Israel is the face of mass femicide, not liberation

A response to the idiotic logic of the warmongers

I’ve posted a few notes on Substack and they don’t seem to get any views. Then today I posted one, got a notification that someone had commented, and when I tried to see the comment, it appeared that all my notes had disappeared. I don’t know if this is a temporary glitch but I’m re-sharing my comment as a post. It feels a bit silly because I am stating the obvious, but clearly it still needs to be said. My comment was a response to an image of a female IDF pilot with a statement like “Israel has female pilot fighters while Iran murders women for showing their hair.”

Colonizers and warmongers have always painted the world as black and white–good and evil, light and darkness, civilized and uncivilized. For the past decades, women’s rights have been cynically used as an anchor to this dichotomy, and it works. Profound ignorance about Palestine, Iran, and the Muslim world are the norm. Ignorance about the rest of the world too, since a dichotomy has of course two sides. Jews should know better than anyone that the best propaganda has a kernel of truth. (My mom is Jewish btw.) Some do know it, and use that knowledge to craft propaganda to subjugate and inflict the worst sadism onto other peoples. You plant a kernel of truth and you sow a world of ignorance and deceit.

Even if the dichotomy these people paint were true, it wouldn’t justify a war of aggression against Iran. By the logic of hasbarists and other Western racists clamoring for a “war of civilizations”, Israel would be justified in bombing most of the Global South and much of the Global North. Femicide in Mexico? Israel should bomb Mexico. Homophobia in Jamaica? Israel should ethnically cleanse Jamaica. Homophobes in the American Deep South? Israel should round them up and shoot them, since the logic of the day is that summary execution is the proper response to sexism and homophobia. And who should we call on to “liberate” Israeli society from the sexist and homophobic Orthodox Jews?

Let’s also not forget that Israel has been conducting mass slaughter of women for almost two years. Women in Gaza are being blown to pieces, are seeing their children blown to pieces and burned alive, they and their children are being starved and then shot dead when they take the risk to get food at the “aid distribution centers” that Israelis and Americans treat like shooting ranges, Palestinian women are forced to give birth under bombs and often with no medical care, a record number of women have miscarried because of the bombs, the displacement, the malnutrition, the lack of water… and of course there are also documented rapes and torture of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers.

Israel is the perpetrator of large-scale, depraved violence against women. It is the face of mass femicide. This is the Israel that is telling Iranian women, “your hour of freedom is here”.

Andrea Dworkin is, again, relevant. A Jewish American feminist, she wrote about the ideals and prejudices her education instilled in her, and her shift of perspective when she visited Israel. “When I was growing up, the only time I heard about equality of the sexes was when I was taught to love and have fidelity to the new State of Israel. This new state was being built on the premise that men and women were equal in all ways.” After visiting Israel, she came to the conclusion that “the state of women in Israel is abject” and that “if you are a Jewish woman you don't run to Israel, you run from it”.

I wish that Iranian women had somewhere to run to. More than that, I wish that those of us in the West would grind this war machine to a halt.

A few more things for now:

Note:
Is it fair that I use the term femicide, which is specific to the killing of women because they are women (as opposed to just Palestinian)? Yes, I believe it is. When the goal is genocide, targeting women as women, as the “means of reproduction”, the source and resource for new life, is part of the strategy.

Some protest/activism info:
National Day of Protest June 18 (w/ list of protests)
San Francisco protest on June 20
Codepink - Iran Rapid Response Toolkit

Some more reading:
Onslaught of violence against women and children in Gaza unacceptable: UN experts
Gaza: No Safe Pregnancies During Israeli Assault
Obstetric violence: An overlooked tool of genocide in Gaza
A note to people who complain that they’re “not allowed to criticize Islam”