Shut Down Colonial Feminism on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

By colonial feminism, we refer to Western and colonial discourses and policies that deploy the language of liberating women to justify invasions, genocides, military occupations, resource extractions, and labor exploitations. Colonial feminism depicts Palestinian women as helpless victims in need of saving from their own culture, society, and religion, while simultaneously rendering them disposable, threatening, and deserving of death. These tactics collude to justify the ongoing Zionist occupation of our homeland, expulsion of our people, and endless warfare waged upon Palestinian life. We reaffirm that Palestine is a feminist issue and assert that feminism is incompatible with Zionism.

Gender and sexual violence is indispensable to settler colonialism and its intent to eliminate Indigenous peoples, steal their lands, and repress their resistance. In Palestine, the Zionist settler-colonial project is driven by a demographic anxiety that constructs Palestinian women’s bodies, sexualities, and reproductive capacities as security threats. Palestinian mothers are coded as “problems” and are systematically denied reproductive justice and security. Against this backdrop, the Israeli settler state falsely touts itself as a safe haven for women and LGBTQ communities. Their propaganda depicts us as violent and regressive even as we are being violated routinely, indiscriminately, and with no regard to our bodily autonomy.

Since October 7, we have witnessed the resurgence of liberal, Orientalist, and colonial feminist tropes by Zionist leaders, Western media outlets, and liberal feminists dehumanizing the entire population of Gaza. Within this context, Palestinian men have been depicted as lascivious, brutal aggressors and sexual predators, and loveless fathers who use their children as human shields. The Zionist regime has instrumentalized these racialized sexual discourses to justify its accelerated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and while committing acts of gender and sexual violence through a campaign of mass arrests and sexual humiliation and torture across Palestine. Neither exhaustive nor new, testimonies and documentation evidencing these violations and harms include:

• The brutal killing of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 70 percent of which are women and children, prompting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to say that Gaza has become “a graveyard” for children. We equally mourn the thousands of men who have also been killed simply for being Palestinian. They are our comrades, our brothers, our fathers, our loved ones.
• The 50,000 pregnant women expected to give birth as the genocide unfolds in Gaza, referring to their conditions as a “horror film.” They are forced to undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia or painkillers and give birth in unsterile conditions. Women and girls have resorted to taking birth control pills to stop their menstruation cycles because of a lack of sanitary pads. 
• The arrest and detention of more than 100 women since October 7th as part of the ongoing arrest campaigns in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the occupied 1948 territories. Some have been released, while around 84 female prisoners remain detained. This includes the violent arrest and detention of Palestinian writer Lama Khater of Hebron on October 26th, who was threatened with rape while detained by Israeli soldiers; Ahed Tamimi of Nabi Saleh on November 6, accused of “inciting terrorism” on social media, who is still being held in administrative detention; and journalist Somaya Jawabra of Nablus, a mother of three who was seven months pregnant, and released on November 12 under indefinite house arrest and banned from using the internet. 
• The arrest and detention of more than 200 children in the past six weeks. Systematically speaking, between 500 and 1,000 Palestinian children are arrested every year. According to a report by Save the Children–Palestine, Palestinian child prisoners face physical, mental, and sexual violence and are deprived of seeing their families. 
• The sexualized abuse and torture of Palestinian prisoners. On October 21, news outlets reported that three Palestinian men in the West Bank were stripped naked, beaten, and that a soldier tried to penetrate an object into one of them. The soldiers who tortured them took videos and pictures, reifying the use of sexual violence to subjugate Palestinians. 
• Zionist soldiers threatening to out Queer Palestinians in Gaza to force them to become informants on their communities.
• Pro-Israel supporters calling for physical and sexual harm against Palestinians and pro-Palestine protestors in the United States and Canada.
• The physical, sexual, and verbal abuse of Palestinian and international volunteers documenting abuses by Zionist settlers and soldiers in the area of Tuwani on November 20.

These examples, though not comprehensive, illustrate the multifaceted ways that gender and sexual violence are woven into the fabric of the Zionist settler-colonial project–a project that not only indiscriminately kills women and girls, diminishes their life chances and livelihoods, but also targets Palestinian masculinities for sexualized abuse and torture. We call on you to help us silence the resounding beat of our slow death that settler colonialism and colonial feminists write into their genocide-enabling language and acts.

Our Call for Action

We, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, call on our allies to:

• Join our Twitter storm to Shut Down Colonial Feminism by posting your own testimonies on its harms and why it should be dismantled. Use the hashtags #shutdowncolonialfeminism and #feministssaynotogenocide and tag our social media accounts;
• Reject and speak out against colonial feminist discourses when they surface in the media, in your workplace, and in private conversations, while affirming that Palestine is a feminist issue. Use the PFC toolkit for talking points and resources. If you are affiliated with an academic institution, use our letter to admins to counter the suppression of faculty and students for Palestine;
• Organize a teach-in on colonial feminism and Palestine as a Feminist Issue in your community. Utilize, teach, and learn our growing reading list on settler colonialism and gendered violence;
• If you are a feminist organization, sign the Feminist Front and Palestinian Feminist Collective joint letter calling for an end to the genocide and an immediate ceasefire.
• Uplift our “Say No To Genocide” campaign, a collaboration between PFC and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, by printing out and using our posters and stickers at your local actions. 

Stay tuned for ongoing actions and invitations as this campaign evolves. Follow our social media accounts @palestinianfeministcollective.

To learn more about how colonial feminisms are weaponized against Palestinians and the intersections of sexual, gender, and settler-colonial violence, check out this selection of readings:

• Nada Elia, Greater than the Sum of Our Parts Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine (Pluto Press, 2023).
• Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783.
• Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, eds., The Cunning of Gender Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
• Sarah Ihmoud, “Palestinian Feminism: Analytics, Praxes and Decolonial Futures,” Feminist Anthropology 3, no. 2 (2022): 284–98, https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12109.
• Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky, and Lina Baroudi, “The Forgotten ‘-ism’: An Arab American Women’s Perspective,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press,  2006), pp. 97–112.
• Eman Ghanayem, “Colonial Loops of Displacement in the United States and Israel: The Case of Rasmea Odeh,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2019): 71–91, https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2019.0045.
• Rema Hammami, “Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints,” Current Anthropology 60, no. 2 (2019): S87–S97, https://doi.org/10.1086/699906.
• Sahar Francis, “Gendered Violence in Israeli Detention,” Journal of Palestine Studies 46, no. 4 (2017): 46–61, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.4.46.
• Walaa Alqaisiya, “Decolonial Queering: The Politics of Being Queer in Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 3 (2018): 29–44, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2018.47.3.29.
• Rabab Abdulhadi, Suzanne Adely, Angela Davis, and Selma James, “Confronting Apartheid has Everything to Do with Feminism,” Mondoweiss, March 17, 2021, https://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/confronting-apartheid-everything/.
• Rabab Abdulhadi, “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence,” Feminist Studies 45, no. 2 (2019): 541–73, https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2019.0025.
• Julie Peteet, “Language Matters: Talking about Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 45, no. 2 (2016): 24–40, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.45.2.24.
• Rosemary Sayigh, “Silenced Suffering,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): 1–20.
• Maya Mikdashi, “Can Palestinian Men be Victims?: Gendering Israel’s War on Gaza,” Jadaliyya, July 23, 2014, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30991.
• Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “Femicide and Colonization: Between the Politics of Exclusion and the Culture of Control,” Violence Against Women 19, no. 3 (2013): 295–315, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801213485548.
• Nahla Abdo, Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System (London: Pluto, 2014).
• Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud, and Suhad Dahir-Nashif, “Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” Jadaliyya, November 17, 2014, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31481/Sexual-Violence,-Women%E2%80%99s-Bodies,-and-Israeli-Settler-Colonialism.
• Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones: A Palestinian Case-Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Lena Meari, “Resignifying ‘Sexual’ Colonial Power Techniques: The Experiences of Palestinian Women Political Prisoners,” in Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, edited by Maha El Said, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt (London: Zed Books, 2015), pp. 59–85.
• Loubna Qutami, “Why Feminism? Why Now? Reflections on the ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue Pledge,’” Spectre Journal, May 3, 2021, https://spectrejournal.com/why-feminism-why-now/.
• Hala Marshood and Riya Alsanah, “Tal’at: A Feminist Movement that Is Redefining Liberation and Reimagining Palestine,” Mondoweiss, February 2020, https://mondoweiss.net/2020/02/talat-a-feminist-movement-that-is-redefining-liberation-and-reimagining-palestine/.
• Tara Alalami and Rawan Nabil, “The Birds Shall Return: Imagining Palestinian Feminist Futurities,” Briarpatch, May 4, 2022, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/imagining-palestinian-feminist-futurities.