#intersectionality

Oh summer, you went by too fast.

Appropriation and Animal Rights: The Intersectional Activist by Christopher-Sebastian McJetters
A very valid concern that arises among intersectional animal rights activists is how to be sensitive to the needs of multiple groups without dismissing or appropriating their struggles.

Restrict your role to being the messenger. The best way to avoid appropriating a group’s struggle is to not do it at all. Really, you don’t need to; instead, amplify the voices of people from that marginalized community who are raising awareness about speciesism themselves. Preaching from a place of privilege about things you don’t understand is wrong. Instead, share what you learned from discussions started by people who have had those experiences. For example, I’m not a woman; but I frequently research the voices of vegan feminists who recognize why issues like female reproductive rights make speciesism a feminist issue.

Own mistakes. If you f*ck up, you f*ck up. We’ve all done it—and we’re all going to continue to do it. As much as I use my privilege to support women, I’m still a man who benefits from male privilege. As often as I speak up for people with disabilities, I still recognize that I regularly perpetuate ableism unconsciously. Just OWN it when you do. Accountability goes a long way to legitimizing your authenticity. Apologize. Learn from your mistake, and move on. You’re not perfect, and pretending to be will only get you into bigger trouble.

I’ve been noticing a lot of talk around this topic lately, and Christopher-Sebastian’s post sums up everything nicely. A lot of animal rights activists see connections between oppressions and make comparisons (e.g. the way we treat animals is comparable to slavery, the Holocaust, genocide, etc.) However, this is totally offensive to a lot of people. The “animalization” of minorities is something that has been perpetrated by the majority in the past (i.e. viewing minorities as “subhuman”); therefore, it’s seen as an affront to be compared to animals once more.

It’s important to realize that people who believe in animal liberation have a completely different mindset than those outside of the movement – we don’t believe that animals are “subhuman”, which drastically changes the dynamic. When we talk about the animalization of other minorities, we view it as evidence to how both human and non-human animals are oppressed. Non-AR people view this as dehumanization. Like in the blog post, I think it’s important to realize these differences in thinking and be conscious of how hurtful it can be to some people when their experiences of oppression are compared to those of non-human animals.

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday? by Nathan Schneider
The United States now leads the pack of the wealthiest countries in annual working hours. US workers put in as many as 300 more hours a year than their counterparts in Western Europe, largely thanks to the lack of paid leave.

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.

The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.

Congressman Paul Ryan quickly expressed fears that, with affordable [health] coverage, “the incentive to work declines.” Just the thought of the non-rich working less than all the time, and still having health insurance, was an affront to his idea of the American way. He actually said, “It’s adding insult to injury.”

The time-saving gizmos that Benjamin Franklin hoped for are here. But rather than liberating anyone, they’ve become a clever disguise for corporate greed to sneak ever more into our days and nights. Few subcultures revel in staying at the office after hours so much as Silicon Valley engineers. But who really benefits from their late nights of coding?

This reminds me of an article in Jacobin a few weeks ago, Forced to Love the Grind. “Passion as measured by hours has put the workweek on a course of runaway inflation, to the point at which people are actually shortening their lives and endangering others — sometimes in sudden, tragic form — in pursuit of an ever-elusive ideal of capitalistic individualism.” We’re indoctrinated in “The American Dream”, this concept that hard work and sacrifice is the key to everything (success, wealth, basically all material pleasures).

Schoolgirls for Sale in Japan by Simon Ostrovsky and Jake Adelstein
Japan’s obsession with cutesy culture has taken a dark turn, with schoolgirls now offering themselves for “walking dates” with adult men.

Last year the US State Department, in its annual report on human trafficking, flagged so-called joshi-kosei osanpo dates (that’s Japanese for “high school walking”) as fronts for commercial sex run by sophisticated criminal networks.

In our exclusive investigation, VICE News host Simon Ostrovsky will bring you to one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods, where girls solicit clients in their school uniforms, to a concert performed by a band of schoolgirls attended by adult men, and into a café, where teenage girls are available to hire by the hour. But the true revelations come behind closed doors, when schoolgirls involved in the rent-a-date industry reveal how they’ve been coerced into prostitution.

I’m not sure how I feel about white men going in and “exposing” terrible things that are happening in other countries and cultures. I liked how they showed the work of one Japanese woman in helping girls that have been exploited, but their comments on how odd and wrong the culture is made me feel weird. Sure, at the end of the video they stick in a note on how Western culture isn’t perfect: “It would be easy and unfair to single Japan out as the only culture to sexualize young girls. Tens of millions of dollars have been made on American pop culture, exploiting the luring gaze of adults on underage girls.” And then they go on to say, “But there’s something unique and especially unsettling about the fact that, right out in the open, schoolgirls are available for rent by the hour in one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods.”

How can someone who watched the video help the girls and women they talked to? They didn’t post any links to organizations in Japan addressing the problem. What was the point of the video? To raise awareness? Or is this another example of white people going, look at this weird thing happening in this other culture, we need to save them from themselves?

I didn’t read much during the last couple of days because I was writing a hangoutsbot plugin. It creates a Spotify playlist for your Hangouts chat and adds songs that are posted. I’m in a group chat with a few friends that share a bunch of good music, so the obvious thing was to automate our Spotify playlist.

There are still some tweaks I want to do, like mentioning the title of the song that was added (right now it just replies “Song added!”), as well as separating some of the logic into a script that can add songs to a playlist from downloaded chat history.

Lack of Intersectionality: A Moral Inconsistency of the Animal Rights Movement by Raffaella Ciavatta and Lili Trenkova
Animal rights activists are often accused of not caring about humans.

How can we change this view? There are among us those who truly believe we cannot fight one system of oppression (speciesism) by supporting another system of oppression (sexism, for example). It is morally inconsistent to claim we care about the bodily autonomy of hens but to oppose the bodily autonomy of women, just as it is morally inconsistent to say we care about equality but exclude certain species who are worthy of that consideration.

According to Javed Deck, for animals rights “[…] to be a movement that actually transforms relationships between humans and animals it needs to take seriously issues of race, class, and gender, and the ways these impact animal systems. Just like the transformations feminist and queer struggles have undergone as they crossed cultural boundaries, so must animal struggle change across these boundaries.”

This is a cool post by the co-founders of Collectively Free explaining their views on intersectionality. I like how they gave credit to Kimberle Crenshaw for the term “intersectionality” (this is really important because black voices have been erased from talks about intersectionality). CF has been doing some amazing campaigns: We Are All Animals – Starbucks (I participated in one of these protests with DxE),We All Feel Love,It’s Blood On Our Hands, etc. Their community and openness is inspiring. When someone felt triggered during one of their protests, they “learned: always listen when people who have been hurt share their stories, and always listen when someone brings up issues to your attention.”

This reminds me of a great video A Privileged Vegan made a few days ago, Is speciesism the root of all oppression? (Hint: NO.) She talked about how some vegans use the argument that speciesism is the reason that other forms of discrimination exist as a way to ignore all other forms of oppression (since getting rid of speciesism will get rid of all other -isms, duh). That argument is obviously flawed. As vegans, I think we have an even greater responsibility to be intersectional activists.

Raffaella’s and Lili’s post also mentions active listening and nonviolent communication, which is awesome because I learned more about this type of conflict resolution today!

Conflict Resolution Training by Kazu Haga
East Point Peace Academy’s Kazu Haga led DxE organizers and community members in a conflict resolution training.

Yelling. Arguing. Screaming. Harming. These are things that typically come to your mind when you hear the word “conflict.” However, none of those things are examples of conflict. They are examples of things that happen when you mismanage a conflict. By learning to better understand conflict and how we respond to them, we can use them as opportunities for learning and strengthening relationships.

Conflicts are neither good nor bad, but they are unavoidable - especially when working or living in community. This short workshop will provide some basic analysis and tools that groups can use to manage conflict in healthy ways so that we can stay focused on our mission - changing the world.

If we are organizing for change from the world outside of us, we have to first ensure that we are in line with our values in the ways in which we interact with each other in our own communities.

This was an informative introductory workshop to NVC. Below are some of the notes that I took:

• Pathway Conflict – same overall goals, different methods for reaching them.
  
• Mutually Exclusive Conflict – different goals, but choosing to function together.
  
• Distributive Conflict – not enough (or the perception that there is not enough) resources for everyone.
  
• Values Conflict – different values, different visions.
  

Diagnosing the type of conflict is important because you know more information as to how to respond. We must see things in the other perspective, and knowing what type of conflict we’re participating in is another step to resolution and understanding.

What if someone says that there’s a conflict, but I don’t see it?
It’s important to take responsibility for harm. If someone says that there’s a conflict or that they’re being harmed, it’s important to sit in their shoes (and believe them! don’t invalidate their feelings) even if you don’t see the conflict. Often, power and privilege come into play in these situations (e.g. a man can say that they don’t see discrimination against women).

Most times, people don’t mean harm, but if someone says conflict is happening, take responsibility for it. De-escalate and open up dialog by letting people know that they’re being heard. The possibility for dialog occurs.

All actions are attempts to meet needs. If we can articulate what our needs are, understanding can flow through. Being able to articulate someone else’s needs is important; it shows that you understanding where they’re coming from.

Often, we get stuck in strategies – strategies to meet a specified need. Beneath that, though, there’s often something else. Someone once told Kazu’s colleague, “I need to shoot this motherfucker.” That wasn’t an underlying “need” (no one “needs” to shoot anyone). Maybe they needed to feel powerful or respected.

“We need to learn to have compassion for someone’s ignorance.”
We’re trying to draw out their best and have more patience. However, there’s a time and a place for assertiveness in nonviolence where you say, “What you’re doing is fucked up,” and an example of this is direct action. Sometimes you have to say, “We’re not leaving this room until we have this conversation.” Be firm and assertive from a place of compassion. It’s a balance!

Catching up on sleep this weekend, zzz…

The Sexual Politics of Meat: 25 Years Later by Mickey Z.
Mickey Z. Interviews Carol J. Adams

One of the problems is that the burden is on those of us who recognize the oppression of animals to educate human justice activists on the interconnections and we meet up against something I call “Retrograde Humanism,” the belief that we must help humans first then we can think about animals. An example of retrograde humanism is when animal activists are asked (usually angrily), “What are you doing about the homeless?” […] It’s almost as though cultural discussions gravitate to dualisms (i.e., we’re either for people or animals) when dualisms are the problem and not the solution…

Another thing to consider is what activists several decades ago referred to as the “primary emergency.” What is the primary emergency that a group is addressing? As animal activists, we need to be sensitive to the primary emergency of any group that we seek to work with intersectionally and not overwhelm that focus. For instance, #BlackLivesMatter is saying: this is our primary emergency…. And who could argue with that, given the statistics on the deaths of African-Americans by police?

It helps for us to ask ourselves, “What is the privilege I am bringing to this situation? What do I need to be aware of that may not be visible to me? What are my presumptions?” In seeking alliances, these are important questions that I hope will keep us from reifying or co-opting someone else’s oppression in our work.

Intersectional activism isn’t about equivalencies, but about interrelationships. Misogyny is not racism is not speciesism is not homophobia. They are interconnected, not analogical. I believe these oppressions arise from a white patriarchal system of domination. Various forms of oppression will be mobilized in keeping groups down: so attitudes about species can be used to mark race, sex, and disability. And attitudes about the other species are inflected with gender, race, and ableism. Part of the issue for each oppressed group of human beings is how species prejudices are used to describe, oppress, or delimit who they are.

Carol J. Adams is someone I respect a lot – even more so now due to this interview. I think empathy and compassion are key to intersectional activism. Especially in the case of retrograde humanism, Oppression Olympics™ abounds. I love the idea of identifying the primary emergency of other movements and supporting them along with our own.

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making by Maggie Nelson
An excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’.

A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo‘s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

I thought the passage was romantic. You read it as a possible retraction. In retrospect, I guess it was both.

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

I really enjoyed reading this excerpt, for the lyrical quality of the words as well as the content. Now The Argonauts is on my (very long) list of books to read, along with Bluets.

Unfinished Letters From the Most Popular Kid in the Psych Ward by Casey Rocheteau
To all my QTPOC who struggle with mental health issues, which is to say most of us, because the multitude of oppressive systems we face would rather that we disappear than thrive:

I love you. Take care of yourself. Let yourself be taken care of. You deserve love. You deserve care. These words are not enough, can never be enough. You are not invisible. You are not a problem. You are not your illness.

May you find your kin. May they hold it down and keep you safe. May we find new roads to healing.

We gon’ be alright.

One of my most unfavorite things is “colorblindness” with respect to race, along with the erasure of other aspects of identity (e.g. queerness, class, education), especially when talking about mental health. My experiences with depression and disordered eating are – yes – colored by my race, ethnicity, and culture. I like how Casey addresses this head on.

I just spilled super glue all over my fingers.

Shared brain activity for aesthetic and moral judgments: implications for the Beauty-is-Good stereotype by Takashi Tsukiura and Roberto Cabeza
The Beauty-is-Good stereotype refers to the assumption that attractive people possess sociably desirable personalities and higher moral standards.

‘Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty’. This quote illustrates the Beauty-is-Good stereotype, which is pervasive in human societies, and has been the focus of social psychological research for over three decades. Compared to unattractive people, attractive individuals are assumed to have better personalities and be morally good. For example, one study found that facial attractiveness was positively linked to socially desirable personality traits, such as kindness, honesty, friendliness, trustworthiness, etc. The Beauty-is-Good stereotype has been demonstrated in a variety of everyday domains, such as undergraduates’ teaching evaluations of instructors and voters’ preferences for political candidates. Attractive people are more likely to get hired and earn on average 12% more than unattractive people. Unlike the case of race, gender, ethnicity, disability and age, there is no legislation against attractiveness-related discrimination. However, the most somber social impact of the Beauty-is-Good stereotype is within the justice system, as studies of mock trials have shown that defendants who are less attractive are more likely to be found guilty and receive longer sentences.

The existence of this bias suggests that the neural mechanisms for judging facial attractiveness and moral goodness overlap. To investigate this idea, we scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made attractiveness judgments about faces and goodness judgments about hypothetical actions. Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased as a function of both attractiveness and goodness ratings, whereas activity in the insular cortex decreased with both attractiveness and goodness ratings. Within each of these regions, the activations elicited by attractiveness and goodness judgments were strongly correlated with each other, supporting the idea of similar contributions of each region to both judgments. Moreover, activations in orbitofrontal and insular cortices were negatively correlated with each other, suggesting an opposing relationship between these regions during attractiveness and goodness judgments. These findings have implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of the Beauty-is-Good stereotype.

I ended up reading this paper because it was linked in a “change my view” Reddit thread, CMV: There is nothing wrong in having height or weight preferences. Their methodology is pretty thorough (”Given that most of our participants are Caucasian, we decided to limit the study to Caucasian participants and Caucasian faces to avoid potential differences in perceiving faces across races”). If our brain processes aesthetic and moral judgments similarly, how can we use that information to overcome the Beauty-is-Good bias?

Inside the Horror Show That Is Congress by Matt Taibbi
But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.

“Nobody knows how this place is run,“ says Rep. Bernie Sanders. "If they did, they’d go nuts.”

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination – a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule the parameters of debate. If Rules votes against your amendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committee, you control Congress.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason.

This article is a decade old, but the system is still as broken. I tend not to read articles on politics because they just make me mad/sad/frustrated.

Photo shared by Aja Barber

I just reported facebook’s post to facebook as spam. Because August 26, 1920 was the day white women were allowed to vote. Native women were allowed to vote in 1924 (CORRECTION: Most Native Women couldn’t vote until 1964, some even as late as 1967). Asian women were allowed to vote in 1952. BLACK WOMEN were allowed to vote in 1964. This is why intersectionality matters. Because without it, we whitewash parts of our history in one fell swoop. Erasing history is erasing identities. And it is wrong.

I found it exceedingly ironic that Facebook was so superficial in their diversity as to include women of color in a celebration of something that did not include women of color. I hope Aja’s post prompted discussion within the company.

I’ve been doing a lot reading this summer and I thought it would be interesting to post the things I find thought-provoking.

Against Charity by Mathew Snow
Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

The core problem is the bourgeois moral philosophy that the movement rests upon. Effective Altruists abstract from — and thereby exonerate — the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms.

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Having been reading more and more socialist/radical left commentary, I feel like most criticism can be distilled down into, “the system is wrong, so why are we focusing on making this thing inside the system better?” This is particularly evident in the criticism of animal welfare by animal rights advocates, i.e. why are you pushing for better treatment of animals before they’re killed when they shouldn’t be killed in the first place?

Lessons in White Fragility: When Vegan Abolitionists Appropriate Intersectionality by Dr. C. Michele Martindill
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.

They spout clichés such as “all lives matter” or “just go vegan” or “veganism is not about race” or “intersectionality shows the interconnectedness of all oppressions.” When anyone in the animal rights movement claims they are practicing intersectional veganism, defining it merely as wanting justice for all and being against all exploitation and oppression, they are operating under a misguided act of cultural appropriation. They are also working to insure that an upper class white cis gendered ableist man dominated ideology remains at the center of the vegan abolitionist animal rights movement. Intersectionality or pro-intersectionality is not a let’s-have-a-group-hug approach to social justice, nor is it simply a path to growing a revolution—increasing movement membership–that will end all oppressive social systems.

Intersectionality has become a buzzword these days, without acknowledging Patricia Hill Collins or Kimberle Crenshaw or that the term was originally used to describe how Black women experience multiple systems of oppression. This was important for me to read because before I knew the history, I had thought that intersectionality was simply the acknowledgment that multiple systems of oppression can affect a group of people and how oppressions are interconnected.

This Is What I Mean When I Say “White Feminism” by Cate Young
I’m talking about the feminism that disregards the fact that whiteness is a privilege that is not afforded to all women. 

Every single time women of colour talk about “white feminism” or “white feminists” within the context of discussions about the way that the mainstream feminist movement privileges whiteness, we deal with an onslaught of defensive white women insisting that they personally are not like that, and would you please say “some white women” and not make generalizations?

Now, I understand the impulse to get defensive. It can be very off-putting to feel attacked for a transgression that you know yourself not to be guilty of. But in the context of social justice and movement building, if you’re feeling attacked, it probably means you’re having your privilege challenged, not that you are a bad person. As I always say, “If it doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not about you. If it’s not about you, then don’t take it personally.” Being a good ally means recognizing that sometimes your input is not needed or wanted, and that it’s incredibly inappropriate to demand that a marginalized group, (in this case, WoC within the feminist movement) restructure a conversation that is happening to serve their needs, in a way that is more “comfortable” for the very people they are mobilizing against. That is the very definition of flexing one’s privilege.

I think a lot of this can also be applied to privilege in general, i.e. when you call out someone’s privilege, they get defensive and insist that they personally don’t want or act on their privilege. It reminds me of a sermon that John Metta gave last month – I, Racist. He spoke about how he doesn’t talk about race with white people because they’re unable to divorce their participation in a racist system from an accusation that they themselves are racist. “Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn’t exist because they don’t see it.”

~Land of hope and glory documentary

~Dominion documentary

~From Dr Joy

~Viva, a fab UK charity which has loads of info

~ This book out herewhich is free to download which I would highly recommend to everyone.

~From Earthling ed

~ Dear leftists critiques of veganism

~Veganism as left praxis

~The left and speciesism

~ Testimonies from many former “humane” farmers here

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 practices.

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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 practices.

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.

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 LawfareProject,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.

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”.

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 astroturfinggroupco-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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 practices.

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.

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 LawfareProject,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.

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”.

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 astroturfinggroupco-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.”

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.

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.

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.

exclusive-cowboy:

positivityisntdiscourse:

Making it increasingly hard for trans and non-straight aspec people to get access to resources and aid for their aspec-specific issues in safe spaces does nothelp them.

By fighting to exclude ace/aro people y’all have only made it more difficult for us “lgbt aces/aros” to actually have easy access to aspec resources in LGBTQ+ safe spaces. Most safe spaces would only provide aspec resources if aspec people were included, and the only safe spaces I’ve gone to that actually have aspec information or resources have been inclusionist spaces. No exclusionist spaces I’ve seen have actually provided any, and “why don’t you make them outside of lgbtq+ spaces” doesn’t work because I need my aspec safe spaces to be lgbtq+ safe, because I’m not straight or cis and my bi-ness and transness is incredibly intertwined with my aspec identity.

If y’all will neither: 1, believe “lgbt aces/aros” when we say some of us might actually, desperately need aspec-specific resources and aid, and 2, help us receive that aid and fight for its inclusion in LGBTQ+ spaces, then you’re not an ally to “lgbt aces/aros” and you never have been.

This has never been the case.

If you are LGBT, you will be allowed into LGBT safe spaces. Regardless if you are aro/ace.

You will not be allowed into LGBT spaces if you are

• Cis Asexual Aromantic
• Cis Asexual hetromantic
• Cis Aromantic Heterosexual
• Aka Fucking Straight.

It isnt rocket science. If you aren’t being allowed into LGBT spaces it’s probably because you are trying to make people prioritize YOU over everyone else because you are ace/aro.

Ex: making rules about not talking sex, relationships, etc.

And forcing everyone to abide by those rules or seeing them kicked from a SUPPORT group.

LGBT people who are not aro/ace like we are, do not have to create online safe spaces for us because we can make our own support groups specifically for us.

Just because you are LGBT and Aro/ace, does not mean people will exclude you. People dont fucking care. So long as you aren’t straight or a crybaby about being Aro/ace, you can always find support groups.

The Laziness of the Aro/Ace community astounds me.

“Making my own safe space doesn’t work”.

“They’re supposed to make safe spaces for us”.

Bullshit. You havent even tried.

I’m bisexual, trans and aromantic. I’ve met more biphobic and transphobic aces/aros in support groups than I have “aphobes”.

This post is not about me being allowed into LGBTQ+ spaces as a bi/trans person, this is about me having access to ace/aro specific resources in safe spaces. I can get into LGBTQ+ spaces just fine!! This isn’t about me being lazy or getting kicked out of safe spaces for being a jerk! It’s about how the resources in many LGBTQ+ spaces are not suited for the needs an aspec person might have! These resources come in the form of:

• education/information about ace/aro identities and issues
• advice, therapy, and other aid that can be specifically applied to my needs as an aspec person, not just as a trans or bi person. Being aspec changes what kind of advice and therapy I might need. I might need a different kind of sex/dating education, a different kind of therapy that’s insightful of the fact that I’m aspec and the issues I might face because of that. Dealing with aphobia and ace-specific patholoziation affects all of that. Similar to how I need trans-specific resources, I need aspec-specific resources.

This is not a situation of me being too lazy to make my own safe space!! I’m perfectly willing to provide some education and information about being aspec, I’m perfectly willing to make “online safe spaces” but “online safe spaces” are not what I’m talking about! I’m talking about physical safe spaces and LGBTQ+ organizations! I’m a minor living in a low income household in the south, I do not have the resources to make my own physical safe space anyway!

LGBTQ+ safe spaces are supposed to provide safety for intersectional identities! Which means they should have the information and resources for “lgbt aces/aros” to be able to aid us when we need it! Yet inclusionist spaces are the only ones who’ve I’ve seen do that before! Groups like the Trevor Project have provided ace resources that I can use if they need them, and yet exclusionists complain about those even though they help more than just “cishet” ace people, they help “lgbt aces” too!

And as I said, aspec resources outside of lgbtq+ safe spaces don’t help me the way resources in lgbtq+ safe spaces do, because I’m not straight or cis! I need resources that will also be attuned to my needs as an lgbtq+ person! Resources that aren’t created entirely by cis straight people! This is not about being lazy!! This is about the need for aspec resources in LGBTQ+ safe spaces! Because intersectionality exists!

And you being aromantic doesn’t mean that you have the same needs or experiences as mine. Not all aspec people need aspec resources, but they’re vital for those that do. I’m glad you haven’t experienced aphobia, but I have.

Also. Acearo people are not straight and you cannot speak for their needs or experiences.

The face of depression.