EXCERPT
International Women’s Day of Resistance
Friday, March 8, 2024
This International Women’s Day we answer the call from Palestinian feminists to resist the British state’s collusion with Israel in the ongoing genocide. We take instruction from the rich history of the Palestinian women’s movement, a movement that exists despite settler colonial fragmentation through occupation of the West Bank, besiegement of Gaza, settlement of ’48 and incarceration across seventy five years of the Israeli state. We follow in the footsteps of freedom fighters like Leila Khaled and Shadia Abu Ghazalah, whose participation in armed struggle against occupying forces reminds us of the rich and varied nature of feminist resistance. We recognise this revolutionary spirit in the present day Tal’at movement, who fight, like us, for an end to femicide, exploitation, domestic and state violence. Today, we honour the origins of International Working Women’s Day.
FREEDOM OVER EQUALITY
Feminism means an end to the occupation, an end to arming the settler-colonial Israeli occupying forces who murder and maim Palestinian people with impunity. An end to the devastation caused by starvation, disease, assault, aerial bombardment, and exile. This IWD, we note how gendered and sexual violence has always been central to settler colonialism: Israeli occupiers have, for decades, consistently used sexual harassment, degradation, and torture on Palestinians as a weapon of war. They proudly loot and rifle through the intimate belongings of Palestinians. Hundreds of Palestinian women have been violently sexually assaulted. Alongside this, we witness how the decimation of healthcare infrastructure has caused unspeakable reproductive horrors. Living in tents under siege, under constant threat of bombings and starvation, pregnant women are forced to give birth under horrific circumstances without pain medication, dehydrated and injured, in unsanitary and unresourced maternity hospitals and on the street. Susan Abulhawa’s words haunt us, “The reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.” Entire bloodlines are being erased. The scale of the destruction is unfathomable.
Source:
https://www.sistersuncut.org/2024/03/08/iwd-resist/