this experience, I now refuse.”
The late and formidable Maha Abu-Dayyeh Shamas (of the WCLAC) explains that in the International Women’s Commission (IWC) the Israeli feminist she was working with most intimately failed to take a radically anti-war stand against the 2009 attacks on Gaza.
The women I was working with supported [the attacks on] Gaza and we [Palestinian women] said this is against our platform so you can’t be part of the group. We are women against war; we are against using human civilians as targets; and we’re supposed to sign on to this? I find that Palestinian women are more clear and sharp on their feminist principles—on feminism and what feminism is—than Israeli women.
Both Palestinian women return the gaze of feminist assessments back onto Israeli feminist allies, taking up the position of interrogator, even if they are not reinforced with ideological and repressive state apparatuses.
Islah Jad, a prominent Palestinian feminist scholar, also resists feminist fractal discursive environments through responding to the questions which should have been asked, not the ones posed to her. When Islah Jad was asked by a feminist journalist for the Association for Women’s Rights in Development about the impact of the “war in Gaza on women” in 2009, she saw the multiple discursive fragmentations in that question (temporally, geographically, and conceptually). And she healed that fragmentation in a kind of powerful epistemic reconstitution–a kind of whole-making. She effectively re-named the Israeli attacks referenced in mainstream media as “Operation Cast Lead” within a larger temporal framework, the ongoing Nakba. She said (in “AWID Interviews Islah Jad about Palestine and Israel,” a 2009 interview published in Rabble on 9 May 2011):
The war situation in Gaza is another episode of a long series of wars and violence against the Palestinian people since their collective expulsion from their homes in 1948 to create and establish the state of Israel….
She refused the temporally fragmenting premise of the question of the “war in Gaza” and made whole again the ongoing history of the Nakba. Jad went on to explain that the inhabitants of Gaza are mostly “refugees from villages and cities now inside Israel and close to Gaza (Majdal, Askalan, Ramleh etc.)” who were “expelled from their homes in 1948.” She recounts that Gazans have endured “non-stop wars” that began in 1948 when “Israeli planes were attacking refugees in their march to find a secure place to stay,” followed by more attacks in 1951, 1956, 1967, and between 1970 and 1971. Jad contextualizes the events in Gaza with reference to a long history of military attacks, continuous targeted assassinations, the repression of particular political groups through imprisonments, and the Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza (since 2006), which blocks food and fuel supplies from reaching Gazans, interrupts access to electricity, and pollutes natural water resources. She goes on to foreground the preceding suffering of the Gazan people who were slowly starving and increasingly under-nourished during the ongoing four-year siege. Jad takes a question structured through white feminist priorities, which temporally fragments Palestine into parts, and the impacts of occupation on women by making whole the ecosystem of occupation temporally, politically, and geographically—a decolonial epistemic praxis.
While she spends some time describing women’s suffering (e.g., women digging their children out of rubble), she then goes on to emphasize the communal aspect of the suffering (instead of “the impact on women”) by telling the stories of families:
Whole families have been exterminated by Israeli artillery from air, sea and ground. The example of the Samouni family is just one case. The Samouni family work on their agricultural land at the outskirts of Gaza—it is a big extended family. The Israeli army asked the family last week to stay together in one house. More than 160 gathered together, and once they were all settled in one house the army opened fire, killing instantly 30 people—mostly women and children.
Tens of houses have been destroyed on their inhabitant’s heads. Many families moved to empty schools run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), but the Israeli artillery followed them in their new refuge and killed, in one example, 42 Palestinians—again, mostly women and children. This led the UNRWA director in Gaza to ask for an international investigation to document the so [sic] many war crimes committed against the civilians in Gaza.
Jad, by detailing the ways in which Israeli violence obliterates entire blood lines, troubles the fragmenting extraction of the “impact on women,” a colonial epistemology often mediated by racial categories anyway.
We Palestinians lack the structural power to interrogate the Israelis—we cannot ask them if they “condemn the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh? Hind Rajab? Rachel Corrie?”–or whether they support misogyny through their hypermilitarized cultures. However, we will continue to articulate our refusals as resistance and interrogate back through decolonial epistemic activism to say, as Palestinian women and feminists: “Are you a feminist?” “Do you condemn the anti-feminist occupation?” Indeed: “Are you really a feminist?”
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; Manijeh Moradian’s essay “Iranian Feminist Solidarity with Palestine” here; Ather Zia’s essay “Intifada: From Palestine to Kashmir” here; and Wazhmah Osman’s “Livestreaming and Deadstreaming: On the Optics, Politics, and Effects of Violent Imagery in Comparative Perspective” here.
