Palestinian feminists stand against colonial genocide

Art by Baltimore based artist Ashanti Fortson that reads "Our struggles are all interconnected," and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," shared as part of the Justseeds Palestine will be free! Graphics Care-Package #7.

Interview • La Laboratoria • May 23, 2024 • Leer en castellano

The ongoing genocide in Gaza sparked this urgent conversation between Belén Marco, Susana Draper and Ana María Morales from La Laboratoria feminist research collective in New York and Quito, and Sarah Ihmoud, Eman Ghanayem and Tara Alami, who are members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a collective of Palestinian and Arab feminists active on Turtle Island (so-called Canada and the United States).

“We are an intergenerational collective of activists, organizers, practitioners, creators, thinkers, artists, scholars, healers, Water and Land Protectors, life givers and life sustainers,” said Ihmoud during the interview, which took place over Zoom in March.

We’re sharing part of the interview below. You can read it in full on TruthOut. —Eds

La Laboratoria: How do you frame your work and collective in the language of reproductive justice and within a feminist, anti-colonial understanding of peace?

Sarah Ihmoud: Israel is a settler-colonial project, and settler colonization necessarily implies the elimination of native people from their Indigenous lands and territories. A feminist lens invites us to understand the gender and sexual politics of that project. As Palestinian feminists, we name the gender and sexual violence of reproductive genocide as central to this larger structure of settler colonial power and its racialized machinery of domination. So, this includes rape and sexual violence, which were systematically weaponized against Palestinian women at the onset of the Nakba in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were removed from their ancestral lands and territories. That politics gives broader shape to the logic of settler-colonial power and how it operates today.

Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in this genocidal escalation in Gaza, of whom 70 percent are women and children. A million women and girls have been displaced multiple times by foot. There’s a 300 percent increase in the miscarriage rate among pregnant women. Pregnant and lactating women are at a severe, obvious disadvantage within this broader machinery of violence and power. A recent UN press release called attention to deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of women and children in places where they sought refuge or were fleeing. The UN also noted instances of rape, instances of sexual violence and even the “forcible transfer” of at least one Palestinian child by the Israeli army in Gaza.

So, we have to ask ourselves: How do we understand attacks on Gaza specifically as gendered assaults on women’s bodies, sexualities and life-giving capacities? In other settler-colonial contexts, bodies, sexualities and reproductive capacities are targeted in particular ways because of what they represent — land, which is reproduction; Indigenous kinship and governance; and the possibility of alternatives. In this case, it’s the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. We must understand the question of reproductive justice in this broader context.

Tara Alami: Incarceration and the violence of the nation-state, of a settler-colonial nation-state, is an attack on the generationality of native people and land. As the settler state develops into different stages (for example, on Turtle Island) it becomes an attack on the nationality of all oppressed people, oppressed or underrepresented genders, and people who are living in deliberately precarious material conditions. (By “deliberately” I mean “designed by the state”.)

This includes being unhoused or impoverished or starved, not having access to education, living in a food desert, not having access to equitable and affordable health care, and much more. The attack on Palestinian generationality and the ability to reproduce and sustain life in Palestine is part and parcel of the Zionist settler-colonial design. It’s in the fabric of Zionist genocide. In the context of Gaza right now, we know that around 5,000 women have had to give birth under the most unsafe conditions, under constant bombardment. These conditions are also unhygienic. They lack access to proper health care. During pre- and postpartum conditions, they are starved, malnourished, unable to sustain life after giving it. There are pictures of the premature babies in the ICU who were killed because they were starved, because there’s no electricity in the hospital, because their machines were not working anymore.

We saw an acute need to define “reproductive genocide” in the context of Palestine during the past five or six months, as well as during the last 100 years of resistance against colonialism and imperialism, whether it was British or American. The attack on generationality can take different forms. It can take the form of really violent night raids by the Israeli Occupation Forces on villages and, literally, attacks on the homes where children are kidnapped from their parents or vice versa. 

Parents are kidnapped from their children and taken away and put in Zionist dungeons. It can take the form of being a Palestinian political prisoner. We know that wherever there is oppression (and in this case, a genocidal attack on generations), there will be resistance. 

This is where, for example, sperm smuggling emerged as a form of anti-colonial resistance against this ongoing genocide. People are calling what’s happening in Gaza right now a genocide. But the truth is that it’s an escalation. It’s a massive escalation of a genocide that’s been happening for decades and decades.

So, it’s not just about the past few months, or just about Gaza, but about all of Palestine.

The statement that we wrote and released recently defines reproductive genocide maybe more concretely as policies — and even discourses and material practices — that deliberately restrict, target or attack life-giving and sustaining capacities, choices and access of Palestinians; or, more broadly, communities that are made vulnerable by systemic military violence, occupation, besiegement, settler colonialism or colonial and imperialist warfare. In our definition we include incarceration, psychological warfare, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and gendered and sexual violence against women, girls and men by an occupying state or a military force that enforce conditions of unlivability. 

You’re just unable to sustain a life in these conditions. And we’ve seen, in Gaza in the past few months, an escalation of this enforcement. But we must also remember that Palestinians in Gaza have been living under an air, land and sea blockade for 17 years now, and an occupation before the Israeli occupation forces withdrew. I think people sometimes forget that for decades Gaza had actual settlements in it before the military blockade and siege.

Right now, we’re seeing deliberate control and cutting off of vital resources like water, fuel, electricity and food. Just recently, we saw that part of the U.S. aid (if you can call it that) was actually dropped on the solar panels of a hospital and ended up destroying the source of electricity for that hospital. 

It’s a clear attack on life-sustaining sources, a denial of whatever remains of lifesaving medical resources. This also includes the collective starvation of all people, and especially of disabled children in northern Gaza who have specific dietary requirements that must be met in order for them to live. We’ve also seen the eradication of entire genealogies of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Christian families of Gaza have been targeted by airstrikes. We’ve seen mass murder of children and babies, the obliteration of medical institutions by airstrikes and ground invasion, and the annihilation of sources of agriculture harvests. Gaza is famous for strawberries. Airstrikes on Palestinian farms and life target the source of labor and the fruits of that labor, the vital food infrastructures. It creates a very toxic environment where people without the most basic health care infrastructure are being exposed on a daily basis to toxic waste and materials, and exposed to viral and bacterial infections that can impact the health of future generations.

We saw this in Iraq, where women in Fallujah are still giving birth to children with fatal and congenital conditions because of attacks by the U.S., the U.K. and Canada in 2003. That’s over 20 years ago, and we’re still seeing their effects on children and on babies that are being born right now in 2024.

Part of our mission and our values is to hold so-called feminist spaces or groups and women’s rights institutions here accountable, and also to counter their efforts at either weaponizing the language of women’s rights or completely erasing the reproductive genocide that is happening in Palestine. An example of that is the Planned Parenthood statement in December of 2023, which completely failed to mention pretty much anything about Palestine and Palestinians, or anything about Zionist settler colonialism. The Zionist state requires the annihilation of the Palestinian people and our removal from our land. In Planned Parenthood’s statement, we saw clearly an orientalist framework of Palestinians as violent, aggressive sexual deviants that are animalistic and savage. The statement attempted to deflect from the ongoing escalation of genocide and also to help manufacture consent for the current attacks on Gaza. As a collective of Arab and Palestinian feminists who are informed by Indigenous, ecofeminist and Third World feminist thought and frameworks, we completely reject this statement and others that follow the same framework.

SI: I’ll just make a couple of points about peace. I think we’re in a moment where we’re witnessing the implosion of the Zionist project. And part of that is a broad recognition that the peace process has failed. I think we have to understand that Palestinians have broadly rejected the liberal peace paradigm and what’s broadly understood as the Middle East peace process. This liberal peace paradigm seeks to transform our anti-colonial liberation movement into a state-building project that benefits colonial powers. This state-building project ends up supporting the settler-colonial project in its ongoing processes of land confiscation and carceral control of our mobility. It also supports broader forms of violence and control, including, centrally, the Palestinian Authority’s participation in security coordination with Israel. We have to understand that this liberal paradigm of peace has failed us. It has become a tool of further entrenching Israeli colonial violence, and it has enabled the reconsolidation of a predominantly male Palestinian ruling class that is committed to maintaining the status quo.

But again, this moment shows us how the ground is really ripe for alternatives. And this is a moment that invites us to really think with the possible alternatives that are not vested in this hegemonic language of liberal peace and that are instead about reenvisioning our liberation project as an anti-colonial project. And as feminists, we have to think about what that means in terms of what our role is in that envisioning process.

LL: What are forms of international solidarity and struggle that you feel are most needed at this moment?

Eman Ghanayem: You know, we’re all inspired by Audre Lorde. We’re all inspired by Black, Indigenous and Latinx feminists who say that there is no point in singular struggles. And I think that the colonized are good at being in solidarity with each other. We just need to remember to make people who are invisible visible. 

Our role as the Palestinian Feminist Collective is to make women visible, to make children visible, to make queer Palestinians visible, and to share love toward Palestinian men. I think this resonates with a lot of people and other liberation struggles, because we are tired of being told how community should look when we already know what it should look like.

SI: We have to continue to uplift the voices of Palestinian women in this moment, especially in Gaza, which is really the front line of our liberation movement right now. And part of that requires rejecting the colonial narratives that are being used to justify the exterminatory policies of the Israeli state right now.

It requires that we reject the broader politics of death that’s being waged on our people, on our homeland and on our entire ecosystems of life as Indigenous people. 

Decolonial feminism, on the one hand, rejects, interrupts and forcefully opposes these colonial politics of death. And at the same time, it uplifts alternative visions that affirm our lives and the potential futures of our people on our homeland. We have to continue to uplift those life-giving visions at the same time that we reject this colonial politics of death. We are implicated in each other’s survival. I like this idea of us being co-conspirators in each other’s liberation, and I think that is a way to think about our transnational solidarity politics as well.