Zionism, its impact on women, contradictions, and the powerful resistance led by Palestinian women.
Learning Materials
- An interview with Leila Khaled (also in Spotify & Youtube)
- Leila Khaled is a long time activist for Free Palestine
- She particularly stresses the importance of Palestinian unity in the struggle, she criticises the Oslo Accords, which were marketed as a peace agreement, but in reality increased the power of the colonizer and neocolonial economic oppression
- UN 1948 recognized Israel as a state, but failed to recognize how Palestinians were evicted from their homes and their lands stolen
- She says we know that now the world is divided on whether countries support Israel or not
- She defends armed resistance, and the right of the oppressed to resist, armed resistance has always been an important part of resistance
- She defends the PLL plane hijackings to defend Palestinian rights.
- She sees hope in international solidarity and organising around it and defending the Palestinian right to land restitution
- Nakba74: Rethinking Zionism as a gendered colonial enterprise
- The article deals with, how sexual violence is used as a tool and is one of the fundamental ideas in Zionist ideology
- the article deals with it, the difference between anti-Semitism and Zionism and the historical basis of Zionism the emergence and development of Sionism
- Zionism is colonialist and just like other colonialist projects, the sexual sexual violence is a part of
- Zionism sees women as a threat to population growth and genocide, so that’s why it targets women, targeting the next gender.
- attacking women will also lead to family displacement, which is the goal of Zionism
- the author also mentions the concept that attacking the honour of women is a way of forcing them to move – when rape they also fear for their honour, and this is why they feel compulsive need to move away
- the first Israeli Prime Minister of Israel has clearly stated in his 1948 diary that the rape of women as one of the tactics
- Israel uses war and colonial oppression, mass rape. in the article description of the of the incident when a woman was raped and killed by a group of 15 militants
- intimidation of women, rape, lack of menstrual supplies, lack of medicines that are necessary for childbirth, all this is a Zionist attack on femininity against women
- Zionism also uses patriarchy as a tool, for example when colonisers have attacked women raped her, the family is then informed of this rape and thus to increase the shame associated with the honour of the rape. woman and her family, among other things because of this in the Palestinian in feminism, questioning the patriarchy plays an important role in the struggle against Zionism
- Why Feminism? Why Now?
- Written by Loubna Qutami, a Palestinian feminist scholar and researcher.
- The researcher seeks to highlight the importance of describing exactly what feminism itself means/what we mean
- It is important to say that we mean feminism as practised by oppressed people
- In the article, the author seeks to highlight the fact that Zionism is built on sexual violence and the undermining and silencing of Palestinian agency
- Palestinians are oppressed and silenced not only in Palestine but all over the world
- This movement and Palestinian feminism is not new, it is a decades-old feminism based on the struggle of Palestinian women against Zionism
- The article highlights how black and indigenous feminism in the West needs to be brought to the surface, because Western feminism is a different matter
- The decolonial feminist perspective is to imagine and move towards a better future.
- The urgency of anti-imperialist Feminism
- The message of this article is important because it deals with how the oppression of women is linked to material rights and the maintenance of capitalism
- The article discusses the work of Silvia Winter on who is and is not considered human
- Arab men are portrayed as savages from whom Arab women must be protected and the article also describes orientalist perceptions of Arab men
- The author talks about the current genocide and how sexual violence is instrumentalized against Palestinians, how NGOs for example spread propaganda about violence against Arab men, fighters and generalize it to the whole nation
- Israel is the hand of US imperialism. Killing people and destroying nature, it has a direct link to economic profit. The arms industry is directly profiting from this
- This is not all, capitalism tries to minimize the cost of renewable labor
- Israel is dependent on cheap and oppressed Palestinian labour
- Israel makes profit from this oppressed labour and makes profit again from killing Palestinians
- Feminism has to take into account material interests and material needs, and this is what Western bourgeois feminism does not take into account
- Western bourgeois feminism completely cuts off issues of femininity/queerity from material needs and the article criticises this
- Post structural feminism, this means that our identities are open and produced in cultural phenomena, and the problem with this perspective, according to the author, is that material issues are not addressed in such feminism
- It also ignores the struggle over nation-states and does not deal with the right of nations to self-determination, but deals with hybrid identities, such as the idea that a Palestinian-Israeli identity could offer solutions to the settler-colonial violent land-grabbing project
- He also talks about a future-oriented heteronormativity, a focus on the creation of new life, and this perspective is not very attractive for Palestinians, for example, or for the oppressed in general, because the problem is that racist capitalism is constantly questioning that future
- In some ways he does not entirely disagree with identity, but the critique is more on the idea that identity brings solutions to material problems and injustice
- The struggles of nations, they are also places where new shared identities are created
- Injured Palestinian detainee denied treatment in Israeli prison
[Video 3min] - Saving Israa Jabees from Israeli oppression is human duty
[Video 2min]