Voices from Palestine: Building feminist solidarity

Words: Kirthi Jayakumar

For the past five months, my morning routine has been like this. I wake up at 4 AM and check Instagram. I look up accounts that have been documenting the ongoing genocide in Palestine, silently wishing that those behind these accounts are still alive.

I scroll through my feed, my heart stopping every few seconds before speeding up in rage, grief, and anxiety. The loop goes on.

All around me, my neighbourhood is waking up. Chickens in my neighbour’s coop begin to cluck and crow. I watch a video narrating how whole swathes of Palestinian land were carpet bombed the previous night, with no end in sight. I watch a grieving story of a journalist missing her pet cat after the bombing.

Bikes are revved up and down as their riders pause to make deliveries on my street: Milk, fresh produce, newspapers. My thumb hovers over a post sharing about the ongoing starvation in Gaza.

I hear school buses pull up. Children bid their parents goodbye. I hear a mother desperately trying to get her son to eat one more morsel of breakfast before boarding his bus. My heart breaks at the sight of a mother on screen. She is bent double as she whispers into the ears of her dead child through layers of plastic wrapping: A sacred whisper as she sends her child onward into a journey she will never return from.

I sit with the dissonance.

Life is somehow going on – even as we watch a genocide unfolding in the palm of our hands.

This has been a shared reality at We Are Feminist Leaders – and perhaps with you, too. We’ve been trying to make sense of it all and drawing a blank. How does anyone make sense of a genocide, anyway?

At We Are Feminist Leaders, we’ve been grappling with the idea of solidarity. What does solidarity look like in these times? How do we show up for each other? How can we make the most of our collective social capital in doing so? This moved us to lay the foundations for this solidarity by recognizing that our social capital lies in our networks – however small – and we decided to bring in our communities as audiences to listen to the voices of Palestinian women. As bell hooks said, ‘To truly hear each other is an exercise in recognition’ – and it only made sense that we must hear the voices of women from Palestine. This led to the creation of a listening series centring the voices of Palestinian women.

Stories from the ground

In the first session in our series, we heard from Kifaya Khraim, International Advocacy Coordinator at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), in Ramallah, Palestine. One of the first feminist organizations established in Palestine, WCLAC has 5 branches in different areas of West Bank and Jerusalem. It offers legal aid, counselling, and psychosocial support for survivors of domestic violence on the one hand, and documents Israeli violations of Palestinian women in various areas through a network of field researchers, on the other. WCLAC documents these stories by taking affidavits, and through images and videos.  

Kifaya’s presentation was titled “Women Sheltering in Gaza,” alluding to the absence of designated shelters for women and families in Gaza to go to during times of military violence. Most often, women and children take refuge in schools.

The stories Kifaya shared with us in the series were documented by a colleague, Safad, who was in Gaza but fled with her three daughters in the first week of the aggression in October 2023. In the time before leaving, Safad had interviewed 15 Gazan women who were sheltering in schools and hospitals. When she returned home during the 10-day truce, she found that her home had been bombed.

Violence during evacuation

Women in Gaza told WCLAC that they were forced to take shelter together because of the destruction of most houses. The dense population in these areas resulted in a greater number of deaths and injuries. When given evacuation orders, many families tried to leave – but several among them were forced to stay back because there was no way to make the long, arduous journey on foot or on donkey carts in the absence of cars.

It was challenging for people with disabilities, the elderly, and family members who were ill to make these journeys. Women also testified to being bombed while evacuating to the south – either because of the constant bombing of the areas they were in, or because they were instructed and accordingly forced to leave by the Israeli occupation forces.

Once they reached their destinations, they found most schools that were being repurposed as shelters, overcrowded with displaced people like themselves. Often, several of them were told to find another school to stay in. Some of these schools were bombed, too, with women and children living in these spaces.

Leaving Gaza is near impossible: One would have to spare a minimum of USD 5000 for each person who wants to leave. Staying back makes one vulnerable to being bombed, and living in overcrowded spaces with the threat of diseases, alongside no food, no water, no medicines or healthcare facilities, no sanitary products to support menstruation, and no formula for children. Women have been forced to fashion toilets out of broken chairs placed over holes dug in the soil. Starvation, and electricity and water cuts, are being used as weapons – a war crime.

Stories of war crimes

Kifaya shared the stories of specific women on the ground. A pregnant woman gave birth after being shifted from hospital to hospital, and continues to live in fear of white phosphorus and chemical fumes and its potential impact on her baby. Another woman whose leg was injured by bombing remains separated from her children and has no knowledge of their whereabouts or wellbeing after she was carried on a dislodged door to a hospital by her brother and another man. A 70-year-old woman reported how an IOF soldier entered her house, and shot her two sisters, 30-year-old daughter, and her. The soldier shot them until he was sure they were dead – the woman survived because she pretended to be dead. Sadly, her sisters and daughter didn’t make it.

Women have been detained in Palestine throughout the occupation. However, stigma and fear have kept them silent all through it. Since October 7, though, more instances of detention have unfolded, and more and more women have begun speaking about it more openly – perhaps a function of the solidarity they find in each other and the sheer scale of the ongoing atrocities.

Women are forced to take off their clothes, subject to nude searches, and slut-shaming, alongside pressure to disclose information about Hamas – although none of the women have no knowledge of Hamas or any information to give at all.

Kifaya’s stories show how the IOF has long used sexual violence to shame and dehumanize Palestinian women. For a long time, women in Palestine keep their families’ money, jewellery, and other expensive items because men are the ones who are typically strip-searched at checkpoints. However, since October 7, women are also being strip-searched, and their money, jewellery, and other expensive things are stolen from them. There is an actual video on TikTok where an Israeli soldier shows off after having stolen a Palestinian woman’s necklace – which he then gifts to his girlfriend.

Even as Gaza has been the site of mass atrocities and war crimes, WCLAC has also documented testimonies with horrifying details of women in the West Bank. They were subject to threats, night raids, extreme violence, and extensive damage to property.

Women have been humiliated in front of the male members of their families, subject to detention and arrest, and sexual violence. Kifaya shared that women get calls for months in advance, threatening them that the IOF is coming for them. In detention, women are sexually assaulted, denied food, medicine, medical care, and sanitary products. They are left with nothing to cover themselves in the freezing cold of winter. Most women are arrested on falsified charges of “incitement.”

Where do we go from here?

October 7, 2023 and the events that unfolded after have not emerged out of nowhere. They are very much a product of a colonial, patriarchal, violent, militarized, and powerful system that has been able to keep up its violence behind a veneer of silence. A genocide is simply NOT acceptable, normal, or even condonable.

The work WCLAC is doing on ground is hard, painful, and challenging. Their dedicated documentation of the stories of women and their experience – not just now, but throughout the history of the occupation – presents the world with important truths that it cannot look away from. It is heavy to bear witness, and yet it is precisely what we must do. To exist is to resist. To resist is to centre revolutionary love. To centre revolutionary love is to recognize the truth. To recognize the truth is to know that all truth is actionable.

Nothing about this is going to be easy: The dissonance of leading life amidst all the pain and grief is as real as real can be.

To be feminist is to reflect on these realities, and to acknowledge that we’re part of a collective – the divorce of the individual in the name of liberal politics does no one any service.  As Dra. Rocio Rosales Meza says, "You are healing from 500+ years of colonization. Be gentle with you, and each other."

We worked with Riya Nagendra to produce a graphic note from the event. You can view it here.