Palestine and the Hypocrisy of Western Feminists

The following is a transcription of a speech from a symposium on Gaza hosted by the Yemen-based Insan Organization for Rights and Freedoms. The full livestream archive can be watched here.

In conjunction with the ongoing “Israeli” genocidal war on Gaza, Palestinian women continue to pay a heavy price. We take the time to dwell on some related issues.

Historically, women have been exposed to multiple sorts of injustices; a fact that cannot be denied. The so-called women’s liberation movements, which has inaugurated in the West, at the end of the nineteenth century, has not been in a vacuum. The goal was to obtain some public rights that men enjoy, such as education, work, and political rights.

However, these just demands were quickly marred by fallacies manipulated by the great powers that have worked to relentlessly obscure the distinctive feminine characteristics, through manipulating women in labour. It becomes clear that the real goal was not to “empower” them but providing a labour force for factories that were emptied of their workers who joined the battlefields of World War I.

This reveals that the “empowering women” slogan was not innocent, rather, it has concealed the ongoing efforts to secure the interests of economic forces that treat women as cheap labour, as they are enforced to work long hours in harsh & inhumane conditions.

Psychologist Edward Louis Bernays, an American pioneer in the field of public relations, mentions in his book Propaganda that a cigarette company asked him, in the 1930s, to organize an advertising campaign to increase its sales. Bernays believed the best way to increase cigarette sales was to convince women to smoke, hence, he invited a number of models & actresses to participate in a march entitled “Torches of Freedom,” at a time when women smoking was socially unacceptable in the US. On the next day, 1 April 1929, the New York Times ran the headline “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom.’” This incident has highly influenced the second wave of the so-called feminist movement in the 1960s.

At that time, the women’s movement was no longer just socio-political movement that protested against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War; but rather perpetuated the “commodification of women” policy by the neoliberal system, which dealt with both men and women as mere consumers. French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called it “symbolic violence” practiced by unconscious social mechanisms that perpetuate the dominance of the upper classes in order to prolong their dominance and not women’s “liberation.”

In our colonised countries, the Western system has manipulated women’s issues as a tool of hegemony, domination, and control; this explains why we have systematically been invaded by various suspicious feminist NGOs, relying on unlimited financial support and unfortunately taking advantage of some existing and undeniable loopholes in a bid to destroy the family entity and its religious, ideological and political identity.

The current “Israeli” genocidal war on Gaza has exposed many hypocritical slogans and dropped the masks, whereby Palestinian women were left alone without any real support from these hypocritical feminist associations who have turned a deaf ear and a blind eye as if the killing, displacement, starvation, and violation of their dignity is not within their interests, instead of showing the steadfastness of the Palestinian women as a role model for all women in the world.

From this platform, all my greetings to every Palestinian woman, to all the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners, who have established a school from which heroes and resistance fighters have graduated. Those heroines are making history of Palestine and beyond.

Also, long live every patient woman of resistance in southern Lebanon and dear Yemen, and every woman who never tires of going out to the streets to express her rejection of Zionist atrocities. Together we create freedom, pride, and victory.