Israel, White Feminism, and Racism: The Triad of Privilege

Insight by Camilla Donzelli

On the occasion of International Women's Day, the IOF X account shared a video, less than a minute long, of a female soldier explaining an alleged Hebrew phrase book supposedly given to Hamas fighters to carry out the mass rapes whose reports were amplified by many Western media outlets before verifying their authenticity or sources. The video ends with the following message: “The IDF has been operating every single day, women and men, shoulder to shoulder, to make sure no woman has to face a masked terrorist and hear those words ever again. Now more than ever, as the world commemorates International Women’s Day, we cannot forget the atrocities committed against women on October 7th. Fight for women. Fight with us.”

The allegation of “widespread and systematic” rapes committed on October 7 has been widely debunked by reputable outlets such as The Intercept, Al Jazeera, and The Electronic Intifada. Yet, with the complicity of the European and US media, the story has been repeatedly amplified internationally and continues to resonate strongly within the dominant narrative of the ongoing genocide. At first glance, this may appear to be nothing more than a successful propaganda operation. However, the power of this communication strategy has much deeper roots, embedded in the ideological substrate of a particular strain of white feminist thought that decolonial activist Françoise Vergès describes as “civilizational feminism”.

In her book “Women, Race and Class”, Angela Davis offers a thorough analysis of the myth of the black rapist, explaining how false accusations of rape against white women were carefully constructed as a powerful tool to serve colonial racism. Over time, this myth was not only systematically invoked to legitimize lynchings and waves of violence against the entire black community, but also laid the groundwork for justifying the alleged cultural and intellectual inferiority of black people - a narrative that was ultimately used to give moral meaning to their annihilation and enslavement. Indeed, if black men are conceptualized as pathological rapists, black women are automatically stereotyped as inherently promiscuous or submissive. In this way, the entire ethnic group is dehumanized and bestialized, and in a society where sexism is pervasive, the extreme violence perpetrated by the white community is excused - or even demanded and praised - in the name of “taming” and “civilizing” to protect “our women”.

Similarly, the accusations of rape against Hamas militants have dehumanized Arab men as a group, reducing them to a bestial stereotype. This narrative undermines not only the moral legitimacy of the struggle for liberation from colonial oppression but, more importantly, the very legitimacy of the existence of the Palestinian people as a whole. From this perspective, the unprecedented violence inflicted on the people of Gaza is “deserved”, with the automatic consequence of justifying Israel's “salvific” military intervention to “civilize” and “uplift” a society perceived as pathologically and irredeemably backward and misogynistic.

This is precisely where the alliance between white feminism and Zionism emerges.

Continuing her analysis, Davis notes how many feminists active in the early decades of the 19th century actively supported and promoted the myth of the black rapist. To explain this stance, Davis traces the origins of white feminism, reminding us that it was a movement typically rooted in the bourgeoisie and therefore inherently liberal. The approach adopted by this strain of feminism has never questioned the systemic causes of gender oppression. Instead, it has consistently reduced the discourse to a mere negotiation of spaces and rights within the existing system, which is seen as the best possible option because it ensures the prosperity of the dominant class, of which liberal white feminists themselves are a part. Over time, white feminism has indeed worked to maintain the status quo, becoming a key player in the “civilizing mission” to spread Western values and models of economic organization and development.

It is no surprise, then, that many European and US feminist voices have amplified the Israeli authorities' propaganda - consider, for example, the spread of the #metoounlessyouareajew campaign. This has fuelled a collective, femonationalist narrative that portrays “our women” as needing protection from a threatening, obscurantist “them”. This “them” stands in stark contrast to the media representation of the emancipated white female body as the tangible embodiment of a progressive and morally superior West.

Less than two months into Israel's genocidal assault, the British tabloid Daily Mail published a piece entitled “Lionesses of the Desert: Inside the all-female Israeli tank unit taking on Hamas Terrorists”. The article focuses on the figure of the battalion commander, a young British citizen, who is pictured smiling with a rifle slung over her shoulder, maneuvering a tank against a post-apocalyptic backdrop. In one of the photographs, we can see her hands, described by the reporter as “perfectly manicured with painted nails”. The commander seems to be emphasizing the strength and courage of her unit, which is made up entirely of women and whose mission is to “protect the people”. The article ends with a quote from another soldier, an Israeli citizen and mother of three, who says: “I looked many in the eye. They saw me, and they saw I was a woman. Put it this way, they won't be getting 72 virgins because they were taken out by a woman”.

Women in uniform, free to pursue a military career like men, even as mothers, able to maneuver weapons and tanks with their nails painted red. In short, women, ready to “save” and “re-educate” the Palestinian female population, portrayed in stark contrast as veiled, silenced and subservient to a generalized, pathologically misogynistic and tyrannical male entity.

Yet the primary victims of the Zionist colonial machine are women - the very Palestinian women Israel claims to be “saving” through the charitable actions of its emancipated female soldiers. But it hardly matters, because ultimately there is a convergence of interests between white feminism and Zionism: the maintenance of privilege. From a global class perspective, it is only by extracting value from the Global South and from the Indigenous peoples oppressed and exploited by imperialist policies that this same privilege is maintained and reproduced. This is why white feminism is so eager to find a moral justification for the ongoing genocide: to recognize the suffering and legitimacy of the struggle for self-determination of Palestinian women - and the Palestinian people as a whole - would mean questioning its own privilege and ideological positioning. Essentially, it would mean acknowledging the need to fundamentally rethink the capitalist system based on the exploitation of racialized people that produced this privilege.

The existence of patriarchal oppression within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate and exacerbate this oppression, is even more problematic. The issue of gender oppression cannot be considered in isolation from occupation, apartheid and genocide. How can one imagine spaces for dialogue and change within society in a context where everyone, including women, is relentlessly fighting for their survival?

White feminism is a rhetorical distortion that extrapolates and decontextualizes the issue of gender oppression within Palestinian society in order to give credibility to capitalist and imperialist logic. To avoid falling into this trap, it is necessary to mend the rupture and reclaim the radical demands that the Palestinian resistance has long articulated.

The first step - perhaps the most important - in moving in this direction is to identify and deconstruct all those internalized stereotypes rooted in racism and Islamophobia that portray the Palestinian population (and, by extension, all Arab populations) as backward, misogynistic and homophobic. In other words, we need to decolonize our minds and become aware of the pedestal on which we sit, which leads us, sometimes unconsciously, to view all other identities from a position of superiority and to adopt prescriptive tones that claim to “teach how it's done”.

As feminist anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud suggests, it is important to reject the language, narratives and imaginaries of the oppressor, which are based on liberal categories of state-nation and borders, and which consequently present militarisation, borders and oppression as natural facts. Instead, we should get used to listening to and using the words of the oppressed.

In doing so, we would discover, for example, that the stereotypical representation of Palestinian women as silent and submissive, sold by Israel and its Western allies, is a historical falsehood. The participation of Palestinian women in the resistance movement and, more generally, in political life has a long history. This history dates back to the early 20th century, with an active contribution to the resistance against the British occupation. It continued and developed through the 1970s and the First Intifada, where Women's Committees played a fundamental role. It extends to the present day, with valuable individual and collective experiences. A history that clearly demonstrates the importance of fighting on multiple fronts, bearing in mind that one form of oppression cannot be dismantled at the expense of another. A history that invites us to open ourselves to entirely new imaginaries of liberation.