Patriarchal Violence and Zionist Genocide: The Resistance of Palestinian Women
Tifidi crafts a powerful analysis of how Palestinian women resist colonialism, genocide, and patriarchy through militant struggle, rejecting both imperialist oppression and bourgeois feminism.
By Tifidi
Israel: Loyal Attack Dog of US Imperialism in the Middle East
Although zionists have real teeth, as do any other jackal of planetary imperialist domination, they have become exposed and weak. As revolutionary leader Mao taught us, which can be found in his seminal Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung written by Hou Bo and the Chairman himself and published in 1964, they are paper tigers. When you cut open an occupying zionist soldier, a fragile nazi general bleeds. They haven’t been, and will never be, successful in smothering the fire of Palestinian uprising. The zionist stormtroopers cower in the face of Palestinians smashing their bondages of colonial oppression and slavery. There is a deep reservoir of hatred against the israeli occupation that has become seared into the political consciousness of oppressed humans around the globe.
In the context of Palestine's women fighters, they possess a fervor specific to their conditions. They know patriarchal suffering, the oppression of the female sex, is intimately bound to the genocide of their people as an oppressed nation. This has propelled them towards political organization, taking up arms and stabbing colonialism directly in its neck. The zionists and their legion of imperialist goons believe they have destroyed everything of Palestine—and while it is true that they have left them without homes, schools, electricity, water, and without their parents and siblings, Palestinian spirits will not be crushed. They find a pervading resistance in their homeland. There is nothing but righteousness and heroism in the Palestinian fight against zionist terror and genocide. They are delivering one of the strongest blows to the world imperialist system.
Zionism: its role in the Maintenance of Patriarchy & Femicide
Throughout this most recent explosion of zionist terror and bloodshed against Gaza, we have seen settler soldiers and military pigs break into women's houses to flaunt their undergarments as souvenirs and proof of the forced mass exodus of Palestinians due to zionist parasitism. These can be properly described as sexual crimes premised on the pornographic humiliation of Palestinian women as colonized and female subjects. This perverted logic used to sexualize and debase the women of Palestine is a political weapon used by israel to justify its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian masses.
While the liberal feminist camp has capitulated to propaganda that supports imperialist and zionist narratives bloodlibeling Palestine's resistance groups as “male rape hordes” mass violating female settlers, Palestinian women and children are being systematically sexually exploited and annihilated by zionist soldiers who rape with impunity. We should believe women in situations of aggravated sexual exploitation and violence, but we should not become mindless stooges that happily absorb the propaganda of the US-imperialist zionist axis which disguises itself as the inhibitor of “unbiased” journalism.
Patriarchal violence through the means of sexual slavery, prostitution and mass institutionalized rape during imperialist wars is a reality—that of which primarily affects the women and people of oppressed nations who are being occupied, exploited and dominated by foreign military and geostrategic interests. More on these manufactured claims can be found in the article US and Israeli mass rape propaganda, without credible evidence, is being used to justify Gaza genocide by Patrick Martin written in 2023 just two months after the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation.
There is also a stark connection between the zionist occupation and prostitution expansionism that we as revolutionary women and feminists must renounce; israel is one massive rape bordello comprised of some of the deepest elements of patriarchy and capitalist sex exploitation. The sex trade in the zionist entity generates $500 million a year as masses of women from nations in the former USSR, and parts of the imperialized world, have been exported to occupied Palestine as sex slaves, more on this can be found in an article published by Anya Stone called How the Sex Trade Becomes a Slave Trade: The Trafficking of Women to Israel; whereas statistics on prostitution revenue in the zionist occupation can be found in their own national reports, which are most likely intentionally deflated.
Furthermore, this isn’t even mentioning the barbarous conditions created by the zionists and their allies that have left the overwhelming majority of Palestinian girls and women open to the claws of the commercialized rape market under world imperialist patriarchy. Also, it is painfully true—zionist prisons serve one of the core functions of prostitution itself, which is sexual enslavement through repeated rape and assault. The israeli army leverages the captivity of national liberation fighters to punish all Palestinians as dispossessed and colonized subjects. The political economy and social practice of rape is an egregious arm of the imperialist world system.
Who are our Enemies & What is the Revolutionary Line?
It is pertinent for us to be completely opposed to hegemonic liberal feminism, which is the same ideological farce that praises women for flying fighter jets over oppressed nations dropping bombs. It defends female brothel owners that shackle women to patriarchal sex captivity and prostitution, it celebrates women owning neocolonial slave corporations, and in this case it celebrates women in israel’s occupying military. In all of this ruthless critique, it is not my intention to suggest that the oppression of women will cease to exist once the zionist military outpost is nothing more than a corpse but, rather, that national salvation must be achieved in order for female emancipation to be a considerable reality.
“Women’s activism” has largely been captured by liberalism and postmodernism, hampering our ability to mount resistance against global imperialism and its fundamental role in maintaining the oppression of women. Today, an abundance of yankee and western feminists are mere appendages to democrats. The “third wave feminism" of today has largely worked to reinforce the hegemony of postmodernist ideology, a distinctly nebulous outlook that obfuscates the class relations which generate exploitative contradictions—which has furthered the imperialist reconfiguration of women’s oppression. Imperialism is the worldwide exploiter of women’s labor and degrader of her dignity, it is the primary economic architecture that must be smashed to begin the transformative process of ending the enslavement and oppression of womankind.
The female revolutionaries of Palestine are mothers, students, and everyday people who, through experiencing the extreme oppression of the zionist occupation and fighting against it, have been transformed into women-for-revolution. They have been thrown into israeli prisons and sexually tortured as political prisoners for engaging in organized struggle against the zionists and their occupation. They have rejected the entrenched patriarchal backwardness of the old society that positions women as vessels for domestic slavery, reproduction, and sexual submission to men, and have fought as armed combatants for national and women's liberation. They are the faces of the revolutionary women’s movement.
The bourgeois feminist position that situates resistance to colonialism and imperialism as a “masculinist” trait explicitly ignores the role of the slave woman, the peasant woman, the working woman, the plundered woman, as a key revolutionary subject in militant struggle. History and ongoing revolutionary momentum paints a totally different picture of the participation of the exploited woman in relation to the imperialist world system; she is not reducible to an apolitical passerby, she is a brave and militant fighter. The Palestinian woman is no stranger to what the revolutionary women’s army looks like. We support them and the entirety of Palestine's resistance to zionism.