Hamas and Feminist Dissonance
By Sonya Michel.
It was predictable that Hamas officials and their radicalised international supporters would deny that sexual violence against Israeli women and men was committed on 7 October 2023. But denials from the academic field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are more surprising because they appear to violate two of the field’s salient principles: support for women’s sexual autonomy and insistence that women who lodge charges of sexual violence should be believed. Instead, a number of academic feminists have not only rejected Israeli claims, they have also embraced Hamas, along with all the reactionary patriarchal baggage of radical Islam, thereby abandoning their own stated values.
This subversion of academic feminism has been unambiguously apparent in multiple events organised by women’s and gender studies programs across the US since the 7 October attacks. The most recent of these was held on 11 February, when the Gender and Women’s Studies department at the University of California at Berkeley sponsored a webinar panel discussion titled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine.” The original abstract for the event read:
Some of the more important accomplishments of feminism include the insistence on “believing women” who come forward with accusations of sexual assault, and the awareness of increased sexual violence during militarized conflicts. Yet these achievements are currently being turned against real feminist concerns in Palestine. This talk will look at how Zionism has weaponized feminism, so as to serve Israel’s genocidal intent, by upholding debunked accusations of systematic Hamas mass assault, while ignoring documented reports of Israeli abuses.
The abstract was taken down after UCB law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon published a critical op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on 3 February. Solomon anticipated that the panelists’ talks would likely “celebrate antisemitic violence” and create “a hostile environment for women” on campus, thereby violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two days later, UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons responded to Solomon in a letter to the Journal:
The optional event that Prof. Solomon referenced hasn’t happened yet. The courts have made clear that the campus administration can’t cancel an event based solely on fears of what might be said. If the event proves to be a venue where odious views contrary to our institutional values are expressed, I will, as I have in the past, respond appropriately.
The event duly went ahead as planned, but when one of the panelists expressed precisely the kind of views that Solomon predicted, Lyons never responded.
The 11 February panel featured three speakers: human geographer Walaa Alqaisiya, anthropologist Nadine Naber, and Nada Elia, an Ethnic Studies scholar. Their presentations consumed the entire hour allotted for the webinar, which left no time for questions.
Alqaisiya’s talk probably sounded harmless to the uninitiated, since her points were buried under an impenetrable layer of postmodern jargon. She claimed that Zionism “occupies queerness” and that “hetero-colonising” blocks “Palestinian struggles for liberation.” Nevertheless, “de-colonial queerness” could be used to counter “Zionist settler imaginings,” and the Palestinian queer movement alQaws is busy opposing “ecocidal violence.” Alqaisiya acknowledged that an Israeli soldier had raised the rainbow-coloured Pride flag in Gaza in November 2023, but she dismissed this display as an act of “pinkwashing” (the anti-Zionist claim that Israel’s progressive record on gay rights is used to obscure the greater crimes of Zionist occupation and oppression). She challenged depictions of Palestinian women as passive and downtrodden with the assertion that their “anti-imperialist feminism” transforms their experience into a form of “living martyrdom.”
Nadine Naber sought to recast the subordinate role that radical Islam imposes on women as voluntary and politically valuable. She argued that efforts by Palestinian women in Gaza to protect and nurture their families are comparable to those of poor African American and “Latinx” mothers in Chicago. Both, she said, are acts of “revolutionary motherhood,” critical to “resisting state violence.” (One may well ask if the women themselves experience it that way.) While the problems faced by these two groups of women clearly derive from very different sources, Naber’s American analogy seemed to be intended to elicit the sympathy of her American audience by evoking a familiar point of reference. Left unmentioned was the fact that much of Gazan women’s suffering results from Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields, which deliberately places mothers and children in harm’s way.
Nada Elia’s presentation was more disturbing than the two that preceded it, since it bore at least the veneer of scholarly respectability. She denied that Hamas had committed any rapes on 7 October but went on to allege that the Israeli military had engaged in sexual violence “from the start” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beginning with the kidnapping of a young Bedouin girl in 1949 who was then “sexually enslaved.” Mention of this outrage, she pointed out, had even been recorded by Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion in his contemporary diaries. And in the decades that followed, sexual violence was repeatedly inflicted on Arab men and women in Israeli prisons and detention centres—crimes documented by the UN High Commission on Human Rights and by NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Elia specifically mentioned a 2024 UN report prepared by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (also known as the “Pillay Report,” after its lead investigator, Navi Pillay). Elia noted that the Pillay Report accuses Israelis of subjecting Palestinian prisoners to various forms of ill-treatment, some of which have been sexual in nature. When the report became public, Elia said, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich expressed outrage about the leaks involved but not about the acts themselves. Indeed, she asserted, unnamed “Israeli officials” have claimed that sexual violence is needed to maintain their country’s security—and that “all measures were legitimate against terrorists.”
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What? Events on campuses are canceled all the time before they happen because of fear of hearing dissenting opinions.
It would be useful to know how many attended this "event." Does anyone care about this nonsense anymore?