The Silence of Western Feminists Over Gaza Exposes Their Fraud
Zeteo Fatime Bhutto, Guest post
Miscarriages in Gaza tripled in the first half of this year to nearly 4,000, a shocking statistic. If this were any other place on Earth, women would be marching worldwide. They would be – rightfully – setting fire to the streets. Remember how upset women in Europe were that their Iranian sisters had to wear a piece of cloth over their hair? They made videos and signed petitions and cut snippets of their own hair in sisterly solidarity, and they were very, very mad indeed. But the news of Gaza’s women being unable to complete their pregnancies at a phenomenally large rate didn’t bother global feminists at all.
Did Gloria Steinem hold a demonstration? Did Oprah devote herself to a series of shows?
Of course not. Feminism today is dead, and it was killed by its supposed icons who urgently rallied for what women wear and how much they earn in Fortune 500 companies but sit silent and pathetically useless while women suffer a historically grave maternal health crisis in Gaza. Not only did doctors raise the alarm about Gaza’s astonishing rate of miscarriages, but doctors have also reported seeing a “sharp increase in premature births before 26 weeks of pregnancy,” when survival is not guaranteed and only possible with access to medical care. Images of a damaged maternity ward from Israel’s attack and raid showed destroyed incubators. There are videos of Israeli soldiers smashing ultrasound machines. Some of the videos I remember seeing are now impossible to find online. YouTube deleted more than 700 videos of Israeli human rights violations, Meta routinely removes documentation of Israeli war crimes, and AI platforms are being programmed to deny Israeli genocide. It’s not just that we are watching the jolly violence of a deranged army being erased; we are watching the erasure of acts of genocide.
Under Article II (d) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the definition of genocide includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within” a specific target group. Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure was purposely and maliciously targeted; its doctors tortured and taken hostage. Add to that repeated displacement, malnutrition, unavailability of medicine, machinery, and diagnostic tests, exposure to white phosphorus among who knows what else as Israel tests its military technology on Palestinians, starvation, heat, cold, and unrelenting chronic stress, and you have Israel’s genocide in action. Israel’s criminal siege of Gaza means NICU equipment is highly restricted, often blocked, from entering the Strip. According to the UN, Gaza’s health system for mothers has been “decimated.” Early in its genocidal war, Israel also bombed Gaza’s largest IVF clinic, destroying 4,000 embryos (joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran also targeted an IVF hospital in Tehran). But it takes a lot more than that to rile up your ‘Favorite Western Feminists.’ Maybe if Gaza’s women were being covered up with extra fabric rather than shot in the head, they might organize some effort, but I doubt it.
I’ve long been disillusioned by feminism, which has morphed into a meaningless series of idiotic slogans – my body my choice, #MeToo, pink pussyhats, Time’s Up, etc. I wrote about it for my first Zeteo column more than two years ago, and nothing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse. How can you seriously believe in an idea whose main proponents are overly privileged women who think wearing a badge means anything, or that serial war supporter Hillary Clinton and top cop “I’m speaking” Kamila Harris are icons? I know that there are real feminists, true fighters for women’s lives and liberation, but I also know that they are the ones dying in Gaza, being bombed in Lebanon, and ignored in Africa and Asia. Here I’m referring to women with voices and global platforms who found nothing to say about the recent reports of drastic rises in the number of babies being born with severe congenital abnormalities in Gaza.
“In previous years, seeing a baby born without limbs or feet was an extremely rare occurrence. Now it has become a recurring phenomenon in delivery wards,” Dr. Adnan Radi, the head of Gaza’s Health Ministry’s advisory committee, told The Independent. It’s the chemicals being used by Israel, the new weapons being tested, the utter pollution of the air and environment of Gaza, but it doesn’t matter; the global feminism movement doesn’t care.
What exactly is feminism about if it doesn’t stop the world at the news last year that the number of births in Gaza had declined by 41% in three years? Pregnant women are being starved in Gaza. When their babies are born, they struggle to breastfeed. Save the Children recently reported that mothers are resorting to mixing water with tahini to satiate their baby’s hunger. Without adequate nutrition themselves, Gaza’s mothers cannot feed their children.
The increase in the number of miscarriages in Gaza is so tremendous, so unfamiliar to us, that it is difficult to comprehend. Gaza has shattered our understanding of so many things – human rights, international law – and exposed the fraud that is feminism, but it also defies statistics. Life, in Gaza, is a luxury. It is luck. It is pure chance. Israel’s horror is so total, so comprehensive, that if they don’t kill you by stopping your mother’s ambulance, they will kill you by bombing the hospital you were born in. Or they will kill you by turning off the electricity so you rot to death in your incubator, or die through starvation, or perhaps shooting your mother while she breastfeeds you in a makeshift tent. Israel has done all these things to babies.
If you are one of the lucky ones to make it through infancy, they might send their American weaponry to airstrike your school or apartment building. Maybe your life will be snuffed out from disease, seemingly orchestrated by the creation of abysmal hygiene conditions. If you reach adolescence, they will likely arrest you on no charges and hold you hostage in their dungeons. In jail, we know, thanks to Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem, that rape and torture are a matter of policy. How do the women suffering these losses survive? If – big if – you get out, they will kill you anyway. By denying you leave for medical treatment, by slaughtering your family in front of you, Israel never runs out of ways to end life. Israel may be the enemy of life, but they have exposed the global feminist movement for being no allies to women. Their silence is nothing short of damning complicity.
Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide,’ a collection of essays she co-edited, and her memoir, ‘The Hour of the Wolf,’ are available now.