“What does it mean to practice feminism in a moment of bearing witness to genocide?”
Just as I penned these words in my notebook Wednesday morning, after reading through the daily counts of the ongoing atrocities — with 4,200 Palestinians killed, including at least 1,000 children, and over one million displaced in just ten days — I received a WhatsApp message from a young woman scholar in Gaza, Mona Ameen, who I spoke to several weeks ago. She had reached out to interview me for a research project on global Palestinian feminism. We spoke for an hour or so, she asked her questions in Arabic, I responded mostly in English, with reflective pauses, bursts of laughter, a dropped call after the daily power outage — a reconnection, finally, and sharing stories in between. I had messaged her after the war began last week, a war that, in reality, began seventy-five years ago. I had worried about Mona periodically as the death toll kept mounting. Her first message was: “I am not fine at all, my neighbors and my colleagues are martyrs now, it’s my turn now ... just pray for us.”
Mona was, like many Palestinians in Gaza at this very moment, suspended in the alternative space-time of colonial war. Waiting for death, expecting it to arrive at any moment, while also fighting for her life. She had already lived through multiple Israeli assaults on Gaza. Her younger brother’s foot had to be amputated due to injuries sustained from an airstrike in 2014, and in 2021, she had borne witness to more atrocities. Originally from Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeast edge of the Gaza Strip, she had fled her house days ago during this latest assault, after receiving a “warning” call from the occupation forces. Her home was now uninhabitable after the bombing, and she was seeking refuge in Sheikh Radwan. When I asked if she had a message to women and feminists around the world in this moment, she replied:
“My message to all women and feminists [is] just to keep posting about Palestine and Palestinians and spread the truth, spread the news as much as they can, keep talking about us, we are not numbers, tell the world that we are not [only] under bombing as every time, this time is the most difficult, and we are [experiencing] a genocide, tell the women and feminists that huge numbers of mothers lost their children and huge numbers of children will complete their lives without their mothers. Keep posting and posting and posting about us ... keep us in your prayers.”
As I read and reread her messages now, I am holding close to the memory of the kindness in her voice when we spoke that day. I am holding on to Mona’s humility, too — the humility of a young Palestinian woman, living in the largest open-air prison in the world — in asking questions about how I, wrapped in all the privileges of bearing witness to colonial war from afar, in a U.S.-based academic institution, no less, understood feminism, about how I practiced it as a diasporic Palestinian. I am struck now, especially by one of the questions she posed: Do you believe in the power of raising feminist awareness as a critical consciousness? What are its goals, and how does it differ in your opinion from Western feminism?
At this moment, it is Mona and our Palestinian women, our people on the ground, who are teaching us lessons about what it means to practice feminism. Indeed, I want to answer Mona’s question with the proposition that practicing decolonial love in a time of genocidal war is a practice of critical feminist consciousness.
In speaking about feminist consciousness, I am not speaking of that universal, atemporal feminism that casts Palestinian women as defenseless victims who must be saved from the savage brutality of our Indigenous men, especially our Muslim men — that dangerous Orientalist narrative that has been weaponized to sell an imperial war to the masses, justifying the invasion, theft, or destruction of our homelands — the very narrative that has helped stoke fear and hatred in the colonizer this time around, mobilizing them for a military assault against our people, the grotesque scale of which we could not have fathomed. Nor is it that brand of colonial feminism that views us only as “human animals” (the term mobilized by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Oct. 9) who birth future terrorists, those one thousand (and counting) Palestinian children massacred by Israel in the recent incursion the world has allowed to be stripped of their humanity and denied their childhood and future. I am speaking of a decolonial Palestinian feminism.
To practice feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life. To practice feminism in this moment is to hold each other through the vast darkness of our grief, to walk with each other hand in hand, to bear witness to landscapes of death, and, as Mona urges us, to tell the truth. Indeed, Mona’s words invite us to break out of this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.
Telling the truth means not only refusing to look away from that which feels unbearable to know — that our people have not had access to water, food, shelter for days. As Mona wrote to me: “If we don’t get martyred from [the] bombing, we will die from the lack of water and food.” That our buildings, homescapes, and even hospitals have been targeted and destroyed on a mass scale; bodies buried in their depths, and our dead babies are still being pulled from the rubble. And that the entire population of Gaza has been framed as a dehumanized enemy that must be killed in order to give life to the colony. Telling the truth as feminists in this moment requires rejecting colonial narratives, and boldly affirming the power and creativity of our life force that we have always possessed and cultivated as Indigenous women, the power we have always wielded in service of dismantling settler colonialism and genocidal war, thrusting its overbearingness into crisis. In the same breath, telling the truth means amplifying our visions for freedom and dignity.
If we listen, we can witness the fractals of these visions in the voices of our people in Gaza, like Mona, who said:
“survived many wars, but this one, I don’t think I will survive! Although I don’t want to die, I have dreams. I want to have the chance to travel, and I want to have a chance to do my master’s degree and then my Ph.D., I have many dreams I am still young …
Tell the world … tell the world that I am here—one among many — all the people here are traumatized and don’t know how to express it, and we will not forget. Please keep talking about us, keep telling and spreading our stories and what is happening now, and keep us in your prayers.”
Mona’s message, her affirmation that she is still here, despite many wars, that she has dreams, and she (and we) will not forget, is an affirmation of Palestinian life and future making in the midst of colonial attempts at epistemicide and memoricide.
I texted Mona back: “We will never forgive the world that has allowed this to happen, nor will we stop fighting for our people’s lives.” I told her that I would share her words and that I also wanted to share that we love her and we love our people. To love our people and our homeland are one and the same, and that love is something the colonizer can never comprehend and can never take away from us. To know this, to feel this love deeply, is to know that we have already won.
As the Israeli settler colony has thrust another moment of apocalypse upon Palestinians, we must hold fast to Mona’s words: we must continue to enact refusal, shaking free of ghassa/ غصة, that lump in our throat when the grief is thick and suffocating, to boldly disrupt the noise of complacency. We must loudly denounce this genocidal violence. At the same time, we must continue to love and affirm each other, and our communal struggle for life, the very thing that exposes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the colonial project. Our refusal is a form of love. Indeed, our refusal and our love amidst this genocidal war expose the fractures and the limits of the colonial infrastructure. Our love is vital in this moment because it is revolutionary love that gives us the courage to continue the struggle to affirm Palestinian life and a future in our homeland. This is our Palestinian litany for survival.
