By Linda Ford
“There is only one solution! Intifada! Revolution!”
–Pro-Palestinian Street March Chant, 2023-24
On November 2nd, there was a “No Votes for Genocide” protest in New York City. To those pro-Palestinian activists, candidate Kamala Harris was fully supporting a genocide in Gaza and candidate Donld Trump promised complete devotion to the Israeli war criminal state committing it. Palestinian-American Layan Fuleihan was out in front of the march leading the chants in Arabic and English: “Free free Palestine! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” And “Imperialism will fall! Every fascist state will fall! Hands off Gaza now! Hands off Lebanon now! We demand liberation! End the Zionist occupation!”
Claudia de la Cruz, presidential candidate for the People’s Party for Socialism and Liberation, also exhorted the crowd. “Our so-called ‘democracy’ has no backbone to stand against genocide. Trump and Harris both support millionaire military contractors!” For Fuleihan and de la Cruz, as with the thousands of women marching there and all over America, there is no other choice but to dissent against the egregious US/Israeli partnership to commit war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Anti-genocide women activists see this holocaust as a feminist issue. They see it as a matter of “human rights and justice,” as the Palestinian Feminist Collective puts it, and as a war crime directly impacting huge numbers of defenseless and innocent women and children. The seven women featured here, although from diverse backgrounds, and employing different strategies, strongly agree with those sentiments. They are young socialist feminists Layan Fuleihan and Calla Walsh; veteran Palestinian activists Hazami Barmada and Huweida Arraf, and very long-time anti-war activist Medea Benjamin; and two women in politics, one, Michigan Congresswoman and Palestinian, Rashida Tlaib; and socialist, anti-imperialist PSL candidate, Claudia de la Cruz.
The seven women dissenters are fighting the Israeli/Jewish apartheid state which is carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the US/Western support of this genocide, as part of racist Western colonialism. The Palestinian resistance group Hamas started their “Al Aqsa Flood” operation last October 7, essentially a slave rebellion to break out of 75 years of extreme apartheid/occupation. It was met with an unbelievably violent response: an Israeli holocaust which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. The journal Lancet reported last July that the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of 45,000 dead is far too low. They estimate, after considering the victims buried under the rubble, and the people who succumb to disease and famine, the true tally is upward of 186,000. UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has outlined in great detail how Israel’s intention is to kill “the totality of the Palestinian people.” After over a year the US and Western countries continue to stand by and watch the genocide unfold, literally and in great detail, on social media. Anyone with a shred of humanity has to oppose it; many women are choosing to resist it. And many are paying the price for defying the Empire and its cosseted partner, Israel.
Professor As’ad Abu Khalil has said that the “movement against Israeli/American colonialism and genocide is being led by remarkably brave young Palestinian women.” If you have seen the rallies, marches, university encampments, and attacks and arrests by police—you’ve seen many remarkably brave young women. Layan Fuleihan re-tweeted the comments of Hamas-allied Hezbollah Resistance leader Hassan Nasrullah, since murdered by the Israelis. Nasrullah was surprised at the support American student protests gave to the Palestinians. He called it “another front of the resistance.” Fuleihan and her fellow young protesters take being another resistance front very seriously and are convinced they can show their power in their dissent. There are hundreds of student/youth organizations involved in this effort, many of them Palestinian-led, and many women-led. The very visible Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) “supports and unifies” the over 200 campus Palestinian solidarity organizations “in occupied Turtle Island” (US-occupied Native-American lands). Its aim is to “contribute to the fight for Palestinian liberation.”
Last May, the SJP and Within Our Lifetime, which seeks university divestment of Israel investment, organized a rally which included hundreds of protesters, to oppose Israel’s Gaza genocide. That same month, encampments were set up at Columbia University and City College in NYC, and in Massachusetts, Iowa, Texas, Michigan, California, and all across the country. And in every case, they were met by heavy-handed repression by university authorities and security and by the police. At the May NYC student protests, over 300 were arrested. Hunter College student Johanna von Maack joined an encampment praising the students’ “solidarity and support.” But von Maack was appalled at the NYPD’s reaction. They were in full riot gear, “pepper spraying students; they were injuring them.” She wondered, “Why was it so brutal and violent? They were just trying to get CUNY to divest away from genocide.” The counterforce was well under way to stop student protest.
Zionist/Jewish/Israeli pressure has influenced university presidents, legislators and law enforcement to bring the hammer down on the anti-genocide dissenters. Many hundreds have been arrested—often in brutal and violent ways—from Emerson College in Boston to USC and UCLA. USC security and LAPD police shoved young women protesters wearing kaffiyehs to the ground and clubbed them, and then hauled them off as their fellow protesters chanted “free Palestine!” The crackdown has only worsened this fall. There are new stricter regulations for demonstrations, and at NYU, pro-Israel “Zionists” are now a protected class. There is more repressive surveillance and a greater police presence. Two women students, Samantha Escobar and Naomi Guttierrez, were among four arrested for the felony of putting up posters criticizing people who were for genocide at the University of Rochester. The Jewish/Israeli lobby was at work to maintain the school administration’s continued support of Israeli/US genocide. When student protester Reem Odeh of Chicago was out in the streets last summer, she said “The US role is to continue genocide and persecution. . . The American ruling class spends money killing children in Gaza.” And “We want a weapons embargo now!” At the same event, a young woman called Melach of the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation denounced the “settler colonial regime of Israel.” “Revolution is here!” Such is their commitment.
My two young activists—Layan Fuleihan and Calla Walsh—have different methods, but share leftist politics: they want the revolution here and now. A day after Hamas began the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, Layan Fuleihan said “the oppressed people of Palestine broke out of the open-air prison they have been subjected to.” She was speaking at an “All Out for Palestine” rally organized by the People’s Forum. Fuleihan is education director for the Forum, an organization which “makes no apologies for calling for the destruction of an apartheid and colonial state that is actively engaging in a genocide of the Palestinian people.” Fuleihan is an impressive and insightful writer. She “educates and organizes” for the Forum, sharing what she has learned as a “student of the struggles of the oppressed.” She works to promote a “world free from the control of imperialism and capitalism.” She has written that the end of the Gaza war will bring a way “for the Palestinian people to realize their goals for liberation, for dignity and for true independence.” She dreams of returning to “a liberated Palestine.”
She’s continually at rallies—in New York on October 24, ’23, she spoke out against the US as a “capitalist imperialist government” which supports the Gaza genocide. Fuleihan was at the huge march in DC last July protesting Netanyahu’s visit, which saw a lot of police violence against the marchers. Her message was that the US “provides a “fortress” for “war criminal” Bibi Netanyahu. “We are the people of conscience—there is no place for genocide!” “Hands off Gaza now!” Her twitter posts reflect her politics: she lauds the Palestinian resistance and condemns Israel. When Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza she wrote: “Israeli occupation is genocidal and needs to go now.” Last January at the “Shut it down for Palestine” march, she said “we will stay in the streets until there is a permanent ceasefire and Palestine is free!” She was arrested and she continues to be. “The genocide defenders sent their puppets, the NYPD, thinking they could shut us down. They were wrong. Arrest us, and the millions will keep marching. We are the ones with the power.” And the bravery.
Beyond rallies, marches and encampments, some female dissenters opt for direct action in their anti-genocide fight. Activist Calla Walsh, now 20, is one of the “Merrimack 4,” arrested for her action against the Haifa (Israel)-based Elbit Systems plant. Elbit is a major supplier of the drones, artillery and munitions Israel needs to do its genocide in Gaza. Walsh began her political activism at 16 in Massachusetts, working to create online youth support for Senator Edward Markey, who quickly disillusioned her with his support for Israel. Walsh changed political directions and became a socialist, often speaking out against US imperialism, especially as used against Cuba and China. She argues that the US uses promises of “democracy” and aid as weapons to fight real (anti-US) democracy around the world.
Walsh, with Sophie Ross, 22, Paige Belanger, 32, and Bridget Shergolis, a 24-year-old former Disney actress, spray-painted walls, raised burning torches and smashed some windows at the Merrimack, NH branch of Elbit. Walsh and Belanger had helped organize a US branch of the British Palestine Action which has been busy getting its people arrested for doing direct action against Israeli arms-related businesses. Before Merrimack, Walsh and company had been involved in related actions in Virginia and Cambridge, MA (Ross and Walsh are still facing court action there). The Merrimack arrests were followed by very harsh charges.
Brought into court in shackles and orange jumpsuits, the women were met with accusations of “riot, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief, burglary and falsifying evidence.” Each charge, a felony, could mean a three and a half to seven- year prison sentence. A conservative NH attorney general, backed by numerous politicians, such as Governor Chris Sununu, called the action “antisemitic” and “a vile act of hate.” They joined the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in calling the women antisemitic for crimes targeting Jewish and Israeli-owned businesses. The Canary Mission, an Israeli-run website which tracks and smears Palestinian advocates (including Fuleihan) through network informants, calls Walsh a “vicious antisemitic communist hooligan.” This is partly because she supposedly worked on the “Mapping Project” of Boston [Jewish] organizations’ support for colonization of Palestine. She denies that and says she only “supported it,” but didn’t work on it.
In September the felony charges were dropped. Apparently, the prosecutors hoped to coerce some guilty pleas, but also to discourage others from such actions. The sentences were reduced to 60 days, starting on November 14, for misdemeanors. Walsh said the “hardest part was all the months of waiting, isolation and fear of a lifetime in prison.” But she still believes direct action is better than parades and “liberal reformism.” Palestine Action stated the women will be “imprisoned for trying to stop a genocide.” The punishments for fighting a holocaust are harsh.
My older activists, Hazami Barmada, Medea Benjamin, and Arraf Huweida, have all faced numerous arrests and threats. Palestinian Barmada was inspired to fight because of the Gaza genocide, but Jewish anti-war campaigner Benjamin and anti-occupation Palestinian Huweida have been in the struggle for years. Barmada, probably my favorite dissenter, comes from an interesting background. I first saw Hazami Barmada in a video with another dozen people, shouting at Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he drove away from his house. “War criminal! War criminal!” Barmada and crew set up their camp across the road from his house in January, calling it “Kibbutz Blinken.” The protesters ask people driving by to honk for Palestine, and they usually do. At seven every morning, Barmada wakes Blinken: “Wakey, wakey war criminal! How many kids did you kill while you were sleeping?” The group follow that up by putting blood red paint on the road as Blinken leaves for the State Department. Blinken asked Barmada not to make his kids “uncomfortable.” But she told him Palestinian kids their age “are treated as dispensable. They can’t escape the rain of bombs that drop on their heads.”
Barmada is Syrian/Palestinian/American; she is CEO of Humanity Lab Foundation, and once headed the Arab Empowerment Institute. She has an MA from Harvard in public policy and has been a consultant to the UN, Aspen and the government of Oman. In 2023 she became an adjunct professor at George Washington University in DC. In her earlier persona, she is pictured as an attractive buttoned-down CEO, but as an anti-genocide activist, her hair is carelessly pulled back in a kerchief and she’s in jeans. Why the change? She says the last few years have been hard: her father had a paralyzing stroke, and she almost died twice during her last pregnancy. She had never been a Palestinian activist, because they didn’t do that “in philanthropy work.” But then she saw a photo of a Palestinian woman holding her daughter on her knees. She looked at it as she was putting her son to sleep. She started crying. “What would I do if it was my kid?” So she said she “went out and put my body on the ground in front of the Capitol.” As a mother, she felt compelled to fight the Israeli/American genocide.
Barmada wanted, like Walsh, to do direct action and “political street theater” to “engage” and “educate” people more that marches do. Her actions include “die-ins” at the Israeli Embassy and White House, making State Department workers walk through blood red paint to get to work, and interrupting pro-Israel politicians’ speeches. For her actions, she has received many death threats and been assaulted by Israeli Embassy people. Barmada and company lived at Kibbutz Blinken from January through July, experiencing a lot of support from locals (and especially from Arab and Palestinian restaurants). Finally in late July, the state of Virginia decided it was illegal for them to “block the road” (although they weren’t). Police with rifles cleared them out. Barmada says she has lost friends because of her activism, but she has gained a new family.
Fellow dissenter Medea Benjamin seems to be constantly dogging the steps of government leaders—trying to make them listen. It’s very much an uphill battle, and Benjamin has been fighting to change politicians’ minds for decades. To me, her most dramatic and spectacular anti-genocide display was the one done very early in the Gaza “war,” on November 3, 2023. Dozens of protesters, including Benjamin and her COlDEPINK colleagues, held up hands painted bloody red as a backdrop to secretaries of state and defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin as they presented their case to the Senate Appropriations Committee for giving more money to Israel to commit war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza. When her turn to interrupt came, Benjamin told them they had blood on their hands. “How can you send more weapons to Israel? They kill a child every 10 minutes. . .Who are you representing? [Jewish/Israel lobby’s] AIPAC? The arms industry?” She was dragged away as the Senate audience looked annoyed or indifferent.
Medea Benjamin has been arrested hundreds of times because she refuses to stop her anti-government dissent. Benjamin was born to a Jewish family on Long Island in 1952. She went to Tufts where she embraced feminism and joined SDS. She left school to hitchhike through Europe, and then returned to earn MAs at Columbia (public health) and the New School (education). She spent 10 years as a nutritionist in Latin America and Africa. Her activism efforts are really too numerous to mention, but they center in anti-war dissent: a watch center on US abuses in Baghdad, anti-Guantanamo Prison protests in Congress, anti-drone activism, pro-Venezuela action in Washington, and taking part in Gaza flotillas and freedom marches to break Israel’s siege.
Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and 100 others started CODEPINK in November ’02 to protest the Iraq War. The CODEPINK name was to counter President Bush’s national security codes of Orange and Red and offer pink as a call “to wage peace.” After four months in existence, 25 of their number including Benjamin, were arrested at the White House gates protesting the war. From then until now, you can find CODEPINK people, often including Benjamin, at any significant government function regarding war and peace. They were there in force at the Democratic National Convention last July—plaguing VP candidate Tim Walz when he spoke at the “Women’s Caucus” about the ERA. But he did not mention Palestinian women’s rights, and so he was informed. “Gaza is a feminist issue!” The DNC was a clear example of US political depravity. Onwar Omeish was one of the women reading out the names of dead Gazan children, to ridicule, and for the most part, to attendees “covering their ears.”
When Medea Benjamin was honored at the global Peace Unity Conference in London last October, she told them she has gone to Congress every day since October 7. As an American she is disgusted. And as a Jew, she says her “religion has been twisted.” “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” She is fighting “Israeli apartheid.” She does not (publicly) grapple with the huge support American Jews, in every local synagogue and federation, give to Israel and its genocide. One egregious example was an LA synagogue selling Gaza land in anticipation of its Israeli takeover. Israel is a Jewish supremacist apartheid state and needs to be condemned by—as Benjamin put it—”anyone with a sense of humanity.” Benjamin was back opposing Austin last April at the House Appropriations Committee. She told him US support for Gaza genocide is “illegal, immoral and disgraceful.” She shouted, “The whole world is watching what we are doing in Gaza. Secretary General you are supporting a genocide. Free Palestine!” Again, she was led away in handcuffs. She spoke to the cameras: “We must all do what we can even if it means going to jail for justice.” And she did. And she will.
Veteran Palestinian-American activist Huwaida Arraf has also been doing what she can for Palestinian rights for decades, although as a Palestinian she comes at it from a different direction from Benjamin. Like Benjamin, Arraf maintains mainstream connections while she criticizes political policy. My impression is that she and Benjamin are both shaken by the US government/Democratic administration support for Israeli genocide. Last March, Arraf joined the crowd of protesters rallying against President Biden as he prepared to give his State of the Union message. She wielded a microphone to tell the crowd they “actually represent the ideals Biden claims to speak for.” “We know the State of the Union, the State of the Union is genocide!” His motorcade avoided the protesters, their huge Palestinian flag, and their chants: “From DC to Palestine, occupation is a crime!” Arraf, 48, knows only too well about the crimes of occupation. Huwaida Arraf grew up in Michigan after her Palestinian parents moved there when she was an infant. She visited Palestine until she was 11, and later studied in Jerusalem. She got her law degree with a focus on human rights.
Arraf worked with Seeds of Peace, a US organization promoting Jewish-Palestinian dialogue, and met her Jewish husband there. But it wasn’t long before she left Seeds of Peace. She has said it was a “feel-good project” and it “ignored Israeli hegemony.” Instead she and her husband founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in 2001 with the very different focus of resisting “the long-entrenched and systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population” with non-violent and direct actions methods. She was off and running: from Ramallah, West Bank, joining the PLO’s Arafat in solidarity, under Israeli fire in 2002; to serving as a “Palestinian freedom rider” defying Israeli anti-Palestinian law and thus getting dragged off a bus and arrested in 2011. In 2008 she was aboard the first of the International Gaza Freedom Flotillas (which she helped organize). The ship was the first to reach a Gaza port in 40 years. Arraf was also onboard in 2010 when their ships were raided by Israeli commandoes. The Israelis killed 10 and injured 50 of the activists. When a Greek participant of the 2010 action recently died, she tweeted he’d be with her in spirit “when we return to a free Gaza and free Palestine!” She was an organizer for the Flotilla attempt last April to call attention to the siege and genocide in Gaza, knowing “Israel might attack us.” But there were Turkey/Israeli/American political machinations and delays which ended their attempt.
Maintaining her ties with the Michigan Democratic party, Arraf ran for Congress in 2022. She said she hoped once there, she would be able to work on writing better human rights laws. Unsurprisingly, she had vicious Jewish/Israeli Lobby opposition with their charges of antisemitism, and lost the primary handily. As noted, her disillusion with the Democrats is growing. She tweeted on November 1st she would never vote for Kamala Harris, and on the 6th that she was not surprised Secretary Blinken ignored Israel’s blocking aid to Gaza and his refusal to change administration policy. She spends her time defending Michigan students who face disciplinary action for their pro-Palestinian protests. She’s at rallies and giving talks and seminars—my husband, a pro-Palestinian writer himself, says she doesn’t get enough credit for all she’s done. According to Huweida Arraf, “The Palestinian struggle is for freedom–for basic human dignity and human rights.” Obviously an Israeli/American genocide would, to her, have to be fought at all costs.
My two women in politics, Rashida Tlaib and Claudia de la Cruz, have differing political views but the same dedication to the anti-genocide struggle. The only politician in Washington fighting against genocide, like her close friend Arraf, Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has been scorned and censured by her own party for her (understandably) strong pro-Palestinian stands. She refused to endorse Democratic presidential candidate and pro-genocide, Kamala Harris, but won her own fourth term with 80% of the vote. She won in spite of strong Jewish lobby pressure against her. On November 14, she was on the floor of the House, demanding that Secretary Blinken resign for lying to Congress. In an October letter he threatened Israel with withholding arms if they didn’t start sending aid to the population of Gaza. He, of course, reneged on that promise, which, as noted, Arraf also condemned. Tlaib tweeted that Blinken’s lies had led to the starvation of Gaza. “I can’t believe our country won’t stop funding and enabling these war crimes.”
Rashida Tlaib, 48, is the first and only Palestinian-American to be in Congress. She comes from a working-class Detroit family; attending college for a political science and then law degree. She ran for and won state office in 2007 and then Congress in 2019. Her opposition to Israeli apartheid has always been central for her, and she’s made no apologies for it. She promotes a one-state solution and supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Israel banned her from the country so she cannot visit relatives in the West Bank. In Congress she has been investigated for allegedly violating campaign finance laws, and last October the House voted to censure her for criticizing Israel and “leading an insurrection” for participating in a Capitol protest. That censure motion failed. Tlaib called it “deeply Islamophobic.” The next attempt in November succeeded. This time 22 Democrats joined the GOP in denying their colleague free speech. The Republican-led resolution accused her of “promoting false narratives” regarding the Hamas operation of October7 and of using the phrase “from the river to the sea” to advocate Palestinian self-determination as “a genocidal call” to “destroy Israel.” Tlaib has actually been careful about her statements, dutifully criticizing Hamas and denying the Congressional “river to the sea” interpretation. But her ceasefire calls and criticism for US support for genocide is too much for Congress.
One of the bravest acts of courage I’ve ever seen is when Tlaib sat alone in Congress on the occasion of the Congressional lovefest for Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu last July. She was noticeably avoided and ignored by her colleagues. No one joined her as she held up a sign which said “War Criminal” on one side and “Guilty of Genocide” on the other. She explained: “It is important for myself as a Palestinian-American to make sure that our community is not erased, that the genocide in Gaza is not ignored.” There was one presidential candidate who opposed the Democrats who joins Tlaib in her determination that it will not happen.
No one exemplifies the courage and backbone to fight genocide better than the indomitable Claudia de la Cruz, 44. As noted, de la Cruz was marching with Fuleihan last January in a NY “Shut it Down for Palestine” rally, when she suffered one of her numerous arrests. She pulls no punches as to whom to blame for the genocide. Last July at a rally in NY protesting Netanyahu’s visit, one met with slobbering devotion by both political parties, Dominican-American de la Cruz, PSL candidate for president, had a decidedly different view. “The US sponsors terrorism! Congress/Trump/Biden/Blinken and Harris—no pass given for a black woman—all support it.” “We are in the belly of the beast. . . We are committed to liberation. Long live Palestine!” De la Cruz is a complete socialist: anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
She prides herself on her working- class background. Born in the South Bronx, she has a degree from John Jay, an MA in social work from Columbia, and a divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary. At an early age she was organizing—as in a 2003 march against the Iraq war—and began a movement to promote leadership for young Dominican and Puerto Rican women in honor of the nuns killed in 1960 who opposed Dominican dictator Trujillo. As pastor in a Latin American church, she worked to use her faith to do community organizing. Her link with Layan Fuleihan stems from her being co-founder of the People’s Forum. Her PSL candidacy features socialist reforms like single payer healthcare, recognition of Native-American treaty rights, and eliminating billionaires; but her main goal has been ending Israeli/American genocide.
In a University of Rochester student interview, she said she’s been demonstrating for Palestine since she was 13. In her opinion, the worst thing to do “as we approach one year of this genocide is give them [the ruling power] space to demoralize us. . . Genocide is the issue because it shows us that they have the capacity to annihilate, to exterminate, an entire population. What do you think will happen to us?” So de la Cruz keeps marching, organizing, speaking out and being arrested. A few weeks ago she was in New York exhorting her listeners: “Hello comrades! It’s a long march! People in Syria, in Gaza—they all know the US is a terrorist entity too! . . . Are you tired of marching? [A resounding No!] Hands off the Middle East! From the Belly of the Beast!” She said she’s a girl from the Bronx and she “fights to win!” So “Buckle up, it’ll get bumpy! We’ll build resistance to lift us to liberation! Free Palestine!” De la Cruz would be the president we badly need.
Not everyone believes the genocide should be fought at all costs. In fact, incredibly, the job of mainstream western media is to normalize genocide, and again, an array of female dissenters are working hard to make sure people are constantly presented with the reality of how genocide is abnormal and the worst crime against humanity. One of the most infamous supporters and hawkers for Israel, is CNN’s Dana Bash. Bash makes her arguments, like Antony Blinken, by unabashedly centering them in her being a Jew. She constantly parrots the IDF and Israeli government line. She insists Israel is a wonderful democracy where “every life matters.” She calls US student protests against the genocide “rage against Jews” and “hate on college campuses.” When addressing the need for a ceasefire, she says “On October 6, there was a ceasefire, but it ended on October 7 with the brutal massacre of Israelis done by Hamas.” There is no context and no argument.
Bash has been confronted by protesters who charge her with “media malpractice” and “promoting genocide.” When Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal told Bash 15,000 women and children had been killed by Israel, Bash said “at least Israeli soldiers don’t rape Palestinian women.” That, of course, is a lie, with plentiful documentation of their soldiers’ raping women and men in their prisons and at their checkpoints. But her favorite focus was the since disproved story of Hamas soldiers systematically raping and killing Israeli women on October 7.
The weaponization of rape as used by Empire narrative managers is not new. In this case, beyond Dana Bash and CNN, it was used most notably in a film by Sheryl Sandberg called “Screams Before Silence.” The film is supposedly a documentary of the rape and murder of Israeli women by Hamas, with women sexually abused, some mutilated and raped, and some killed. But her witnesses and her evidence have been debunked. In spite of that, Democratic Party “feminists” like Hillary Clinton and Senator Kristen Gillibrand lined up for an Israeli embassy event lauding the film. Kamala Harris repeated the disproved narrative numerous times, insisting “Israeli women suffered unspeakable sexual violence.” Truth has no place when engaging in heavy-handed Israeli genocide propaganda.
A whole host of alternative female podcasters, journalists and writers battle that narrative by presenting the truth and horror of genocide. There are numerous Americans, including Anya Parampil, Sabby Sabs, Katie Halper, Amy Goodman, and Margaret Kimberley. The writing efforts of Australian Caitlin Johnstone tackle the horrors of genocide and imperialism with her wit and insight every day. And there is brave former Gaza activist, Canadian Eva Bartlett bringing her first-hand knowledge to describe Israeli atrocities. Truthteller Vanessa Beeley, once detained by police at Heathrow, is still bringing the truth about the Empire’s new invasion in Syria. And the stubbornly strong Sarah Wilkinson, because she provides Gaza news for many thousands, was arrested, injured, and her home ransacked—with the British SWAT team dumping out her mother’s ashes. All these women bring their sanity and humanity, and their unswerving support for the women, the children, the innocents being killed in the Israeli/American genocide.
A couple of weeks ago, the door to my house was egged. We live in a small town, but on a busy highway. Someone objected, I believe, to the signs in our windows: “Stop Israeli Apartheid” and “Let My People Go” in English and Arabic. As a child of the 60s, it is clear to me this is the time for building a movement against the Empire’s imperialism and global destruction, which now includes the brutal, violent takeover of Palestinian Resistance bulwark Syria. Young Palestinian women like Layan Fuleihan are leading rallies and marches, which she says shows the strength of the movement—of “people who refuse to be complicit in genocide.” Claudia de la Cruz has the same mission: “We’re fighting to build socialism here. . We’ll build resistance to lift us to liberation.” Barmada, Benjamin and Arraf demand that women in government stand for “true feminism and liberation” and not “weaponize women’s rights” as the Palestinian Feminist Collective puts it.
Female dissenters are willing to take the consequences for being part of this movement. To quote Paige Belanger of the Merrimack Four: “I didn’t want to serve time in jail, but I have no regrets about being incarcerated for materially disrupting the flow of weapons to Palestine and I will forever be proud that I took a stand against genocide, especially because it meant putting my own freedom on the line. Standing by and doing nothing simply wasn’t an option.” And standing by silently was not an option for Hazami Barmada when she confronted Joe Biden’s campaign speech last January. The topic was reproductive health. She interrupted him to shout out that women’s reproductive health was under attack in Gaza. He spoke over her, said she was a Trump MAGA, and called her “the woman hollering over there.” Women are hollering and they won’t be silenced. They won’t be stopped.
Linda Ford is a retired history professor living in Madison, NY. She is the author ofWomen Politicals: From Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart and Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party.
18 December 2024
Source: countercurrents.org
