[News] Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women Faci
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Mar 18 18:16:08 EDT 2008
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence endorses the following statement.
~~~
Given that International Women's Day coincided
with the catastrophic events in Gaza, please show
your solidarity by signing the statement below
from the Campaign of Solidarity with Women
Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation. You can send
your name, affiliation, and place of residence
to: <mailto:solidaritywomen at yahoo.com>solidaritywomen at yahoo..com.
Piya Chatterjee & Sunaina Maira
An Open Letter to All Feminists:
Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women
Facing War and Occupation
As feminists and people of conscience, we call
for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza
suffering due to the escalating military attacks
that Israel turned into an open war on civilians.
This war has targeted women and children, and all
those who live under Israeli occupation in the
West Bank, and are also denied the right to
freedom of movement, health, and education.
We stand in solidarity with Iraqi women whose
daughters, sisters, brothers, or sons have been
abused, tortured, and raped in U.S. prisons such
as Abu Ghraib. Women in Iraq continue to live
under a U.S. occupation that has devastated
families and homes, and are experiencing a rise
in religious extremism and restrictions on their
freedom that were unheard of before the U.S.
invasion, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," in 2003.
At this moment in Afghanistan, women are living
with the return of the Taliban and other
misogynistic groups such as the Northern
Alliance, a U.S. ally, and with the violence of
continuing U.S. and NATO attacks on civilians,
despite the U.S. war to "liberate" Afghan women in 2001.
As of March 6, 2008, over 120 Palestinians,
including 39 children and 6 women (more than a
third of the victims), in Gaza were killed by
Israeli air strikes and escalated attacks on
civilians over a period of five days, according
to human rights groups.[1] Hospitals have been
struggling to treat 370 injured children, as
reported by medical officials. Homes have been
destroyed as well as civilian facilities
including the headquarters of the General
Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions.[2] On
February 29, 2008, Israel's Deputy Defense
Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened Palestinians
in Gaza with a "bigger Shoah," the Hebrew word
usually used only for the Holocaust.[3] What
does it mean that the international community is
standing by while this is happening?
Valnai's threat of a Holocaust against
Palestinians was not just a slip of the tongue,
for the war on Gaza is a continuation of
genocidal activities against the indigenous
population. Israel has controlled the land and
sea borders and airspace of Gaza for more than a
year and a half, confining 1.5 million
Palestinians to a giant prison. Supported by the
U.S., Israel has imposed a near total blockade on
Gaza since June 2007 which has led to a breakdown
in basic services, including water and
sanitation, lack of electricity, fuel, and
medical supplies. As a result of these
sanctions, 30% of children under 5 years suffer
from stunted growth and malnutrition. Over 80%
of the population cannot afford a balanced meal.[4]
Is this humanitarian crisis going to approach a
situation similar to that of the sanctions
against Iraq from 1991-2003, when an estimated
500,000 Iraqi children died to lack of nutrition
and medical supplies, and the woman who was then
Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, proclaimed
that the death of a half million Iraqi children
was worth the price of U.S. national security?
As feminists and anti-imperialist people of
conscience, we oppose direct and indirect
policies of ethnic cleansing and decimation of
native populations by all nation-states.
In the current climate of U.S.-initiated or
U.S.-backed assaults on women in Palestine, Iraq,
and Afghanistan, we are deeply troubled by one
kind of hypocritical Western feminist discourse
that continues to be preoccupied with particular
kinds of violence against Muslim or Middle
Eastern women, while choosing to remain silent on
the lethal violence inflicted on women and
families by military occupation, F-16s, Apache
helicopters, and missiles paid for by U.S. tax
payers. This is a moment when U.S. imperialism
brazenly uses direct colonial occupation, masked
in a civilizational discourse of bringing Western
"freedom" and "democracy." Such acts echo
the language of Manifest Destiny that was used
to justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines
and Pacific territories in the 19th century, not
to mention the genocide of Native
Americans. U.S. covert, and not so covert,
interventions in Central, South America, Africa,
Asia, and the Caribbean have devastated the lives
of countless indigenous peoples, and other
civilians, in this region throughout the 20th
century. The U.S., as well its proxy militias or
client regimes, has inflicted violence on women
and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to
Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged
the deaths of its soldiers by its own "honor
killings" that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq.
It is appalling that in these catastrophic times,
many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on
misogynistic practices associated with particular
local cultures, as if these exist in capsules,
far from the arena of imperial occupation.
Indeed, imperial violence has given fuel to some
of these patriarchal practices of misogyny and
sexism. They should also know that such a narrow
vision furthers a much older tradition of
feminist mobilizing in the service of
colonialism—"saving brown, or black women, from
brown men," as observed by Gayatri Spivak.
While we too oppose abuses including domestic
violence, "honor killings," forced marriage, and
brutal punishment, we are disturbed that some
U.S. feminists—as well as Muslim or Middle
Eastern women who claim to be "authorities" on
Islam and are employed by right-wing think
tanks—are participating in a selective discourse
of universal women's rights that ignores U.S. war
crimes and abuses of human rights.
While some progressive U.S. feminists claim to
oppose the hijacking of women's rights to justify
U.S. invasions, they simultaneously evade any
mention about the plight of women in Palestine,
Iraq, or Afghanistan. Their statements continue
to focus only on female genital mutilation or
dowry deaths under the guise of breaking the
"politically correct" silence on abuses of women
in the "Muslim world" that the Right disingenuously laments.[5]
Some progressives may support such statements
with good intentions, but these critiques ignore
the fact that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim
feminists have been working on these issues for
generations, focusing on the intersections of
gender, sexuality, race, class, and
nationalism. Their work is ignored by North
American feminists who claim to advocate for a
"global sisterhood" but are disillusioned to
discover that women in the U.S. military
participated in the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.
We are concerned about these silences and
selective condemnations given that the U.S.
mainstream media bolsters this imperialist
feminism by using an (often liberal) Orientalist
approach to covering the Middle East or South
Asia. For example, on March 5, 2008, as the
death toll due to Israeli attacks in Gaza was
mounting, the New York Times chose to publish an
article just below its report on the Israeli
military incursions that focused on the
sentencing of a Palestinian man in Israel for an
honor killing; the report was deemed worthy of
international coverage because the Palestinian
women had broken "the code of silence" by resorting to Israeli courts.[6]
The implications of this juxtaposition of two
unrelated events are that Palestinians belong to
a backward, patriarchal culture that, rightly or
wrongly, is under attack by a modern,
"democratic" state with a legal apparatus that
supports women's rights. Others have shown that
the New York Times gave disproportionate
attention to the Human Rights Watch report in
2006 on domestic violence against Palestinian
women relative to its scant mention of the 76
reports of Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights
by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and
the Israeli organization, B'Tselem.[7]
Similar coverage exists of women from other
countries outside the U.S. that are portrayed as
victims only of their own cultural traditions,
rather than also of the ravages of Western
imperialism and predatory global capitalism. No
attention is paid in the mainstream U.S. media to
reports such as that in Haaretz documenting that
Palestinian women citizens of Israel are the most
exploited group in the Israeli workforce, making
only 47% of the wages earned by their Jewish
counterparts in Israel, and with double the rate
of unemployment of Jewish women.[8] Little is
known in the U.S. about what the lives of Iraqi
women are really like now that they are pressured
to cover themselves in public or not work outside
the house, nor of Afghani women whose homes are
still being bombed in a war that was supposed to
have liberated them many years ago.
We stand in solidarity with feminist and
liberatory movements that are opposing U.S.
imperialism, U.S.-backed occupation, militarism,
and economic exploitation as well as resisting
religious and secular fundamentalisms.
We also support the struggles of those within the
U.S. opposing the War on Terror and racist
practices of detention, deportation,
surveillance, and torture linked to the
military-industrial-prison complex that
selectively targets immigrants, minorities, and
youth of color. We are grateful for the
courageous scholarship of academics who are at
risk of not getting tenure or employment because
they do research related to settler colonialism
or taboo topics such as Palestinian rights and
expose controversial aspects of U.S. policies here and abroad.
At a moment when U.S. military interventions have
made "democracy" a dirty word in much of the
world, we strive for true democracy and for
freedom and justice for all our sisters and brothers.
Piya Chatterjee, University of California-Riverside
Sunaina Maira, University of California-Davis
Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation
South Asians for the Liberation of Falastin
[1] "The Tragedy in Gaza," Kinder USA,
<http://www.kinderusa.org/>www.kinderusa.org. March 5, 2008.
[2] Weekly Report on Israeli Human Rights
Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:
"Wide-Scale Israeli Military Operations Against
the Gaza Strip." Palestinian Centre for Human
Rights, <http://www.pchrgaza.org/>http://www.pchrgaza.org. March 6, 2008.
[3] Rory McCarthy, "Israeli Minister Warns of
Holocaust for Gaza if Violence Continues." The
Guardian, March 1, 2008. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>www.guardian.co.uk.
[4] "The Tragedy in Gaza."
[5] For example, Katha Pollitt's petition, "An
Open Letter from American Feminists," posted at:
<http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6901_an_open_letter.html>http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6901_an_open_letter.html.
See also: Debra Dickerson, "What NOW? Feminist
Fatigue and the Global Quest for Women's Rights,"
Mother Jones.
<http://www.motherjones_com.news.mht/>www.MotherJones_com.News.mht
[6] "16-Year Sentence in Honor Killing," The New
York Times, March 5, 2008.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/world/middleeast/05honor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Honor+Killing+March+5,+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/world/middleeast/05honor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Honor+Killing+March+5%2C+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin.
[7] Patrick O'Connor and Rachel Roberts, "The New
York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and
Palestinian Rights." November 7, 2006.
[8] Ruth Sinai, "Arab Women – the Most Exploited
Group in Israeli Workforce." Haaretz, January 2,
2008. <http://www.haaretz.com/>www.haaretz.com.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
PO Box 226
Redmond, WA 98073
phone: 484-932-3166
<mailto:incite_national at yahoo.com>incite_national at yahoo.com
www.incite-national.org
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is a
national activist organization of radical
feminists of color advancing a movement to end
violence against women of color and their
communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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