Nada Elia’s new book transports us across the globe to center women and queer peoples’ position in joint struggle and imagines a new future for Palestinian resistance.
Zionism has always used sexual violence as a primary tool to eliminate indigenous Palestinians, and maintain the Israeli settler-colonial regime.
Challenging patriarchal notions in Palestinian society is not a separate issue from ending Zionist settler-colonialism. In fact, it has been precisely through gender violence that the colonial project has thrived.
This International Women’s Day, let us affirm that there can be no free homeland without free women, without free queers, and without free children as they rise above binaries, reach out across boundaries, laugh at society’s archaisms, and model the alternative.
Zionists are working hard to decouple the struggle for racial justice in the United States from Palestinian liberation, but the movements are intertwined through shared experiences of state violence and a legacy of joint struggle.
Understanding Palestine as a racial justice issue is to understand it as part of the broad fight for collective liberation.
The experience of other colonized and oppressed people shows us that Palestinian women are most able to imagine a more just vision of our future, with a single democratic state for all its citizens in historical Palestine as its goal.
Too often Palestine solidarity organizations expect the expertise of Palestinian women for free, while paying Nice Guys handsome amounts of money, for being “decent.”
The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s open letter asking allies to adopt Palestinian liberation as a critical feminist issue has set off debates within feminist and Palestinian liberation movements. Nada Elia writes that some of the debate is understandable considering mainstream Western feminism’s disregard for the plight of the Palestinian people, but ultimately the call is about affirming, yet again, that one cannot be a feminist while supporting gendered violence, settler-colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and apartheid.