Thank you for being here with us today, for standing firm against the anti-Palestinian agitation and for giving us visibility as Palestinian and Palestine solidarity feminists. Because that is what the decision to allow Palestinian flags is all about: visibility, the end of silence.
We understand that the struggle for liberation is international and it is feminist, because settler colonialism, war, destruction of nature and prisons are expressions of patriarchal violence.
We know that the Palestinian struggle must be understood as feminist and intersectional: Gendered and sexual violence are a central element of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.
These systems are inextricably linked and are based on patriarchy, global white supremacy and colonialism.
Throughout the country, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes, expels Palestinians, subjects Palestinian prisoners, including women, queer people and children, to systematic sexual and physical abuse and torture, and controls Palestinian bodies, sexuality, reproductive rights and family life.
Today we emphasise the role of Palestinian women in the fight against colonialism from the time of the British Mandate until today.
We emphasise that this resistance mostly took place through the invention and implementation of alternatives to its violence.
We know this because they are our grandmothers, mothers and daughters, our cousins and aunts who hold extended families together, who are freedom fighters, who are organisers and supporters of uprisings, who are political prisoners, who are hundreds of thousands of heroes who are unknown outside their intimate circle, but they are also well-known poets, writers, scholars and lawyers who are our cultural and social memory.
We know that Palestinian women’s resistance to foreign attacks is not a new phenomenon.
We have been participating in anti-colonial protests since the early 1920s, when it became clear that the British Mandate would facilitate the dispossession of Palestinians.
In the late 1930s, when British troops attacked the militant village of Baqa al-Gharbiyya, rounded up our men and took them away, stormed unarmed Palestinian women entered the barracks where the men were being held and secured their release.
Decades later, under Israeli occupation, it was women who were instrumental in organising popular committees that supported the first intifada. This was a mass mobilisation to win recognition of the Palestinians‘ right to self-determination.
Our women founded and staffed mobile health clinics, they taught underground in Gaza because Israel closed the schools to collectively punish the rebellious Palestinians, they prepared food and looked after the young people on the front lines.
Their forward-thinking grassroots leadership was marginalised by bureaucratic fragmentation after the 1993 Oslo Accords and the return of the only male Palestinian politicians began; those who clearly lacked and still lack the imagination to lead us out of the repressive bureaucracy of the so-called „peace process“.
It is therefore impossible for us not to emphasise the difference between the first and second intifadas, especially in terms of gender, a difference due in no small part to the creation of the treacherous Palestinian Authority in 1994.
We emphasise that women are still at the forefront of fighting the gender-based violence of settler colonialism and restrictive cultural norms. After a series of femicides in 2019, feminists from Rafah to Ramallah to Haifa organised themselves as the Tal’at movement under the slogan: There is no free land without free women. They declare Tal’at as part of a revolutionary feminist tradition. This means that our feminist movement is shaped by the experience of more than seven decades of Israeli settler and colonial violence. As Palestinian people, we are deprived of our most basic rights and needs while being paralysed in our collective development and resistance.
This reality forces us to analyse the experience of violence – in its various forms – as a social and political problem that must be tackled at its root and collectively, as a society.
We emphasise that Israel not only poses a direct threat to our lives and social reproduction, but has strategically worked to crush and fragment Palestinians socially, politically and economically in order to consolidate its control over us.
We emphasise that the deprivation of the Palestinian communities‘ collective capacity to act goes hand in hand with the strengthening of the patriarchal structures of kinship. This is particularly acute in the case of Palestinians in Israel, where a favourable relationship has developed between the Israeli government and the heads of the extended families. As part of this relationship, the state gives these men the power to regulate matters that are considered „internal“. For example, the Israeli police have returned fleeing women suspected of being abused to their relatives and spouses, the same people from whom they have sought refuge.
The police, as women all over the world know, are neither our protector nor our ally,
not only in Germany, but especially when they are part of a colonial structure that
sees Palestinians as subjects to be monitored and controlled, be it the Israeli police
or the American-trained Palestinian Authority police, whose primary task is to protect interests of our coloniser and render Palestinians in the Palestinian territories incapable of acting.
We emphasise the systematic paralysis of Palestinian economic development and the transformation of Palestinians, including women, into cheap and exploitable labour. All of this culminates in a multi-layered system of violence in which power relations are intensified and reproduced in their gendered, economic, social and political forms, directly affecting life within our community.
Together here today in the anti-colonial bloc, we uphold the legacy of solidarity between Palestinian, black, indigenous, feminists of the Global South, the international working class and queer communities who have fought side by side in anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements around the world.
This is in contrast to imperialist, neoliberal feminist traditions: Those who proclaim elsewhere in Leipzig today; that they can buy themselves flowers while continuing to deploy feminist discourses and hair-brained accusations of anti-Semitism against Palestinians and other marginalised communities, deliberately omitting the structural forms of gendered and sexual violence.
Liberal feminisms rely on Orientalist discourses to silence and undermine the collective aspirations of Palestinian women and their peers, contributing to an intensified political oppression that criminalises freedom of expression and opinion about Palestine and Palestinian liberation. Their colonial feminism portrays Palestinian women as helpless victims, who are afraid of their own culture, society and religion need to be saved, while at the same time portraying them as expendable, threatening and worthy of death.
Since 7 October, we have witnessed the resurgence of liberal, orientalist and colonial feminist narratives by Western media and society: in this context, Palestinian men are collectively portrayed as brutal aggressors and sexual predators, as well as unloving fathers who use their children as human shields. Palestinian boys and men have been generalised as bloodthirsty terrorists, rapists and savages to justify the genocide and collective punishment of Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinian boys and men subjected to extreme physical and sexual torture in Israeli prisons and detention centres. These are just a few examples of how we understand this current genocide and the broader structure of Israeli settler and colonial violence as rooted in gendered and sexual violence and oppression. There is no end to the perversion. Testimonies and documentation of these violations and harassment are far from new, but there is selective interest in whom this violence is taking place. We refuse to play this game of selective observation and pitting those affected by this violence against each other; we continue to demand clarification.
We as Palestinians and Palestine solidarity feminists reject any appropriation of feminist and queer discourses, the so-called pinkwashing, which are used to dehumanise Palestinians, justify the ongoing violence in Palestine, and de-legitimise and oppress our political activism at home and in the diaspora.
Israel falsely praises itself as a safe haven for women and men. LGBTQ communities. Their propaganda portrays us as violent and regressive, even though we are routinely, indiscriminately raped, abused and murdered without regard for our bodily autonomy.
We as Palestinians continue to affirm life in the face of the ongoing Naqba (catastrophe) that manifests itself in the deadly closure and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the military occupation of the West Bank, the legal categorisation as second-class citizens in the settler state, exile in refugee camps and the global diaspora, and the denial of the right to return to our homeland. Our liberation is an act of love, a radical reimagining of a world based on dignity, equal rights and freedom for all.
In memory of our people in Gaza and our ancestors. Free Free Palestine