Response to Andrea Dworkin's essay on Palestinian women; What
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IN THIS MESSAGE:
* Response to Andrea Dworkin's essay on Palestinian women
* What the NYT Did Not Report
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In Response to Andrea Dworkin's Essay "The Women Suicide Bombers"
[Note: Andrea Dworkin's essay can be found on www.feminista.org]
We were disturbed to read Dworkin's analysis of "women suicide bombers."
Although Dworkin has a history advocating against gender oppression, this
article's gender analysis fails because of its racist, colonial, and sexist
depictions of Palestinian women. Dworkin's article is filled with hateful
lies, false accusations, and a lack of proof, particularly about the lives
of women "suicide bombers."
Dworkin unleashes biased undocumented repugnance on Palestinian women's
national beliefs without any convincing references, dates, interviews,
resources, names, institutions, events, statistics, or personal accounts.
She starts by defining Palestinian women "as lower than animals". The first
question that comes to mind is how could Dworkin's feminism be so frankly
and openly hypocritical? How could she call herself a "feminist" and
humiliate and degrade Palestinian women by saying that they are "lower than
animals"? Is it because they are Palestinians? Is this what US white
feminism is all about? Such a feminist analysis is unbalanced, dogmatic, and
biased, because it does not address the institutionalized and carefully
planned state terrorism that is manifested in one of the last racist
occupations/colonizations in the world, "Israel," against the indigenous
Palestinian people in Palestine.
Dworkin characterizes Palestinian female martyrs as "young women, often
women who had been raped, sometimes by men in their own families . . . (who)
trade in the lowly status of the raped woman for the higher status of a
martyr." Her argument disregards the reality that Palestinian women
sacrifice themselves in order to be liberated from Isreali racist military
occupation/colonization and to stop the annihilation of their people.
Furthermore, her blanket generalization that they are survivors of family
rape is unfounded, there is no support or evidence offered to prove such a
statement. How does Dworkin know if Wafa' Idriss, Ayat Al Akras, Andaleeb
Taqtaqa, and Dareen Abu Aeshah were in fact victims of "family rape?" Where
are the voices of Wafa, Ayat, Andaleeb and Dareen in telling their own
truths?
While we acknowledge that sexual violence happens in all communities,
Dworkin's analysis that sexual violence is the reason women would become
suicide bombers is faulty. She ignores the most obvious reason, that
Palestinians are subjected to a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing by
the state of Israel, funded by US tax dollars.
Why does Dworkin utilize women's sexuality as another colonial tool of
oppression, presenting falsifications of the lives of Palestinian women, of
so called "hymen repairs?" Is this all in the name of "feminism?" We must
unearth the Zionist, racist and colonialist underpinnings of US white
feminism. This article shows that in a racist world, rape and sexual
inequality within communities of color are used by racist oppressors,
including feminists, as an excuse for further racist and colonial ideology
and violence, as was also seen with the US government's sudden interest in
Afghani women's rights so as to justify military invasion.
Dworkin's article ignores Palestinian women's national aspirations and that
nationalist movements for communities and women of color are struggles for
liberation. Dworkin dismisses the valor of Palestinian women's fifty-four
years of resistance to Israeli occupation, erasing the reality that
Palestinian women use their own bodies to fight for and defend their legal,
moral and national rights.
Elham Bayour, a member of the Incite! National Planning Committee,
documented Palestinian women political prisoner's testimonies. Their voices
provide answers to why Palestinian women would join the Palestinian national
resistance. Jenin's answer was,
"No one influenced or encouraged me to be involved, I did it by myself. It
was a protest of the situation, protest of the occupation. It is from the
poverty and misery. There were nights when my brothers and sisters did not
have dinner to eat. They cried to my mother, hungry, they wanted to eat.
I was fed up with the bugs and the dirt. We lived in tents in Shati Refugee
Camp in Gaza. The insects and the bugs infested our dirt floors. We suffered
from sewage water, rain, cold winters, hot summers, and
collective bathrooms. Open sewage became small puddles full of diseases and
bad smell. Plague attacked us once. Rats, roaches and mice were rampant.
Poverty and suffering pressed me to be political. This is why I became
involved in the struggle to free myself and my people."
(Excerpted from personal interviews conducted during Summer 1998, Fall 1999
& 2000)
Liberation from colonial oppression is the primary reason why Palestinian
women join in resisting the Israeli occupation. Moreover, Dworkin dismisses
the historical and socio-historical consequences of Israeli occupation that
rendered ethnic, social, health, political and cultural catastrophes. This
occupation uprooted and annihilated over 530 villages and created over five
million refugees. This military occupation instituted barbarity, aggression,
ethnocide, killing babies in cold blood, sieges, roadblocks, curfews,
starvation, malnutrition, anemia, homelessness, and violence against women's
bodies. An expected human reaction to the occupation is to resist it,
because Palestinian women "are not lower than animals," as Dworkin attested.
They are human beings who do not and will not accept Israeli
colonization/aggression and these women continuously rise above racist
tactics that the Zionists and their sympathizers impose on them.
In addition, nowhere does Dworkin point to the complicity of the US
government in supporting the continued colonization of Palestine. She
reduces this colonization to a simple conflict between warring nationalisms,
as if this conflict is not in every way fostered by the interests of US
imperialism. It is disingenuous for a woman who is a US citizen to write
about this situation as a disinterested party when, in fact, she is, as well
as all US citizens, complicit in this colonization as our tax dollars go to
fund it.
There is another truth about violence against women that is painfully
neglected by Dworkin's article. It is well known that aggressors/occupiers
utilize rape as a tactic of war against native women. Bayour's research on
Palestinian women political prisoners reveals various tactics of sexual
terrorism that the Israeli occupiers perpetrate on Palestinian women
political prisoners. These Palestinian women are victims of Israeli sexual
violence because they are females of the Semite Palestinian race and because
they dare to stand up against the racist practices employed by Zionism
against the indigenous Palestinian population.
Regrettably, Dworkin's article does not render attention to the reality of
state sanctioned Israeli sexual assaults of Palestinian women.
Dworkin's second reason why Palestinian women martyr themselves is that
"women try to rise in the nationalist struggle so that when that struggle is
over the status of women will be recognized as deserving of citizenship and
equality." Is not the struggle for liberation of a people also the struggle
for liberation of women? Palestinian women fight for their national
liberation because they believe in their historic, legal, national and moral
rights as Palestinians. Are not women around the globe fighting for these
same reasons? But Dworkin missed the key element in this reasoning, which is
that the entire Palestinian population is under Israeli military prosecution
and Palestinian males, as well as Palestinian females, do not possess
citizenship or civil society. So there is a more fundamental question of how
can women be equal citizens, if there is no citizenship for anyone?
Dworkin's third reason why Palestinian women martyr themselves is "pride."
She argues that Palestinian women gain pride by holding up male family
members who are "civilly superior to them." "The best and brightest are
motivated to stand up for their families," she writes. Dworkin ignores the
fact that Palestinian women have human agency and political awareness. By
defining them as such, Dworkin's article attempts to exterminate over eighty
years of Palestinian women's national resistance, rendering Palestinian
women as selfish, apolitical, and "lower than animals.
Another key problem with Dworkin's article is that she equates Palestinian
nationalism with Israeli nationalism. That is, she seems to feel it is
acceptable to denounce Palestinian nationalism as long as she simultaneously
criticizes Israeli nationalism. While her analysis that nationalist
struggles often marginalize women is accurate, she fails to acknowledge that
asking a colonized people who are currently experiencing genocide to give up
a nationalist struggle is itself a colonial act. The nationalism exercised
by a colonial country, in this case, Israel, simply cannot be equated with
the nationalism of a colonized nation, in this case Palestine. Dworkin
suggests that Palestinian men stand in the way of sisterhood between Israeli
women occupiers and Palestinian women. The reality is that there can be no
sisterhood until colonization is eradicated and until Israeli women
occupiers stop wholly supporting the military extermination of native
Palestinians.
Palestinian women's courage lies in their strong beliefs, in their rights to
their ancestral land, and in their commitment to living free lives.
Palestinian women will always rise high, despite the racist and colonizing
attacks of Dworkin and other western, white, US aggressors. Palestinian
women know well that their freedom will be never granted, but rather it must
be acquired.
Elham Bayour, Paula Rojas, Andrea Smith, Ann Caton, Sherry Wilson, Clarissa
Rojas, Mimi Kim, Loretta Rivera, Nadine Naber - INCITE: Women of Color
Against Violence
The Women Suicide Bombers
Andrea Dworkin
There are good reasons for women suicide bombers, and anyone who
knows what's happening to women in the Middle East can't be surprised.
This is not the first time there have been women martyrs from
Palestine. Between June 1967 and October 1985, there were 353 terrorist
attacks inside Israel and each caused casualties. In the era of Oslo and the
early days of the Palestinian Authority there were a near endless parade of
suicide bombers who murdered Israeli civilians in acts of terror. There
were, in the interstices of the terrorists, young women, often women who had
been raped, sometimes by men in their own families. Rather than face an
ignominious death, the young women wrapped themselves with explosives and
committed a glorious suicide, one that would raise them up into the elite of
martyrdom. Now one sees the same happening with exemplary young women, whose
motives have to do with trying to scale the heights of a woman-hating
society. How does one rise up in a land where women are lower than the
animals? If one does what the men do, does one get a measure of the respect
the community gives the men?
It is better, easier, and more logical to blame the Israelis for
women's suffering than to blame the men who both sexually abuse and then
kill them according to honor society rules. Says one woman: "It is as if we
were in a big prison, and the only thing we really have to lose is that.
Imagine what it is like to be me, a proud, well-educated woman who has
traveled to many countries. Then see what it is like to be an insect, for
that is what the [Israeli] soldiers call us-cockroaches, dogs, insects."
The female suicide bombers are idealists who crave committing a pure
act, one that will wipe away the stigma of being female. The Palestinian
community is not sacrificing low women, women of no accomplishment, women
with no future. Instead, the women suicide bombers are the society's best in
terms of human resources, a perverted example of the best and the brightest.
There are reasons for this.
The first has to do with sexual abuse. Israeli and Palestinian
feminists have worked together in rape crisis centers to repair the torn
hymens of Palestinian rape victims. This is a life-saving procedure, since
sexual abuse is perceived as a form of the woman having prostituted. There
is no empathy, no post-traumatic stress disorder, no redemption, no revenge
against the rapist, no legal prosecution of him. Instead for the woman or
girl there is secrecy or death. In becoming suicide bombers, women trade in
the lowly status of the raped woman for the higher status of a martyr. The
fact that women suicide bombers have not been recognized as such before this
current onslaught of anti-Israeli aggression has to do with the invisibility
of women in general and the necessary silence of injured women.
The second reason for women suicide bombers is to try to rise in the
nationalist struggle so that when that struggle is over the status of women
will be recognized as deserving of citizenship and equality. In Algeria
women fought heroically. All the rules that bind women seemed to change.
Women were in the company of men. Women were brave. Women were not hidden.
After liberation the women were pushed back down. A similar dynamic took
place with Israeli women, needed to fight and to settle the land early on,
now distinctly second-class, especially under increasingly influential
religious law.
The third reason is pride: the deep-seated belief that a young woman
can be as brave, as sacrificing, as willing to submit to revolutionary
imperatives as men. Girls and young women want to stand up to the Israelis,
hard to do in a landscape of maniacal fighting men. The best and brightest
are motivated to stand up for their families: their beaten fathers, their
destroyed homes, their angry mothers, and the brothers who are civilly
superior to them.
In this time of terror, there is no tie between Israeli and
Palestinian women, no conviction on the part of Palestinian women that the
Israeli women they are killing have anything in common with them. Even
though policy is made in both communities by aggressive, angry men, there is
no sisterhood to speak of, no sense that there but for the grace of God go
I. Instead adult Palestinian men pick out those needing or desiring
martyrdom, strap explosives around them and send them into Hell, not Heaven.
The more women want to prove their worth, the more women suicide bombers
there will be. The lower the Israelis push the "cockroaches," the angrier
the accomplished Palestinian women will be, and sisterhood between them and
the young bombers will also disappear. The older women will let the younger
women do the dirty work. They will not stop them.
Both Israeli and Palestinian men push women into an anti-sisterhood
camouflaged as nationalist liberation.
Andrea Dworkin is the author of "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and
Women's Liberation." Her most recent book is "Heartbreak: The Political
Memoir of a Feminist Militant
============================================================
When we stop questioning our president we are giving up a democracy and
becoming a dictatorship.
What was NOT said in The New York Times Article Published on Monday,
September 30, 2002
Democratic Congressman Asserts Bush Would Mislead US on Iraq
by John H. Cushman Jr
From Democracy Now's morning broadcast, 9/30/02, http://democracynow.org
Jim McDermott of Washington State said much more and much stronger words
against the Bush administration designs for war than the NY Times reported.
McDermott came into politics at the end of Vietnam and recalls the lies
(mis-leading statements) used by Johnson & Nixon to justify the Vietnam war.
USA trying to make it so the inspections won't work as a pretext for war
not to do the work.
Disarmament or regime change?
On Lott saying McDermott was irresponsible sounded like a advocate for
Iraq and should come home, support Bush and keep his mouth shut.
McDermott responded, Does Mr. Lott think America is not a democracy with
the right of free speech. "When we stop questioning our president we are
giving up a democracy and becoming a dictatorship."
McDermott, a physician, visited Iraq 10 years ago at the end of the 1st
Iraq war. On this visit he noted the once large middle class of Iraq had
been pushed in to poverty. "The country is poor beyond belief compared
to 20 years ago." He also talked about an 80% increase of baby
malformations probably due to the depleted uranium shells used 10 years ago.
McDermott want to ask the USA military what else they know about the
Gulf War syndrome affecting many USA soldiers from the 1990's Iraq war.
McDermott also said, to send USA soldiers will do more harm to the
people of Iraq. It is wrong. Absolutely wrong.
Call McDermott's office and thank him.
The phone calls to congress are running overwhelmingly against the war.
Call and encourage others to call their congress members again and again
to say no to the Iraq war.
===
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