Afroze Fatima Zaidi has something to say. We think you should listen.
In late 2022, when Mahsa Amini died in a hospital in Iran following an incident of police brutality, no one was louder than the western feminists. Suddenly, everyone from Hollywood celebrities to the Israeli state was tweeting ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and sharing videos of women cutting locks of their hair in solidarity with Iranian women.
Fast forward to 2024, and amidst a genocide that Israel has been perpetrating for almost a year, it seems fair to ask: where are these feminists now?
Women in Gaza have reportedly been cutting off their hair or shaving their heads since at least early July due to Israel’s blockade on toiletries and personal hygiene items.
A heartbreaking video of eight-year-old Sama Tbail began circulating recently because Sama faced acute hair loss due to “psychological shock” as a result of living under constant bombardment.
But there has been no campaign of feminists cutting their hair in solidarity with these women and girls.
Reports of Palestinian women being ‘arbitrarily executed’ by Israeli soldiers have been in the public domain since February. Palestinian women and girls have gone missing or faced sexual assault, “degrading treatment”, and torture while being imprisoned by Israeli forces.
Meanwhile pregnant women in Gaza have been dealing with bombardment, displacement, a lack of food, water, and sanitation, and practically no access to healthcare. Yet there appears to be no orchestrated movement to call attention to their plight from the same feminists who were loudest in chanting ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’.
In addition to toiletries, sanitary pads are either unavailable or unaffordable. Is this not a feminist issue? In mid-August, pharmacist Jumann Arfa was killed along with her mother and her four-day-old twin babies when their apartment was bombed; it later came to light that Arfa was targeted because she was using her social media to expose the deliberate shooting of children by Israeli forces. Is this not a feminist issue? In addition to facing harassment, threats, cyber-attacks and physical injuries, at least 21 women journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza. On 20 August, an Israeli tank shot Palestinian-Australian journalist Salma Al-Qadoumi in the back while she was wearing a press vest.
Is this not a feminist issue?
So what, you might ask, have these feminists been doing all this time?
Clearly they haven’t collectively been on a 322-day holiday, because in this time they’ve still managed to slander and launch an online bullying campaign against Olympic gold medallist Imane Khalif.
They’ve still managed to sign a letter to have an Emmy nomination rescinded from Peabody-award-winning journalist Bisan Owda who has been documenting life in Gaza through this genocide.
They’ve loudly voiced their support for Kamala Harris and danced at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), while putting their fingers in their ears when confronted with the names of children murdered by Israel.
We are witnessing a genocide in Gaza that has now been going on for 322+ days. For more than 322 days, Israel has been carrying out its indiscriminate onslaught on Gaza’s civilian population with impunity.
Every day we read about new atrocities and witness the most grim, abhorrent suffering inflicted by Israeli Occupation Forces upon Palestinians, and countless times we have asked ‘Is this the red line?’ Will this be enough to spur western nations into some sort of action against the genocide?
Will it at least be enough to put a stop to the US’s steady supply of arms to Israel?
Campaigners have disrupted events at the DNC to demand an arms embargo against Israel, and while this is the right thing to do, this pressure was needed throughout the past ten months.
In all this time, the people who are shouting the loudest about the imperative to support Harris as the US’s first woman president could have been lobbying for an end to arms sales to Israel.
They could have been demanding an end to the targeted killing of health workers, aid workers, and journalists.
They could have been campaigning against Israel’s decimation of healthcare facilities in Gaza or its deliberate, genocidal blocking of aid.But in ten months, they have failed to do anything of the sort, primarily because they don’t see Palestinians as human beings.
Aside from solidarity with Palestinians, however, they haven’t even spoken out about the treatment of female pro-Palestine protesters in their own communities.
Footage from Chicago, where the DNC was taking place, Sweden, and repeatedly in the case of Berlin, of police violently apprehending protesters who appear to be women has garnered no major reaction, outrage, or solidarity.
Why?
Because showing actual solidarity with Palestinians goes against the neoliberal, imperialist agenda of these feminists.The genocide in Gaza has made it clearer than ever how thoroughly the interests, politics, and agendas of liberal western feminists align with western imperialism.
This is the best explanation for the discrepancy between their response to the struggles of Iranian women in 2022/23 vis a vis their response to Palestinian women now.
Whether in the aftermath of Mahsa Amini’s death or in the lead up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, solidarity from western feminists has furthered an age-old colonial narrative: that Muslim women are being oppressed by Muslim men and need to be rescued by (western) people of conscience.
This solidarity is absent for Palestinian women because their direct oppressors aren’t Muslim men, but the most powerful present-day agents of western imperialism and white supremacy: Israel and the US, with support from the UK and other western nations.And this is why these feminists aren’t going to save us, nor take any sort of meaningful action to end the genocide in Gaza. They just need to do us a favour and keep Muslim women out of their mouths henceforth.
Afroze Fatima Zaidi is a writer, editor and independent researcher. Afroze has an established track record of writing about current affairs in a manner that challenges narratives in the mainstream media. She also regularly offers rigorous, research-based critiques of colonial/ white supremacist structures and institutions.
@afrozefz
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