Feminists For a Free Palestine

As women’s health and safety workers, trauma-informed professionals, lived experience advocates, educators, and anti-violence campaigners, we urge the Australian Government to call for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the bombardment of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and an end to Israeli apartheid and military occupation of the people of Palestine.

Over the past 48 days, Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza has resulted in the killing of over 14,000 Palestinians, more than one third of whom are children. Over 24,158 Palestinians have been injured, and thousands upon thousands are buried under rubble. Others cannot be identified due to the dismembering effects of Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. Over 60,000 residential units have been destroyed, in addition to hundreds of targeted precision attacks on hospitals, primary care clinics, and other medical facilities, including ambulances, 90 education facilities including schools and universities, and 49 media offices.

Israeli government officials have publicly expressed genocidal intent, labelling Palestinians 'human animals' and 'the children of darkness', and calling for the complete destruction and erasure of Gaza. The people in Gaza, who have been held hostage by Israel’s devastating blockade for 16 years, are being starved of food, water, electricity, and fuel. These expressions and actions are evidence of Israel’s racist ideology, law, policies, and practices against Palestinians that operate within a violent system of apartheid.

Itimad Abu Ward, a midwife employed by the World Health Organisation in Gaza, has described the assault on Gaza as a ‘health, environmental and social disaster’. We note the following facts which provide details of the particular impact this has had on girls and women:

Over 493,000 women and girls have been displaced from their homes within the Gaza strip. Temporary shelters including schools and refugee camps are being targeted.
50,000 pregnant women, including 5,500 expected to deliver within the next month, do not have access to vital healthcare, with electricity and supplies running out at all hospitals across Gaza.
Doctors report seeing more birth complications than ever, including increased cases of placental abruption. Hysterectomies are being performed in circumstances where they would not otherwise, due to a lack of blood for transfusions.
Women are delivering babies in hospitals where supplies are depleted. Caesareans are being performed without anaesthetic. Children are undergoing surgery without anaesthesia.
There is a history of sexual violence against Palestinian women that dates back to the 1948 Nakba up to the present, including physical and sexual violence against incarcerated Palestinian women.
Women in Gaza are reporting a lack of access to sanitary products and clean water for personal hygiene, with some having to resort to taking birth control pills to stop their menstrual cycle. We note that as supplies run short, women will also cease to have access to contraception.
Babies are being delivered posthumously from the bodies of pregnant women who have been killed in Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Reports indicate that one child is being killed every five minutes.
A new acronym is being used by medics in Gaza: WCNSF — Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. In the words of British doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah, working in Gaza City, 'There is no lonelier place in this universe than around the bed of a wounded child who has no more family to look after them.'

Many of the above points are longstanding and predate 7 October 2023. UNICEF data prior to October 2023 indicated that 25% of pregnant women in Palestine were considered high risk, and that more than one Palestinian child was killed per week throughout all of Palestine. Palestinian women are systemically targeted as a way of dehumanising the Palestinian population, with Palestinian babies being described as ‘terrorists’ before they are born. We recognise that the current violence sits within a long history of settler colonial violence and dispossession.

As anti-racist feminists, we see the connections between gender oppression and state violence. Many of us work in multicultural communities, providing services to CALD and refugee women within a social model of health and human rights framework. Many of us campaign against interpersonal abuse and domestic violence. We recognise the many parallels between interpersonal abuse and systemic abuse, including the strategies used by the state to control and oppress large populations. We recognise the ways in which Israeli officials are engaging in denialism, gaslighting, and a calculated reversal of victim and offender in order to evade accountability.

Many of us have made a commitment to anti-racism, intersectionality, and survivor-led practice. We stand in solidarity with the Arab and Palestinian women with whom we work, and to whom we provide services and support. We acknowledge the silencing they are experiencing. We recognise that our fellow advocates, colleagues, and clients include women who are survivors of Israeli aggression and who have lived experience of war crimes, dispossession and military occupation.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Sahar Aziz, Professor of Law and Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar at Rutgers Law School notes, ‘Muslim women’s civic and political engagement is almost always met with attacks on their own safety, defamation of their character, and threats to their employment — all aimed at silencing their voices.’ We stand in solidarity with Muslim and Arab women in our communities in the face of ongoing Islamophobic racism and silencing in the workplace, and recognise that the brunt of this aggression is borne by women who are visibly Muslim. We also recognise that the dehumanisation of men and boys is part of Israel’s campaign to frame Palestinians as ‘barbaric’ and 'violent’. We reject these racist representations that work in the service of neo-colonialism and the suppression of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

As part of our commitment to anti-colonial, intersectional feminist practice, we stand against the debasing of feminism in service of imperialism. We recognise the ways in which feminism has been historically weaponised to justify military incursions and invasions. We recognise the ways in which ‘purple-washing’ - presenting something as feminist when it is not - and imperialist language have been deployed to prop up racist Zionist narratives, including in liberal feminist spaces. We recognise the ways in which feminism has been historically weaponised to justify military incursions and invasions. We reject the use of the oppressor’s language, frameworks, discourses, and equivocations. Ending state sanctioned violence and oppression is not a footnote to our feminist work in dismantling patriarchy and settler colonialism; it is our urgent goal.

We stand in solidarity with our Palestinian sisters in Gaza and Arab women in our communities by calling for an immediate ceasefire and the unfettered delivery and provision of food, water, power, and medical supplies to Gaza. Stopping the genocide in Gaza is of utmost urgency and demands our attention as well as our action. We demand an end to the siege on Gaza, an end to Israeli apartheid, and an end to the occupation. Ongoing militarism, systemic racial discrimination, ongoing expropriation of Indigenous land, mass arrests, and settler-paramilitary violence are the very root causes of violence: unless they are addressed, there can be no lasting peace.

We call on all feminists to affirm their commitment to anti-colonial, anti-racist and intersectional feminist principles and practice by standing with Palestinian women, whose rights, dignity, and political aspirations have been violated for 75 years. We make this call as we witness attempts to ban and silence all forms of solidarity with the Palestinian people. We urge our colleagues to speak out and take action in the face of this long-standing injustice.

We believe the struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the intersection of every social justice movement, and is a true test of our commitment to freedom and justice for all people.

◦ Rukhshana Sarwar (Immigrant Women's Speak Out Association NSW)

◦ Dr. Sarah Ayoub (Journalist, author and academic)

◦ Amani Haydar (Author, victim-survivor and advocate for women's health and safety)

◦ Chelsea Watego (Institute of Collaborative Race Research)

◦ Amy McQuire (Darumbal journalist, QUT)

◦ Maha Krayem Abdo OAM (Muslim Women Australia)

◦ Gayatri Nair (Financial Abuse Service NSW)

◦ Carly Findlay OAM (Author, speaker, appearance activist and arts worker)

◦ Roxanne Moore (Noongar lawyer, campaigner and activist)

◦ Nemat Kharboutli (Muslim Women Australia)

◦ Dr. Emma Whatman (Lecturer and researcher in Gender Studies, University of Melbourne)

◦ Dr. Yumiko Kadota (Doctor and DV survivor-advocate)

◦ Dr. Anisa Buckley (Educator, advocate, and academic)

◦ Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts (Lawyer and human rights advocate)

◦ Riley Brooke (Community Legal Centres Australia)

◦ Mariam Mourad (Bankstown Women's Health Centre and Fairfield Women's Health Service)

◦ Yumi Lee (Older Women's Network NSW)

◦ Jaguar Jonze (Artist and activist)

◦ Catalina Labra Odde (Migrant women's health advocate and researcher)

◦ Rose Pearce (Open Place, Relationships Victoria)

◦ Tasnia Alam Hannan (Arise Foundation, lecturer at UNSW)

◦ Dr. Jessica Kean (Lecturer, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

◦ Hala Abdelnour (Institute of non-violence)

◦ Kathryn Joy (Family violence researcher)

◦ Amanda Morgan (Yorta Yorta woman. DSFV survivor, advocate, activist, and researcher)

◦ Grace Tame (The Grace Tame Foundation)

◦ Diana Sayed (Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, campaigner and international human rights lawyer)

◦ Clementine Ford (Author)

◦ Madison Griffiths (Author)

◦ Yasmin Khan (The Bangle Foundation)

◦ Sally Stevenson AM (Wollongong Citizen of the Year 2023)

◦ Ezra Thomas (Our Watch)

◦ Khadija Gbla (Human rights activist)

◦ Priyanka Bromhead (we are the mainstream)

◦ Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah (Future Fellow, Macquarie University)

◦ Abigail Boyd (Greens NSW MP)

◦ Kristine Ziwica (Journalist and author)

◦ Therese Wolfe (Women's Health NSW)

◦ Dr. Rebecca Howe (Education Programs Coordinator, the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne)

◦ Dr. Peta Malins (Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Justice Studies, RMIT University)

◦ Salwa Al Baz (Cumberland Women's Health Centre)

◦ Rola Rifai (Integrated domestic and family violence specialist)

◦ Eman Al-Dasuqi (Women's health advocate and cultural consultant)

◦ Sara Ahmed (Author, independent scholar)

◦ Dr. Paula Abood (Educator and community worker)

◦ Lobna Yassine (Lecturer, University of Sydney)

Feminists For a Free Palestine. Stop the Genocide. End the Occupation.

Signatories