Farha (dir Darin J Sallam) 2021. This film shows the 1948 Nakba, a forced displacement, an exodus forced onto the lives of Palestinians by the Zionist state of Israel. They sanctioned military invasion of the civilians with the funding of imperial powers. This further caused the murder of several people including newborn babies, children, women, and men. The illegal settler colonies encroached into the Palestinian land robbed them and built massive walls of separation to create an open-air jail.
Table of Contents
Western Feminism’s Silence on Imperial Violence
The film discusses the Nakba and conveys its elements through the real-life story of one of the survivors. The story introduces its narrative from the experience of a 14-year-old ordinary Palestinian girl called, Farha. She is depicted in the beginning as a happy, bold aspiring girl who is aiming for higher education instead of the traditional expectations of marriage at an early age. After some disagreements and discussions, her father understands her dreams and prepares the letter for her admission to a school outside the village even though the situation around them is alarming due to the violence created by the settler colonialists.
This military siege and invasion created violence, murder, and extermination of her entire village, she escapes by hiding in the cellar of her home but is left alone to watch a whole terror and is traumatised. She was robbed of everything, her chance, her opportunities for further education, even a normal life; everything was destroyed.
We have seen global powers, world leaders, and advocates of social justice, and women’s rights fail to recognise or notice how military violence, state-sanctioned discrimination, and destruction are eliminating women’s opportunity for education. We see how the occupational violence brought by the settler colonial state denies any basic rights and deprives the people of their right to live as Achille Mbembe identifies this violence as a practice of necropolitics implemented on Palestinians by the Zionist state.
Millions of people like Farha from Palestine and other apartheid nations go through this situation of necropolitics where the supreme power of imperial and colonial figures control and decide a multitude of people’s lives and deaths. They manage, and restrict the means of sustenance of an entire population. Former colonial nations continue to be involved in the matters of countries they previously colonised, policies, treaties, etc. are made to extract resource benefits and geographical advantages.
Patriarchal Oppression and the Denial of Women’s Education
Currently, liberalisation and more law sanctions for imperial policies allow them to gain resources and power. However, to maintain the power and demand for resources they have found their way of extraction from other countries. In the name of ‘war on terror,’ several imperial interventions leading to destruction and war on countries have been brought up by these ‘power’ nations.
Regardless of that, the most outstanding and ‘political’ among them is their agenda to ‘save’ and ‘protect’ Muslim women. The argument of this essay is to structurally point out the usual depiction of an alarming necessity to protect and save Muslim women from Muslim men and the Islamic culture as the primary concern raised by Western feminists instead of questioning state-sanctioned violence over Muslim women’s rights by global nations or occupational forces and military under the same name of ‘saving’ Muslim women. The failure of Western feminism to address the Palestinian struggle or other concerns of feminism arising from third-world countries is to be questioned.
In the film, Farha dreams of further education but the tradition and the situation of conflict raise a concern for a female child to go outside the village in aspiration of education or anything of such matter. Her father seems hesitant as other girls of her age are preparing for their religious studies and aspiring for marriage proposals.
This depicts the primitiveness of the thought and fear of the situation. Historically patriarchal structures have thrived on the free labour of women, and they would ensure ways to sustain such means by denying or objecting to opportunities for education or other means of independence for women. Looking at the feminist movements in various parts of the countries, we can see how education and other basic rights were denied to women regardless of region, religion, and culture.
Women were not even treated as citizens who had the right to vote at one point in time in the so-called progressive nations. The culture of patriarchal domination prevails in different forms and different structures. However, women are capable and have been fighting these in their ways. Respecting the choice of women in this struggle by considering their practices and culture should be understood before attempting to mansplain the subaltern people ‘what is feminism’.
The Violent Reproduction of Oppression Through Militarism
A scene is depicted in Farha where she watches helplessly the brutal murder of an entire family by the Israeli forces, the family was not violent nor carrying any arms. The intense scene portrays a childbirth by a mother while fleeing from the violent military, her situation is in pain as she gives birth to the child during this displacement. She is denied any proper medical care or comfort, she is surrounded by her two children and husband trying to help her in given means.
As she survives the delivery and holds her baby, they are surrounded by a vicious group of military criminals on their premises. The scene continues with the brutal murder of this unarmed helpless Palestinian family by the military murders. They shoot each member of the family and decide to kill the newborn baby by saying that the boy child will be a growing ‘threat’.
The mother is killed for her ability to reproduce and provide life to Palestinians and the child who was a boy was called a ‘militant by birth’ by the Zionist forces. The vulgarity of Zionist actions is inhumane and brutal. They are entitled, ignorant members of a terrorist state who rob the lives and rights of Palestinians.
The film is historic for its representation of a historical episode of occupational violence by a Zionist state through military invasions, which has continued in the land of Palestine from 1948 till now in 2024. The crimes against humanity, genocidal war crimes, and ethnic cleansing have all been conducted across the land of Palestine, Gaza.
Women, children, men, the elderly their property, culture, everything has been destroyed and buried through carpet bombings and other massive violence measures. Women are raped, murdered, denied health care, affected by poverty, molested by the army, and robbed of privacy, and are left humiliated during such occupational insurgencies in the name of security, and even the safety of women, as what happened in Afghanistan by the United States Army invasion.
“Palestinian woman’s freedom of movement, her right to an education, her right to vote, her right to work, her right to live where she wants, her right to sufficient food, clean water, and medical treatment in her homeland are denied to her not by her fellow Palestinians but by the illegal occupying power, Israel (Elia, 2011, 158).”
It is not from a piece of cloth, burqa, or any such material that a woman needs emancipation but from the oppressive state apparatuses and cultural patriarchy that exploit women for their gender, sexuality, and labour. Women have the agency and perform resistance in their struggle.
An analysis of the mainstream feminist movement’s discourse around “Muslim women’s rights” reveals a biased Western perception and call for action to save “Muslim Women”. Feminism even in its universalism has to be approached from the regional cultural context that is often distant from the Western dominant perceptions of feminism.
Agency, autonomy, empowerment, or emancipation have their signification and cultural meaning production within the context of history, politics, and social structures. The cultural hegemony, or patriarchal norms that regulate agency and access to basic fundamental rights for women can be tackled with resistance through reform, education, and cultural practices to revolution.
However, the Western tactics of using military invasion in the name of saving women and Western feminists supporting such actions of the state violence as a necessary measure to ‘save’ ‘Muslim’ women are polemic and are comments of ignorance and entitlement.
Lia Abu Lughod brings out arguments regarding the feminist movements in Egypt and Palestine to portray the existing regional feminist movement to counter question the polemic arguments raised globally by the Western perceptions of feminism over the safety and security of “third world women’s rights”. They behave with a sense of saviour complex regarding the matters of women’s rights, especially regarding Muslim women.
Lughod documents NGO and regional organizations that are working for the education, job, and other pension services for women. Her experience recorded seems to present a vision of ground-level movements and feminist organizations brought into work for the welfare and security of women by themselves, these are also funded financially by agencies outside the nation-states. However, she also argues that the organizations at times ‘reflect a global trend that is taking a particularly novel form in the transnational social networking of cosmopolitan Muslim women” (Abu-lughod 2009).
Western Perceptions of Feminism and the Savior Complex
Palestine has also become one region for the recent “global” projects in the name of the “Muslim women’s rights “ campaign. The campaign Lughod mentions is about the “stop stoning and killing women” – (2007campaign) this was later changed to stop killing and stoning women.
This organisation was coordinated by the anti-fundamentalist Algerian feminist Marieme Helie-Lucas for the rights of Muslim women. They tend to address the trend of “cultural and religious legitimisation of lethal violence against women” (WLUML 2007,2) their campaign focuses on violence against Muslim women by Muslim families, Muslim regimes, and Muslim fundamentalists. They focus on “honour crimes” in their campaigns as the evil against Muslim women’s rights and they treat it as a phenomenon despite the difference in each case, countries of origin, etc (Lughod 2009 )
The “Stop Stoning and Killing Women” Campaign in Palestine
The argument is not to denounce the seriousness of the issues of domestic violence against women worldwide but to look into the functionalities of certain organizations mentioned by Lughod in forming a peculiarity about the deployment of violence as a specific violation of “Muslim women’s rights”. this Lughod identified to be coming from the “terrain of sensational projects to save Muslim women from their cultures, whether imagined as the backward rural communities that well-educated urban youth” ( 17).
In contrast to the serious alert global organisations raise towards campaigns like “Islamofascist Awareness Week” they remain silent towards the violence against women across nation-states in war by militaries. There are women, (Muslims) who get abused by the state systems of global powers for being Muslim, it happened in Afghanistan, and it is happening in Palestine, and Kashmir with the entire world being ‘aware’ of it and yet remaining silent. Thousands of people die every day, women during pregnancy are killed, health care is denied to them, and several heinous crimes are committed against them.
Are there no global feminist campaigns against this violence, why? The trauma of experiencing political violence by watching the murder of own children, house raids, demolitions and the terror of sexual harassment, untimely childbirth without proper health care, and other gender-related violence, unemployment, and poverty pushes a woman in a war site to a point of catharsis. Several Palestinian feminists work to provide help and services in the process they cooperate with international and governmental organisations to work for women’s rights or empowerment.
However, despite the knowledge of human rights and the necessity of emancipation, the circumstances narrow down the chances for development. The increased militarisation in society has made women subject to violence than any time before. This atmosphere denies education or movement for women and any individual in this case. The pressure and violence perpetuated to maintain the “Jewish character of the state” is gendered and racialised at every level (Lyod,10).
The biopolitical power deployed on Palestinian women’s bodies, the regulations of their movement and access to necessities are eliminated so that their ability to survive and sustain Palestinian life is also eradicated. The Israeli state has been targeting women and children specifically as they are agents of life and the future of social and cultural life (Lyod, 13). Achille Mbembe articulates this destruction of the daily biological, material, and cultural reproduction in Palestinian social life as the space of a “necropolitical state”. (Mbembe,2003).
The Palestinian women’s movement and feminist organisations like the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW) and Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees (PFWAC) and majorly around 170 Palestine civil society organisations initiated integral movements like the Palestinian Call for BDS (Boycott divestment and sanctions since 2003 ) against Israel since its violations.
However global Western feminist organisations have not allied with any such movements despite the broad appeal of non-violent and rights-based movements. (lyod 3). Here he argues that there is a lack of feminist solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. The BDS movement also calls for the boycott of Israeli academics and universities this is in resistance to as Shalhaoub-Kevorkian refers to the long-standing practice of “invisiblising Palestine”, evicting them from the public sphere. (17)
Challenges and Solidarity in the Palestinian Feminist Struggle
Elia in her essay mentions the incident between Betty Friedan and the Egyptian feminist Nawal Al-Saadawi at the United Nations International Conference on Women (Nairobi, Kenya). She looks at the incident where Friedan tells Al-Saadawi ‘not to bring up Palestine in her speech’. However, Al-Saadawi, went ahead and talked to Friedan’s commentary that “This is a women’s conference, not a political conference” (qtd. In Al-Saadawi, 2006, p ii) that she cannot be silenced and she later wrote.
“Of course in my speech, I did not heed what she had said to me since I believe that women’s issues cannot be dealt with in isolation from politics. The emancipation of women in the Arab region is closely linked to the regimes under which we live, regimes which are supported by the USA in most cases, and the struggle between Israel and Palestine has an important impact on the political situation.
Besides, how can we speak of liberation for Palestinian women without speaking of their right to have a land on which to live? How can we speak about Arab women’s rights in Palestine and Israel without opposing the racial discrimination exercised against them by the Israeli regime? (al-Saadawi, 2006)
This incident reveals the liberal Western approach towards the “Muslim women’s rights” they always want to ‘fight’ for. Elia also argues that the “global sisterhood” that she is borrowing from Friedan’s peers like Robin Morgan does not equally consider the global south women. She continued by questioning the foundation of Sisterhood is Global Institute by Morgan and Simone de Beauvoir In 1984. They never supported the Palestinian call for BDS till now despite the participation of other Palestinian womens rights organisations.
In conclusion, the arguments are to be reiterated to emphasise the importance of addressing the Palestinian struggle as a feminist struggle and to maintain a recent criticism of mainstream liberal feminism that avoids discussions on women’s rights during violence that is state-sanctioned and has a history of imperial and colonial involvements. Nelson Mandela once said “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” and the current campaign of “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” The struggle must be taken by all the progressive movements and especially the feminists.
Films like Farha, 3000 Nights, children of Shatila, when I Saw You, and many other works narrating the stories of Palestinians should be in mainstream discussions.
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