Summary
Across the Middle East and beyond, women face systemic violence, repression, and political silencing in environments shaped by conflict, extremism, and authoritarian governance. Gender based abuse, including sexual violence and social control over women’s bodies, is often used strategically to maintain power. At the same time, women are leading resistance movements, advocating for justice, and challenging oppressive systems despite severe personal risks. The treatment of women ultimately reveals the moral structure and political integrity of a society.
Key Takeaways
- Violence against women in conflict zones is often used deliberately as a method of control, intimidation, and political power rather than being an accidental byproduct of war.
- Silence by international institutions and advocacy organizations can deepen injustice when recognition of victims becomes selective or politically influenced.
- Societies that suppress women’s rights frequently reinforce authoritarianism and extremism, while women’s participation and leadership often support democratic resilience and social change.
“I write so that silence will not be the last word,” wrote the Lebanese poet and editor Nadia Tueni. In the same breath she insisted that even in the face of ruin one can demand that ink restore life. In Jacques Neria’s tribute essay about her, this sentence is not merely a beautiful poetic line but a worldview: writing as a stance against fear, against erasure, against a reality that insists on dictating where women should stand and what they should say.
Precisely for this reason, in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs’ campaign for International Women’s Day, we are not trying to “decorate” the day with empty gestures. We seek to speak about it in terms our region understands well: power, responsibility, institutions, and the price women pay when regimes, terrorist organizations, and extremist ideologies compete for control.
Ahadya Ahmed Al-Sayed writes with a clarity that is painful to read: on International Women’s Day, “we mark, we do not celebrate.” She writes as a woman without titles and without headlines and describes how women pay for wars they did not start and for extremism they did not create. She looks around and sees an Iran where, in her words, women are killed, arrested, and beaten under a regime that polices the female body and silences voices. She recalls the cry of despair from Afghanistan on the day the Taliban entered Kabul and the almost immediate erasure of women from public life. She also brings the testimony of a Yazidi woman who told her how ISIS trafficked her as if she were property. She returns as well to the documentation from the Nova festival, to young women who were dancing and were then dragged away and turned into a “tool” of terror. Within this continuum she also mentions so-called “honor killings,” the dehumanization that always begins with the violation of dignity and self-respect, and the uncomfortable truth about the depth of incitement and the education toward hatred.
But if there is one lesson that emerges from her text and from the voices we heard in the podcasts, it is that this violence is not a “side effect” of conflict. It is a method. And within that method, silence itself is also a weapon. Natasha Hausdorff speaks about hypocrisy and double standards: international women’s organizations, including those that are supposed to stand at the forefront of defending women, remained silent or responded with significant delay to the gender-based crimes committed on October 7. In her view, when sexual violence becomes a tool of war, it is a blatant violation of international law, and the world cannot choose which women deserve recognition and which women remain outside the conversation.
Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a legal expert on women’s rights who served on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, presents an even harsher reflection. She describes a systemic failure of international institutions in addressing violence against Israeli women and the resulting crisis of trust between women in Israel and the global feminist movement, when recognition itself becomes political and selective.
Against systems that attempt to silence women, the episodes on Iran make the story unmistakably clear: gender oppression is not a side issue but the core of the regime. Marzieh Amirizadeh recounts her imprisonment in Evin Prison and her struggle for religious freedom, describing the systematic oppression of women under the rule of the ayatollahs, from compulsory hijab laws to the denial of basic rights within family and society. Within this reality she emphasizes that women stand at the forefront of resistance, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and sees them as the key to democratic change.
Gazelle Sharmahd, who is fighting to save her father after he was abducted by the Iranian regime, paints a picture of female leadership under extreme pressure and speaks about attempts to silence women who raise their voices against injustice, precisely because such strength is perceived as a direct threat to dictatorships.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Elyana Elian describes a very different model: Kurdish society, particularly in Rojava, as a relatively advanced space for gender equality where women serve as fighters and commanders in the YPJ and are integrated into governance and decision making. Yet even there, she warns, achievements are not guaranteed. The rise of extremist Islamist forces, including those associated with Mohammed al-Julani, poses a direct threat to women’s freedom and to what has been built through immense effort.
This is where the question emerges that our campaign refuses to avoid: how do we measure real change in a region where “reforms” can function as a showcase while fear remains a mechanism of control.
Sahar Saeed writes a sentence worth reading twice: “A society reveals its moral architecture in the way it treats its women, its mothers, and its conscience.” She describes the Saudi Arabia of her childhood in the 1980s, where motherhood did not guarantee autonomy and women remained legally dependent on a male guardian for basic decisions. She recalls the segregated public sphere, the religious police, and the cost of challenging norms. She also acknowledges change. She writes about a different Saudi Arabia where women have been granted rights previously denied to them, including the legal right to drive following a royal decree in 2017 that took effect in 2018. Yet she refuses to stop there. In her view, modernization in the public sphere does not necessarily resolve questions of conscience and moral agency. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression remain socially and legally sensitive, and mechanisms of cultural enforcement within the family and tribal framework can punish deviation from accepted norms. She also describes a discreet Christian community that gathers in secret and emphasizes the price women themselves may pay simply for exposure.
There is one thread that connects all these voices, and it is not a convenient “inspirational story.” It is a thread of responsibility. In the Middle East, anyone who wants to understand regional security, extremism, stability, and incitement cannot ignore the places where women are pushed aside, silenced, punished for their bodies and their voices, or recognized only when they fit a particular narrative.
Dalia Ziada connects the advancement of women’s rights with democratic stability and argues that a society that excludes women is more vulnerable to religious extremism and terrorism. Her voice, as an Egyptian woman who was forced to leave Egypt because of her support for Israel after October 7, reminds us how high the personal price of an independent female voice can be in a world where public discourse can still be dangerous.
Therefore, on this Women’s Day, we choose to focus on the essential point: to stop treating women as decoration in diplomatic and security discourse and begin treating them as a measure of truth. The truth of international institutions that evade or delay, the truth of regimes that understand that controlling women is a way of controlling the future, and the truth of women who refuse to disappear even when they are forced to pay the highest price.
Perhaps that is why it is worth returning, in the end, to Nadia Tueni. Not only because she was described as a “pioneer, poet, boss,” but because she stands as an exact metaphor for this struggle: a woman who believed that words are power, that culture is not a luxury, and that silence can never be the last word. If there is one thing our region needs to hear on Women’s Day, it is precisely this.
