When Feminism Failed Israeli Women

During and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians perpetrated systematic sexual violence against Israeli women at the Nova festival, in the kibbutzim they targeted, and against hostages they held, with some enduring daily sexual attacks until they were released.

International feminist organizations’ responses were late and equivocal, only mentioning the Israeli victims in context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What happened to “#metoo,” the Women’s March, and “believe women”?

The response can be attributed to radical feminism in the form of Third World, transnational, multicultural and intersectional feminism, and Queer Theory taking over the feminist narrative. These radical forms actually negate women’s most basic rights to safety and equality, and work to further the aims of extremist Islamist terrorists like Hamas.

The radical feminism of the 21^st century isn’t meant to work to establish and protect women’s rights through law as the first and second waves of feminism did. They are meant to virtue signal neo-Marxism-Leninism and to transform society into a fantasy equitable utopia which has never existed and will never exist.

Using a dogmatic oppressor-oppressed approach, intersectional feminism negates Jewish Israeli “Zionist” women’s rights since they are complicit in their view with settler colonial oppression of Palestinians by their very presence in Israel.

Radical feminism oddly aligns with the end goals of radical Islamism in that both wish to eradicate Israel off the world map. Both were influenced, from Berkeley to Beirut of the 1960s, by post-colonialists Jean Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon who believed decolonization was a violent event that should be defeated by any means necessary, now advertised on placards at university protests. Rape is a deliberate strategic and tactical psychological warfare practice. In the regressive ISIS-inspired Hamas rapes of October 7, Gaza men degraded Jewish civilian and combatant women to demoralize their enemies and humiliate them through sexualized terror. “Rape is Resistance” Palestinian flag stickers in Toronto framed these acts as legitimate tools against “occupation” while Hamas official Ghazi Hammad asserted “everything we do is justified.”

These extreme views underline radical feminism’s clash with reality. The case of Israeli women on October 7 provides a stark example of the clash of women’s actual rights with highly dogmatic third-wave feminism that is an anti-liberal movement that negates women’s most basic safety and sacred individual rights, sacrificing them for an imagined global solidarity. By sidelining facts, culture, and their consequences, radical feminism joins other woke movements that aim to implode Western civilization.

Western feminists including Jewish ones are often unaware or willfully blind to the fundamental contradictions between their liberal forms of feminism and the radical ones that would nearly fall short of criticizing Hamas’s rapes and its more generally brutal behavior on October 7 and thereafter. Andrea Dworkin, a leading radical feminist academic in the 1970s and 1980s, in her 2000 book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, argues that Zionism and feminism were both liberation movements for historically oppressed groups, since Jews and women serve as parallel “scapegoats” in patriarchal societies. Today, Dworkin’s views on Israel are passé.

Anti-Zionism, asserting that the State of Israel is illegitimate, is now a feminist litmus test. Feminism, according to Maryam Barghouti is the liberation of not just women, but all peoples, and is also anti-colonial and anti-racist.¹

Barghouti’s pronouncements are typical of radical feminism. The libel that Israel is racist was the result of a Soviet disinformation campaign aimed at the Arabs and the Third World, using the Palestinian issue as a wedge to build solidarity. So too, today, intersectionality, rooted in Black socialist feminism of the 1970s, uses Palestine as a uniting issue for an agenda that is anti-Western. This agenda has been adopted by most social science and gender studies academics, many of whom serve as senior staff and rapporteurs at the United Nations and other international community institutions.

The Palestinian cause was marketed as “Third World” and “post-colonial” since Nasser and the Soviets brought it to the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung conference. The cause was always pan-Arab, Arab nationalist, Marxist-Leninist, and anti-Western. The cause, the last bastion of colonialism according to its adherents, flies in the face of facts: there are 23 Arab states; there are 57 Muslim majority states; Israel never colonized any territory; Jews are a Middle Eastern minority and indigenous to the Land of Israel; Israel provides more human and civil liberty rights to its non-Jewish citizens than Arab countries provide its own Arab, Muslim citizens.

In addition to the political dimension, transnational, intersectional feminism considers Islam from postcolonialist Edward Said’s “orientalist” position: the West purportedly marginalizes, oppresses, and stigmatizes Islam, making Islamophobia a form of racism. Feminists who follow Said like Lila Abu-Lughod write that Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of patriarchal religious structures in “gendered orientalism.”

Abu-Lughod decried the post-9/11 Western media discourse on the Middle East and Islam on women’s rights and the abuse of Muslim women, justifying military interventions in Muslim countries like Afghanistan. She argues that Muslim women should be viewed within their own “social and ideological contexts.” Meanwhile, after the American military pulled out of Afghanistan during U.S. President Joe Biden’s term, the Taliban continued its repression of women as if uninterrupted.

The Queer movement’s scholarly leadership also had mad itself absurd considering the paradox of the Islamic and Arab cultural rejection of Queer people. Queer solidarity with the Palestinian cause, is explained by the radical nature of the Queer movement as opposed to the rights-oriented liberal LGBT cause – these two movements respectively paralleling liberal and radical feminism. The radical Queer believes that as “liberation movements” the Palestinians and Queers together must resist systems of oppression in solidarity. The Queer movement views hetero and cis-normativity as bedrocks of Western oppression and it aims to fundamentally transform society by disrupting these “normativities.” In reality, though, Islam rejects Queers.

This self-immolating logic informs the activism of Queer theorist Professor Judith Butler, a prominent advocate of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. In 2006, Butler declared it “extremely important” to understand how Hamas and Hizbullah are “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.” Predictably, Butler also described the October 7 attacks as an “act of armed resistance” in March 2024, and casted doubt on rape allegations against Hamas, until later making an equivocal remark when the evidence mounted as to the veracity of the reports.

Butler is not alone and radical views such as hers fill academic journals, conference panels, and syllabi, creating an anti-Zionist activist academic consensus. The Palestinian Feminist Collective, which includes many academic activists, declared “Palestine IS a feminist issue,” condemning “reproductive genocide” in Gaza – since clinics and hospitals used as military bases and weapons depots by Hamas were destroyed by the IDF. Just days after the massacre, the organization Black Women Radicals released a statement claiming Israel was committing genocide, and invoking intersectionality. It held an October 22, 2023 hosted in part by Angela Davis, an old school communist radical and BDS activist whose 2015 book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement brands the Palestinian cause parallel to American race issues – as “resistance.”

Davis is part of a large and dominant radical milieu that academizes the Palestinian cause. In this group is professor and Al Jazeera commentator Marc Lamont Hill, and radical legal professor and Palestinian-American activist Noura Erekat.² In a podcast with Erekat, Hill said that Black-Palestinian solidarity was primarily a radical cause committed to “anti-imperialism as a primary target.” Erakat remarks of the solidarity: “It was in alignment with Cuba, it was alignment with China, it was alignment with the FLN, it was alignment with the PLO….”

From this we learn that radicalism is about dismantling empires. Iran proxy Hamas is therefore included in the radical stream, revealing the wider global aims of radicals. Hill considers both the United States and Israel to be examples of international “settler colonialism….requiring a violent response.” During a June 2020 webinar on South African Youth Day Hill recalls a Palestinian friend’s text glorifying violent, destructive BLM protests: “I love that you all are tearing shit down.’ And I’m all like, yes, this is exciting. And that kind of reenergized solidarity…. So now we’re talking about an international fight against settler-colonialism and imperialism and authoritarianism, and I couldn’t be prouder and happier to be part of this moment because there’s so much possibility in front of us.

In gender studies, radical scholars advocate for a “decolonized Palestine” or one-state solution ending Jewish sovereignty. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Hebrew University has publicly called for “abolishing Zionism” as a “criminal project.” Mizrahi feminist scholars like Smadar Lavie and Ella Shohat, inspired by Black radical feminism, link Mizrahi oppression to the colonization of Palestinians.

Ella Shohat, an NYU professor and self-described “Arab-Jew,” authored “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims” (1988) and later “On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements” (2017), which won the Palestine Book Award. Shohat argues that Zionism is responsible for the “de-Arabization” of Mizrahi Jews, that European Zionism primitivized both Palestinians and Mizrahim as part of the same colonial logic. Of course, this ignores the reality that in Arab lands, Jews were tolerated and often oppressed dhimmi, and that “Arabism” actually colonized tens of tribal, language, and religious identities through colonial conquest over centuries.

Western Washington University professor and Palestinian American activist Nada Elia’s 2017 paper “Justice is Indivisible: Palestine as a Feminist Issue” established that “Solidarity with Palestinian women entailed denouncing and organizing to end Zionism as a settler-colonial project.” Elia’s 2022 book Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine describes Zionism as guilty of hyper-militarism, environmental devastation, and gendered violence. The book description on Amazon says that Elia “insists that Palestine’s fate is linked through bonds of solidarity with other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. She also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, including that of Native Americans.” Elia criticizes the mainstream feminist movement for supporting Zionism, “Many of these spaces view Palestinian women as oppressed exclusively by Arab patriarchy, rather than by the all-pervasive violence of Zionism. This is not to deny the longstanding solidarity with Black, Indigenous, Third World feminist, working-class and queer communities, who have struggled alongside Palestinians within larger anti-colonial and anti-racist movements in the US and globally.”³ Similarly, Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University has critiqued liberal “peace feminism.”

In reality, though, in Gaza and the West Bank, sharia law prevails, honor killings persist without punishment, spousal abuse is common and rape are severely underreported due to social stigmas. A 2019 UN study showed that 15% of married Gaza women experienced repeated sexual abuse, with a widespread acceptance of violence to preserve family unity. In Palestinian-governed territories, there is nearly no protection against gender-based violence. In Gaza, no laws prohibit domestic or sexual violence in the family, with widespread impunity for “honor killings” under the 1936 Penal Code (Article 18 allowing reduced sentences), and high rates of abuse—51% of married women report experiencing physical, sexual, psychological, economic, or social violence from husbands, though under 1% report it due to stigma and mishandling by authorities. “Honor killings” persist, with many misclassified as suicides and are underreported. Embarrassingly, Arab Israeli women have more women’s and human rights than their contemporaries in the Arab world.

In addition, in Gaza and the West Bank, male guardians must approve marriage, while men are allowed polygamy and unilateral divorce. In divorce women must provide cause, and often forfeit financial rights like mahr (direct dowry). Sharia-based inheritance gives women half a man’s share (with 88% in the PA reportedly receiving nothing). Child custody laws favor fathers. Hamas enforces gender segregation in schools, mandatory hijab and modesty enforcement with punishments for non-compliance, and male guardian permission for women’s travel, alongside employment barriers. Hamas’s female representation in government was limited to token ministerial positions (e.g., Women’s Affairs) and they are excluded from the decision-making Political Bureau. Women’s unemployment exceeds 62%, and women are underrepresented in professions like medicine (12%), law (13%), and engineering (17%), due to social norms. There are prohibitions on activities like women riding motorcycles, smoking publicly, or driving without male accompaniment; and differential legal treatment, such as women’s testimony valued at half a man’s, harsher adultery penalties for women (two years versus six months for men).⁴

Though the PA’s adopted CEDAW in 2014, its insistence on keeping sharia requirements means they rejected most reforms. Moreover, in the PA’s February 2026 draft constitution, Islam is the official religion (article 4), citizenship is patrilineal, and gay marriage is denied (article 59).⁵

In the context of war, Hamas’s actions of October 7 terrorist and Gaza civilian perpetrators may justify their actions within the framework of “defensive jihad” (jihad al-daf’), an obligatory resistance under Islamic jurisprudence against alleged Israeli occupation and aggression on Muslim lands, drawing on Quranic verses like Surah Al-Baqarah (2:190-193) to position the assault as a response, making it a fard ayn (personal duty) for Muslims. Senior Hamas official Hamad emphasized this in an October 24, 2023, interview on Lebanon’s LBC TV, stating that Palestinians are “victims of the occupation” and “everything we do is justified,” while vowing to repeat such attacks until Jewish presence and Israel are “annihilated.”

This framing, therefore, also justified taking captives, including female hostages as “ma malakat aymanukum” ( “those whom your right hands possess”) and the mistreatment and degradation of perceived combatants like IDF women. Quranic verses and hadith have been interpreted as permitting sexual relations with female captives taken as spoils in legitimate jihad, without requiring the captive’s consent, under slavery norms. Key verses include Surah Al-Mu’minun (23:5-6) and Al-Ma’arij (70:29-30), which exempt relations with wives or owned captives from chastity prohibitions; Surah An-Nisa (4:24), allowing intercourse with married captive women; and Surah Al-Ahzab (33:50), permitting the Prophet, and by extension believers, relations with allocated captives. Muhammad himself, within the context of his conquests, had killed the Banu Nadir Jewish tribe in Khaybar and took a Jewish woman, Safiyya bin Huyay, whose prominent father from Medina was killed and whose husband was tortured and killed by Muslims, was taken as captive during the battle of Khaybar. Saffiya was allocated as a slave to a Muslim companion but traded to Muhammad for other captives. Since according to Islamic doctrine, Muhammad is regarded as the ideal human exemplar and role model for Muslims in all aspects of life, (Quran 33:21, 68:4) his actions were divinely guided and infallible, making his conduct the standard for ethical behavior in Islam. To this day, “Khaybar, ya Yahood” is a common anti-Israel chant by Muslims regarding Jews and Israel. These themes cannot be overlooked in the highly symbolic and fundamentalist Muslim Arab culture, from ISIS to Hamas and beyond. On May 16, 2021, a convoy of cars flying Palestinian flags drove through predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in north London. The cars’ occupants shouted antisemitic slurs such as “Fuck the Jews, fuck their mothers, rape their daughters” while honking horns.

These opinions are not only held by angry young men. Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour has also defended Islamic sharia law as “misunderstood” and “empowering for women.” She attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a public intellectual and survivor of female genital mutilation who critiques sharia, tweeting on International Women’s Day 2011 of Ali and Lebanese American conservative activist Brigitte Gabriel: “I wish I could take their vaginas away—they don’t deserve to be women.” Sarsour declared, “you can’t be a feminist and a Zionist.” In 2018 she declared at an Islamic Society of North America convention: “If you’re on the side of the oppressor, or you’re defending the oppressor, or you’re actually trying to humanize the oppressor, then that’s a problem,” referring to Israel as the oppressor. This dehumanization logic explains feminist equivocation of the October 7 sexual assault on Israeli women.

She and fellow 2017 Women’s March leader Carmen Perez have been intensely involved in the Palestinian cause. Perez joined Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors and about 20 other radical leaders including Marc Lamont Hill for a Palestinian advocacy tour in 2015. Cullors a self-declared Marxist radical stated that “Palestine is the new South Africa,” referencing Israel’s “apartheid,” and requiring the joint dismantling of “white-supremacist patriarchal and capitalist societies.”

Sarsour still remains relevant, taking credit for the 2025 electoral success of Democratic Socialists of America-backed New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Sarsour’s rise and popularity is symbolic of the dominance of intersectional feminism over liberal feminism. Though liberal feminism remains active in the court system, intersectional feminism is active on the radical political frontier that ideally aims to abolish “systemic racism.”

The feminist trend parallels a general American political polarization. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has begun to dominate in place of its liberal feminist icons such as Hilary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The rise of the progressive Congressional “Squad” – Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, among others, reflects the growing visibility and power of those who publicly identify with intersectionality and anti-Zionism.

Though proponents of multiculturalism claim that suppressing religious legal frameworks risks cultural imperialism and erasing minority identities, this creates a contradiction between collective cultural rights and the liberal principle of individual gender equality. This is where Third Worldist postcolonial activism movements like transnational feminism and intersectional feminism become absurd. A multicultural approach that emphasizes intersectionality is primarily concerned with oppression from outside a woman’s society. Yet, in Israel’s case, the Jewish state provides all its women with equal rights. In contrast, in Gaza and the West Bank, women have fewer rights as individuals than their female counterparts, both Muslim and Jewish, have in Israel. Liberal feminism legislates and litigates for rights in a democratic society. Radical feminism wishes to fundamentally transform society , but actually perpetuates frameworks that limit women’s rights.

The radical feminist allies with radical Islam, whether in the Islamic Republic of Iran or under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Radicalism considers Islam worthy of solidarity as a marginalized identity, with its states in the Third World-postcolonial category. The Red (Left)-Green (Islamist) alliance then excuses radical Islam’s limits on individual freedom as it looks to the larger collective goal of liberation. To the Islamist liberation is the caliphate or the Mahdi, to the radical, liberation is general human liberation.

Online and campus protest rhetoric demonstrate that radicals view the Iranian regime and its proxies as formidable powers against Western, and by extension, Israeli, imperialism, colonialism, and liberalism. Transnational and intersectional feminism, are merely feminist-branded branches of a Marxist-inspired anti-Western solidarity movement. The radicals’ embrace of postmodern “standpoint epistemology,” where knowledge is socially constructed by power dynamics disregard reality in favor of grievances that will destroy complacency with the existing liberal systems.

By finding fault in Israel, a country at war with a terrorist militia that killed and raped 1200 people, the Leftist complex, including its feminist branch, scapegoats Israel as the root cause of violence directed against it -“victim blaming”- excused by the charge of “settler colonialism.” This recycled Soviet narrative disregards the indigeneity and MENA minority status of Jews, the nature of the Arab conquest, and erases Jewish women. Radical feminism no longer aims to solve problems, it aims to upend normative liberal and Western structures, like any radical movement, making it more like the anti-liberal Queer movement.

To radical feminists, the ideal of a decolonized, transformed Palestine matters more than actual conditions women face there. Under the popular iteration of academic and activist radical feminism, ideology displaces evidence. The exclusion of Israeli women from feminist solidarity after October 7 was the culmination of decades of ideological devolution into extremism. Radical feminism now approves the methods and aims of the radical Islamist terrorists.

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Notes