they denounce the turn taken by the demonstration of November 25 – L’Express

Saturday November 25, on the occasion of the international day against violence against women, several demonstrations took place in France. In Paris, we hoped to hear international solidarity resonate with all women. Because, from the courageous Iranian women who continue to resist to the Afghan women deprived of all rights, from the Uighur women raped and sterilized in Chinese camps to the violence committed against Kurdish women, Armenian women, forced into exile, the list is unfortunately endless of all the violence suffered. In wars, women pay a heavy price, as in Ukraine where the denunciation of rapes committed by the Russian army is finally coming out of silence. As for Syrian women, they seem of little interest to the world, despite the continuation of the massacres which have already left 500,000 dead. We stand with them as we stand with Palestinian civilians, among whom many women and children are dying today under the bombings.

But this solidarity can in no way justify the scandalous exclusion of a group of demonstrators who came to denounce this violence against Jewish women committed by Hamas.

It is undoubtedly necessary to recall the facts: on October 7, in Israel, men and women, children and old people were massacred in a horrible way by Hamas terrorists. The women were raped in a specific way, gang-raped until their pelvises were broken, mutilated, decapitated and burned alive. The authors, drunk with the enjoyment of death, filmed them and posted them online on social networks. The images that no one can dare ignore showed women and sometimes their corpses, displayed naked like trophies to be spat on.

Faced with horror, while many international NGOs remained silent, feminists immediately denounced these crimes, many however remained silent, while some did not hesitate to consider them as part of the “Palestinian resistance” .

Thus, in an astonishing forum, the signatories even claim to be the guardians of the meaning to be given to the “feminist signifier” (1), a new meaning in the fight of women, which considers the denunciation of violence as part of “obscene propaganda “Israeli.

Further, they believe that the condemnation of “Hamas fighters” amounts to “reiterating the vision of a barbaric Muslim world against a feminized Israeli population and thus cleansed and cleared of all suspicion”, or even “is linked to the construction of a monstrous Orient. This orientalist vision, steeped in neocolonial condescension, seems to illustrate more than contradict the imagination that they claim to denounce. Because for our part, we saw neither “fighters” nor “monstrous Orient”, only rapists and murderers in the service of an ideology of death.

“The long-tested strategy of Israeli pinkwashing” is also denounced by its authors – pinkwashing being a hypocritical commercial approach, aimed at exploiting the rights of LGBT people in order to exonerate themselves. Thus, perhaps even without their knowing it, these “feminists” of a new kind are taking up the old demonization of the name of Israel: the Jew, deceitful by definition, would this time paint in pink his taste for blood and of domination.

After the “Judeo-capitalist peril”, the “Judeo-Bolshevik plot”, here is the new Jewish ruse to establish its deception. The signatories of this forum are signing yet another edict of expulsion against Jews, this time in the name of feminism. And this is what was translated into reality during the Parisian demonstration on Saturday November 25 in Paris.

These considerations are given as support “as feminists” for “solidarity with the Palestinian people”, and as “a radically supportive position in the fight against colonialism and imperialism”. Strange consent to the sullying of this fight that Hamas has carried out. As for us, we believe that support for the Palestinians, as well as the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle, deserve better than this contempt and this disfigurement.

Disagreements between feminists and differences of analysis on many issues have always accompanied feminist movements and there is no reason to regret this. Even if the current debates linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cross all political currents and particularly the left, and therefore do not arise from the field of women’s causes, this, we see, is widely concerned. But there are red lines, crossings of meaning that turn their backs on feminism.

The blindness or minimization of Hamas’ crimes in the name of “resistance”, the consent to its anti-Semitism constitute an unprecedented ethical fall and a calling into question of decades of feminist struggles. A step has even been taken, since the abandonment of solidarity towards all women cannot under any circumstances be disguised as feminism. Furthermore, we cannot justify violence against women in the name of a fight considered more important, which makes other fights secondary and even forgets them.

Feminism, let us remember, was built on the refusal to relativize the oppression of women in the name of a main struggle. Whether it is the fight against capitalism or against imperialism, feminists have demanded that their struggle be, not secondary, but an integral part of the fight for human emancipation. Furthermore, they understood the need to build autonomous feminist movements, not subordinated to other struggles. Feminism can be associated with other struggles but it cannot be confused with them. We must stop – and this is the minimum – maintaining interference.

For us, feminism combines the fight against anti-Semitism, support and solidarity towards Jews as well as towards the victims of all racism and all oppression. Feminism, which is a political fight, cannot and must not rely on ideological simplism; it can and must embrace complexity and stay there.

Faced with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a perfect example of complexity, we believe “as feminists” that equating the condemnation of Hamas’ crimes with support for Israeli supremacists and settlers in the West Bank or with the forgetting of Palestinian women in the gang of Gaza is a manipulation, not only of feminism but also of this essential quality which is intellectual honesty. Feminism is like the desire for emancipation.

Brigitte Stora, feminist and anti-racist activist, author,

Martine Storti, feminist activist, essayist,

Bouchra Azzouz, director,

Geneviève Brisac, novelist,

Sylvaine Bulle, feminist sociologist

Farida Gueroult, feminist and anti-racist activist

Fatima Meziane, feminist and anti-racist activist

Laurence Rossignol, feminist activist, socialist senator from Val de Marne,

Catherine Vieu-Charier, communist activist, former deputy to the city of Paris, in charge of memory

(1) Pro-Israeli war propaganda; our feminism will not allow itself to be enlistedsigned by a collective of feminist activists, researchers, artists (Le Média, November 21, 2023)