Radical Feminism’s Strange Love Affair With Hamas
Currents
On October 7th, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas killed 1,200 Israeli civilians, many of them women and girls who were raped and dismembered. Hamas also controls the Gaza Strip, where they have made life for Palestinian women about as dismal as it is anywhere in the world. If there was ever a patriarchal villain for feminists to call out, it’s Hamas. And yet, many Western feminists seem to defend them. For example, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights declares, “When we look at the world through an intersectional feminist lens, it becomes clear that Palestine is a feminist issue. Palestinian women face oppression and violence at the hands of Zionism, and are disproportionately impacted by the structural violence of Israeli apartheid.” It has become fashionable among academic feminists — whether in women’s studies and gender studies programs or among activist organizations — to proclaim that Israel is the sole oppressor of Palestinian women. How could this happen? As we will see, it’s because modern feminism has absorbed so many other unrelated causes that it’s forgotten about the very people it exists to fight for: women.
As a budding forensic psychology student in the 1990s and early 2000s, I went on something of a binge reading the radical feminist literature, particularly on issues related to sexual assault. I was left with a number of questions: whether radical feminism had become anti-male; whether their analysis of the supposed causes of sexual assault, such as pornography, were correct; and whether “patriarchy” was still the best frame for an increasingly egalitarian industrialized world. But one thing was beyond dispute at the time: radical feminism was dedicated to promoting the welfare of women.
Fast-forward to today, and across much of feminist academia and activism, there appears to be little mention of the welfare of the Jewish women killed, kidnapped, or raped by Hamas and other jihadist groups on October 7. Nor of the rampant sexism, violence, and assault women experience in Gaza, which is shocking when we consider the specifics.
Women in Gaza cannot travel without the permission or supervision of a male guardian. Nearly four in 10 Gazan women report experiencing domestic violence, with prosecution of such crimes often impeded by the Palestinian courts. Women’s employment numbers in Gaza stand around 18.7% — far lower than the rest of the world (about 50%), and far lower than men in Gaza (at about 71%, roughly equivalent to the global average). According to the United Nations, women under Hamas are often coerced into marrying their rapists. Forced marriages of underaged girls, sometimes to first-degree relatives, remain a common problem in Gaza. Of the 17,000 registered marriages in Gaza in 2012, 35% involved girls under 17 years old. In 2015, nearly a quarter of all married people in Gaza had been married as minors. In addition, abortion rights are virtually non-existent in Gaza. This is what life under Hamas looks like for Palestinian women. Where is the outrage from Western feminist academics and activists? Where is the solidarity and the moral concern?
The aforementioned US Campaign for Palestinian Rights cites the writer Jaime Omar Yassin, who asserts, “If gender is shared by all racial groups, feminism cannot be Zionist, just as it cannot be neo-Nazi — feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” Yassin echoes common sentiments among anti-Israel Westerners when she conflates “Zionism” with the state of Israel, and compares it to Nazis and white supremacy.
Another recent statement, this one signed by hundreds of university academic departments and advocacy groups, assures us that the Israel-Palestine issue is not “controversial and complex.” They proclaim “As gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline.” All blame for the fate of Palestinians is placed in the hands of Israel. These attitudes aren’t new — activist Linda Sarsour declared in 2017 that “Zionism” is incompatible with feminism — but they are spreading.
Similarly, FRIDA, an organization that describes itself as a youth-led feminist group (named after the 20th-century bisexual Mexican artist), claims, “The world is currently witnessing a genocidal campaign carried out by the Israeli government on the people of Gaza.” They describe Israel as a “settler colonialist, white-supremacist state” and refer to Oct 7 only as the beginning of Israeli military operations against Gaza. They further state, “We affirm the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance”, which is, in essence, a de facto endorsement of Hamas’ terrorist violence, including the rape and murder of women and girls.
These statements bear a familiar pattern. Feminism’s marriage with “intersectionality” — the belief that multiple identities such as race and gender combine to form a hierarchy of privilege and oppression — has tied it into a multitude of progressive causes and rendered it all but unrecognizable. We are told that “Immigration is a feminist issue”, and “Healthcare for all is a feminist issue”, indeed that trans advocacy, climate change, and even COVID-19 mask mandates are feminist issues. The tragic irony is that this new and expanded version of feminism blithely disregards the suffering of some of the world’s most oppressed women in order to map the US’s far-left cultural politics onto the Middle East. In doing so, the project of defending women morphs into categorically denouncing Israel (and America) as “settler-colonialists.”
The concept of intersectionality has provided some useful insights into how intersecting identities can create unique circumstances for individuals and reshape our approach to anti-discrimination laws. Incorporated into a totalizing worldview, however, it becomes a system of morally ranking people, groups, and even whole countries and geographic regions by identity category, and then dividing them into “oppressors” and “oppressed” based on where their identities stack up. White people, in this view, become “oppressors,” and people of color become “oppressed.” Similarly, Jews, who are associated in Western societies with white people, are seen as oppressors, while Muslims are seen as brown and therefore oppressed. And to be oppressed is to be virtuous because such suffering confers a form of enlightenment by opening one’s eyes to the true nature of the world. Feminism, under the influence of this worldview, becomes far less about women in general, and much more about the right kinds of women in the right kinds of circumstances with the right kinds of political implications.
We can see this mindset in action with the slogan “By any means necessary”, taken from a 1964 Malcolm X speech and applied to the Palestinians, wherein their oppressed status relieves them both of moral responsibility and agency. Being seen to support the Palestinian cause, then, is to be on the “right side of history” vis-à-vis supporting the correct “oppressed” group. That the Palestinians may have contributed to the troubles in Palestine; that their fighters have raped and murdered Israeli women; that many Jews are not “white” by any reckoning; that many were evicted by Arab states and are refugees with no “right to return”; and that Muslim states have committed more than their fair share of imperialism, genocide, and slavery over the years are inconvenient truths to be swept under the rug. This is how you get academics turning a blind eye to the plight of gay and bi people in the Muslim world, and self-identified feminists pretending not to notice that Palestinian women live in a true patriarchy under Hamas.
This simplistic approach to intersectionality renders modern academic feminism incapable of holding two thoughts at once: that the Palestinian people suffer in horrible circumstances and also that there are aspects of their own government, religion, and culture that cause harm to women. Instead, intersectional feminists regard the welfare of Palestinian women under Hamas as something that must be sacrificed to the larger Palestinian cause against Israel. If women, LGBT people, or anyone else suffers in Gaza, they find ways to blame everyone but Hamas, be it Israel, British imperialists from a century ago, or the West in general.
Another mechanism that helps enforce this double standard is the fear of Islamophobia. Anti-Muslim bigotry is real. It was of particular concern in the wake of 9/11 and the refugee crisis in Europe and remains so today. Although Islamic terrorism is a real danger, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of Western Muslims live in peace. Nonetheless, reasonable concerns about Islamophobia have had a profound effect, particularly in academia, in creating taboos against criticizing any practices of Islam, even its most fundamentalist or militant versions. Equal to the fear that one may be guilty of Islamophobia is the worry that one may be accused of such. These two fears act in tandem as powerful disincentives for speaking out. The result is a culture in which academics and activists who feel little to no restraint in criticizing Christianity, Judaism, or atheism feel deeply uncomfortable criticizing any aspect of Islam. But while this may partially explain the silence about Hamas’s crimes against Palestinian women, understanding the full-throated defense of Hamas requires further explanation.
For decades, mainstream feminism was justifiably criticized for ignoring non-white, non-elite women. However, it is unclear how effective intersectional feminism has been for the non-elite women of color for whom it ostensibly advocates. For instance, the MeToo movement largely ignored blue-collar or service-industry women. In Australia, women seeking to report their experiences with rape in aboriginal communities were erased by feminists, largely due to “intersectional” concerns regarding race and sex. The dynamic played out similarly in the UK and US, where violence in minority communities, including against women, is considered taboo to speak about in polite society. But who really is served by this high academic approach to feminism? Ironically, it serves the sensibilities of affluent, privileged women with fancy educations at the expense of downtrodden women in places like Gaza and Afghanistan.
It is possible, of course, to criticize the Israeli government’s policies in good faith, whether their bombing campaign or their policies and actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Regarding Palestinian women, it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that both Israel and Hamas have made their lives worse. However, modern feminism’s inability to speak out about the treatment of women by Hamas, Palestinian men, or fundamentalist versions of Islam suggests something deeply troubling. Feminism is becoming a movement no longer motivated by the universal human rights, equality, and well-being of women. It’s time for academic feminism to have an existential crisis.
Published Dec 29, 2023
