Veranstaltungen

I had a great deal to learn, but it was clear from the outset that Gaza had historically been the center of Palestinian resistance to the occupation, a point of pride for those I worked and lived with. It has also long been the center of Palestinian historical memory. The vast majority of residents come from families who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from such places as Isdud, al-Majdal, and al-Faluja. Some of my earliest memories from Gaza are of young refugee children describing in great detail the homes and villages that their grandparents had lived in but that they had never seen. They were strikingly intimate with their ancestral homes. I remember the delight they took in their descriptive power and the self-esteem it gave them.

Im Laufe des letzten Jahrhunderts wurde der palästinensische Widerstand unabhängig von der dominanten Bewegung, dem Anführer oder der Ideologie als Terrorismus bezeichnet. Dies folgte einem etablierten westlichen kolonialen Muster, bei dem alle nationalen Befreiungsbewegungen und Anführer als Terroristen klassifiziert wurden, vom Emir Abd Al-Qadir in Algerien gegen die Franzosen in den 1830er Jahren über die indische Meuterei und ihre Anführer gegen die Briten im Jahr 1857 bis hin zu Nelson Mandela und Yasir Arafat in den 1980er Jahren. In jedem Fall wird mit der Bezeichnung "Terroristen" versucht, das Gespräch zu unterbinden und den politischen Charakter des antikolonialen Widerstands sowie den historischen Kontext der Widerstandsbewegungen und ihrer Taktiken auszulöschen. Der Umgang des Westens mit dem palästinensischen Widerstand im Oktober 2023 setzt diese lange Tradition fort, indem er jeden Kontext ablehnt und auf einer "Momentaufnahme" besteht, in der nichts, was vor dem 7. Oktober oder danach passiert ist, in die Debatte einfließen darf.

Bis Anfang der 1990er Jahre waren palästinensische Frauenverbände und Komitees in der Lage, eine große Zahl von Frauen zu mobilisieren. In dieser Zeit verfolgten sie ein klar artikuliertes und visionäres feministisch-nationales Befreiungsprojekt. Mit der Unterzeichnung des Oslo-Abkommens 1993 und der Gründung der Palästinensischen Autonomiebehörde wurde die neoliberale Entwicklungshilfe und externe Finanzmodellen zu einem festen Bestandteil der palästinensischen Zivilgesellschaft, und zwar zu einer Zeit, als auch die linken politischen Parteien systematisch geschwächt wurden.

Die zunehmend prekären und lebensbedrohlichen Bedingungen, die alle Facetten des palästinensischen Lebens durchdringen, veranlassten viele zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen, darunter auch Frauen- und Frauenrechtsgruppen, sich der westlichen Entwicklungs- und ˝Kooperations˝-Modelle anzupassen, um sich zu erhalten. Unter dem Druck begrenzter Budgets und Zeitpläne, kurzfristiger Projektzyklen und global beeinflusster Agenden durchliefen die neuen feministischen NGOs einen allmählichen Prozess der Entpolitisierung. Sie konzentrierten sich zunehmend darauf, die oberflächlichste Symptome des patriarchalen Systems zu bekämpfen, ohne die Auswirkungen von Kapitalismus, Kolonialismus, Imperialismus und Rassismus auf das vielfältige Leben der palästinensischen Frauen zu berücksichtigen.

In early 2023, an estimated 97 percent of water in the enclave was unfit to drink, and more than 12 percent of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera, and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.

Now, OCHA reports more than 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 percent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration, and waterborne diseases are mounting threats. 

We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders. 

Among the women placed in the crosshairs of the “war on terror” are Palestinian women’s rights defender Khitam Saafin, sentenced last month by an Israeli military court to 15 months in prison after her organisation, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, was listed alongside several other Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist” entities by Israel; Sudanese women’s rights defenders including Amira Osman, arrested and detained in January on “terrorism” accusations by the military coup government; Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul, tried in a special “terrorism court” for her work in service of women’s rights (she was released last February after being tortured and imprisoned for almost three years); Aafia Siddiqui, abducted, disappeared into a US “black site”, and sentenced to 86 years for “attempting to shoot” an American soldier (although she was the one who was actually shot); Indigenous Mapuche land and rights defenders like Patricia Roxana Troncoso Robles, criminalised as “terrorists” by the Chilean state; and Indian activists such as Hidme Markam and Ishrat Jahan, imprisoned under sweeping anti-terrorism laws for protesting against the Hindutva government’s assault on Adivasi (Indigenous) and Muslim communities.

Such cases are not simply an “abuse” or “misuse” of counterterrorism, but an expression of its original function: to suppress resistance to the colonial, capitalist status quo, whether on the 20th-century British killing fields of India and Kenya, or in the current-day open-air concentration camp of Gaza.

It is urgent that we call out rape atrocity propaganda and remind that this stratagem has historically been one of the most potent weapons used by White power to discredit, demonize, diabolize, and destroy Black and Brown men and to deflect sympathy from those resisting oppression to the actual oppressors, and finally to justify lethal responses. 

Race-critical feminists have filled libraries with books and writings on the historical and contemporary iterations of rape atrocity propaganda in the service of war, imperialism, and maintaining racial hierarchies. In the violent settler colony of Australia from where I write, Indigenous scholars such as Larissa Behrendt and Judy Atkinson have written about systematic sexual abuse of and assaults against Aboriginal women by White Australian colonialists as a function of conquest. Angela Davis' seminal text, “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist” (1981), showed how the racist trope of the African American rapist was mobilized after the Civil War to justify lynching and race hierarchies. Chicana scholar Antonia Castaneda has written about sexual violence waged against Amerindian Women in service of the Spanish conquest of Alta California. In 2007, Lebanese-Australian feminist and scholar Paula Abood analyzed media representations of group sexual assaults that took place in south-west Sydney and interrogated how racial ideologies were mobilized within media texts to “present rape as a manifestation of Arab male bestiality” to “reassert racialized subject positions.”  

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At the centre of the ‘believe women' movement were women's voices. Voices that are often silenced, discredited, ridiculed, and treated with hostility and contempt. However, when a critical race lens is applied to the absolutism of ‘believe women,' particularly in settler colonial contexts that are highly racialised with histories of lynching and vigilante settler violence, pernicious claims put Black and Brown men and their communities at great risk.

To be clear, the allegations of mass rape have come from the Israeli regime, not women.

In 2002, a coalition of Western women’s organizations sent an open letter to President George W. Bush, asking him to “take emergency action to save the lives and secure the future of Afghan women.” Its signatories included Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation in Virginia, together with other notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep, and Susan Sarandon. US women overwhelmingly support the war, they noted, because it will “liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression.” The National Organization of Women (NOW) put out statements in support of the war and its allegedly “feminist” objectives. Everyone in the mainstream American and British establishment, including white feminist heroines like eventual Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, signed on wholeheartedly to the cause of fighting the War on Terror via any means that the military, the CIA, or the president thought necessary. The disconnect between the practice of American brutality and preaching of American saviordom managed to escape notice.

Der aktuelle Gesundheitsnotstand in Gaza baut auf den ruinösen Auswirkungen der jahrelangen israelischen Maßnahmen gegen das Gesundheitssystem des Streifens auf. Wie Asi am 14. November gegenüber der Foundation for Middle East Peace erklärte, "wir hören immer öfter, dass das Gesundheitssystem in Gaza zusammengebrochen ist. 

Aber in Wirklichkeit steht das Gesundheitssystem des Gazastreifens schon seit 16 Jahren am Rande des Zusammenbruchs". In dieser Zeit hat Israel den Gazastreifen unter einer streng kontrollierten Blockade gehalten, die nicht nur den Zugang zu medizinischen Geräten und Medikamenten, sondern auch zu Lebensmitteln und Wasser einschränkte. Aus Dokumenten geht hervor, dass Israel zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt sogar die lebensnotwendige Mindestkalorienzufuhr berechnete. Diese Beschränkungen haben dazu geführt, dass 63% der Bevölkerung des Gazastreifens nicht genug zu essen haben und 30.000 Kinder unter fünf Jahren schwer mangelernährt sind. Auch das Wasser in Gaza war bereits vor dem 7. Oktober zu 96% nicht mehr trinkbar und verursachte ein Viertel der Krankheiten in der Enklave. Im Jahr 2018 waren Krankheiten, die durch Wasser übertragen werden, die häufigste Ursache für den Tod von Kindern in Gaza.