Feminist Except for Palestine: Where Are Feminist Social Workers on Palestine?

Abstract

Despite international social work commitments to social justice, human dignity, and individual worth, feminist social work remains silent on Palestine. Israeli settler colonial violence pushes us to revisit our responsibilities to stand against colonized militarism. We insist that collective liberation is a feminist ethical constant, a political bosom for decolonization, a compass for critical feminist social work. In this article, we extend previously made claims that Palestine is a feminist issue by highlighting four moral imperatives: 1) persistent sumud, (2) gendered impacts of Zionism's settler colonial violence, 3) commitments to justice and liberation, and 4) feminist praxis of narrating violence.

During May 2021, the world watched the violence of occupation and settler colonialism unleash, once again, on Palestinians in Gaza, Shiekh Jarrah, Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ), as well as on Palestinians who are Israeli citizens in Lydd and Haifa. While many citizens and organizations from around the world spoke out against violence and ethnic cleansing, social work and feminist social work remained largely silent despite international social work commitments to social justice, human dignity, and individual worth. A scan of international social work boards, federations, and journal editorials during May and June 2021 reveals just one lukewarm commentary about the ongoing brutality and violence of the occupation, calling for “peace” and social work involvement acknowledging “both sides” (IFSW, 2021). Aside from the International Federation of Social Workers’ 2018 censure of the Israeli Union of Social Workers, global and feminist social work remain largely silent on Palestine (IFSW, 2018).

We begin with the claim that Israeli settler colonial political violence pushes us, as global feminists, to revisit our responsibilities to stand against colonized militarism and for decolonization. The idea of Palestine as a feminist issue exists beyond geographies, politics, and global political economies, as witnessed through demonstrations across the globe including Chile, Yemen, Kashmir, the United States, and Europe in May 2021. We hold that Palestine, as a feminist social work issue, represents the global struggle of historical injustice that defined Palestine as a “Land with no people for people with no land.” We hold that it is against feminisms to stage Palestinians as “no people.” Here we draw on Palestinian feminist writings on sumud (Tawil-Souri, 2009; Meari, 2014, 2015) as well as feminist coraje as articulated by LéBron (2021), whereby “coraje has the potential to create networks of solidarity grounded in refusal of the current order” (p.822). Our Palestinian steadfastness (sumud) as refusal against the ongoing violence and suppression of Palestinians, the dispossession of land, and the idea of Palestine insists on the need to build, produce, intervene, educate, and mobilize counter powers for decolonization against the brutality of the settler colonial regime of erasure.

Settler colonial state violence biopolitically governs civilians in their homeland (Li, 2006; Salamanca, 2011), transforming life and land into monitored zones (Lentin, 2016; Zureik, 2016), and borderlands of unliving (Anzaldúa, 1987; Bhan & Duschinski, 2020; Joronen & Griffiths, 2019; Makdisi, 2010). Palestinians are reduced to “bare life” (Agamben, 1998; Puar, 2015), colonized legalities (Nasir, 2016; Pugliese, 2013), and governed by reproductive politics, population control, and family “re-unifications” (Franklin & Ginsburg, 2019; Roberts, 1997).

Family reunification refers to the processes of politico-legal maneuvering that Israel invoked against Palestinians. These processes substituted their internationally recognized rights of return, and right to reunite with their families, with the settler state's sanctions (El-Ahmed & Abu-Zahra, 2016), including the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (2003, 2020). The state's preoccupation with demography and the “Jewishness” of the state (Rouhana & Sultany, 2003), evidenced by this law, has created major fractures among family members by conferring residency status to some members, while denying it to others. These processes deny the right of passage to birthing mothers and the transportation of dead bodies through checkpoints, prohibiting Palestinians from reaching necessary services including, but not limited to, hospitals and educational institutions (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2012a).

Beyond the impositions of discriminatory laws, colonial politics hold affect as a major capital in the hands of the state (Fanon, [1963] 2005, [1952] 2008). Colonial erasure is not only biopolitical and necropolitical machinery of oppression but machinery of psychic oppression, an embodied affectual demolition (Joronen & Griffiths, 2019; Jabr, 2007) operating through psychological warfare (Fanon, [1963] 2005; Martin-Baro, 1994; Hammami, 2016). This psychic oppression is what author and political prisoner Walid Duqqah (2010) refers to as searing the consciousness. Such psychological warfare induces political precarity where life and death, under a constant machinery of elimination, becomes filled with fears about an unsettling future, and unending violence. As social work feminists, we must attend to affect and how coloniality shapes the psychic life of colonized people in Palestine (Barber et al., 2013; Barber & Olsen, 2009; see also Jabr & Berger, 2017). This requires that we acknowledge, “how Palestinians confront the regime of psychological foreclosures that has defined their personal lives, social existence and national conditions” (Sheehi & Sheehi, 2022, p. 10), and work toward anti-oppressive, liberatory, and revolutionary social change.

For over 73 years, Israeli feminists and social workers overlooked state political violence, denying responsibility for acts committed by state officials, and ensuring their exclusivity by maintaining Palestinians as exilic subjects. In fact, social work journal articles published by Israeli social workers, alongside numerous other academic disciplines in the past 30 years, consistently fail to even mention Palestinians (rather, we are referenced as Arabs, Bedouins, and Israelis) (Deeb & Winegar, 2015). Nor do they mention the occupation or settler colonialism, enacting a type of bystanderism that amounts to complicity with the state's brutality. Most social work academics and practitioners know very little about the history and present of Palestine: we have observed this in our own lived experiences as Palestinian women and those of our colleagues in the diaspora, whether as refugees in the Bethlehem area, citizens without citizenship (Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury, 2014) in the old city of Jerusalem, or as exiled people in the U.S. We suspect that some of the ignorance is willful, a fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, as well as a reaction to swift and public backlash that comes from groups like Campus Watch, Canary Mission, and the David Project that stridently go after Palestinians and our allies who speak out against settler colonial Zionist violence. We also suspect that some of the ignorance results from orientalist assumptions that Arab and Palestinian cultures are inherently violent, misogynistic, and dangerous. Our own lived experiences as Palestinians ground our belief that social workers have limited knowledge of the continuous oppression against us. The violations of our bodies, home intrusions, the killings and arrest of children, coupled with the poor quality of life, poverty, and inhuman living conditions go largely unrecognized by Israeli and global social work. Consequently, we advance Palestine as a global feminist social work issue by offering our Palestinian, feminist, and social work epistemologies, ethics, practice experiences, and voices of refusal to our “no peoplehood” from inside (Bethlehem and OEJ), and outside (the U.S.) of Palestine.

The Nakba Continues

In May 2021, Palestinians faced yet another escalation of the ongoing Nakba and colonial warfare, which the occupying forces have waged for more than 70 years. These forces have mobilized a lethal military arsenal, including internationally banned weapons, which Israel does not hesitate to use against men, women, and children (Musleh, 2020; Dana, 2020). From its inception, the settler colonial Israeli project has been based on a racist ideology of segregation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (Sa’di & Abu-Loghod, 2007; Abu El-Haj, 2010). The Israeli governance of Palestinian lives is embedded in Jewish “exclusivity” and sacredness alongside Palestinian profanity (Rouhana & Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2021). The brutal Israeli attacks against Gaza in May and June 2021, besieged for more than 15 years as the largest open-air prison on the face of the earth, resulted in thousands of human casualties including 256 dead; among them 40 women and 66 children (OHCHR, 2021). Among those killed were two mental health workers who were colleagues of ours, one of them psychologist Raja Aboul Ouf, who lost her life alongside her four children.

Zionism and the Settler Colonial Context

Social work is slowly building its capacity for truth-telling around the settler colonialism of social work (Fortier & Hon-Sing Wong, 2019) and its colonial complicity (Park, 2019). We suggest that understanding the violence against Palestinians as state-based settler colonial violence offers opportunities to mobilize truth-telling forces and to produce decolonizing knowledge against hegemonic epistemic violence. Understanding social work's complicity with settler colonial violence in Israel first requires recognizing Zionism as an ongoing, calculated settler colonial machinery of dispossession. Embedded in this machinery is a project to erase Palestinians, rendering us as “No People,” pushing us to the limits of humanity, if not outside it (Da Silva, 2009). Racialized no-peoplehood penetrates the psyche, as Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Racialized no-peoplehood is not simply a byproduct of the colonial order, but rather central to that order and its making (Fanon, [1963] 2005). Furthermore, no-peoplehood intensifies Palestinians’ sense of insecurity in their homes and land, while maintaining their criminalization and demonization in the service of erasure.

Zionism's domination over Palestinian bodies, land, life, and psyche exists to nurture a binary necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003). This binary naturalizes that there are those who should be killed, and those who always and forever possess the right to maim, kill, and eliminate (Puar, 2017). Such logic is apparent in Israel's Jewish Nation-State Law as it maintains the exclusivity of the Jewish Israeli state, and the demonization of the disposable other (Jabareen & Bishara, 2019). Framing settlers as always-and-forever victims, rather than as invaders and abusers, ignores Palestinian ordeals, and erases historical memory alongside present narration (Zreik, 2016). Not even the narration of a Palestinian child's dead body, unchilded (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019) targeted by Israeli soldiers, can nudge the narrative of Palestinians as “other” (Rabaia et al., 2014). Ultimately, the state's brutal attacks, denial of historical and present injustices, coupled with the dismemberment of the Palestinian social, cultural, and spiritual fabric, together constitute intentional national domicide alongside racialized dehumanization.

Palestine Is a Feminist Issue

Feminist social work that stands against settler colonial violence requires local and global political organizing. Such organizing must work to transform the conditions of colonialism, including its psycho-social and political apparatus, in service of decolonization. By referencing Palestine as a feminist issue, we hence refer to the ongoing occupation, dispossession, and violence of settler colonialism, as well as Palestinian refusal. While some alliances between radical, BIPOC feminists and Palestinian feminists exist (e.g., INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence Palestine Points of Unity, the National Women's Studies Association, Angela Davis’ work, and the work of feminists in Kashmir), the struggle for Palestinian liberation has consistently faced limits among progressives and feminists alike (Elia, 2017; Lamont Hill & Plitnick, 2021). We extend previously made claims that Palestine is a feminist issue (Elia, 2017; Lloyd, 2014; Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2021; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2014) by arguing that Palestine and consequently Palestinian liberation are morally embedded in global feminist social work concerns (Jabr, 2003). In what follows, we outline four elements of our claim: 1) persistent sumud, 2) the gendered impacts of Zionism's settler colonial violence, 3) commitments to justice and liberation, and 4) feminist praxis of narrating violence.

Persistent Sumud

Palestinian feminist Lean Meari (2014) points to the sociopolitical and affective value of sumud as a psychological act of both defiance and willful self-affirmation. Sumud, she argues, is a healthy attachment to one's inner self and social world. Palestinians have demonstrated persistent sumud by continuing to refuse oppression and resist the label of “no people.” Indeed, Palestinians across geographies have arisen to refuse all aspects of racial discrimination, systematic oppression, and settler colonial uprooting, as a response to the continued killability, wounding, arrest, and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, and the prevention of freedom of worship for Christians and Muslims alike in occupied Al-Quds/Jerusalem. This refusal is evidenced by so many, including the voice of Mona el Kurds against the evictions in Shiekh Jarrah in June 2021. These attacks have not been restricted to 1967 occupied territory, but rather have also targeted Palestinian cities, and Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. While Palestinians have called for a firm and deep-rooted right to exist in freedom and dignity in their homeland, Israeli settlers and right-wing mobs, supported by government and police forces, are cheering “death to Arabs” on Palestinian land, in homes, and even on Palestinian graves. These forces aim to instill terror among the Palestinian population, burning and destroying Palestinian property and thousands of olive trees, as well as violating the privacy of homes (OCHA, 2020). Recent forms of racial terror are not aberrations, but formative technologies of the settler colony. The inclusion of the state's “security” agencies (i.e., border security and military) to quell the popular uprising as it spreads, reminds us of the early stages of uprooting and state cruelties during the 1948 Nakba. Nevertheless, Palestinians continue to refuse settler colonial violence in all its forms.

Palestinian resistance in the homeland and outside is collective, creative, generative, and unshakable, even in the face of the psychological tolls, the pain, vulnerability, and immense burden of dispossession. Feminist refusal (Simpson, 2007; Ahmed, 2010; Honig, 2021; Karera, 2021; Meari, 2014; Hammami, 2015), in all its manifestations, offers a lens for recognizing Palestinian hope, creativity, and acts of liberation and livability. As feminists, we reject the yardstick that criminalizes and pathologizes persistent sumud.

Gendered Impacts of Zionism's Settler Colonialism

While some have spoken to the settler colonialism of social work (e.g., Fortier & Hon-Sing Wong, 2019; Park, 2019), few in social work have written about the settler colonial violence of Zionism. This type of violence matters and should matter more to feminist social work given the gendered impacts of Zionism. Zionism's settler colonial violence seeks to dehumanize Palestinians in general, including women, by suggesting their struggle against the occupation stems either from their oppressive societies (Berko, Erez, & Gur, 2017), or a hatred of Jews, rather than because of the violence perpetrated against them (Ahmed, 2021). Ironically, Israelis frequently appropriate women's rights as propaganda to suggest it is the only democracy in the Middle East (Lloyd, 2014; Odeh, 2007). This results in a type of “feminist washing” that rests on orientalist principles that Arab and Muslim cultures are incompatible with women's liberation and democracy (Lloyd, 2014).

Zionism and the violence of occupation deny women access to health care, including hospitals (Giacaman et al., 2007; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Wick, 2005). The occupation limits the movement of women, men, and children through checkpoints and the separation wall (Hammami, 2019). The ramifications have far-reaching consequences on education, employment, cultural celebrations and rituals, birthing, dying, mourning, and healing (Shalhoub-Kevorkian & Ihmoud, 2016). Furthermore, settler colonial violence isolates women and girls in ways that make them vulnerable to gendered violence, patriarchal control, misogyny, and rape. A recent study suggests that the dehumanization of Palestinian women visiting loved ones in prison makes them vulnerable to sexual and physical violence from soldiers (Abed Rabo Al-Issa & Beck, 2020). Also relevant to this violence is the fact that rape has been used as a weapon of war including in Deir Yassin in 1948 (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009). Giacaman and Johnson’s (2013) qualitative research with wives and mothers of political prisoners offers the concept of “triple captivity” constituted by the Israeli colonial system, the Israeli prison, and the post Oslo Palestinian political landscape, to help us understand the matrix of oppression, dehumanization, and control that Palestinians face. Obviously, the health and mental health ramifications of such gendered violence coupled with unending loss and killings of loved ones continue to devastate.

As we reflect on the recent bombings of Gaza to expose Zionist violence and its devastating consequences, the gendered impacts are clear: these include the gendered impacts of loss, birthing under bombing, breastfeeding while being violated, menstruating when loved ones are wounded and lost, and parenting when the right to security at home is violated (Abu Jamei, 2021).

Commitments to Justice and Liberation & Feminist Praxis of Narrating Violence

Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014) argues that feminism “entails understanding the nature and significance of solidarity with the dispossessed, something that global feminism, international law, and Israeli feminism have so far failed to do” as far as Palestinian women are concerned (sec. 4, para. 2). Social work programs around the world teach practitioners to examine the power and the many ways it functions in society to better understand systems of domination and consequently pathways to liberation. The social in social work requires that we care about those who are oppressed. The violence in Sheikh Jerrah and Silwan is but a microcosm of the ways settler colonial violence uproots the indigenous people from their homes and their lands as part of continued dispossession and land grabs.

It may be tempting to assume that attending to violence and oppression is at the heart of social work practice, as is speaking out against violence (whether it be at the personal, community, institutional, or state levels). Yet, the feminist and social work silence around Israeli settler colonial violence nudge us to ask, where do violence and tolerance for violence live in social work? Where is the social work mobilization against injustice for Palestinians? Where is the social work activism against Palestinian affectual demolitions, unchilding, domicide, femicide, and unparenting? We hold that speaking against the impacts of oppressive racist powers by naming them are feminist social work concerns, in addition to addressing the effects of the cumulative trauma of ongoing settler colonialism including the intergenerational transmission of collective trauma (Hoosain, 2018; Masson & Harms-Smith, 2019).

Conclusion

We understand feminisms as vocal, an act of life amidst debilitation and dying. How can 73 years of dispossession of life, land, and the continuous intimate invasions of wombs, homes, schools, roads, borders, and communal life be met with silence by feminisms? Feminist commitments should motivate us to speak out when we detect atrocities, so why the feminist social work silence to Israel's settler colonial violence? We wonder, how can Israeli social work feminists claim feminisms while ignoring Palestinians’ deprivation of land and life, only to enjoy the fruits of the land, sleep in their own beds as we are uprooted, incarcerated, wounded, and killed, turned into refugees, occupied, or exiled from our homes? Feminisms ought to create new possibilities for love and life against “no peoplehood” and erasure.

Anti-colonial knowledge productions, actions, interventions, and education are ethical backbones against settler colonial injected fear, despair, and servility (Fanon, [1952] 2008). Speaking against racialized oppression goes beyond the largely white feminist assumption that the personal is political to include acting against Zionism's unending demolition of homes, and settler colonialism's penetrability of land, bodies, and the psyche.

Palestinian liberation is a global compass of feminist ethics, an intellectual tool for analyzing contours of injustice, and an intervention strategy for liberation. Palestinian liberation as a feminist social work theorization, methodology, and practice is about historicizing, politicizing, and psychoanalyzing refusal in service of decolonization. Economies of dispossession (Byrd et al., 2018) reveal how the overlapping ways settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and gendered dispossession function to facilitate the slow death of Palestinians. Palestine is both a social work and social welfare issue, as well as a global feminist issue because feminisms insist on reclaiming livability, justice, and home/space/land/welfare for the dispossessed. Feminist social work must engage actively in restoring life against state's machinery of death.

Palestinian sumud insists on collective liberation as a feminist ethical constant, a political bosom for epistemology, theory, methodology and practice: in short, a compass for critical and decolonial feminist social work. We call on readers to speak out against the “no peoplehood” of Palestinians, take measures against the Israeli state's violent terror against the psychic, land, and life, and simultaneously mobilize against these colonial cruelties. As social work scholars, practitioners, students, and organizers, we urge you to write, mobilize, join the United Nations Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People (resolution 32/40B), educate, and act in solidarity with liberation movements including but not limited to Black Lives Matter, and Stand with Standing Rock. Let us stand with those who mobilize against the racialized eliminatory practices that pose major ethical concerns for critical social work professionals and decolonial scholars. As Serena, from Gaza, urged us:

You can’t just watch us die….do something….demonstrate, talk to your government, pressure association, organize, educate yourself about your cause….don’t fund us….stop the atrocities and killing….I want to go back to my university. (Serena, 21 years old, Gaza)