There is no turning away from the harrowing images and videos coming out of Palestine each day. In one such video, not explicitly ‘brutal’ like the rest of them, an Israeli soldier shows a pair of high heels belonging to a Palestinian woman. He records himself saying how pretty they are, and that it is going to be a gift for his engagement party. A souvenir from a ruined, desolate home. In such a context, what speeches and silences mark the women’s day? Which women, whose oppression, and whose resistances comprise the conversations in global feminist revolutions and their definition of worthwhile lives?
‘Celebrating’ International Women’s Day
Over the last few days, I have been wondering how to think of the International Women’s Day or if it makes sense to write about it. Not that it has ever been huge on the agenda where I have grown up, or in other contexts. Especially considering that for many women across the world, on various fronts, multiple battles are ongoing each day and for the many marginalised, the idea of a women’s day to celebrate is ‘distant’. Singling out one day to either speak of these issues or reflect on them seems tokenistic or inadequate.
This is not to overlook that for many women, International Women’s Day is a space to come together and reflect on their experiences and forms of resistance. But especially now, in the times we are living in, where unimaginable violence on Palestinian bodies, homes, memories is ongoing, how does one specifically speak of gender? As I struggle with these thoughts, Israel has committed what commentators are referring to as the “flour massacre.” Dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed after Israeli tanks opened fire on people gathered to receive food aid, as they face starvation. Over a hundred people have been killed, with many more injured, some of them having lost their limbs.
We have seen an entire healthcare system crumbling. Abandoned dead babies in the paediatric section of a hospital after forced evacuation. Pregnant women left without medical aid. Women undergoing a C-Section for giving birth without anaesthesia. Surgeons operating upon them without water available to even wash their hands. Human rights groups and aid agencies have brought up this in their appeals to call for a ceasefire.
The repeated invocation of Palestinian women and children evokes widespread condemnation, even though it does nothing to the system that enables a violent force to continue with unimaginable terror. What it also shows is the invisibility of Palestinian men – the absence of any public mourning, as if they are undeserving of a dignified life or death. Palestinians, irrespective of gender and sexual identity, continue to be killed, injured, maimed, and starved. What remains of the humanitarian system after this and its promises of rights for all? How does one talk of International Women’s Day in the middle of a genocide?
Weaponising Gender and Sexuality
There are ways in which gender and sexuality have been specifically deployed to justify the ongoing crimes. What we have been witnessing as part of this genocide and its narrative warfare is security feminism on display – women joining the violent security apparatus at the frontlines as part of the Israel Defence Forces. They are being presented as “symbols of progress and equality,” and “pushing new boundaries”. In many ways, it becomes a way to bolster the army’s image as the presence of women seeks to make the army appear more humane – after all, women are ostensibly kind, caring and nurturing and so, the institution they represent is a projection of the same benevolent nature.
It is also a way to appeal to gender equality claims – that women are equal participants, given equal opportunities and equally invested in the “righteous” fight against the “terrorist” other. This speaks to a weaponising of gender and sexuality where these “courageous” women fighting for their right of ownership over Palestinian land are shown to represent the perfect form of female subjectivity, as against the otherised Palestinian women.
Added to the spectacle of conquest images, we have also seen image after image of Israeli soldiers gleefully holding lingerie found in the homes they have destroyed or pushed out Palestinians from. Clothing belonging to women who may have been killed or displaced. In the ruined homes, in the debris of what was once some family’s personal space, finding and displaying intimate objects as a performance of military masculinity somehow brings out an emotion of utter joy, coupled with the humiliation and dehumanisation they seek to subject Palestinians to.
It is as if the colonised are not supposed to have a life of intimacy, and as if these images are meant as an exposè of the personal lives of Palestinians, their desires and intimacies. This visual violence, aimed at claiming power, dehumanising and humiliating Palestinians, is a constitutive dimension of the military occupation and telling of how it revels in its control over public and private spaces.
Urgency of Global Solidarities
When we think of women’s rights today, it is important to understand how gender and sexuality are weaponised for colonial domination which produces gendered experiences, even as these specific identities do not work to differentiate vulnerability in a genocide. As Abeera Khan reminds us, “Neither sexuality nor gender offers protection from occupation, colonization, and genocide.” The discourse of women’s rights cannot and must not distance itself from the conversations and outrage over the genocide in Gaza. The need for global solidarities against intersecting forms of oppression has never been more urgent.
On International Women’s Day (8 March), as activists gather on every platform hard fought and won by women’s rights advocates following decades of struggles, we must see it as an urgent responsibility to raise our voices against military occupation and its unimaginable violence. Otherwise, the deafening screams and silences from Palestine will forever haunt us.
