As wars rage from Ukraine to Gaza, the plight of women and LGBTQ+ people caught in the crossfire all too often goes unremarked. Panelists from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Iran, and the US share intersectional feminist perspectives for building solidarity, ending racial, economic, and gender violence, and stopping colonial and imperialist wars.
Oksana Dutchak is co-editor of Ukrainian Spilne/Commons: Journal for Social Criticism. Dutchak holds a Ph.D. in social sciences. Oksana is devoted to engaged and public research, which contributes to public discussion and policies, trying to give voice to women, workers and other structurally underprivileged groups.
Dr. Anwar Mhajne is a Palestinian political scientist specializing in international relations and comparative politics, focusing on cybersecurity, disinformation, gender, religion, and Middle Eastern Politics. She is the co-editor of Critical Perspective on Cybersecurity: Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions Forthcoming with Oxford University Press (March 2024).
Yali Hashash is a Mizrahi queer feminist academic. She has a Ph.D. in Jewish history (Haifa University, 2011). Her research interests include social history of the 19th and 20th-century Palestine and the Middle East, poverty, gender, nationalism, ethnicity and religion. She is the author of Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism. (2022).
Tova Benski is a sociologist and lecturer at various universities in Israel. She is a co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution and Social Transformation (2013).
Barbara Smith is a US Black feminist scholar and activist and co-author of the Combahee River Collective Statement. She is the editor of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983/2023) and author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom (1998/2023).
Frieda Afary is an Iranian American public librarian, translator, activist and author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (2022). She is the producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation and socialistfeminism.org.
Editor’s Note (12/13/23): At multiple points in the conversation, the panelists refer to the accusations that Hamas fighters committed acts of mass sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks. While Israeli officials and media outlets have repeatedly affirmed the veracity of these accusations, Israel has not provided requested information to journalists and even to officials at the United Nations attempting to independently investigate and verify the accusations. As Mondoweiss reported on Dec. 8, 2023, “Lurid stories of gang rape, mutilation, and even necrophilia, have been disseminated by the media. This has occurred despite there being no substantive developments in evidence of sexual assaults from the Israeli occupation forces. Israel has repeatedly failed to provide forensic evidence, concrete photographic evidence, or victim testimonies to news organizations beyond inferences made by Israel’s forensic teams. Indeed, the Times of Israel alleges that the IOF will never provide forensic evidence because ‘physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities,’ and it is now, reportedly, too late to collect conclusive evidence… Israel’s secrecy remains deafening; the IOF exclusively screened a 47-minute compilation of ‘raw footage’ to invited journalists, as opposed to sharing the footage with news agencies to report on and verify independently (Al Jazeera journalists, notably, were not invited to attend). Amongst those invited, journalist Owen Jones saw no ‘conclusive evidence’ for torture, sexual violence, rape, or beheadings. Furthermore, despite calling on the UN to condemn Hamas’s acts of sexual violence, Israel refuses to cooperate with a UN commission of inquiry into sexual violence committed by Hamas on the ludicrous basis that the UN has ‘an anti-Israel bias.’” Due to the dearth of such evidence provided to journalists by Israeli officials, TRNN can neither confirm nor deny the substance of these allegations.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Barbara Smith:
Hello, this is Barbara Smith, and welcome to The Real News Network. I’m a longtime Black feminist author and activist and a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network.
We’re all aware that we are living in a time of intensive state-orchestrated violence with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’ brutal assault on Israeli civilians in October of this year, 2023. Despite robust discussion, organizing, and debates about these wars, the specific impact of these conflicts on women and the LGBTQ community is seldom considered, nor are they looked at from an intersectional feminist perspective. Today, we have a great opportunity with great panelists from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, and Iran to discuss redefining feminist internationalism. I’d like to introduce our panel members now. We are thinking of this as a roundtable actually, and we’re going to try to have it be like that.
Oksana Dutchak is a co-editor of Ukrainians Spilne, Commons: Journal for Social Criticism. Oksana is devoted to engage public research which gives voice to women, workers, and other structurally-underprivileged groups. Anwar Mhajne is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a political scientist specializing in international relations and compared to politics with a focus on gender, religion, and Middle Eastern politics. Yali Hashash is a Mizrahi queer feminist academic. She has a PhD in Jewish history from Haifa University. She is the author of Whose Daughter Are You?: Waves of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism, which was published in 2022. She is a member of is Isha L’isha-Haifa Feminist Center. Tova Benski is a sociologist, senior lecturer emerita, and a feminist and peace activist. Her fields of academic interest in research include gender, social movements, peace studies, and the sociology of emotions. She has been engaged in research on the Israeli Women’s Peace mobilizations since the late 1980s. She’s a co-author of the book Internet and Emotions published by Rutledge in 2013 and co-editor of Current Sociology: Special Issue also published in 2013. Her co-authored book, Iraqi Jews in Israel, won a prestigious academic prize in Israel. Frieda Afary is an Iranian American public librarian, translator, activist, and author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach published in 2022. She is the producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation and socialistfeminism.org.
So I’m going to start with Oksana. Since Hamas’ attacked on October the seventh on Israeli civilians in Israel’s war against Gaza, world attention has shifted away from the war in Ukraine. Could you give us an update about what is going on in Ukraine right now?
Oksana Dutchak:
Definitely, we are on the stage of the war of attrition for quite a while already, so there is no general moment of the prompt line, a big one. And then we’re also on the stage when society comes to realize that it may last for far, far longer than many people hoped or expected in the beginning. However, nothing is in the past. Soldiers and civilians die almost every day, especially in eastern and southern part of Ukraine, close to the front line. Also, now with the cold weather started now in Ukraine, we have other attempts yet again like the previous year, attempts to attack critical infrastructure to leave people without heating, without water, electricity. However, these attempts are now far less successful because of the western weapon, which somehow was delivered to Ukraine during the previous year and which keep many cities relatively safe as for example here where I’m staying.
There are also a lot of processes of adaptation on the level of society. So we can say that society in different ways tries to adapt to this kind of new life that’s living through, the war reality. This adaptation happens on various level, also an institutional level and personal, individual level, on the level of families depending on their situation of course. For example, I always bring this case when in Hlukhiv, which is a big eastern city of Ukraine, very close to the border with Russian to the frontline, they run our schools underground, like on the metro station. So they opened different rooms which were technical rooms in that metro station, and they use them as classroom so children can attend school safely. So this adaptation is happening. Otherwise, a lot of people try to continue with their lives in every possible way and society in general also.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you for that. As a resident of the United States, born in the United States, one of the things that I often think about in relationship to the amount of warfare and violence that occurs around the world is how little people in the United States actually know about what it’s like on a day-to-day level. Sometimes I think that has not positive impact on how we understand what our relations should be in relationship to solidarity and support, because in many ways, for us, it’s an abstraction. It’s not that the US has not been involved in wars, but as I said, that day-to-day of having to have children and others go to school in subway tunnels, that’s very different from the experience in the United States. Thank you so much for that. This for the panel as a whole, anyone who wishes to respond. What are specific ways that women in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, and Iran are being affected by these invasions and wars? Just anyone who wishes to respond to that. Tova.
Tova Benski:
Well, as you know, we are still in the middle of the war or maybe the beginning, I don’t really know. Nobody knows how long it is going to last. But I have looked at the specific ways that the women in Israel have been affected particularly by the Hamas attack, going from the more individual to the more social level. But again, the individual is not really entirely individual, because it’s social and it’s cultural because what Hamas did was trying to culturally, socially, physically inflict humiliation, kill, mutilate, rape, not just women, by the way. In effect, over 1,400 women, children, teenagers and boys, older women, young and older men were murdered by Hamas in October 7th, committing crimes against humanity and gender-based crimes in the invasion into Israel, attacking over more than 20 villages and kibbutzim and young men and women who were attending a musical festival near kibbutzim.
In fact, they have done systematic acts of gender crimes like rape, slaughter, mutilation, torturing, and abduction. And those who managed to survive are forever scarred by trauma and will never fully heal. 240 Israelis and foreign nationals, including women, children, and babies were brutally abducted and dragged into Gaza. They’re now being held hostage by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. They’re held in difficult life-threatening conditions and requests by the International Red Cross to visit them and assess their condition were denied. To this date, some of the hostages have been released, mostly women and girls, but still, Hamas is holding on to 138 men, women, and the children. There are still not allowing the Red Cross to visit them. We are very much afraid for the fate. We don’t know how they are.
On the personal level, the immediate victims of the Hamas attacks. Then we have the usual effects that war has on women like grief, bereavement, orphanage, widowhood. There’s also becoming refugees in their own country with over 200,000 men, women, children that have survived the attack being displaced and cannot really go back because there’s nowhere to go back. On the social level, I’m looking at collective trauma, increasing feelings of insecurity among women. Because Israeli society is very small and it is closely knit with interlocking networks, there’s no family in Israel that remains unaffected or does not know families and individuals who are affected. Me personally, one of my colleagues in Women Wage Peace, 70-year-old Vivian Silva, she was murdered and her body was mutilated. We did not know that until 30 days after the attack because we thought she was missing. The long process it takes to identify parts of bodies because this is what they have, it took about 30 days for us to know that she actually was murdered.
In a sense, most of us feel that we are living in a surrealistic world and cannot find words to describe and express our feelings. The most simple and mundane question, how are you? is difficult to answer these days. I have more to say about the feelings of betrayal of the women in Israel by international feminist organizations, but I’ll leave to the next question. Thank you.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you, Tova. Did anyone else want to respond to that question to the impact of these wars/invasions on people in the countries where they occur?
Anwar Mhajne:
I can go next if that’s okay. I do have to just clarify, I am a Palestinian, but I’m Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. The reason why I’m stating that is my positionality is a little bit different than others in the West Bank and Gaza and experiences are a bit different. But I’m going to convey to you what’s going on in Gaza right now at the moment and in the West Bank as well.
We know that in general conflicts and the literature has been established that there’s a disproportionate impact on women and children, and that’s not different in the situation in Gaza. However, we know about 50% of the population or close to it are kids who are under 18. So that heightens the impact on civilian and children. We know that over 70% or around 70% of the people who were killed since Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7th attacks on the communities in Gaza’s envelope, we saw that around 15,000 people died. Now there’s a question of how many of them were combatant and how many were not, but we know that about 70%, maybe a little bit less, are women and children.
We know that one in 200 people in Gaza has been killed. We know that a child dies every 10 minutes. We know that with the collapsing healthcare system, lack of clean water, and just to highlight this, before the war in Gaza, about 96% of Gaza’s water was undrinkable because of pollution. You hear people on kids talking about [foreign language 00:13:44] versus [foreign language 00:13:44], which means saltwater versus sweet water because the aquifer underground is so polluted and also so overused that it gets seawater from under. We know about the lack of food. Now we have more aid trucks coming in during the ceasefire, and I think now still some of them are still trickling into Gaza. We also know that a lot of the hospitals in Gaza, the north and now we know that Israel started its incursion into the south, Khān Yūnis and all of that, we see that hospitals are either not operational because of where they’re located, like Al-Shifa Hospital, or hospitals that didn’t have fuel and had to close their doors. They have 5,000 patients in a hospital that should house 700.
We’ve heard stories of women who had to deliver and have a C-section without anesthesia. In Nasser Hospital there was a video for decomposing bodies of babies that were in the NICU and didn’t survive because the staff had to leave. For some reason, these kids weren’t evacuated because it was dangerous for them to be evacuated and no ambulance got there to evacuate them. We also talk about being widowed, like similar to the case what Tova talked about. So being a widow, that increases the pressure on women. Gender-based violence, we know it increases during times of conflict. Displacement, about half of the people in Gaza have been displaced and we know of now the south that was considered safe is becoming an operational space. So that’s another level of adding to the catastrophe that is happening in Gaza right now.
We also know that now the household are going to be run by women in a place where unemployment was really high, especially among the youth, where 70% before the war were underemployed. That’s also complicating issues when it comes to women. About 55,000 women were pregnant in Gaza or are pregnant in Gaza, and they’re expecting about 1,000 of them to deliver this month. The displacement, about 45 to 50% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. The kids are not going to school. There’s no education, no sanitation. Even sanitary products, women products women don’t have access to. I could go on for a long time on what’s happening in Gaza right now, specifically on women and children, but in general for the civilian population in Gaza.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you for that. Thank you to you both. I think I’ll move on to the next question, and I think that those of you who may have wished to respond to that first one about what the impact is, I think you’ll have that opportunity in relationship to the next question that I’ll be asking because this one is about how are groups and organizations responding. How have feminist groups and movements in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Iran, and the US responded to the crises that you have just described?
Yali Hashash:
I would like to answer that one. Isha L’isha, my own political home, quite at the beginning of the war issued a very clear statement talking about rape as a war crime and at the same time talking about war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and about the need not to use war crimes committed on women in the south of Israel to excuse any war crimes done in Gaza. Palestinian feminist organizations in Israel just recently issued a similar statement saying really beautifully, “Our feminism cannot be divided.” We trust the Israeli Crisis Center information, and we are appalled by Hamas using rape against women. That statement, “Our feminism cannot be divided,” and that we stand with the women of Gaza at the same time as we stand with the women being hurt in South Israel was very touching and very accurate and very… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m a bit… Everything is so sad. Thank you, Anwar, for saying all of this.
Another thing that I want to say about the influence it had on Israeli women, ever since the 7th of October, guns have been distributed to civilians by the thousands, and it’s been really scary for women especially if they are in a bad relationship and suddenly the man in the family gets a gun and he can use it against the woman. The fact that the street is now like an American city street where people can just carry guns is very scary for women in Israel. One of the things that we are doing in feminist organizations in Israel is to fight the distribution of gums very much influenced by the American RNA and very much promoted by it. The other thing that we try to do is to create solidarity meetings between Palestinian and Jewish women so that we’ll never be alone with our pain and we’ll be able to imagine some kind of a future together.
Anwar Mhajne:
If I may add, I think the debate about sexual violence and rape, I actually have been disheartened a lot by at least what I’m hearing in the West about it. As a Palestinian and as a feminist, as an Israeli citizen as well, I see that our community is more in tune with the suffering of both sides and connected to the suffering of both sides in a way that I really admire and I think is very important. I think it’s important to acknowledge that rape and sexual violence should never be used as a weapon of war, regardless who the perpetrators are and regardless of who the victims are. It should never be normalized, marginalized, or justified. It also should not ever be used to justify violence and masculine violence to the killing of civilians. And I think these truths should be held together at the same time, just admitting what happened in trusting women.
A lot of people are saying, “Well women, there are no testimonies.” I know that a lot of these women were found dead. That’s why you don’t really have a lot of testimonies from victims themselves, you hear it from witnesses. But the questioning itself for me is very, very problematic when people don’t trust these stories. I think it’s okay to hold these two truths together, that violence was committed against civilians, rape and sexual violence was used. And also, what’s happening in Gaza is disastrous, and it does violate a lot of human rights and it does affect civilians and innocent people on mass scale, and that there are elements of the Israeli government that are extreme and have called for ethnic crimes of Palestinians for pushing them to Egypt, for thinning out Gaza population. So different terms that have been used. I think it’s important for us as feminists to acknowledge both truth and push for them and normalize talking about them at the same time.
Tova Benski:
Can I add a comment? I have just received from a colleague of mine, some of you might know him, Lauren Langman from the US, he sent me a slogan that was posted on social media and the slogan says… I cannot show you because it comes out the other way around, it’s “Feminist to demand a cease fire in Israel-Palestine.” Women are not natural pacifists, but feminism is a movement against violence and domination. I rephrase it, I mean adding, not dismissing that one, of course I’m all for it, but I’m also adding the possibility that it’s feminist to demand international denunciation of the gender war crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli women. One thing doesn’t rule out the other. To be against violence against women, women are women all over the world, it doesn’t make any difference where they are. Rape is a rape is a rape. Rape does not have any context. There’s no light rape. Rape is rape, and women are women wherever they are.
Barbara Smith:
Thank all of you for that. I was just getting ready to share, to say that some of the perspectives that you have just shared with us show why a panel and a discussion about looking at these international issues from a feminist perspective, why that’s so important. It really is pretty much missing from the mainstream and from even the political left or progressive politics or whatever. Because I think that the unity that feminism has made an effort to build over decades, if not centuries, but certainly during my long years as a feminist in the United States, the roots of that have possibilities in them. I have to say that whenever I have these kinds of conversations and I have these not necessarily for broadcast, but when I have these conversations with feminists I think, “If only they would just let us figure the things out. If only, if only.” Maybe that’s naive or whatever, but I just feel that feminist politics at their best are about us being able to communicate with each other in ways that are respectful of the paths that each of us are on. I hope that people are getting that from our conversation today.
Frieda, would you like to jump in because we haven’t heard from you?
Frieda Afary:
Thank you. I would like to talk about both Iran and the US feminist responses. Beginning in Iran, [inaudible 00:25:36], a prominent feminist attorney and one of the imprisoned leaders of the current women’s rights struggle wrote an open letter last year to oppose Russia’s imperialist invasion and to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination.
Now, concerning Palestine and Israel, Narges Mohammadi, another prominent Iranian feminist, writer, and activist, and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate issued a statement from prison in early November. She condemned, and this is a quotation, “assaults on homeless people, the slaughter of children, women, and civilians, hostage-taking, the bombing of hospitals and schools and residential areas and called for an immediate ceasefire, an end to war, respect for human rights, and the creation of conditions for peaceful coexistence of peoples.” As far as the US is concerned, I wanted to point out that there was a petition entitled Feminist for a Free Palestine. Stop the Genocide. End the Occupation signed by over 140 feminist scholars, most of them on the left. Then earlier this month, another one, Palestine is a Feminist Struggle: U.S. Feminist Organizations Call for Permanent Ceasefire Now issued by various organizations, including Jewish and Muslim ones. And as was mentioned earlier, some feminists on the left have refused to criticize Hamas and instead refer to Hamas as part of the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people even though Hamas is a misogynist, authoritarian, religious fundamentalist organization that has committed war crimes, including the rapes that were mentioned.
And the fact that some feminist individuals and organizations in the US refuse to condemn Hamas greatly concerns me as well. And to conclude, I wanted to contrast this to a statement I received from an Afghan feminist who lives inside Afghanistan right now, and she writes, “We need to emphasize that a reactionary opposition cannot be liberating. The oppressed people of Palestine need to form a democratic opposition in the midst of this war. If the Palestinian people themselves do not take up the leadership of the resistance against the occupation, and if the reactionary forces of Hamas are the leaders of the resistance, they will poison a future Palestine with religious fascism.” That’s the end of the quote from her. Thank you.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you, Frieda. I’m going to move on to our next question, and that is… Well, you’ll hear. Accurate and inaccurate comparisons are often being made concerning Russia-Ukraine on the one hand and Israel-Palestine on the other. I’d like to hear what similarities and differences you see between Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination against Russian imperialism and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination against Israeli occupation and apartheid. I know that Oksana is a signer, that you are a signer of a statement of solidarity of Ukrainians with the Palestinian people. Could you also tell us about that statement and the response it has received?
Oksana Dutchak:
There are a lot of talks with this comparison with some parallels drawn. The comparison I would make is that in Ukrainian history or in the history of the region, there were no precedents of the scale and brutality if to compare with attack of Hamas on the 7th of October. The closest example I may think of is attack on school in Beslan in Russia, where a lot of school children were taken hostages some years ago, and many of them died during the attempt to free them. Or we can also draw some parallels with the events in wars in the ’90s after the collapse of Yugoslavia. But otherwise, in Ukrainian history or closest history of Ukraine, there are no precedents of this brutality and scale.
At the same time, we are witnessing currently developing during the last almost two years the very close precedent of the events which are happening on Gaza Strip now after the Israelian army attack on the Gaza Strip. So all these pictures of ruined hospitals, buildings, of civilians killed, all that are very familiar to us. The closest comparison I can draw here is Mariupol, the city which was basically under siege and to a great extent destroyed by the Russian army on the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022.
So if to compare the course of Ukraine and the course of Palestinian people, I would say that both obviously struggles with self-determination in the context of either imperial or now colonial or colonial aggression. This offense which they’re faced with is based on brutal military force, ignoring international law, and committing war crimes, partially also using genocidal rhetoric. Though in the case of Israeli-Palestinian war, we see genocidal rhetoric from the very beginning on both sides, unlike in the case of Ukraine and Russia. Hence, both struggles I would say worth solidarity, especially taking into account the obvious threats they’re facing now.
Otherwise, I would be very cautious with any comparison of parallels as we have very different history, we have very different dynamics of the recent events, we have very different political, demographic, geographical, and yes, geopolitical context. So I would be very cautious with any comparison beyond this very basic situational. If people make comparison or parallels, I would always ask myself why they’re doing this, so what kind of argument they’re trying to make. Because it can be used in very different and sometimes opposite directions and for various different and opposite reasons.
I would say that the question to compare or to build parallels, the only valid answer for me is to build some political solidarity between different struggles. And here I mean not only Palestinian, Ukrainian struggles, but also for example, the struggle of part of the Russian civil society for liberation from the authoritarian rule of the Putin regime or the struggles of parts of Israeli society against a government which they were obviously not satisfied with.
Coming to the question of a letter which was published and signed, including by me, I would say that reaction to this letter in Ukraine was very different. Otherwise, the webpage, we published it on our webpage, our journal, it went through a large scale DOS attack and basically was not able to operate for several days after the letter was published. So it was obviously something targeting us. We can assume who was the agent of that attack.
And also, I felt that part of the society which were shocked by the events happening in Israel and later in Gaza Strip, they felt also relief reading this letter, and they felt that they’re not the only one who shares this position with us. But on the general level, I would say that mainstream society, civil society in Ukraine and political discussion, it’s not in favor of statements like this. This letter would be rather a marginal voice in the general discussion in Ukraine for various reasons. Also for not good reasons I would say. So all the civilizational rhetoric which Ukrainian government has been using since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion, it plays against building solidarity, not even speaking about Palestinian struggle for self-determination, but just even with the cost to stop war crimes and to start the ceasefire. And that’s a pity.
That’s also something which is very different from the official position of Ukrainian government during the past several decades because it was always supporting the UN resolutions which were condemning Israeli actions in West Bank and Gaza Strip and which were supporting the Palestinian population. But in general, the society take a very anti-Palestinian stance, I would say, unfortunately. But we’re trying also to make a difference here and to explain people the historical reality of the events which are happening in Israeli and Gaza Strip and West Bank and all the structures of inequality and depression which are present there.
Yali Hashash:
I would like to give another context to… I don’t know about the comparison between the Ukrainian situation and the Palestinian situation, but I would like to use this question to give a different global context to what’s happening in Israel. That context to me is the global evangelical fascist movement. For me, when I look at what Israel is doing in Gaza and what Israel has been doing in recent decades, it’s being supported by millions and millions of fundamentalist evangelicals in the US and in other countries. There is a global movement of evangelicals coming from the US and turning governments all over the world, in Nigeria, in Argentina, in Brazil, in many places. The one thing that connects all these places is that all these evangelicals that are making presidents and making prime ministers, all of them believe that Jerusalem is the place where Christ will come back, and they all believe that Christ will come back once all the Jews are there taking power and fighting against Islam, who’s the antichrist or whatever.
Sadly, it’s playing under the radar because it’s supposed to be a religious movement, so nobody’s noticing it. But really, this is a very strong and powerful political movement that goes hand in hand with the alt right in Israel. You see these voices saying the exact same things, but one of them is Jewish, one of them is Christian, and they’re really basically speaking as if that is one religion. So you can see John Hague from Christian United for Israel having a rally and crying to the audience and with them, “Jews and Christians, we are one.” And you see him and his son and other very influential pastors trying to push Israel not to sign any agreement with Hamas about releasing prisoners and getting hostages back. They’re very militaristic, they’re all for, yes, occupy Gaza. The Lord is coming back through your power.
It’s like a mutual interest between the fanatic alt right in Israel and the fanatic alt right in the States pushing all of us into some kind of Armageddon, and it’s not even discussed the political public life in Israel. This is something I really want to put in the discussion because I think it’s really important to mobilize Christians in the US that don’t believe that the role of Christiandom is to fight Islam and they don’t believe that their role is to unite forces with Jews to fight Islam. Because really, we are now expected to be the soldiers of Armageddon. You have enough alt right Jews here that believe that we need to rebuild the third temple, and they go with that vision of Armageddon. So this is one important thing I want to put forward.
Barbara Smith:
I really appreciate your bringing that up. In our groups that are working on these issues, we do indeed talk about Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals who are Zionists and who have very cynical agendas in relationship to all of the international struggles that you just mentioned.
Another thing that we haven’t really talked about that much, and that was the motivation in some ways for the last question, is the role of the United States, the incredibly negative role of the United States in all that we are discussing. That’s where that making parallels between Russia and Israel and Palestine and Ukraine, that’s where that comes in because of the fact that this government, by which I mean the United States government, is funding the conflicts in both places and because our legislature, our Senate, and our House of Representatives there are fights around which country deserves to get funding. If you don’t do this, if you don’t deal with our border situation, which is an absolutely white nationalist agenda in relationship to immigration and migration into the United States, that’s why they’re concerned about the border. They’re not concerned about the Canadian border, they’re concerned about the southern border, where people would be coming from Latin America, South America, et cetera.
But be that as it may, as I said, the United States has a cynical and sinister role in this, and that’s where that’s inaccurate parallelism comes up. Did anyone else wish to respond to this? Anwar?
Anwar Mhajne:
Yeah, so I mean as a comparativist, I do have a lot of problems with this comparison. First of all, Gaza is not an independent country, but the international community acknowledges as an independent country with defined borders like Ukraine, for instance. It has been under Israeli control. Under international law, even though Israel does not occupy physically, it’s still within the map that Netanyahu carried at the UN, what, a few months ago, right? It’s not an independent country. It doesn’t really have a military… Hamas has its own paramilitary branch and the Palestinian Islam Jihad, but it doesn’t have a military. That military doesn’t get funding from the United States. It doesn’t get weapons shipped to it. It doesn’t get military aid. It doesn’t even have control over the sea, air, and the border with Israel. And even the border with Egypt, we know that Egypt has a strict control over the Iraq border.
So there are a variety of issues with that. We know that also with Ukraine, they got legitimate international support for their fight against the Russian invasion annexation while in the context of Israel and Palestinians in general, the occupation in general, and if we want to just focus on Gaza, I feel like it’s important to talk that it’s more general, it’s not just Gaza. The West Bank right now, the violence is increasing. Think over 200 people were killed since October 7th. Settler violence is increasing with Ben Gvir as a Mr of National Security and [inaudible 00:43:14] by tunneling funds and encouraging these radical factions of Israeli society. We see the violence in the West Bank is really, really high intense. And so just talking about these all different dynamics, the comparisons falter, and also the fact that the Biden administration wanted to condition the aid to Israel to the aid to Ukraine both together, that’s another level where they’re trying to flip that comparison, where Hamas is more like Russia rather than Gaza’s Ukraine [inaudible 00:43:44]. That just as structural comparisons, I have lots of issues with that.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you for that. Oksana?
Oksana Dutchak:
I might add first to what Barbara was saying though. We know how problematic US involvement in anything happening for the past several decades or half a century or even more, let’s say. We must draw this distinction between the support because the only reason why I could come back to Kiev with my kids is a western weapon partially supplied or mostly supplied by US to Ukraine to defend the major cities from rockets, for example. And to continue with what Anwar was saying, the limitation of this comparison, I sometimes draw this example or parallel, which is also very, very rough parallel. But why it is so painful for me personally to look on what is happening in Gaza Strip now is because I understand that this may be a Ukrainian future.
If there will be no international support at some point, that part of international community which support Ukraine, which is not all international community, will get tired. Governments would be changed, and they would have not enough funds. Some other problems will come up. If the support will vanish at some point in the future, we can have a very similar dynamic of a society where the political ruling party or elite will become more radicalized or more radical people will come into power, more and more radical every decade. And we will have our own Hamas, let’s say, at some point. And we will have the situation where there will be nothing to protect the sky, for example, from Russian rockets, let’s say.
Of course this is a very conditional comparison because, first of all, we have totally different geography and demography than in Gaza Strip. For example, Ukraine is a huge country situated in the middle of Europe with several tens of millions of populations still here even after the war started. The proportion of this population is also totally different. I mean, it’s a very conditional comparison, but it is what make me sometimes to live through these events, to see these events unfolding so painful because I can imagine it could be the future of Ukraine.
Tova Benski:
Can I just add a comment that I think is very, very important, continuing Yali’s argument about the Christian evangelical? One big difference, very big difference between Russia-Ukraine and Israel and Gaza is the religious element, which I think is missing in the Russian-Ukraine conflict. It does make a great difference. The evangelical organizations have actually interfered with the government, and they have been the ideology behind the extreme right wing parties. Some say even that they were the ones who actually wrote the new judicial reform that the government tried to implement and that brought out hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets. So this is, I think, a crucial difference that is at work here. Thank you.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you for that. The right wing in our country, that is again the United States when I say our country, the right wing has been on the ascendants for quite some time. We have a presidential election next year. Although I don’t spend a lot of time looking at all the whys and wherefores of what may happen, because, of course, there’s no way to know what’s going to happen a year from now exactly, but depending on the outcome of that election, we can see things become even worse, more negative. As I said, that right wing ascendancy is affecting within the country too, like trying to get Black studies and African-American studies and women’s studies and queer studies erased, for example. So we’re dealing with all of that.
Our time really is coming to a conclusion, but I’m going to ask Frieda a question I think that you would really like to share and be a part of this discussion, and that is, do you think the US Black Liberation Movement and Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement have had an impact on the struggles in Ukraine in Palestine and peace organizing in Russia and Israel?
Frieda Afary:
I don’t know if I can really speak on behalf of the Ukrainians and Russians and Palestinians and Israelis, but what I can say is what it is that we can learn from them. As an Iranian feminist, what has inspired me is that when you look at the Black liberation struggle in the US, it came out of the struggle against slavery and the abolitionist slavery. And of course, now we have the current abolitionist struggle with Black feminists in the forefront opposing mass incarceration and the death penalty and opposing the gender and state violence. But what inspires me about Black liberation struggle is that it’s had an affirmative and humanist vision. Despite all the adversities, all the genocidal attacks, the violence, the vision that they’ve offered has been so affirmative. It’s that affirmative humanist vision that we really need at the current moment if we’re going to get out of this madness.
What I also appreciate about the Woman, Life, freedom movement in Iran is that, again, it’s opposed to gender and state violence. It’s opposed to book bans. It presented ideas for critical thinking in education, labor struggles, defense of the rights of oppressed minorities, whether ethnic minorities or religious minorities like the Baha’is. It’s a very affirmative struggle. It’s not only about rejecting the compulsory hijab. It’s much, much more than that. And it’s that kind of expansive vision, that kind of humanist affirmative vision that we need in the Middle East region, in the US, the whole world, if we’re going to get out of this madness that we’re living through right now. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond to that.
Barbara Smith:
I think although there’s one other good question that we have, and that’s how intersectional feminist politics embody solutions for opposing and ending wars and building alternatives to the current global order of imperialism, et cetera, fascism, racial capitalism, gender oppression, and environmental destruction. So that’s that last question. I’m going to trust that we can address that very quickly. I think I’m so uplifted by this opportunity to meet and speak with all of you because to me, our conversation embodies what feminism has brought to the world. Not bourgeois feminism, not corporate feminism, but actual grassroots, on the ground feminism that is really for the liberation of all people, actually all people, not just for people defined as women. So just any last things that you would like to share about how being a feminist and having a feminist political perspective has some potential for solutions or transformation in these situations that we’ve discussed today.
Anwar Mhajne:
I think one thing though to say is that the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter movement are very, very intertwined with Palestinian struggles. And that’s what I try to explain to people, that the Palestinian struggle in general is tied to more than just Israel-Palestine. It’s a metaphor for a variety of things. It’s a metaphor for colonialism, for West versus East, for whose lives matter and whose lives don’t matter. It’s every group in the US, every brown community that lived in the West and experienced marginalization, silencing, and oppression. That’s why you see George Floyd’s mural on the West Bank separation wall. So they’re very, very intertwined, the civil rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement. People use quotes from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, even though Martin Luther King I know some people misquoted him a few times. I know there was a debate between his daughter and Amy Schumer. That’s a totally different topic to talk about.
But I think for feminists though, why I identify as feminist and why I made this journey to becoming a feminist is because I do believe that feminism with intersectionality specifically provides an important lens that a lot of people are missing. It helps us understand that different oppressions and identities intersect, and that in order for us to understand one particular historical moment, you got to understand all the structures of violence that exists. It makes us pay attention not to just physical, bombastic violence, the violence with blood and bodies. It also makes us pay attention to structural violence that encompasses gender, sexual identity, national identity, religious identity, et cetera. I think it’s very core to understanding what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, and it’s very important because then it helps us think about solutions that address the core causes of what’s happening on the ground, not just the atrocities of October 7th, not just the humanitarian catastrophe that is happening in Gaza right now.
It is a whole structure, a whole system that goes beyond just Israel and Palestine. It exists globally, and it’s infused in different and multiple systems of oppression. We know now the companies that are making the most money out of the war are private military weapons companies. If you look at the data right now, Lockheed Martin, the stocks are doing great. We know that the military industrial context is real and somebody is profiting off of these wars, and that’s why they keep happening. Feminists have talked about that. It’s important to talk about sustainable peace, about equality and justice for everyone regardless of their background. I think that’s where feminism could come into the debate and actually bring an important insight. It’s no surprise that the people in Israel, despite all the mourning and the shock and the suffering, they are still holding on to the activism, to the hope for peace and justice. They have to deal with opposition.
They’ve had opposition before, but now it’s more severe because of the context. They still stood up and actually said, “This is where we stand on this. We do want a ceasefire. We want a diplomatic solution that addresses the core causes of the conflict that does not just say, ‘Just get rid of Hamas.’ And then what happens next? What does that mean for everyone else?” I think that’s an important context or an important element of feminism that could be brought up and why it’s an important lens to look at this as well.
Barbara Smith:
Thank you so much. I think that’s maybe our last word. I think that we know that this is… or at least we feel that this is probably chapter one.
Yali Hashash:
Can I say something [inaudible 00:56:33]?
Barbara Smith:
Yes. Yes, Yali.
Yali Hashash:
Just maybe one or two minutes. I want to say that intersection of politics is maybe the most taught in the past decade, but it is maybe the one most difficult to implement, is like you know how to say intersectional in each and every sentence that you want, and you can write it in an essay, but to actually have a group of women with different backgrounds that each of them acknowledges their own privilege and their own oppression, and to be able to actually come together and work together, it’s so much more difficult than to understand the politics behind intersectionality. In that spirit, it’s really important for me to say that the fact that we can hurt for what happened on the 7th of October and we can be devastated by what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t mean that this is a symmetric situation. Israel is still the occupier and Palestinians are still the occupied ones. It’s just important to acknowledge it in the conversation in case it was understood otherwise by what I said.
Barbara Smith:
Well, thank you all so much. I truly appreciate this opportunity to be with you. And for this moment, I do feel optimism because of you, not because of objective reality, but because of the tenacity, the spirit, the compassion, everything that has come across, the smartness, the incisiveness, all of it that has come across in our conversation today. I want to thank everyone for watching The Real News Network, and please don’t forget to subscribe to our channel so you never miss a video. If you can, please support our work so we can keep bringing you more important coverage and conversations just like this one. We’re talking about chapter two of this one. Just head over to the realnews.com, donate, and if you are able donate today. Thank you all so much and peace.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.