Moving To @RedFemBlack

radical feminism and feminist radicalism

[radfemblack]

I will say, the separatism ~discourse~ was the final straw. Don’t expect women to go along with you when speak down to them like trash.

[radfemblack]

Is your "Why Women of the World Fail to Unite" article still online somewhere? I can't find it but I'd really like to read it.

I made it private because I think the writing is subpar now. Enter 4yr3yzRFB as the password and you can see it.

[radfemblack]

or whether the effect is more or less limited to Black women only, because women of other races, esp. white women, have different representations to look up to? I’m really torn on this because I think popstars like Doja Cat, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj or Megan Thee Stallion are quite popular with white audiences but I also don’t want to trivialize the racialized aspect of their hypersexualization by the music industry. I would really appreciate your perspective. Thank you for your time! (2/2)

It’s both. Black women are disproportionately affected but it affects all women. Intersectionality exists in feminism precisely because all women are eventually affected by the specific racialized misogyny borne by women of color. Dehumanization of any target eventually desensitizes people to further dehumanization, the human mind doesn’t compartmentalize. This is why studies reveal that men who patronize the sex trade are more likely to rape non-prostituted women too. Those four rappers you mentioned aren’t just black women, they’re just women too.

[radfemblack]

Hey, I hope it's ok to send you an ask. There is something I have been mulling over: So Black women are insanely sexualized in the music industry, much more than other women, esp. white women. Naturally, Black girls/women are the ones who are primarily affected by this hypersexualized representation. I wonder whether in addition the media’s sexualization of Black women also has some general socialization effects on women as a class and makes female objectification as a whole more acceptable(1/2)

1/2

[radfemblack]

Delete Angela Davis from your background. She has and always been pro-trans rights. Don’t you dare spit on her name like that.

Don’t you dare spit on the name of black women. Angela Davis was an icon of second wave feminism and made her most invaluable contributions to and during it, including articulating the experiences of black females. Don’t condescend and talk down to us dumb negresses as if we know nothing about our own history. It is not necessary to agree with all of someone’s beliefs to celebrate their accomplishments, I’m not the one in a cult.

Most feminists alive and deceased certainly do not agree with your men’s rights agenda so what now? In her famous Ain’t I A Woman speech, Sojourner Truth mentioned her bearing children in the same breath, clearly signifying that is what makes her a woman. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of the most famous and celebrated feminists of African ancestry today, clearly agrees with gender critical views. Can’t pick and choose chief.

[radfemblack]

“Listen to sex workers!”

That statement goes both ways. You can’t just listen to the positive and not the negative. It’s not different than a Yelp or Amazon review. If you are interested in a product or service, you want to make sure it’s worth the effort and money and not a scam. If a person were just to read the (often paid for) positive reviews they could get screwed. So why is listening to sex workers any different?

[radfemblack]

Hi, I’m trans and would love to know why I shouldn’t be allowed to identity as I please, present how I please, have my identity respected, and in general be allowed.

Thanks for your time,

A Trans Person

(She/They)

You literally can do whatever you want. You can’t force other people to “respect” your identity, nobody is obligated to validate your internal self perception — something called freedom exists and it cuts both ways. Everyone already is allowed to “identity” (sic) however they please, and present how they please, so those are moot points. No police officer will pull up and arrest you for claiming to be something you’re not. Nobody is not letting you “be allowed” to do shit because what you’re talking about is out of your hands anyway.

The real questions are: why you are obsessed with policing other people’s thoughts and speech; why you want to impose your metaphysical beliefs onto other, secular, people; why you care so much about and seek other people’s approval for an identity that is supposedly just your own business; why women can’t organize and associate as we please, say what we please, talk about our own bodies and lives as we please, have our spaces respected, and in general be allowed to exist; and why you can’t wrap your thick skull around such simple things and thus need to invent strawmen red herrings to justify your massive victim complex. FOH.

[radfemblack]

You are appreciated

Thank you. I’m feeling really under appreciated rn.

[radfemblack]

hello and merry christmas!! i just wanted to say that as a black radfem, it's really encouraging to see you be so active in the community and hold us to a higher standard of intellectual rigor. sometimes radfems online can get very stuck on dunking on libfems n tras, and while thats all fun and good, it's good to see you place value on discovering the truth and being a good person over reactionary behavior and ideological purity, especially since radical feminism is meant to adress the material realities of women. thank you for running this blog : - )

Thank you so much for your words.

[radfemblack]

Hi please can you not interact with my blog, thanks!!

Who even are you

[radfemblack]

*anonymous* NIGGER

🤨 I know you are but what am I

[radfemblack]

do have a pinterest bc im like 100% i found u

Yes.

[radfemblack]

I feel like your recent posts on how women's rights are used as shield for colonialism have been something of a wake up call for me, along with one of my professors, a muslim feminist, who is actively talking about this problem, mainly in the context of American imperialism in the middle east. I think this is something that western feminists should be more aware and on top of, as our work is often appropriated for these causes, or we just straight up contribute to it both on accident and on purpose. It's really made me think more deeply about how women's rights is used both as justification for imperialist intervention and also as a way to shut down feminists in other parts of the world with "look how good you have it compared to the women over there." Idk, I just think that acknowledging this issue and actively reckoning with it is important for radfems right now, as women in Middle East have multiple levels of oppression and conflict to contend with at this very moment.

👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

[therearenogirlsontheinternets]

UNO reverse

[radfemblack]

Purplewashing | Decolonize Palestine

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women's rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful pr

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

[radfemblack]

Much to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were [You can read more about this here].

It is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.

It is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:

“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”

These strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity. The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.

[radfemblack]

Death and destruction, but feminist

Much of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the Lawfare Project, hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.

Hannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.

All of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.

This purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.

[radfemblack]

Intersectionality as threat

The body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.

Zionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.

[radfemblack]

A purple-tinted view of history

Smearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.

To Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” [You can read more about this here].

These efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”

In the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfing group co-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:

“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”

[radfemblack]

The fixation on Palestinian women

Zionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant [You can read more about this here]. Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.

Thus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”. Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.

Even the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.

[radfemblack]

Misogyny is not better when it’s Zionist

The aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.

Stephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”

Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”

Palestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats” [You can read more about this here]. This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written, in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.

The aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.

Furthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.

[radfemblack]

Solidarity, not condescension

That misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable [You can read more about this here].

Palestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:

“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”

Palestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.

[radfemblack]

Further reading

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Militarization and violence against women in conflict zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian case-study. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera et al. Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism. Jadaliyya. November 17th, 2014. [Link]

Farris, Sara R. In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.

Jad, Islah. Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism. Syracuse University Press, 2018.

Abdulhadi, Rabab. “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence.” Feminist Studies 45.2-3, 2019: 541-573.

Elia, Nada. “Justice is indivisible: Palestine as a feminist issue.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 6.1, 2017.

Sharoni, Simona, et al. “Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Justice in/for Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4, 2015: 654-670.

Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab and Arab American feminisms: gender, violence, and belonging. Syracuse University Press, 2011.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim women need saving?. Vol. 15. No. 5. Sage UK: London, England: SAGE Publications, 2015.

[culturewarconversation]

No Judith Butler, gender-critical feminists aren't 'fascists'

In 1999, The Guardian ran a piece on an annual prize for bad writing, which celebrates “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”. The only condition for entry was that no parody was allowed. The winner was Judith Butler, for this: This week, The Guardian ran an interview with Butler who [...]Read More...

[radfemblack]

Purplewashing | Decolonize Palestine

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women's rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful pr

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

[radfemblack]

Much to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were [You can read more about this here].

It is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.

It is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:

“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”

These strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity. The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.

[radfemblack]

Death and destruction, but feminist

Much of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the Lawfare Project, hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.

Hannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.

All of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.

This purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.

[radfemblack]

Intersectionality as threat

The body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.

Zionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.

[radfemblack]

A purple-tinted view of history

Smearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.

To Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” [You can read more about this here].

These efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”

In the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfing group co-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:

“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”

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The fixation on Palestinian women

Zionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant [You can read more about this here]. Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.

Thus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”. Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.

Even the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.

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Misogyny is not better when it’s Zionist

The aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.

Stephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”

Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”

Palestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats” [You can read more about this here]. This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written, in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.

The aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.

Furthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.

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Solidarity, not condescension

That misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable [You can read more about this here].

Palestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:

“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”

Palestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.