Feminism and Zionism are Incompatible.

Facts For Working People shares this article from Tony Greenstein's UK Blog. Visit his site for further reading on this issue

How Identity Politics Turned the Victims of Sabra & Chatilla into the Antisemitic Oppressors of Zionist Feminists –

A Reply to Erica Burman

 Looking back – the Attack on Spare Rib which Prefigured Labour’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ Crisis by nearly 40 years

On June 6 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. An estimated 20,000 civilians were killed and over 70,000 injured. The savagery of Israel’s attack gave birth to Hezbollah, the Party of God, which is the only Arab force to have defeated Israel militarily.

In 2000 the war of attrition waged by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon forced Israel to abandon its ‘Christian’ mini state in the south of Lebanon, under Major Saad Haddad and General Antoine Lahad and end its occupation of Lebanon. In 2006 Israel was forced to pull its troops out of Lebanon after another invasion.

The Lebanon war was a pivotal moment for the Palestine solidarity movement, in Britain and internationally. It convinced large sections of the left, especially in the Labour Party, that Israel was no socialist oasis in the Middle East and that its army was no citizen army but an army of genocide and occupation. An army whose major ‘victories’ had been against the indigenous population of the West Bank and Gaza.

Zionist women maintained they could be both Zionists and feminists – but only by excluding Palestinian women

Both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. Tribune and even the New Statesman became hostile to Zionism and Israel. It was also when I got to know Jeremy Corbyn personally, who became an MP the following year. Corbyn spoke frequently at meetings of the Labour Committee on Palestine later Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine, which I chaired. 

A group of us met in the University of London Union in the spring of 1982, after an initial Israeli attack on Lebanon, to form Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The Zioness group in the USA, which maintains that you can be a feminist and a Zionist, borrowed the image of a Black woman (left) and whitened her for their poster!  

Palestine and the Women’s Movement

Nothing angered the Zionist feminists of the time more than the statement by Aliza Khan, the Israeli woman in Women Speak Out Against Zionism in Spare Rib 121 of August 1982 that

 ‘if a woman calls herself feminist she should consciously call herself anti-Zionist.’

It was saying that feminism and Zionism were incompatible.

This was a red rag to Israeli and Zionist feminists (who masqueraded as representing all Jewish women). Zionist feminism was based on the idea that women should be equal participants in the oppression of the Palestinians. They had no quarrel with the racism of Zionism and its othering of Palestinians. Their only disagreements were on their subordinate role in the oppression of the Palestinians.

This racism reached absurd proportions in the United States with the Zioness Group. As Electronic Intifada revealed [Fake feminist group Zioness used rapper’s image without her approval] the Zionesses produced a fiery picture of 3 Zionist Amazons. The woman in the middle of their poster with her arms folded was Black South African hip hop artist, Dope Saint Jude. Or at least she was until the Zionesses whitened her face! Zionists simply can’t help their racism.

DOPESAINTJUDE  makes it clear she has no ties to the racist Zionesses

The issue of Palestine and Israel had a major impact on the British women’s movement which had largely ignored questions of racism and imperialism. Racism, like sexism, was seen primarily as a question of personal interaction as in the slogan ‘the ‘Personal is Political’. Institutional racism, western colonialism and imperialism was a ‘men’s’ issue.

As Jenny Bourne wrote in Jewish Feminism and Identity Politics:

feminism allowed us to: conflate the political and the personal, the objective and the subjective, the material and the metaphysical; and escape into Identity Politics. And the New Marxism gave’it refuge. (p.4)

The personal was held to be political rather than the political being personal. What this meant was that every woman’s personal experience was equally valid. They could be fascist women, Zionist women or just very rich, they were still women, despite the fact that they participated in the oppression of Black and third world women.

There was no understanding of how women’s oppression is magnified by class and race For example abortion is easily obtainable if you are well off but if you are Black or poor then it may be impossible to obtain legally in which case you may seek a back street abortion with all the possible risks.

The real enemy for middle class feminists was patriarchy, which men had created, an overarching ideological framework which subsumed race and class. The answer of western feminists was an all-encompassing sisterhood and consciousness raising. What this left out was the fact that women can also be the exploiters and oppressors of other women. Issues such as race and class were seen as divisive, a threat to women’s unity. 

As I showed in my recent post White Women as Slave Owners and the Myth of Sisterhood – Stephanie E. Jones women slave owners played their full share in slavery. Under Apartheid White women were equal participants in the oppression of Black people. So too in Israel where Jewish women identify with Jewish men not Palestinian women.

In all settler-colonial societies women are part of the settler colonial population. Of course within these societies White/Jewish women were oppressed by male settlers but their demands were not for the liberation of all women but for their right to equality with men in the oppression of the indigenous population. In Israel the demand that women have an equal role with men in the army and in combat duties is used to portray Israel as an equal society. Women too can kill Palestinians with impunity.