Palestine, the Women's March, and imperial feminism Much effort is made in the US to maintain that

Palestine, the Women's March, and imperial feminism

Much effort is made in the US to maintain that Palestine is not a feminist cause and erase the plight of its women.


Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory,walk together on Pennsylvania Avenue during the Third Annual Women's March in Washington, US, January 19, 2019 [File: Joshua Roberts/Reuters]
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Recent assaults on the reputation of Women's March cochair and prominent black American activist Tamika Mallory demonstrate, yet again, that speaking even the most basic truths about Israel and Palestine is a hazardous undertaking. Last June, Mallory was disinvited from a conference in Australia for public comments observing that the creation of the state of Israel entailed a "human rights crime" - a statement that should hardly have been considered radical, let alone grounds for a disinvitation, given that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that accompanied Israel's founding has been well-documented, including by Israeli historians. Mallory has come under fire again for a January 17 interview on PBS's "Firing Line", in which she responded to host Margaret Hoover's insistence that she recognise the state of Israel's "right to exist" by maintaining that "everyone has a right to exist ... I just don't feel that anyone has a right to exist at the disposal of another group." Mallory's position is an accurate reflection of international law: no state has an inherent right to come into existence, and certainly not any right to commit the crimes involved in Israel's ongoing "disposal" of the Palestinians, copiously recorded by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organisations.
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Journalists like Hoover fixate on the fabricated rights of Israel, while the actual rights of Palestinians enshrined in international covenants, such as the right to self-determination, the rights to be free from discrimination and collective punishment, and the right of return for refugees, are completely erased from the picture. Clearly, what is being demanded of activists like Mallory is not an affirmation of Israeli people's rights, but a denial that Palestinians have any rights at all.

The treatment of Mallory is alarming not because it is exceptional, but because it is not. Between 2014 and 2017, American NGO Palestine Legal responded to almost 1,000 incidents involving attacks on the expression of solidarity with Palestine - baseless lawsuits, censorship, violence, threats of violence, firings, and false accusations of anti-Semitism and terrorism. Over the past few years, laws against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which aims to pressure Israel to comply with international law, have now been enacted in 26 US states. Targets of punishment for Palestine solidarity in the US in the last few months alone have included scholar-activist Marc Lamont Hill, whose speech at the UN in support of justice and freedom for Palestinians got him fired from his post as a commentator on CNN - an outlet that habitually features a preponderance of Israeli government and advocacy perspectives while marginalising Palestinian ones. And Angela Davis, whose Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute was rescinded because of her activism for the fundamental human and civil rights of the Palestinians - a decision only reversed after it generated widespread public outcry.

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The conceit that Palestine is not a feminist issue is sustained by perpetual erasure of the Palestinian women who, in the words of Amnesty International, "carry the burden" of Israel's American-sponsored occupation and militarism: the women whose homes have been destroyed and family members arbitrarily imprisoned or killed, the women forced to suffer the indignities of being violated by soldiers and giving birth at checkpoints, the women harassed, abused, or killed for protesting the unliveable conditions under which they are made to exist.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/palestine-women-march-imperial-feminism-190129102338367.html