A Feminism That Embraces Humanity

Lila Abu-Lughod

12 December 2023

I would like to focus on some concerns I have as a feminist scholar with close personal connections to Palestinian feminist colleagues.[1] Their situations and their insights have helped me see aspects of the dynamics now at work in the devastating human nightmare unfolding in Gaza.  

What is perhaps most distinctive about our current moment is that the seventy-five years of Palestinian dispossession and subjection to genocidal violence is happening in real time and on camera. There’s nothing new in Israeli aims to force Palestinians to accept their subjugation or to expel them. But the intensity and visibility are unprecedented. In the past, those supporting Israeli rule tried to organize their debates around disputes about facts—who started what, who did what, who refused what. But they cannot now dispute the scale of the deaths, injuries, deprivations, and displacements.  So, they have to try to frame the issues in ways that distract us from what we are seeing. I’ll give just two examples that have shown this tactic starkly.    

First, I want to discuss the reaction of the heads of the Hebrew University in Jeruslaem (HUJI) to a public letter signed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian colleague with whom I worked for years and collaborated recently on The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (2023). Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a chaired professor of law and social work at HUJI and a brilliant and accomplished scholar, one of only a handful of tenured Palestinian women in the top ranks of the Israeli academy.

On 26 October, she signed the public letter “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.” She speaks as an expert and the author of, most recently, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019).  She is also a therapist, social worker, feminist antiviolence activist, consummate ethnographer, and a sophisticated theorist of the effects of militarization and securitization on women and on children.  The open letter that has by now garnered over two thousand signatures from experts on childhood is about the devastating effects on children of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with arms provided by Western powers; the forced evacuation of over a million people by the Israeli Defense Forces; and the denial of food, water, and fuel by the Israeli state. The letter placed this in the framework of seventy-five years of settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and seventeen years in which Gaza has been little more than an open-air prison. The letter points out that children are losing their lives, their futures, and their ability to breathe.

At the time the letter was published, there were three thousand children killed. The number has more than doubled since late October—over seven thousand now, not to mention the wounded and missing. The letter describes research that has exposed the long-term effects of wartime experiences and research in Gaza that reveals the ongoing cumulative trauma and its effect on children’s well-being and emotional, mental, and physical health. It concludes that there is no moral justification whatsoever for continuing this brutality that will result in “the debilitation, wounding, and death of thousands more children.” As it has now. It insists, poignantly, that “Palestinian children have names, families, stories, and dreams, yet they are facing global and local brutalities that reduce them to anonymous numbers.”  It concludes: “As academics and students of childhood, we say that no child should be subjected to violent death, injury, or starvation, no matter where they are from. We affirm: Palestinian children’s lives are precious.”

Three days after this call for a ceasefire and protection of the people in Gaza went public, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian received a joint letter from the president and the rector of her university. The letter’s final line states: “We are sorry and ashamed that the Hebrew University includes a faculty member like you. In light of your feelings, we believe that it is appropriate for you to consider leaving your position.”

I want to point out that they refused to accept the open letter’s framing of the bombardment and ground incursion as a genocidal war, calling it an “appalling claim regarding the extermination of a nation that Israel is allegedly committing”; and they denied as “absurd” the by now well-documented history of the colonization of Palestine and the effects of the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 and the ongoing settler colonial expansion and rule through law, prisons, and violent appropriation in the years that followed, including the present; and they were silent on the substance or content of the letter, which was, after all, about children and the traumatic and inhumane debilitation of children’s lives by war. They objected not because of the facts she had described about what was happening to the people of Gaza but because of the way the letter framed the ongoing events. They objected to the framing because they could not dispute the facts. It was intolerable for them to see the victimization of children and their mothers and uncles and aunts; so, they called instead for the resignation of a courageous, brilliant, and internationally recognized feminist member of their faculty.

They threatened not just Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s dignity and livelihood but her personal safety. She feared arrest. She hid in her apartment. She still does not know whether she will be teaching when HUJI reopens. This story matters to me not just because she is a colleague and friend but because one of the most important things she taught me while we worked together on our book on gender violence is that we must attend to how violence is framed. The final paragraph of our introduction  offered some guidelines: “Untangling the multiple entwined and layered forms of violence that devastate the lives—physical, social, and psychic—of so many around the world is a first step to resisting the selectivity of the violences that are made visible, the willed blindness to ‘collateral’ harms, and the suspension of judgment about the complex political interests at stake in the worlds we inhabit” (p. 38). We urged the reframing of an important feminist agenda to widen the definitions of what constitutes violence and what violence matters. What happened to Shalhoub-Kevorkian is significant for the way it reveals the power of framing. 

The second case that shows how framing matters in these dark times is about the weaponization of anti-Semitism by an American feminist social justice organization in response to current events. The organization is called Zioness, and it describes itself as a coalition of Jewish activists and allies who are unabashedly progressive and unapologetically Zionist. They claim to be fighting for the inclusion of Zionists in social justice spaces. Zioness, their website says, “commits to actively opposing all forms of oppression, including racism, classism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, white saviorism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia.” Zionism is described not as a colonizing movement but as “the original progressive movement––a movement of liberation for a long-persecuted minority, and a veritable miracle in the global fight for justice.”

Again, however, as it has become impossible in these times to deny the deadly violence being unleashed, Zioness tries to reframe the issues. Zionesses entered the war of words recently, in this case with the word genocide. On their web page “Violating the Victims: Standing Up to the Degradation of the Word ‘Genocide,’” they start off in ways that are uncontroversial: “In an age of rampant misinformation and the mass proliferation of unverified content, many well-intentioned people are struggling to determine the appropriate use of certain language.” But then the document goes on to warn that “too many are reacting to the war between Israel and Hamas in a way that indicates they have internalized age-old antisemitic tropes.”  The accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity, the document insists, are simply morphs of age-old tropes of antisemitism.

What is the trope? Zioness reads the language of genocide as blood libel. “Jews,” it explains, “have been libelously accused for thousands of years of being murderous, bloodthirsty people who enjoy violence and seek it both for pleasure and for ritualistic purposes. This is why imagery of blood in the context of Jews is ubiquitously understood as antisemitic and intended to instill fear of ‘the Jew,’ individually or collectively.” The political use of military violence and mass destruction by the Israeli state and army is reframed here: there is a rush from the present actions of a highly armed nation-state to persecution from medieval times. There is a confusion of political critique with horrible past forms of antisemitism, in that sense instrumentalizing or weaponizing blood libel to avoid criticism. This is precisely what the document deplores in charges of genocide—that it is being instrumentalized. The invocation of the gory trope of blood libel, however, accomplishes the task of making Jews the victims, even while Israel, to which the Zionesses are committed, is perpetrating shocking harm.

In this Alice in Wonderland world, anti-Zionism is called a conspiracy theory and a caricature. It too is simply a morph of anti-Semitism. Here we see the same category mistake that Nadia Abu El Haj pointed out so sharply in her open letter to the President of Barnard College: “Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are directed against persons for who they are—or, perhaps more accurately, for who they are assumed to be. As speech acts, they constitute racist and hate speech. Anti-Zionism, by way of contrast, is directed at a state-building project and a political regime. To render anti-Zionism equivalent to the first three is to commit a fundamental category mistake.”

Anti-Semitism is about who one is; anti-Zionism is about a political project. The two should not be confused. But Zioness confuses them deliberately. It is sad to see a feminist organization that worked on progressive issues like reproductive rights and social justice capitulating to this kind of framing of reality. When they called on their members to go out and march, their cause was the return of the hostages. It was not for a ceasefire that would be good for everyone, including those being held. They did not advocate an end to violence, an end to militarism, an end to war. But militarism and war, and the ways they destroy lives and families everywhere, have long been core feminist issues, issues that Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian risked so much to highlight in the letter on children that she signed.

I have been truly moved over these last two months by the visible leadership of feminists, women, and the LGBTQ+ community in their calls for ceasefire and their charges of genocidal violence. At marches and rallies, in actions around the country, I see how they have learned to shout through bullhorns, determined to keep attention focused on what we are all seeing with our own eyes. They are naming the existential conditions under which Palestinians have been forced to live and die, whether under bombardment or scattered, expelled, and dispossessed. They insist that history did not begin on 7 October. My grandmother, my father, my uncles and aunts, and some of my oldest cousins were forced into exile. My friends and colleagues who stayed, whether in ’48 Palestine or internally displaced in the West Bank or Gaza, have been subjected to the harsh rule of the Zionist project of the Israeli security state. The students and activists have refused to be silenced, and I consider this the kind of feminism I want to stand with and the kind of feminism that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian models for us—a feminism that embraces humanity.   

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Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She studies cultural forms from poetry to media and writes on the politics of representation, gender, nationalism, and women’s rights discourses. She is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics” (2020).

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[1] The following short essay was originally written for the faculty panel “On Feminism and Palestine” organized at Columbia University on 4 December 2023.