Let me start by saying a few words about where I am coming from, and why we at Critical Studies of Iraq initiated this conversation among feminists reflecting and organizing from the standpoints of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and beyond. We started with an urgent question: what does transnational feminist solidarity mean in a time of genocide? Critical Studies of Iraq is an initiative that I am currently leading here at Rutgers-Newark. It aims to foster, support, and develop the critical scholarship of social scientists and feminist scholars based in Iraq. The idea is to take Iraq as a framework to theorize from (and not about); we want to focus and give visibility to the epistemologies and knowledge emerging from scholars and activists in Iraq today. We are working with research and academic institutions, as well as activist groups—including feminist groups in Iraq who are interested in making (as opposed to producing) knowledge and in asking questions such as: what is critical knowledge making? In May 2023, we organized a conference in Baghdad that gathered sociologists, anthropologists, and feminist scholars from all over Iraq and we asked ourselves: what does it mean to theorize from Iraq? What is theory? What is research and who is it for? Whose interest does it serve? We discussed epistemological questions about the social sciences and about women, gender, and feminist studies and how to develop critical thinking and critical theory in Iraq and also transnationally.
For us, it matters very much to talk about Palestine and to take Palestine as a framework to think about the world, as a lens to see the world and understand it, and also to allow Palestine to shape our theoretical and political imagining of justice, freedom, and emancipation. Thinking with and from Iraq and Palestine is to ask fundamental questions about the systems of power that structure the contemporary world.
Let’s say that with Palestine, there is clarity: clarity when it comes to our colleagues and comrades and in academic and activist circles. Even in a space like the National Women’s Studies Association, where we were coming with the assurance that critical feminist thinking, anti-racist, decolonial, and transnational feminist thinking, was a given, we then realized that when it comes to Palestine, nothing is a given. That many of our colleagues, even some of the critical thinkers who have most inspired us, can fall into an “alllivesmatter” narrative. A narrative through which power dynamics are hidden. It is disappointing, it is hurtful, and it is a true reminder that feminist activism and thinking is a constant struggle.
I want to share a little bit about the way I reflect on the meaning of the “transnational” in transnational feminist struggle for justice in Palestine and beyond.
However, before I even start taking the analytical tone that supposedly is the tone of academia, I have to say that in a time of genocide, I refuse the distant, disconnected, academic bullshit; that, as feminists have argued over and over again, emotions are the first window, the first form of analysis; that right now, I struggle to be analytical, to be articulate.
Because what it feels like is that there is so much to say, but at the same time, that everything has been said. That the situation is beyond words. Or, I should say, that only the words from the people of Gaza truly matter.
There is a saturation of discourse on Gaza, most of which consists in political science-y and policy making talks and media interviews using words such as negotiations, resolutions, deals etc. all of it sounding more like noise.
I am saying that because as a woman from Iraq, I have seen my country and my people being talked about as a “thing.” A thing that happened. People in this empire that is the US often say, “Iraq happened.” Iraq (like Gaza) is talked about as the background of a conversation about something else (the something else being mostly US foreign policy), and the everyday life, subjectivities, and experiences of the people living there are missing.
There is also a cover-up in the use of the term “war.” They say, “during the war,” before the “war,” after the “war.” As if talking about equal adversaries.
In 2003, the word war was hiding the term “invasion and occupation.” Today, in relation to Palestine, the term war is militantly and purposely used to hide the term genocide. The saturation of a media propaganda campaign based on lies and misinformation, just like in the early 2000s, is here to hide the apocalyptic reality of Gaza today, the devastation, the incommensurable, unspeakable tragedy.
Because yes, in Iraq, in Gaza, we have experienced the apocalypse, not only once, but time and time again. Words cannot contain the reality of our losses. What are words after all? Just sounds that contain little fragments of our feelings.
This is a time of outrage, of action, and of organizing at every level, of bearing witness and amplifying the voices of people in Gaza, the voices of Palestinians.
As scholars, as feminists based here in this settler colony that is funding, arming, facilitating, and enabling Israel’s genocidal war, there is a lot we can do, from supporting boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) in our campuses and places of work, to writing to our representatives, to protests, to supporting organizations that work with people on the ground, to so many other things. But I think that the first thing we should absolutely continue doing is listening to the people of Gaza and Palestine, to the children of Gaza who are informing us about what is happening, and answer them through our intentions, actions, and words, with all our hearts.
The above strategies counter the structural gaslighting, a term that Palestinian feminist Wafaa Hasan has used in her work, of corporate western media. Hegemonic political discourse will always center white tears and white suffering and have us conflate the oppressed with the oppressors.
Racism, white feminism, and homonationalism frame the hegemonic discourse, and when sometimes (and as a result of Palestinians themselves taking charge of documenting and informing the world about what is happening) it does see “victims,” it can only see them through the lens of “womenandchildren.” In Iraq during the invasion and in Palestine today, and particularly in Gaza, men are not seen as victims. Men and boys are by default considered “terrorist sympathizers” and fighters; they are seen as disposable, erasable, their death is not even mentioned.
I think that one way to decolonize feminism is for feminists, especially those based in Europe and North America, to include Arab men, Palestinian men, Iraqi men, and Afghani men in their political imaginations, as true feminist subjects.
Moreover, for Israel, there are no civilians in Gaza, and Palestinians, women, children, and men, are never victims. The targeting of children and women in Gaza is a central feature of genocide.
In Gaza in the past decade, people have been living in a context of infrastructural destruction, where basic services and infrastructures are lacking. In my work on women, gender, and feminisms in Iraq, I show that in such a context we should see women as infrastructures, as the ones carrying the entire survival of the household and the society on their shoulders, while dealing with many restrictions and challenges. All the systems of power that structure a society are exacerbated to the extreme in a context where the preservation of life itself (not even a good life) is a struggle.
We have also seen in Gaza how people and their bare bodies have turned into real infrastructures. It is remarkable how the people of Gaza, children in particular, have been the ones documenting, interviewing, and informing the world about what is happening. I have realized that much of the information I get about Gaza I get on social media, from children.
In this context where the people of Gaza have been abandoned–where they alone are facing genocidal Israeli ongoing settler colonialism–centering and amplifying their stories, their voices, their subjectivities, their everyday survival, their afterlives, and their memories–mourning them, naming them–is absolutely fundamental.
What does transnational feminism mean in a time of genocide? The “trans” means a refusal of the “inter” that essentialized and homogenized categories such as nation and women. It means to refuse the neoliberal, capitalist, white, middle-class “women of the world.” It says that we live in one world structured by systems of power (such as racial, colonial, heteropatriarchal, capitalist), that some (mostly but not strictly) in the global north benefit from these systems, and some are victims of it, oppressed by it. It means that some live at the expense of others, through their exploitation and oppression.
More clearly, it means that here in this settler colony, in this empire in which we live, we need to insist on the relationship between racism, imperialism, and settler colonialism. We need to remind people that Gaza, Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just like Vietnam, are present in the everyday lives of people in the US, in its military industrial complex, in its normalization of police violence, in its anti-Black and anti-immigration racism and in its neocolonial white feminism and so many other aspects of its social, economic, and political life. All the debates about “racial reckoning” have to be articulated with an imperial reckoning and the recognition that this country exists and thrives at the expense and through the destruction of other countries and their people.
I have to say that I am absolutely thrilled about the solidarity movement for justice in Palestine, and I recognize the ways in which the movement is also the result of a coming together of different struggles. That the repertoire of activism used by Indigenous people and the repertoire of activism used by the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, are contributing to thinking and organizing around Palestine and vice versa. I have learned so much from Palestinians mobilizing in Palestine and in the US about how to build an agenda, a discourse, a narrative of creating intersections with other movements for justice and freedom. It is very inspiring.
At the same time, “trans” also means challenging borders of nation, gender, and sexuality. I want to say I struggle with simplistic anti-imperialist slogans and agendas. I want to think of a world where we humans are all truly connected and in which the integrity of the body–its freedom, its dignity–and the ability to live a dignified life with all the structural and infrastructural dimensions that it requires are at the center of our political and theoretical imagination. This also means that our struggle for justice in Palestine refuses categorically to align itself with fascist regimes and political forces in the region. As the daughter of Iraqi refugees, I know what authoritarianism looks like, and I know too well how most Arab regimes have instrumentalized Palestine. The fascist political forces that are repressing and silencing movements for justice and freedom in Iraq and the region are not my allies; they are an essential part of the problem. I stand with the people of Iran, Iraq, and Syria and not with the regimes that kill them and silence them, no matter what the regimes pretend to represent or their opposition to US imperialism.
It is absolutely essential for us feminists to build spaces where we can collectively imagine the world we want to live in, not only the one that we are standing against. For that, it is essential to continue to center the experiences, the subjectivities, and the lives of those who are so easily erased and imprisoned in their precariousness, and to listen to the terms in which they are defining their oppressions, even when it does not fall into the way we frame or define the political.
See another article that is part of the series “Feminists for a Free Palestine: Voices from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iran, and Beyond” here. More essays are forthcoming.
