Women's Liberation Radio News

Edition 102: Palestine & Israel with Lola Bessis and Dr Dina Siddiqi

Dear Listeners, Thanks for your patience as we get used to working without the stellar strengths and abilities of our former sound engineer and producer, Ms. Jenna DiQuarto. We made the call-out for new sound engineers and producers, dear listeners, and she came! Please welcome our two newest members to the team, Freda Bear and Ann Castile. Ann took up the reigns this month and worked into the wee hours last night to finish up the production of this show. Great job, Ann! Thistle too, is unsure about how much longer she can keep it up with the WLRN collective, so stay tuned for some big changes around here, sisters! Thankfully, the younger generation is pickin' up the slack and Ms. Lola Bessis took the reigns this month on the topic, the interview and even the commentary! Lola's is a compelling voice clamoring for critical and free thought in a world full of an apocalyptic din. Thank you, Lola, for your work! Dr Dina Siddiqi is a distinguished feminist anthropologist whose work delves into critical development, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. Lola interviewed her for this episode turning its attention to the regions of the world known and Israel and Palestine on this one-year anniversary of Hamas' retaliatory invasion of Israel. In Lola's commentary, she talks about her own life and what it means to her to think critically about the forces at work in the Palestinian people's current situation. She begs the listener to do her research and look back at this region's history, peoples, and cultures. The music featured this month is "The Urgent Call of Palestine" by Zeinab Shaath. Cover artwork is by WLRN member, Margaret. Her artist's statement is below. "This month’s image is based on the idea of reflections. There is the Israeli flag (with its Star of David - symbolizing the Jewish religion / ethnicity) in the sky - also ‘reflected’ in the water - that turns into Palestinian rubble. With the Palestinian Flag layered over the water and rubble.   Of course, there are questions of Whose land? Whose water? Who has what rights? Where did those rights come from? And all the various ways of interpreting that."

Broadcast on:: 04 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

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Edition 102 in 5,4,3,2 I was born a woman off my knees I will stand for my liberation Sisters rise again I was born a woman off my knees I will stand for my liberation Rise and rise again Greetings and welcome to the 102nd edition podcast of women's liberation radio news For this Friday, October 4th, 2024 This is the Silpetterson founding member of W.L.R.N. and resident singer-songwriter This month's edition focuses on Palestine and Israel on this anniversary of Hamas's retaliatory invasion of Israel and the capturing of 251 hostages We'll hear an excerpt of an interview Lola did with Dr. Dina Siddiqui a distinguished feminist anthropologist whose work delves into critical development transnational feminist theory and the anthropology of labor and Islam We'll also hear Lola's commentary on the topic Before we get started on today's show we remind listeners that W.L.R.N. is partnering with Garnu.com to raise funds for a team of W.L.R.N. members to attend the 2025 Philia Conference in the UK Philia means "daughter" and was chosen because the activist women of today are the daughters of the women who came before us Philia activists have been organizing conferences since 2013 expect over 3,000 women to attend their 2025 event Help W.L.R.N. to have a presence at the conference and get a discount when you subscribe to Garnu.com and type in W.L.R.N. at checkout That's G-A-R-N-U-U.com Thanks to Macy and the team at Garnu for being the first ever company sponsor of W.L.R.N The team at W.L.R.N. produces a monthly radio broadcast to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men This blocking of women's discourse we see in all sectors of society be they conservative, liberal, mainstream, progressive or radical The thread that runs through all of American politics except for separatist feminism is male dominance and entitlement in all spheres Now here's Mary with women's news from around the globe For this Friday, October 4th, 2024 Take it away Mary Thanks Thistle and now the news September 16th marked the two-year anniversary of the murder of Masa Amini Women killed by Iranian authorities for not properly wearing hijab Since her death, women and male allies of protest in Iran and a UN fact-finding mission estimates that over 550 protesters have been killed in the last two years Following the September 10th, the U.S. presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Taylor Swift endorsed Harris and also urged eligible citizens to register to vote At least two women have already died in Georgia as a result of the state's strict abortion bans One woman, Amber Nicole Thurman, who was also a medical student and had plans to attend a nursing school died at the age of 28 because Piedmont Henry Hospital refused to perform a DNC, which is now a felony procedure Thurman had taken abortion pills, but some tissue remained in her body A couple DNC would have saved her life, she leaves behind a six-year-old son Dominique Pelacott, the French rapist who drunk his wife and helped over 70 other men to rape her as well Asked for forgiveness for his crimes, Giselle Pelacott insisted on making the child public So the men's names could not remain anonymous Rebecca Chapter Gay, a Ugandan Olympic athlete, was murdered by her boyfriend at their home in Kenya Women have since protested, just as they did earlier this year after several women were killed as a result of domestic violence They demand that femicide be established as a separate crime and recognition of the systemic issue that it presents More than 6,000 people protested in South Korea in support of stronger legal action against deep gay crimes, which mostly target women Korean women have made international headlines over the last several years for their effective feminist actions The joint action to condemn misogynistic violence said The crime of deep fake sexual exploitation is not new Women have faced sexual crimes for decades, with their faces and identities exposed in male online communities While the state has downplayed the severity and remained passive As a result, women across the country are anxious and fearful of becoming victims, leading many to abandon their daily lives The UK's Office for Statistics Regulation has finalized their review of the 2021 Census They concluded that one of the questions, which asked respondents if their gender identity aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth, was flawed In this, the first such instance in UK Census history in which census data has been downgraded Oxford professor Michael Biggs drew attention to the question after the census listed 262,000 people, or 0.5% of the population over 16 years old, as trans Biggs noted that the question was worded in a confusing way, especially for people who don't speak English as their first language Biggs became skeptical when the census showed that responses from large immigrant communities reflected a large transgender population After years of criticism from feminists and feminist organizations, Riddle Wadwa, the trans-identified man who led Edinburgh Rape Crisis Center, has finally resigned After a report from Rape Crisis Scotland found that he didn't understand his authority's limits and failed to demonstrate professional behavior The independent consultant led the investigation and found that the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Center used a strategy which did not put survivors first A failure to protect women-only spaces, poor review of systems, procedures, and document control, and a period of weak governance A report also stated that women-only spaces and times must be protected and clearly publicized Palestinian health officials claimed that at least 22 people were killed, mostly women and children, and 30 others were wounded during Israeli airstrike on a school for displaced children in Gaza in mid-September On September 22, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon killed hundreds of civilians, including 50 children and 94 women, marking the nation's deadliest day since its civil war ended in 1990 Among the victims were women like new-end HCR employee, Dina Derwiche, an engineer of Barra Kajuk A mother named Mona Katbei and her three daughters, Zina H-4, Zara H-5, and Banan H-4, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon on September 23 Alice Webb, H-33, died after having undergone a non-surgical procedure known as a Brazilian butt lift in which a dermal filler is injected into tissue to make buttocks appear larger or rounder Save faces director Ashton Collins said the organization has supported 500 women who have suffered complications from the procedure Ms. Collins said, "Liquid BBL procedures are a crisis waiting to happen. They are advertised on social media as risk-free, cheaper alternatives to the surgical counterpart, and that could not be further from the truth" At a UN General Assembly event, actress Meryl Streep emphasized the severe oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, stating that a female cat has more freedom than a woman Since the Taliban's takeover in 2021, women and girls have faced escalating restrictions, including bans on education, work, and public presence, that experts are calling gender apartheid That concludes WLRN's World News segment for Friday, October 4 I'm Mary, share new stories, announcements, and tips with us by emailing info@wLRNMedia.com and letting us know what's going on This is JoBrou, and you are listening to WLRN [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] ♪ To all our daughters and sons ♪ ♪ God, you hear the agony of Palestine ♪ ♪ God, you hear the agony of Palestine, Palestine ♪ ♪ Liberation banner, raise it high for Palestine ♪ ♪ Let us do or die ♪ ♪ Let us heed the urgent call of Palestine ♪ ♪ Let us heed the urgent call of Palestine ♪ ♪ Let us heed the urgent call of Palestine ♪ - That was Zeenab Sha'ith with her song, "The Urgent Call of Palestine." Originally produced by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the early 1970s, the song features Sha'ith's compelling voice and English lyrics, aiming to bring the Palestinian struggle to a global audience. Shot in 1972 by Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout in the mountains of Lebanon, the accompanying film was seized by Israeli forces during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and believed lost until it was rediscovered in Israeli military archives in 2017. Sha'ith, born in Egypt to Palestinian parents, displaced by the Nakhba, was inspired by American protest singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Her music combining activism and art became a beacon of Palestinian identity and resistance and she performed at international events like the 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students. Next up, we'll hear excerpts of an interview Lola did with Dr. Dina Siddiqui, Professor of Anthropology at New York University. - Hi, Dina. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Could you start by introducing yourself to the audience who you are, what your research is? - Sure. Thank you, first of all, thank you for inviting me and to speak on such an urgent topic at this point, at this moment. I trained as a cultural anthropologist. I think of myself as a transnational feminist. I grew up in Bangladesh. I teach now in the United States at New York University and I go back and forth. I kind of think of myself as a global feminist rather than just from one place or another and my work is specifically on Muslim women, labor, representations of Islam and critical development studies. I am particularly interested in this issue, I think because it's globally a women's issue, right? And also because it implicates feminist political economy which I am very interested in directly and indirectly. And because I'm trying to write something that I think of as the travels of what I call civilizational feminism, which is the way in which a particular kind of feminism that comes out of the colonial encounter between the so-called East and the so-called West. I think these are very broad-brushed, produced categories that erase the actual long-term interactions between spaces that now we think of as completely separate. But within the colonial encounter, as Edward Said would say, within the production of this idea of Europe or a phenomenal idea of Europe as a separate space of civilization in contrast to a space of barbarity in the rest of the world. I'm trying to see how questions of feminism travel and how there's a power asymmetry in what counts as feminist freedoms, what counts as a feminist agenda and how institutions like the UN are well-established or the Bangladeshi government end up valorizing certain ideas of feminism that I call the civilizing of the travels of the civilization of feminist civilizational feminism. Sorry, thank you. That's me. - That's really interesting. And it's also, yeah, there's always this divide between the, like what we consider Western feminism and Eastern feminism versus seeing kind of the overlaps and the similar goals. And on this topic, what could you introduce kind of the various feminist forms of resistance that we've seen to Israel's occupation of Palestine, not just in this past year, but throughout the decades. And kind of the, you've mentioned political economy. So the BDS movement to listeners who aren't familiar with it. - Yes, right, I'll do that. Yes, oh, you want me to begin there? Okay, I actually want to, if you don't mind, because we are coming up against the anniversary of October 7th, I think it's actually, imagine important to just, I know your listeners will know, but justice actually remember that at least 41,000 people, including 16,000 children, at least have been killed. At least 96,000 people have been injured. There are more than 10,000 people, just in Gaza who are missing. So these are figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. I want to say that because this affects what, you know, what we think of as feminism and feminism, what counts as feminist concerns, right? And it's, according to a study by the Lancet, by the end of this, we could have almost 8% of Gaza's pre-war population could have been erased, eliminated. Very important to remember that all of these actual figures, as we talk about things like resistance, feminist resistance, I think there's been a long history of feminist resistance, beginning with, and I'll go with feminist scholars from whom I've learned are people I don't know even, right? I think one of the things, one of the issues around civilizational feminisms that I think of, and that I see being operationalized today in the context of the assault on Gaza and also the West Bank is that old colonial tropes are being used very actively to justify certain kinds of actions. So for instance, I'm going to get to your question, really. So for instance, when you hear, for the most part, when there are reports of the death tolls, there's always this idea of how many women and children have been killed. There's a very interesting weaponization of older colonial tropes there. Of course, it's very important to think about women and children or people being killed. But there's a kind of conceptual slip that happens. As 10 years ago, the anthropologist Lebanese anthropologist, Maya Meghtashi pointed this out in, you know, I get this onslaught on Gaza as part of a much longer history, right? One of the things Maya Meghtashi pointed out in an article titled, "Can Palestinian Men Be Victims?" is that even though, of course, the killing of women and children is horrific, but there is something, the reiteration of women and children, it's like almost one word, this thing, the public mourning. What happens is you erase sort of the deaths and also the mourning of Palestinian men killed by what she calls Israel's war machine. She says, we should be aware of how the trope of women and children in relation to Gaza and Palestine more broadly does very dangerous work because the Palestinian male body and the Arab male body becomes the always dangerous body, the body of the terrorists. Anything can be done with the male body, right? And you're sometimes talking about children. Boy is age 12 and 13 and 14, right? And civilians, the category of civilians is also problematic, we won't go in there. But the killing of women and children and preteen boys you can mark, but men, Palestinian boys and men are presumed to be guilty. So anything can be done with their bodies, okay? It is in this context, I think that one of the things, and we can get back to what's happening with the resistance, one of the things that again, a Palestinian author pointed out a long time ago, I think this is part of the resistance, I'm an academic, right? I would, you know, so my interventions are about the ways in which narratives get weaponized. And I see this narrative on violence and who, which bodies are producing violence on which bodies are the victims, this narrative, older colonial trope, is being weaponized continuously by the Israeli state, but also it's being not accepted by most sort of the liberal feminist global world out there, right? So what Nada Ilya points out, and I think this is actually resistance, is she says, and I'm just taking one part of what she says, is that Palestinian women's freedom of movement, they're right to an education, they're right to vote, they're right to work, she wrote this in 2011, to live where they want, to sufficient food, clean water, medical treatment in their homeland, are denied to them not by their fellow Palestinian men, because there is this idea of patriarchy, but by the illegal occupying power, right? And I think that itself, saying that itself is also an act of resistance. - Yeah. And so that's why one big thing that I really want to say, I've learned so much from Palestinian women's scholars, and part of their work of resistance has been constantly pushing back against the large machine that's there off, and it's become much stronger with the media, with TikTok and various other things which I want, with social media, right? I do want to come to that. So let's go to VDS. VDS started off, oh, you want me to explain to your audience, right? What boycott, divestment, and sanctions is, this was actually a call originally from, first of all, Palestinian academics and Palestinian trade unions, but there were questions a long time ago, questions on for academics, but also people who are producers of culture, I could say you could say novelists and others, about how given the fact of occupation and settler colonialism, what should be ones, how does then one go about as a global citizen, I suppose, right? In one's relationship to the state of Israel. And the BDS movement was basically a call by universities and others, and it's a call from people in Palestine. This is not something, this is not resistance that comes from the United States. And I think that's very important because the one thing about transnational solidarity as a transnational feminist, I would say is that we can do our analysis here and we can decide how best to support, say women in Bangladesh, but we have to take our cues from the place where the people know there, what's best for them. So the BDS call, the significance of the BDS call is that it is coming from academics and unions in occupied Palestine, right? And the call is very clearly not a call, it's boycott, divest and have sanctions, right? I'm going to, the boycott part is very important because as an academic, I find that a lot of colleagues get very upset because they think what we are asking for is boycotting individual academics who are Israeli and Jewish and not having anything to do with them. And as my colleagues here will rightly point out, that's totally unjust. We don't know what their views are, we shouldn't assume that they are part of the academic machine, right? So, but so definitely it is not about individuals. What the boycott thing is calling for is an auto stay with the boycotts because that's where the academic part, there's some divestment and sanctions thing right now, but what the boycott thing is calling for is for us as those of us who are scholars placed in universities in the US to stop our universities from having reproducing these relations with Israeli universities, which themselves are actually complicit in the Israeli occupation. And there's a wonderful book by a scholar, I'm assuming named Maya Wind, which the book is on I think is called Ivory Tower from the Ivory Tower. Her name is Maya Wind, and what she does is she's done all the work that's fantastically important for the call for boycott is she shows how Israeli universities from their founding, from the ways in which the universities, the ground on which the universities are built. Actually, they're built on Palestinian villages, but starting from that to the programs that they have, the pro, as you all know, the programs that they have actually are very directly complicit in producing intelligence, producing security, producing training for the IDF. So it seems really important for those of us who want to begin a conversation on how to undo settler colonial conditions to not to ask our universities to not have conditions that reproduce the power of universities. So my university, for instance, New York University has a program at Tel Aviv, right? And those of us who want the Tel Aviv program to be shut down as part of the call for BDS are saying basically that we legitimize by giving NYU's name to the Tel Aviv program. It's an NYU Tel Aviv program. We are sending students to legitimize the larger machine. So we would like to withdraw that. That would be part of it. That doesn't mean that we can't have, I think it's important to have dialogue with colleagues in Israel. Although so far colleagues and many, many intellectuals, as the case of my friend, Nadra Shalhup Kavorkian, who was a scholar, she's a Palestinian scholar, married to an Armenian, she teaches at the Hup Hebrew University. But her, she was actually, because she had signed on early on into this latest assault on Gaza, genocidal assault on Gaza. She, her university wanted her to resign because she'd signed a petition saying that children, this is genocide against Palestinian children. She works on children. And basically she was harassed. Her university and her colleagues wanted her to resign. And it took a whole global kind of pressure to get her reinstated. But it is very clear that's one of the things about the boycott movement and resistance is that Palestinians, Israeli scholars may have freedom of speech, but it's very clear that Palestinian students and Palestinian scholars working in Israeli institutions don't have that kind of freedom and are punished for expressing, for signing a petition. It's not very different from what's happening here, but that's where it is. So that's where the boycott call, I think is very, very important. And there's a, you know, right now there's a, there's something called the Dan David Prize that is given out in Israel. And there is also pressure on people not to accept the Dan David Prize, because again, the logic is you're pretending as though the Israeli state that's, you know, legitimating, honoring people's work. Like people like Amitabh Kosh, who is a wonderful novelist, right? Who has accepted the Dan David Prize, which I find very disappointing. And I have bycotted him or his work as a result, not him particularly. It sort of ends up giving a sheen of legitimacy to Israel that I think, and many other people would think it really doesn't deserve that we should be very careful, right? Not to do. So, and we've had recently another wonderful African-American scholar, Kishab Lane, who writes about feminist internationalism has also accepted that prize this year, which I was again very shocked by. But so these are the kinds of calls that the boycott thing is about. - There's so much that I wanna respond to. I personally learned, I think, or the most eye-opening to me was reading Avi Shlime and kind of then going down that rabbit hole of new historians that were coming out of Israel, which was surprising and just learning about their perspectives and reading their kind of different versions of history and the way in which history is weaponized and the political significance of history. And I wanted to respond to something you said and more at the beginning, but the idea of always focusing on women and children as victims, I think it's also so stressed because children are the future of the nation and then women are seen as the reproducers of the nation. And men are kind of either sent off to war or they're the perpetrators of violence in the first place. And something that I found very interesting and acquiring all this knowledge on Palestine and just Islam and the history of it is the way in which obviously, this is not to deny the way Islam is weaponized against women or against other Arabs, but the way in which Islam has also been interpreted by feminists as a text that advocates for the sexes and it's interpreted by communists as a communist rights throughout history. And so we in the West have this notion of seeing Islam as a violent religion where there's less violence in the Quran than there is in the Torah or in the Bible. And it's just kind of this very orientalist or however you wanna put it way of viewing the East and viewing Islam. And the last thing I wanted to respond to as well is being able, especially as feminists, the radical feminists, being able to see the way in which Palestinian men too are oppressed is often difficult and it's hard as a radical feminist to say this to other radical feminists, but the way I want to stress it is that it's not to deny that violence doesn't exist between men and women in Palestine. This is not to say they're all these great heroes that advocates for the quality of the sexes, it's not to say that but it's to recognize that there's multiple layers of oppression and especially when speaking to an American audience looking at the black liberation movement and the way in which we're able to see black men as victims of racism while still not absolving them of potential violence against women. - Right. - And it's being able to navigate those complex cities and thinking more critically about it. - Right, absolutely. And it is takes a lot, I totally understand, it takes a lot because as feminists, we are trained to think that the male female, I completely understand what you're saying binary, is the one, is the war kind of division in the world. When in fact, it's actually not, it's so much more layered and interconnected and I think this is, that's what you're finding out. First of all, in terms of the history, that's true, the history being weaponized. Yes, it's really, we are taught, nationalist histories basically, whether we're in the US or anywhere else or in Bangladesh or Israel, wherever you grew up, I don't know. So we end up learning a very heteropatriarchal and racialized versions of whatever is wherever we are. So that takes a lot of unlearning which you've obviously done, but it is art. Particularly because constantly in the world around you, there's this common sense of men are ultimately the enemy and all men are the same, right? And that is very hard because that common sense actually is also has a very long kind of colonial genealogy and it helps bolster the imperial order today. So it's something everybody wants to hear. Nobody wants to hear, well, actually it's not just, you know, women and children aren't just victims, for instance, right, what you're saying. So it's harder to do, I want to just get, you know, in relation to this about Islam is violent. Yes, there are, I think there are so many stakes, so many people benefit from reproducing that discourse of Islam as violent, right? That's part of the struggle that you're talking about, whether you watch TV or whether even if you open up a textbook sometimes, the scholarship can be shockingly colonial when it comes to Islam and women. And I think this is why I keep saying Palestinian women's resistance is also very, has to be about undoing the narrative, right? Because, you know, you have to undo them in, you know, foreign policy, but also foreign policy gets normalized when you have the Islam is violent, narrative there. One of the things, Anadirah Shalhup Kavorki and whom I mentioned who teaches at Hebrew University, she's got a wonderful article on, she's done a lot of work on how Palestinian boys and girls are uncharted, as she says, because you don't think of Palestinians as quite human. And even when you're talking about a 12 year old boy, you don't think of that child being, that person being a child, you already start thinking of them as a potential terrorist, potential male. I want to get to some of the theoretical stuff. You normalize that. So it's easy to pick them up, it's easy to harass them. There's a lot of normalizing that goes on with the Islam as violent thing. They're always already violent. You don't want them to grow up and become violent terrorists. So you have to do, you have to take them away earlier. This is part of the discourse. I think that what you're pointing to is what we need. As part of the resistance is, we need a transnational feminist analysis. What you could call an intersectional analysis, however, the Kombahi River Collective had an analysis too, of the kind that you're talking about, which is, and they were writing in the '70s, right? They were doing their stuff a very long time ago about refusing this male-female analysis and saying that we are talking about women who are primarily African-American women who saw themselves in their language, I think at that time as dykes. It's not as though, but they saw the way in which African-American men were racialized and that they realized that men were not their enemy, but they realized what was their enemy in that sense was a systemic structural thing. And that is where when you are talking to your radical feminist friends, you know, if you do a transnational feminist analysis, it can't be about these men versus, you have to then look at older colonial tropes, how they get weaponized. You have to look at which women are being seen as women who can be raped and which women can't. Black women could never be raped in the slave encounter, right? So what is happening in Palestine? I think is actually the way in which things are being, a language is being weaponized, is very much the similar to the way in which black women and black men's bodies or black men were criminalized in which the whole thing about the rapes that did not happen on October 7th, that continues to be reproduced whereas the actual violence on men, women, this is why the male violence, I've been thinking about male violence because of the way in which the rape of Palestinian males that we are actually seeing on tape, just does not seem to, you know, it's institutionalized, we see it, but it has a very different response. I'm not sure why because the, you know, there are all of these ideas that go, I do know why, but you know, but these ideas of Palestinian men as closer to animals, there are the way in which gender and sexuality is so tied into race, gender and sexuality are completely tied into the exertion of colonial power. That's what you're seeing. So you cannot have this male-female binary as a sufficient analysis, it's completely inadequate. And I think that's why I really think the Combahee River Collective, and I teach that in my, it's at the beginning of my transnational feminist classes, even though I'm talking about Bangladesh, in the end, I feel like that's the kind of analysis I need my students to see, that the kind of identity politics that you end up with as we women, I cannot do, I have to reject, I will say, I am older, but you know, I never really had it, I can't, there is no sisterhood that automatically comes in, right, and they're, you know, the sisterhood thing hides, you know, the sisterhood thing erases historical and contemporary capitalist and other structures of power, racial structures of power. So simple equations of men and women just don't work. And it's all about power. So really a black man, or right now a Palestinian man, or a lower-cost man in India, will not have the same power as a white woman, or a Jewish woman, or an upper-cost woman in India, that's just, those are the power structures that have to do with the state. It's not about our individual, what we were born into, our individual identities, you know, we just have to get away from that, I think. So in response, I totally am very sympathetic to your struggles. I can totally imagine those struggles. And being sort of seen as not quite a feminist here, doing that, yeah. - Yeah, and it's not to say that, you know, you take that individual man, put him in front of another individual woman who in a societal structure, yes, she may have more power than him, he can still enact violence against her. We're talking about these broader structures of power, and we're trying to dissect them, and trying, especially in the context of a genocide, of an occupation. - Yeah. - It's about thinking more critically about it. And, you know, you mentioned the weaponization of like the narratives of rape, which I'm not sure if you're familiar, the author entered to work in, she wrote a book about Palestine, and it's-- - Oh, she did, I did not know that. - Yes, it's called The Skate Po. And one of her chapters, which is called Palestinian Women, board slash Prostituted Women, where she kind of, throughout her career, analyzes the Prostituted Women as the constant skate boat to society, and then how a Palestinian woman are viewed in the same way. Like, you can't rape a Palestinian woman, the same way you were mentioning. - Yeah. - Versus this like, if anything happens to an Israeli woman, it's viewed completely differently, versus as feminists or radical feminists, whichever school of feminism you subscribe to, we need to be able to view all women, right? It's, I think the Lord said, I'm not free until all women are free. This idea-- - Yeah, right, no. - There's not one woman's life that is more valuable than the other. And it also erases the violence against women within the Israeli military. - Yes. - Something that is very rarely talked about. And when I mention it to people who have different politics than me, they can freely deny it. And they say, no, the Israeli people are these good, blessed people. Nothing, they have nothing, they have nothing is wrong with them, versus, and as you mentioned, the way in which children are seen as potential terrorists, I always hear the argument, oh, but they give their children guns. - Right. - They're the ones that are this violent society because they're giving children guns instead of viewing Israel for the militarized society it is, which trains citizens to-- - Right. - Violent from such a young age in the military, such a part of Israeli society and the, like of Israel's kind of nation and whole ideology. - Right, wow, I did not know that. But that also makes, they give their children guns, which is, I mean, I mean, wow. Actually, US parents in the US, white Christian parents in the US seem to be giving their children guns. - But that's what reminded me of this from my job. Right, in fact, their children, they're really trying to protect their sons, especially, I actually was thinking of the many similarities of African American mothers wanting to protect their sons and Palestinian mothers, probably feeling very much the same way about what happens when you go out on the streets. It's interesting to think about the structural similarities, that in returning to your question about the militarization of Israeli society and then having to see Israeli men as pure and the saviors, then the women who aren't being, I'm sure it happens everywhere, assaults in the army cannot even say it and will not be believed, right? Right, I mean, your friends are also upset with you, but actually to those to whom it's at, I've never heard of it. And not just because I haven't thought of it, but I'm sure it's true. But it closes, so what the occupation does. It also, it does not actually, in the end, help. This is part of what happens. It doesn't help Israeli women in the long run either, because they also have to enact a certain role. I mean, we keep hearing about how sexualized these men were also raped or sexually assaulted by Israeli female soldiers. That's a very odd, you know. I mean, it's odd, we saw it in Iraq, we saw it, but there is something very soul crushing about that in the end. It doesn't make you a better human being, but you are part of this army. Your militarized society forces you to act that way to be a good citizen. And this is where gender and nation come together and destroy women if you are a feminist and if you care about women's lives and futures and freedoms, that's not a great way to live your life. Surely. - Yeah. - And something I think that all of our listeners are familiar with this concept of not every woman's actions is good, just because she's a woman. Women can be, we call it handmaidens to the patriarchy. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Can help perpetuate these cycles of power. And if viewing militarization and all that through kind of this idea of the male or the like male creations helps these realization, like that can be helpful, but it leads to these dangerous ideas of like women can do no wrong. - Yeah. - When women can perpetuate violence, killing and nationalistic ideas and these, we have very toxic ideas of ethnic purity. - Mm hmm. - You're absolutely, this is, you're being a very, a very important point, which is, yes, women with a big W, I think is a very dangerous concept. That's how I would start. And I often, there are two examples I give my classes. One is about upper caste women in India. I mean, the context I'm familiar with, right? Upper caste women see so-called untouchable women as their enemy. I mean, they will, you know, there is no sisterhood in that. They will treat them in particular kinds of ways that is very shocking, but I know that for instance, there was in 2002 a program in Gujarat under the Modi who is now the prime minister of India. He was the chief minister of Gujarat state and under him is pretty much a program against Muslims in Gujarat and Hindu women were cheering on their men. We're pointing out there is no sisterhood, there is no women. These women have been inculcated with a sense of their ethnic purity, with a sense of fear of Muslim men, with a sense of rightness. Yes, these Muslim men need to be eliminated, Muslim women need to have their pregnancies eliminated. There were some pretty gruesome things we don't even need to go into here, but the Hindu women were literally cheering them on upper caste women, right? That's one, the other thing is that with the racialization and sexual slavery, white women's purity depended on the impurity of the black women under slavery, right? That you just have it there, there is no. We cannot think of women as women, right? We have to deal with power. It's not so much difference in how to think about our cultural differences. I think we have to think historically about the ways in which colonialism and capitalism, like in the case of slavery, brings us together but through very different histories. And if you are a white woman, I think you will be, you will have a different set of, with class differences, a different set of ideas and sensibilities than if you have grown up to be a black woman. And which is why Audrey Lord, and I think the Kombai River Collective also said it, that we cannot be unless we are free, the rest of the world will not be free. And I think at this point, we're at this point with Palestine too. I think if Palestinian women in Palestine are not free, I speak from a third world global south perspective. I feel very much, if this war becomes a regional war, I feel very, very threatened, not because I'm there. But I could see this blowing up and becoming something much bigger in which none of us will be safe. So, and Palestinian women's safety depends upon taking away, removing the occupation and the genocide. And the, you know, I haven't even talked about, we haven't talked about at this whole thing on what the Palestinian women's collective, feminist collective cause reproductive genocide, which is basically how, you know, because children are so afraid, one of the things the children are so feared, because it's a preemptive logic that kill the children. But I think one of the things, it's a demographic fear, right? The killing, the destroying of hospitals, the having women give birth without anesthesia, without medical services, all of those must be bringing down. The info, you know, taking up the infant mortality rate, the maternal mortality rates, all of that is also going into the larger figures, the larger numbers, right? So, all of that is in chaining Palestinian women, but also the rest of us, right? Are, anyway, yes, that was my response to your question. Rima Hamami is a Palestinian scholar at Beersite University, who's written a really interesting article in the same volume called "The Cunning of Gender Violence," added by Laila Bhulugoth. But in the same volume as the Nadra essay on the "Unchilding of Palestinian Girls," and she talks about how violence against a report that the UN produced on violence against women in Gaza was weaponized, and it became all about just the domestic violence, and it didn't have. I mean, the violence, the report itself, had all kinds of violence, that in the end, what came out in the New York Times and other places was that domestic violence, and see, that's the kind of thing that does not help to bring about liberation for Palestinian women, for sure, but for anybody else. So, I keep mentioning these names because I think we need to take our cue from Palestinian feminists, too, but not just sort of in some vague kind of way. I am trying to read their stuff, sometimes to teach their stuff. So, but that's what I do as an academic. That's part of our solidarity, I guess, feminist solidarity, and how we can have that. - Yeah, and I'm sure our listeners who are interested would look up the names or these articles to read more about it. I guess I'll ask kind of a closing question, as we are coming to one year since October 7th, what are the main things that you would want to stress to a feminist audience? And this is also primarily an American audience, so what are the main takeaways and things that we need to remember as we're coming closer to the end-risk. - Right, I think one thing is that, I think the genocide prompts us to ask once more, what comes as a feminist issue, right? I don't think, first of all, to me, foreign policy is a feminist issue. We think of only, and violence against women is a very important thing, but it's nested in a whole host of power relations. We have to talk about violence, but it's not this standalone patriarchy that we're trying to get rid of. It means confronting a whole lot of things. A feminist analysis must have imperialism and histories of colonialism in it, that's something. We need to talk about policing and incarceration. That's also happening. We need to make connections between what's happening in the US and what's happening in Palestine. As feminists in the US, I think feminists in the US have the most, in a sense, I would say responsibility, and I count myself too, because I'm an American citizen now, even though I really think of myself as Bangladeshi, but still our tax dollars are going in there. We have, I think, much more responsibility than others. Do not think of feminist politics as separate from other kinds of politics, but to realize, but to constantly see, be vigilant and reflect on what counts as justice for women, because that means having to look at racialization and policing and all of these things, and to really think about what decolonization means then. It means not just focusing on something called domestic violence or child labor, you know, child marriage, but thinking how that, you know, has taught me that, you know, you can't separate feminist practice from feminist theory. I'm a scholar, but I think I make, I think of myself as a scholar, activist, if that doesn't sound too, I don't mean to be sort of, you know, too full of myself, but I think that's where I make my feminist interventions. Yeah, I really feel that scholarship and activism have to go together, that is my activism. I want to tell people, this is part of my activism, I'm doing this, because I think this is such an important urgent topic, right? So feminism don't separate theory from practice. And I think remembering what you were saying that our, until black women are free, no one will be free, right? That's very, very important. There's a beautiful poem from June Jordan that she wrote in 1982, June Jordan was a black feminist poet, not tourism, yeah, I mean, among many things, right? That she wrote in 1982 that I want to end with. I'm not very good at reading this, but I think that tells you why I think that really brings home to those of us living in the United States, how foreign policy is something we have to think about as very intimate to us in our lives. And it's called Apologies to All the People in Lebanon. I don't know if you know it. Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948 to 1983. And this she wrote after Israel invaded Lebanon, okay? I didn't know and nobody told me, and what could I do or say anyway? They said you shot the London ambassador. And when that wasn't true, they said, so what? They said you shelled their northern villages. And when UN forces reported that was not true, because your side of the ceasefire was holding, since more than a year before, they said what they said was simply to carve a 25-mile buffer zone, and then they ravaged your water supplies, your electricity, your hospitals, your schools, your highways and byways, all the way north to Beirut, because they said this was their quest for peace. They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors to jail. And they cluster-bombed girls and boys whose bodies swelled purple and black into twice the original size and tore the buttocks from a four-month old baby. And then they said this was brilliant military accomplishment, and this was done, they said, in the name of self-defense. They said this is the noblest concept of mankind. Isn't that obvious? They said something but never again, and then they made close to one million human beings homeless in less than three weeks, and they killed or maimed 40,000 of your men and your women and your children. But I didn't know and nobody told me and what could I say or do anyway? They said we were victims. They said you were Arabs. They called your apartments and gardens, guerrilla strongholds. They called the screaming devastation that they created, the rubble. Then they told you to leave, didn't they? Didn't you read the leaflets they dropped from their hotshot fighter jets? They told you to go. "There's a lot more I want my lost bit. "I am not an evil person. "The people of my country aren't so bad. "You can expect so much, but so much from those of us "who have to pay taxes and watch American TV. "You see my point, I'm sorry, I really am sorry." So I think that is written in 1982. And to see that circle, I think, is really, really important and powerful. I know I've made you lead. So I skipped some of the poem, but, you know, I want to leave your viewers, your listeners with that. I, you know, to think about why we need, it's so rather than just worrying about the hijab and the part that God knows what else. There's so much, there's so much work, not that women should be forced into any of this, but there's ideological work that that obsession on the hijab does and continues to be. - Thank you so much for your time. I'm sure listeners will really appreciate it and I'll look up the poem to see if I can put it in our caption. - That's great. - Thank you so much. - You are listening to "WLRN." (upbeat music) You may have to do this by now, but I'm a Jew. I was raised culturally Jewish. My family never hosted your bought dinner, but we had mazuzos on all our doors. We didn't keep kosher, but we lit the menorah every year. We would pick and choose traditions to implement in our lives. I also attended Jewish summer camps, where every morning started with everyone singing the hetiki, the national anthem of Israel. I took trips to Israel with my parents, where we visited the holy sites and louched on the beaches of Tel Aviv. I never critically reflected on what it meant to be a Jew, or what the state of Israel stood for. That is, until I read Andrew the work in scapegoat. She too was a Jew. She too was brought up to believe that the state of Israel was the only way to secure a future for the Jewish people. Although scapegoat was written in 2000, which was over 24 years ago, I believe that it is important to reflect on it given the moment we are living in. The work in examines the founding of the state of Israel as a homeland for Jews, who have historically been stateless and persecuted, particularly after the Holocaust. While recognizing the necessity felt by Jews for a secured state, she critically assesses the impact on Palestinians already living there. She highlights how the creation of Israel led to the displacement and oppression of Palestinians, arguing that institutionalized violence against them has become a mechanism of state sovereignty and male dominance, affecting both Palestinians and Jewish Israeli women. Dworkin connects the conflict to broader feminist concerns, noting how militarization and the ongoing conflict reinforce patriarchal norms and contribute to the subordination of women in both communities. However, she finds hope in feminist collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian women working together across the bides. Dworkin also explores internal contradictions within Israeli society, where the state's role as both a protector of the Jewish people and an oppressor of Palestinians exacerbates inequalities and suppresses dissent. Throughout her analysis, she maintains a critical stance on nationalism, challenging how national identity and solidarity can lead to the suppression of other groups and perpetuate cycles of violence and oppression. Scape Goat is by no means a perfect text or a complete history, but it is an important and necessary text which puts women first. Since its publication in 2000, Israeli settlements have only further encroached on Palestine. I want to reassure you, sisters, that being anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic. Jewish hatred is real, and it manifests itself in tragic ways, but it is not the same as being critical of the state of Israel. Judaism is a religion. Often, like my family embraced it, more of a cultural religion. Zionism, on the other hand, is a nationalist movement based on the idea of a pure nation state. If you simply take a look at any previous movements that have predicated themselves on national purity, you are quick to see the genocidal consequences. We saw them in the Americas, in South Africa, in Sudan. We saw it in Nazi Germany. The roots of Zionist aspiration emerged from the centuries of Jewish persecution in Europe. Facing discrimination, expulsions and violence such as programs in Russian empires, Jews struggled for acceptance. The Dreyfus of Fair in France led Theodore Hurlt to advocate for Jewish homeland in Eraz, Israel, the land of Israel, gaining support from Jewish finances, like the Rothschild family. Palestine was historically a mosaic of diverse communities, such as Jews and Muslims and Christians, and many others, under Roman and later Ottoman rule. By 1882, the population included about 400,000 Arab Muslims, 43,000 Arab Christians, and 15,000 Arab Jews. The first and second Alliah, which were waves of Jewish migration, brought around 50,000 European Jews to Palestine, establishing agricultural communities and the Kaboots movement. Ottoman land reforms at this time caused displacement of local Arab farmers and laid foundations for future land disputes. The late 19th and early 20th century saw European powers, especially Britain and France, vying for influence in a weakening Ottoman empire, driven by strategic interests and oil politics. Britain, in particular, made conflicting promises to both Arabs and Zionists, culminating in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported a Jewish homeland while ostensibly preserving the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine. After World War I, the British and French mandates over former Ottoman territories, including Palestine, overlooked Arab desires for self-determination. This set the stage for tensions between Zionist and Arabs, especially as rising persecution in Europe and the rise of Nazi Germany, led to an increased Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s. But through all this, I believe that as radical feminists who are brave enough to imagine a world without patriarchy, we should be brave enough to envision a world devoid of nation state. Who are we beyond our nationality? What is a nation in today's hyper-globalized society? Has to work in reminds us in the preface of scapegoat. I am an enemy of nationalism and male domination. This means that I repudiate all nationalism. Women cannot be free of male dominance without challenging men of one's own ethnic group and destroying their authority. This is a will of betrayal as any assault on male dominance must be. I also want to remind you all that Islam is not a violent religion. It is not a woman-hating religion. Islam, like Christianity or Judaism or any other ideology is reinterpreted and weaponized by certain groups. The Quran, which has been interpreted in many, many ways, has been interpreted by feminists as a text which advocates for the equality of the sexes. And it has also been interpreted by Marxists as a communist text. I have personally been extremely disappointed by many feminists online like Megan Murphy, who were quick to dismiss the Palestinian cause because the quote or quote left was supporting it or because of the real horrors that women are going through as consequence of the war. Of course, rape is awful. And as a feminist, I recognize that. Unfortunately, women and children are always the first victims of war. I oppose war, I oppose violence, but that does not blind me to the reality of the Palestinian cause. When black women joined the radical feminist movement of the second wave and began to speak about the violence they face from black men, feminism did not turn its back on black liberation. It recognized the importance of fighting against racial injustice and fighting with black women against male violence. I beg for the same critical thinking from feminists today. I beg you to open your eyes. This is Lola signing off. Thank you, sisters. Stay strong. [ Music ] >> Thank you for listening to WLRN's 102nd Edition podcast on Israel and Palestine. WLRN would like to thank our guest this month for sharing her views. Thank you so much, Dr. Siddiqui, for speaking with us. Until next time, this is Aurora signing off on another WLRN podcast. >> If you like what you are hearing and would like to donate to the cause of feminist community radio, please visit our WordPress site and click on the donate button. Check out our merch tab to get a nice gift in exchange for your donation. And if you are interested in joining our team, we are always looking for new volunteers to conduct interviews, write blog posts, post to our Facebook and other social media pages, and do other tasks to keep us moving forward as a collective of media activist women. Thanks for listening. This is Frita signing off for now. >> And I am Bissell Pedersen. Thanks for tuning in. It is my pleasure to welcome our two newest members to the collective, Ms. Frita Bear, an organizer with the We The Women Gathering I got to attend last summer, and Ms. Ann Castile. Both of these totally excellent radical feminists heated the call for a new sound engineer and producer, since our beloved Jenna de Corto has taken leave for new projects and pastures. Welcome aboard, sisters. We are so glad you're here. Next month, we'll focus our program on what inspired our members to be radical feminists and why we joined the WLRN Collective. Our handcrafted podcasts always come out the first Thursday of the month. So look for it on Thursday, November 7th. If you'd like to receive our newsletter that notifies you when each podcast article and interview are released, please sign up for our newsletter on the WLRN WordPress site. Stay strong in the struggle, and thanks for listening. >> This is Ann, one of the two newest members of the WLRN team and your producer in training, signing off on the 102nd edition of WLRN's monthly handcrafted podcast. Jenna leaves big shoes to fill, but I'm excited to serve our feminist community and be part of the team here at WLRN. Thanks to WLRN's sponsor, Garnew.com, for supporting our work. You too can support our work dear listener and get fabulous non-toxic period care when you purchase tampons, pads, and other gear from Garnew.com. That's G-A-R-N-U-U.com. Be sure to type in WLRN when prompted for your discount code to check out. Tell all your female friends and family and let's get our crew to Philly in next year. You can find WLRN on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spinster, Overit, and SoundCloud in addition to our website. Thanks for listening. This is Ann, signing off for now. >> And this is Mary. Our monthly podcasts are always crafted with tender loving care and in solidarity with women worldwide. Thanks for your support. We would love to hear from you, so please share, like, and comment widely. ♪ How will we find our way out of this? ♪ ♪ What is the antidote for the patriarchal kiss? ♪ ♪ How will we find what needs to be shown? ♪ ♪ And then after that, where is home? ♪ ♪ Tell me, where is my home? ♪ ♪ 'Cause gender hurts ♪