Cutting at the Grassroots: How International Disregard for Palestinian Women Reveals the Inequality of The Fight for Gender Equality
“It is like screaming into the void. No one hears the screams of our loved ones trapped under the rubble in gaza. No one hears the screams of our loved ones being starved of all their basic needs. All your advocacy and human rights work have failed our loved ones in Gaza.” The words of Palestinian-Gazan scholar and activist Malaka Shwaikh, have been echoed by Palestinian NGO networks, activists groups, and scholarly networks as the genocide has stretched on for 10 brutal months and claimed an estimated 38,000 lives or more as of July 5. According to a study by the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Canada, the death toll could be as high as 186,000, accounting for four indirect deaths for every direct death. At its core is a question that challenges the last two decades of gender mainstreaming in humanitarianism: Why are the women of Gaza not deserving of safety, life, and protection?
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda and corresponding feminist foreign policies (FFPs) centralize the fact that the gendered nature of conflict has forced women and gender diverse communities worldwide to bear the brunt of violence without any inclusion in security and peace processes. International feminist organizing and testimony brought about this achievement, augmenting women’s participation at every stage of peace-building and working hand-in-hand with gender equal development initiatives to end violence against women and girls. While not without valuable feminist critiques that show the costs of international uptake, such as the portrayal of women from Global Majority countries as backwards and in need of reform as well as the role of neoliberal and neocolonial logics that seek to transform women into carceral and militarized agents, gender equality activists and scholars have still aimed to show that gender equality is universal, and therefore anti-colonial, and is used by women to undertake transformative change. Yet, in the past ten months, Palestinian advocates have argued that the silence of gender equality organizations and experts has demonstrated that the WPS Agenda and feminist efforts are hollow since these feminist instruments have not been implemented to protect Palestinian women now.
This has been exacerbated as the world’s attention has waned but the bombings, ground invasions, starvation, and kidnappings have only increased in intensity and suffering for Palestinian women. Indeed, Palestinian women have been faced with arrest and rape, risky pregnancies and deliveries including abnormally high rates of still births and miscarriages, a lack of any public health system, and singular reliance on performing gendered victimhood through GoFundMe campaigns to evacuate under extremely dangerous conditions. Women have taken medication to delay menstruation due to a lack of water and privacy in spite of doctors warnings that this practice is unsafe. Activist Ahed Tamimi was recently arrested again along with several of her family members and NGOs in the West Bank have faced an upsurge in militarized violence and surveillance. Devastatingly, women working and volunteering with IOs, community based and civil society organizations have been killed in the strikes, including 190 UN field staff and 64 humanitarian workers.
Adding to this, Palestinian men and boys have been targeted for their gender and the assumption that all men are combatants, leading to their kidnapping, torture, and detention. Grieving the justification of this violence against Palestinian men, Palestinian artist @beqararkarke’s piece illustrated these men with the words, “The men of Palestine are not mere numbers. The men of Palestine are brave, kind, gentle. The men of Palestine are human.” This argument has pushed against calls for safety only for women and girls, but explicitly ignored the situation of Palestinian men. Palestinian men in the West Bank have also been targeted and arrested, tortured, or killed with the justification that they could be potential combatants. In spite of this, all of those still left in Gaza face enormous risk.
Responding to the worsening of the situation for this population, Palestinian academics, activists, and humanitarian/development staff have spoken out against the hollowing out of commitment to the WPS Agenda by the global governance bodies, such as the UN Security Council, and the utter lack of regard for international conventions, such as the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law (IHL) and norms seeking to provide gender-sensitive protections in conflict. Months ago, Gazan journalist Bisan reported, women in Gaza are suffering because “they do not have access to hygienic supplies, sanitary supplies, and they are subject to psychological and physical health risks. (…) The thing is, I do not know where is the UN Women, where is the NGOs…World feminists, where are you ladies?”
Similarly, Gazan women’s unions and grassroots movement issued a joint statement, calling on women’s organizations worldwide to speak out, writing:
“This moment is the litmus test not just for international law and the global human rights
Framework, but also for humanity and the very meaning of justice and freedom.
If not now, when?”
In a similar vein, Palestinian NGOs have issued a call to boycott the U.N. following an announcement that Global North donors were cutting off funding from Palestinian civil society groups who had criticized the genocide. In response, these organizations attested that their work with the UN system “has not yielded any tangible results in ending the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people for decades.”. They go on to conclude that the UN system “upholds colonization and prioritizes the voice of the oppressor over the voice of justice.” Other activists and artist collectives published work asserting that “Feminist silence on Palestine, Sudan, Congo is patriarchal violence.”.
In spite of the radical and Global Majority origins of human rights language, patriarchal hegemony has too easily co opted the language of emancipatory feminism. This matters because it threatens decades of explicitly feminist organizing by revealing the ease with which this work can be rendered hierarchical, colonial, gendered, and racialized in ways that are reinforced by Global North feminist agendas rather than challenged by these feminist organizations, policymakers, NGOs, and diplomats.
As a researcher who has partnered with displaced communities in my dissertation research on international and local solutions for gendered violence in Jordan, I directly observed this loss of faith in feminism throughout the past month while finishing my fieldwork from Palestinian friends, research participants, and local NGOs. Everyone asked me, Why are states with FFPs or notable commitments to gender equality supporting the genocide of women in Palestine? While based in Jordan, I have watched firsthand as my Palestinian friends, students, and colleagues have lived through Israel’s killing of their family members and communities and the destruction of their sacred institutions, such as universities, local NGO offices, and mosques. Together, as the months have dragged on, the death numbers have mounted, and the trauma has expanded, all of our faith in feminist global governance, international law, and equal partnerships has diminished.
In this context, both grassroots women’s and gender diverse movements and international feminist frameworks stand to lose the most for two key reasons.
First, state-led FFPs, such as in Canada, and international and national feminist organizations have argued that they can neutrally and morally represent the interests of marginalized women and engage them in global politics. To actually fund and implement complex gender equality programs, such as those that support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence or augment women’s political representation, or protect LGBTIQA+ organizations requires a commitment to feminism that values all subjects equally. Part of this is because gender agendas have historically been instrumentalized by hegemonic actors to justify their military intervention or colonial violence. As aforementioned, the neoliberal bent of many gender equality initiatives has received many of these same criticisms due to the focus on pushing women into traditional capitalist laborers and claiming that ‘resilience’ or ‘empowerment’ has occurred. This horrific violence that Palestinian women have been subjected to gives credence to these criticisms, showing how some women are worth engaging and protecting while others are not.
Second, and even more importantly, as the grassroots level remains the most effective space for the implementation of global agendas around gender equality, the betrayal of Palestinian women and the unimpeded ethnic cleansing serves to weaken any post-ceasefire peace processes and future efforts to strengthen the situation of Palestinian, Arab, or other women in Global Majority countries. Indeed, Palestinian women have been leading efforts to represent their communities in global arenas while also putting international funding to use cultivating agricultural resilience, poverty eradication, equal education, and other crucial feminist goals. These kinds of relationships between street-level activists, transnational feminist networks, and elite global actors produced the WPS Agenda 23 years ago, showing the power of these links. Because of the success of projects that work more closely with local organizations, humanitarian and development actors have increased their partnerships between global and grassroots actors and between Global North and Global Majority networks in the trend of ‘localization’, which has also been prominent in Palestine. Palestinian women and other activists are those who carry out global projects, often at great risk to themselves, with Israeli harassment and violence towards Palestinian organizations extending back far before October 7. As a significant amount of research has shown, peace processes that centralized women actors were more likely to succeed. This has revealed a surprising insight: even global institutions require buy-in on a mainstream and a local level in order to be effective and meaningful, yet this local level is actively under attack.
This loss of relationship and accountability heralds larger problems in the decades to come for FFPs, gender equality goals, and the implementation of the WPS Agenda because it strikes at the heart of gender equality altogether, showing that this agenda remains structured by colonial and racial dynamics that deny Palestinians the right to life and liberty. The broken trust erodes feminist gains from the past two decades by severing relationships with the institutions that promised to be fair, equal, neutral, and to take the sacredness of human life to be their guiding principle. By permitting the ongoing violence in Gaza, both states and international organizations that have failed to meaningfully prevent these acts are demonstrating that when they say “women” or “feminist”, they only mean certain women in certain geographies. Without this trust or belief, the goals of the WPS Agenda will have no one to carry out the work at the level that matters most: the grassroots. And when international agendas are cut off at the grass roots, they tend to die.
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About the author:
Sarah Nandi is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in the Department of Political Science with a focus in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research interests include knowledge production about sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the context of forced migration. Using feminist qualitative methods, she examines questions surrounding expertise-by-training versus expertise-by-experience in humanitarian encounters, the standardization of localized experiences into global data, and the reproduction of gendered and racialized international hierarchies in agenda setting. Before coming to McGill, she read for an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at Worcester College, Oxford where she wrote her dissertation on the tensions between humanitarian development and localized Sahrawi feminist organizing. Prior to this, she was a Fulbright-Nehru research scholar in Kolkata, India focusing on the refusal of rehabilitation programs by Hijra and women refugee survivors of sexual violence during the 1971 genocide. She is proficient in Bengali, Arabic, and French.
