The Question of Palestine as a Feminist Issue

Palestine is often discussed as a geopolitical conflict. Yet it is fundamentally a feminist issue. Palestinian women face violence due to the genocide Israel is committing, seen through reproductive violence and healthcare deprivation. This leads Palestinian women to be disproportionately affected by different forms of violence fundamentally shaped by the occupation. Despite these realities, their experiences rarely occupy a central place within mainstream feminist discourse. Western feminism has historically focused primarily on gender as a field of inequality, often detaching women’s oppression from the broader political and colonial structures that shape it. The case of the Palestinian people forces us to address the intersections of gender, race and imperial hierarchies, revealing the limits of feminist frameworks that fail to address colonial domination.

The gendered consequences of occupation become particularly visible in the examination of Israeli policies and their effects on Palestinian women’s reproductive health and access to medical care. If Western feminism seeks to confront violence against women globally, then it cannot ignore Palestine, where occupation produces forms of gendered violence.

A clear example of gendered violence under occupation can be seen in Israel's attack on reproductive health infrastructure, including hospitals and nutrition programs—a colonial strategy of genocide, often described as “reprocide”. It is defined as the systematic destruction of reproductive capacity and therefore is a gendered form of violence. 

In the eyes of Israel, the size of the Palestinian population has served as a demographic threat, framed as an issue of national security. The assertion of Israel is that to maintain superiority over the Palestinians, Israeli Jews must demographically surpass the Palestinians to perpetuate control over the state. Through this, we see reproduction politicized.

In 2023, it was reported that 50,000 women in Gaza were pregnant, with an average of 183 births a day, of which approximately 15 percent involved complications. In July 2025, there were reports of Israel preventing baby formula from crossing the blockade and mothers unable to breastfeed due to malnutrition. Additionally, Israel has targeted not only hospitals but also aid locations, forcing many women to give birth without medication. Moreover, the performance of Cesarean sections is sometimes done without sterilization or anesthesia, with women being forced to leave hospitals shortly after birth due to a lack of hospital space. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, states that “What is happening to Palestinian women and girls is not collateral damage of war,” but rather “It is the intentional destruction of their lives and bodies, for being Palestinian and for being women.” Israel’s treatment of Palestinian women has equated them to manifestations of nature needing to be tamed and controlled, thus using women's bodies as strategic sites of violence in conflict as a tool of genocide. 

However, the use of healthcare as a mechanism of control is not limited to contemporary events. Historically, Israeli policies have systematically restricted Palestinian access to medical services, reflecting more than institutional neglect but also the ideology of colonial governance. Underlying these policies is the enduring perception of Palestinian population growth as a demographic time bomb. Israel has successfully established conditions for reproductive health to become a tool of control over the Arab Palestinian population.

Research conducted in the Ramallah district in 1981 cited an infant mortality rate of 91 deaths per 1,000 births, which stood in contrast to figures from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, which reported rates of 14 deaths per 1,000 births among Israeli citizens. In parallel to today's situation, malnutrition was pervasive and pregnant women were revealed to have high levels of anemia due this. The average expenditure of health services by the government within occupied territories did not exceed $30 per person, whereas Israeli citizens averaged around $350 per person. Through the Israeli civil administration, Palestinians are made dependent on the few health systems that are made available to them. During the 1987 Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin reduced the number of hospital beds in Israeli hospitals available to Palestinians, which, as Elise Young in her book “Women and the Israeli Occupation” claims, was to ensure further loss of life. Such policies illustrate how healthcare infrastructure has long functioned as a mechanism of political control within the occupation, producing conditions that disproportionately endanger Palestinian women and children through gendered burdens of reproductive care and labour.

Within Israeli detention centers, women are subjected to severe sexual and gender based violence. The extent of the violence is given through graphic accounts from human rights organisations documenting forms of sexual humiliation and violence directed specifically at Palestinian women prisoners. Reports find that pregnant women are handcuffed while they are giving birth. Fabrizia Falcione, a women's human rights officer for the U.N., notes that when commenting about the situation, “the rights of Palestinian women prisoners are recognized, but not respected.” This comment resonates not only with the treatment of Palestine by Israel but also with the way Palestinian women are addressed internationally. They rarely occupy a central place within mainstream feminist discourse, reflecting a broader pattern within Western feminism which historically has framed women of the Global South as a homogenous group of cultural victims rather than political subjects shaped by colonial power structures.

The case of Palestine reveals how structures of discourse show which women’s suffering is recognised within feminism. For decades, Western political discourse has framed Israel as a liberal democracy defending itself against a hostile environment. This framing has shaped not only political debate but feminist narratives. Within these narratives, Palestinian women are often portrayed as victims of their own societies and culture. This shifts attention away from the structural realities of Israeli military occupation while simultaneously dehumanising Palestinian men as inherently oppressive. Accordingly, we see this repeated tendency of scholars to use cultural explanation to justify conflict in the Global South, diminishing the central importance of historical contexts that shape situations faced by women of the Global South. 

Scholars Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar have identified this pattern within feminist discourse as “imperial feminism,” describing how feminism prioritizes Euro-American perspectives while excluding the voices and experiences of Black women and women of the Global South. Cultural explanations not only reproduce colonial narrative but also largely distort reality. This framework labels non-Western cultural practices as “feudal residues,” portraying women of the Global South as politically immature who must be educated in the values of Western feminism. Western feminist analysis of practices done by the Global South typically gives a simplified notion of oppression. Thereby positioning Western feminism as the normative standard against which other societies are judged.

This tendency has long shaped Western feminist interpretations of women of the Global South. Cultural practices such as veiling have frequently been interpreted as symbols of women's oppression. Additionally, geopolitical interventions such as America's invasion of Afghanistan, with the justification of “saving Afghan women”. Such narratives frequently reinforce the notion of muslim women as passive victims in need of Western intervention. Within this framework, women in the Global South are frequently defined primarily through their victimhood rather than recognised as political actors navigating systems of power.

This is particularly problematic within the Palestinian context due to the conditions faced by Palestinian women being dictated not due to cultural oppression but as a consequence of Israel’s settler colonial policies. Their suffering therefore becomes detached from the reality of occupation and reinterpreted as an inevitable product of society. Palestinian women are therefore reduced to a status of passive victims, a representation which serves as justification for their silence within feminist discourse and risks rendering them as merely casualties of Israel’s violence. 

The colonial assumptions within feminist scholarship prompt us to believe that silence is neutral rather than a political position, which reveals privilege and positionality. The relative silence of feminist institutions on Palestine is not an isolated event but rather a broader ideological and institutional complicity within Western academia. The silence translates as a form of epistemic violence, deliberately erasing Palestinian narratives and henceforth legitimising colonial structures. 

Scholars such as Al-Hardan note that Palestinian research is often forced into the framework of the “Israel–Palestine conflict,” a framing rarely required when examining other forms of oppression such as the Holocaust. This constraint limits how Palestinian experiences can be understood and reinforces the marginalisation of Palestinian perspectives within academic discourse. Al-Hardan argues that research “is only possible because of sanctioned epistemologies in academic institutions that treat colonized and stateless peoples as 'others,' to be consumed as objects of knowledge”.

This epistemological structure shapes feminist representation of women of the Global South, creating a homogenous narrative of oppression of women which characterizes the representation of women of the Global South. This contrasts with the self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, in control over their own bodies and with the freedom to make their own decisions. While this does not necessarily reflect material reality, it is rather an ideological construction that sustains historical relationships between Western feminist knowledge and the women it claims to represent.

A decolonial feminist framework is, therefore, necessary to move past the colonial narrative of the passive victims of the global south and instead provide agency through the recognition of the political structures that shape their lives. A recognition that gender oppression should not be separated from the intersecting forces of colonialism, racism and imperial power. 

And while Western feminism is not a monolithic or homogenic movement, its roots remain built on a relationship that is implicitly hierarchical with the Global South. When feminist analysis characterises women as a singular global group defined solely by shared oppression, it creates dangerous blind spots that obscure how geopolitical interests dictate which women deserve solidarity and those who remain invisible.

In the Palestinian context, this dynamic becomes particularly evident through the frequent interpretation of cultural narratives used to account for the experiences of women living under occupation. Western feminism must thereby commit to dismantling structures of power that enable this oppression. As Palestinian scholar Ajour describes the need to decouple the colonial narrative from Western feminism and focus on the intersectionality to avoid separability and confront the political systems responsible for their suffering, “As a Palestinian with a family in Gaza: I Don't Want Sympathy. I Want Solidarity”. A solidarity that necessitates opposing systems and prioritizing justice over political interests. 

A decolonial feminism thus requires the liberation of women to be understood as inseparable from the liberation of the nation itself.

Photo Source: Efrem Efrem, Pexels