During and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, terrorists and Gaza civilians systematically perpetrated sexual violence against Israeli women at the Nova festival, in the kibbutzim they targeted, and against the hostages; some endured daily sexual attacks until their release. On October 7, Gaza men degraded Jewish civilian and combatant women to demoralize and humiliate the enemy through sexualized terror, using rape as a deliberate strategic and tactical psychological warfare practice. Yet, international feminist organizations were late and equivocal in responding. What happened to “#metoo,” the Women’s March, and “believe women”?

The weak response should come as no surprise. Liberal feminists are often unaware or willfully blind to the fundamental contradictions between their feminism and radical feminism. Andrea Dworkin, a leading radical feminist academic in the 1970s and 1980s, in her 2000 book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, argued that Zionism and feminism were both liberation movements for historically oppressed groups, Jews and women serving as parallel “scapegoats” in patriarchal societies. Today, Dworkin’s views on Israel are passé.

Since the turn of this century, radical feminism has aligned with radical Islamism. Third World, transnational, multicultural and intersectional feminism, and Queer Theory now further the aims of Islamist terrorists like Hamas. Their extreme views have taken over feminist discourse in the academy, in the media, and in activism. Radical feminism’s clash with reality in dealing with the October 7 rapes exposes its ideological immorality and absurdity. By sidelining facts, culture, and their consequences in favor of doctrine, radical feminism joins other woke movements that attack civilization.

This has occurred through a process of radicals using an oppressor-oppressed paradigm, in which radical feminism has defined Israeli women as Zionists complicit in “settler colonialism.” The belief that decolonization could only be attained through a glorified violence of “any means necessary” has seeped into feminism via the Red (Leftist) – Green (Islamist) alliance that has taken precedence from Beirut to Berkeley. Anti-Zionism, asserting that the State of Israel is illegitimate, is now a feminist litmus test, according to activists like Maryam Barghouti, who defines feminism as the liberation of not just women, but all peoples, from colonialism and racism.¹

These biased allegations of Israel typical of radical feminism are the historical result of a Soviet disinformation campaign that used the Palestinian issue to build Arab, Muslim, and Third World solidarity. Today, intersectionality, rooted in Black socialist feminism of the 1970s, uses Palestine as a unifier for an anti-Western agenda adopted by most social science and gender studies academics and international community institution staffers. Intersectional feminism and its Third World form, transnational feminism, considers Islam from Edward Said’s postcolonialist “orientalist” position: the West marginalizes, oppresses, and stigmatizes Islam, making Islamophobia a form of racism.

Feminists who follow Said like Lila Abu-Lughod hold that Muslim women are stereotyped as victims of patriarchal religious structures in “gendered orientalism,” arguing that they should instead be viewed within their own “social and ideological contexts.”  Abu-Lughod therefore decried the post-9/11 Western media discourse on the Middle East and Islam on women’s rights and the abuse of Muslim women. She believed that this discourse justified military interventions in Muslim countries like Afghanistan, despite the Taliban’s reversion to its repression of women after the American pullout from that country.  

Equally absurdly, the Queer movement’s scholarly leadership asserts that their movement and the Palestinian cause are both radical liberation movements compelled to resist systems of oppression together despite their utter rejection by Arabs and Muslims. This self-immolating logic informs the activism of prestigious 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 described the October 7 attacks as an “act of armed resistance” in March 2024, and cast doubt on rape allegations against Hamas, until later making an equivocal remark when evidence of the rapes accumulated.

Butler is not alone. 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.” The collective condemned “reproductive genocide” in Gaza – a buzzword used to characterize the IDF bombing of clinics and hospitals used as military bases and weapons depots by Hamas. Just days after the October 7 massacre, the organization Black Women Radicals released a statement invoking intersectionality and claiming Israel was committing genocide. It held an October 22, 2023 webinar hosted in part by Angela Davis, a communist and BDS activist whose 2015 book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement compares Palestinian “resistance” to American race struggles.

Davis is part of a vocal radical milieu that academizes the Palestinian cause. This group includes 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,” while Erakat remarked: “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’s primary function is dismantling empires, which explains radical support for anti-West Iranian proxies. Hill considers both the United States and Israel to be cases of international “settler colonialism….requiring a violent response.” During a June 2020 webinar on South African Youth Day, Hill recalled 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.”

Likewise, in the academic field of 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, ignoring Mizrahis’ dhimmi status in Arab lands and the Arab conquests’ erasure of tens of tribal, language, and religious identities in the Middle East and North Africa.

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

Besides academic abstractions, in reality, sharia law prevails, honor killings persist, spousal abuse is common, and rape is severely underreported due to social stigmas in Gaza and the West Bank. 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. Male guardians must approve marriage, while men are allowed polygamy and unilateral divorce. Women must provide cause for divorce, and often forfeit financial rights like mahr (direct dowry) to attain it, and deal with harsher adultery penalties for women (two years versus six months for men), and child custody laws that favor fathers.⁴

Sharia-based inheritance gives women half a man’s share (with 88% in the PA reportedly receiving nothing), and women’s legal testimony is valued at half a man’s testimony. Hamas enforces gender segregation in schools, mandatory hijab and modesty enforcement (including smoking publicly) with punishments for non-compliance. Women require a male guardian’s permission for travel or male accompaniment when driving, and are prohibited from motorcycling. In Gaza, women’s unemployment exceeds 62%, and women are underrepresented in professions like medicine (12%), law (13%), and engineering (17%), due to social norms and employment barriers. Hamas excludes women from its decision-making Political Bureau, and limits women’s representation in government to token ministerial positions (e.g., Women’s Affairs). 

Though the Palestinian Authority adopted the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2014, the PA’s insistence on keeping sharia means most reforms were rejected. 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

Sharia law not only limits Palestinian women’s rights in peacetime, but it has also been used to justify Hamas’s wartime treatment of Israeli women. Invoking sharia, the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre  justified their actions as a  “defensive jihad” (jihad al-daf’) – obligatory resistance under Islamic jurisprudence. Jewish rule of any land once conquered by Muslims is deemed occupation and aggression, drawing on Quranic verses like Surah Al-Baqarah (2:190-193). This interpretation positioned the October 7 assault as a response, making it a personal duty (fard ayn) for Muslims. These views were reflected in Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad’s October 24, 2023 interview on Lebanon’s LBC TV. He stated that Palestinians are “victims of the occupation” and “everything we do is justified,” while vowing to repeat such attacks until Jewish presence and Israel were “annihilated.”

This sharia-inspired framing also justified taking captives, including female hostages as “ma malakat aymanukum” ( “those whom your right hands possess”) and the mistreatment and degradation of “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, during his conquests, killed the Banu Nadir Jewish tribe in Khaybar and took a Jewish woman, Safiyya bin Huyay (whose father and husband were killed by Muslims) as a wife. Since Muhammad is regarded as the ideal human exemplar by Muslims , (Quran 33:21, 68:4), his actions are divinely guided and infallible; his conduct is the ethical standard in Islam. These themes cannot be overlooked: Muslims still regularly chant  “Khaybar, ya Yahood” invoking Muhammad’s war against Jewish tribes. In this vein, on May 16, 2021, riders in a convoy of cars flying Palestinian flags and honking were recorded shouting “Fuck the Jews, fuck their mothers, rape their daughters!” while driving through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in north London.

These Islamic-themed fighting words are not exclusive to men and in fact, similar terms have been invoked by the most visible Palestinian American feminist activist, Linda Sarsour. Sarsour has 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 also declared, “you can’t be a feminist and a Zionist.” In 2018 she said of Israel 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.”  Sarsour’s Red (Leftist)-Green (Islamist) dehumanization logic completes the circuit in explaining radical feminist equivocations of the October 7 sexual assaults.

Yet Sarsour is only a window into the intersectional solidarity of feminist organizing and its anti-Zionist dogma. Sarsour 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 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 prove the dominance of intersectional feminism over liberal feminism and a more general American political trend. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has begun to dominate over its centrist liberals. Old school feminist icons such as Hilary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsburg have been replaced by a new generation of progressives exemplified by the Congressional “Squad” – Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, now joined by others. This shift reflects the growing visibility and power of those who publicly identify with intersectionality, feminism, and anti-Zionism.

The shift exposes the internal contradictions between multiculturalism’s  claims – that suppressing religious legal frameworks constitutes cultural imperialism and the erasure of minority identities – and the basic liberal principles of individual rights, including gender equality. Therefore, transnational and intersectional feminism are opposed to liberal feminism. The radical feminist is primarily a radical and therefore allies with radical Islam, whether the Islamic Republic of Iran or Hamas and the Palestinian Authority: radical feminism is a front of the Red (Left)-Green (Islamist) alliance. To reconcile the apparent contradictions,  radicals embrace postmodernist “standpoint epistemology,” which asserts that knowledge is socially constructed by power dynamics. This allows them to retain grievances that will destroy complacency with the existing liberal systems, eventually leading to human liberation. Thereby, radical feminists excuse radical Islam, whose own liberation is envisioned as a world caliphate or the coming of the Mahdi.

To radical feminists, the ideal of a decolonized, transformed Palestine matters more than the 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 radical Islamist terrorists.

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Notes