Each March 8, the world is flooded with brilliant campaigns urging us to “accelerate action” and “inspire inclusion”. International Women’s Day has become a polished and favorable spectacle for public relations where companies preach empowerment while women who need solidarity are allowed to fend for themselves.
I can only hope that this year’s call to “accelerate action” means action for all women – not only those who integrate perfectly into corporate feminism, activism adapted to the media and elite successes.
But if history is a guide, the only action that will be accelerated is the brand image of feminism as a marketable commodity, while women enduring war, occupation and systemic violence are faced with erasure.
Year after year, International Women’s Day is paraded as a world of solidarity, but its priorities are carefully organized. The feminist establishment gathers behind acceptable causes, adapted to the media and politically practical – where the difficulties of women can be formulated as individual successes, not systemic injustices.
When Iranian women burned their hijab in protest, they met generalized Western support. When Ukrainian women took arms, they were greeted as a symbols of resilience. But when the Palestinian women dig through the rubble to pull their children from the ruins of their houses, they are encountered with silence or, worse, suspicions. The same feminist institutions that mobilize against “violence against women” even find it difficult to pronounce the words “Gaza” or “genocide”.
In the United Kingdom, as International Women’s Woman Day approached, a deputy and feminist organizations organized an event on “giving a voice to silence in Afghanistan”, starring feminists who had spent months calling for boycotts from the Afghan Cricket team. Because, of course, that’s how you take the Taliban – making sure they can’t play a cricket game.
This is what passes for international solidarity: symbolic gestures that do nothing for women suffering from oppressive regimes but make Western politicians feel morally higher.
Let me be clear: Afghan women deserve each ounce of solidarity and support. Their fight against an oppressive regime is real, urgent and devastating – and yes, what they harden is gender apartheid.
But recognizing their suffering does not excuse hypocrisy as a rank of those who exercise feminism as a political tool, presenting themselves for Afghan women while remaining silent on hungry, bombed and brutalized Palestinian women before our eyes.
The boom of the Taliban was not an act of nature-it was a direct product of the intervention of the United Kingdom and the United States. After 20 years of occupation, after having given Afghan women to men that the West is armed and allowed, these same voices are now crying over their fate.
Where were these women deputies, eminent feminists and traditional feminist organizations when pregnant Palestinian women gave birth in the streets of Gaza because the hospitals had been bombed? Where was the outcry when the Israeli elite shooters targeted journalists, like Shireen Abu Akleh? Where were the boycotts when the Palestinian girls were drawn from the rubble of their houses, killed by bombs made in the United States?
Many and many times, we see the same scheme: feminist indignation is conditional, activism is selective and solidarity is reserved for those whose difficulties do not question Western power. Afghan women deserve support. But Palestinian women, Sudanese women, Yemeni women. Instead, their sufferings are encountered with silence, suspicion or outright erasure.
International Women’s Day, formerly a radical appeal for equality, has become a hollow spectacle – that where feminist organizations and politicians choose and choose what women deserve justice and which women can be sacrificed to the altar of Western interests.
Feminism has long been exercised by the powerful as a tool to justify the Empire, War and Occupation – all under the pretension of “saving women”. During the Algerian War of Independence, the French launched a campaign to “release” Algerian women from the veil, parading women revealed in propaganda ceremonies while brutalizing and violating them simultaneously in detention centers.
The French, of course, were never concerned with gender equality in Algeria; They easily restrict education and employment for Algerian women. Their actions under the guise of helping women concerned domination.
This same story of the helpless brunette woman who needs white saviors has been used to justify even more recent Western military interventions from Afghanistan to Iraq. Today we also see the same game manual in Palestine.
West Palestinian frames as victims – but no bombs, travel or famine. No, the real problem, we are told, they are the Palestinian men. Israeli officials and their Western allies resume the same orientalist trope: Palestinian women must be saved from their own culture, from their own people, while their real suffering under occupation is ignored or rejected.
The systematic slaughter of women and children is treated as an unhappy footnote in the conflict, rather than its central atrocity. We see the same scheme over and over – the concern for women’s rights only when it serves a political program, silence when these rights are crushed under the weight of air strikes and the military occupation supported by the West. It is not solidarity. It is a bond enveloped in feminist rhetoric.
So who will really benefit from International Women’s Day this year? Will it be women whose oppression is perfectly integrated into Western feminist accounts, allowing politicians, feminist organizations and the defense groups for the general public to lounge in their self-feminine glow? Or will it be the women who have been reduced to silence, erased and dehumanized – those for “accelerating action” meant 17 months of genocide and 76 years of colonial violence of the colonists?
Is it just another exercise of “feeling of well-being”, where you can claim to support women around the world without confronting the fact that your feminism has limits? Because if it is a question of accelerating the action, then after 17 months of bombing, famine and travel, we should finally hear you represent Palestinian women.
But we know how it goes. The speeches will be pronounced, the hashtags will be trendy, group discussions will take place – but the women of Gaza will remain buried under the rubble, their suffering too impractical to mention.
As for me, I join the march of the feminist movement today – but let’s be clear, our agendas are not the same. I will walk for every Palestinian woman who has not only struggled to be heard, but was so brutally dehumanized that her suffering in the midst of a genocide is broadcast live with blind eyes and deaf ears.
I – With countless other women who refuse to remain silent – will think of each mother skimming the lifeless body of her child, each girl forced to become a goalkeeper during the night, each sister excavating the rubble with bare hands. And we – the women who believe in real feminist solidarity and to reject selective indignation – will not only “hope” that this call for action means something; We will make sure that is the case.
We will make sure that Palestinian voices are heard. We will make sure to boycott those who benefit from Palestinian oppression. We will make sure to challenge each platform and each feminist who normalizes Palestinian suffering, holding them responsible for their complicity.
To our Palestinian sisters: we feel your pain. We have brought your struggle in our hearts in the last 17 months, and we know that your fight has not started – it has been 76 years of challenge, survival, to refuse to disappear.
And know this: next year, March 8, we will not cry your sufferings – we will celebrate your victory. It is not your so-called “release” of your own men, as Western feminists like to frame it, but your release of the colonial occupation of the colonists. We hear you. We see you. And we will not rest before the whole world too.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
