Palestine to Ukraine: Redefining feminist internationalism

As wars rage from Ukraine to Gaza, the plight of women and LGBTQ people caught in the crossfire all too often goes unremarked. Panelists from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Iran, and the US share intersectional feminist perspectives for building solidarity, ending racial, economic, and gender violence, and stopping colonial and imperialist wars. Oksana Dutchak is co-editor of Ukrainian Spilne/Commons: Journal for Social Criticism. Dutchak holds a Ph.D. in social sciences. Oksana is devoted to engaged and public research, which contributes to public discussion and policies, trying to give voice to women, workers and other structurally underprivileged groups. Dr. Anwar Mhajne is a Palestinian political scientist specializing in international relations and comparative politics, focusing on cybersecurity, disinformation, gender, religion, and Middle Eastern Politics. She is the co-editor of Critical Perspective on Cybersecurity: Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions Forthcoming with Oxford University Press (March 2024). Yali Hashash is a Mizrahi queer feminist academic. She has a Ph.D. in Jewish history (Haifa University, 2011). Her research interests include social history of the 19th and 20th-century Palestine and the Middle East, poverty, gender, nationalism, ethnicity and religion. She is the author of Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism. (2022). Tova Benski is a sociologist and lecturer at various universities in Israel. She is a co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution and Social Transformation (2013). Barbara Smith is a US Black feminist scholar and activist and co-author of the Combahee River Collective Statement. She is the editor of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983/2023) and author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom (1998/2023). Frieda Afary is an Iranian American public librarian, translator, activist and author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (2022). She is the producer of Iranian Progressives in Translation and  Editor’s Note (12/13/23): At multiple points in the conversation, the panelists refer to the accusations that Hamas fighters committed acts of mass sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks. While Israeli officials and media outlets have repeatedly affirmed the veracity of these accusations, Israel has not provided requested information to journalists and even to officials at the United Nations attempting to independently investigate and verify the accusations. As Mondoweiss reported on Dec. 8, 2023, “Lurid stories of gang rape, mutilation, and even necrophilia, have been disseminated by the media. This has occurred despite there being no substantive developments in evidence of sexual assaults from the Israeli occupation forces. Israel has repeatedly failed to provide forensic evidence, concrete photographic evidence, or victim testimonies to news organizations beyond inferences made by Israel’s forensic teams. Indeed, the Times of Israel alleges that the IOF will never provide forensic evidence because ‘physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities,’ and it is now, reportedly, too late to collect conclusive evidence… Israel’s secrecy remains deafening; the IOF exclusively screened a 47-minute compilation of ‘raw footage’ to invited journalists, as opposed to sharing the footage with news agencies to report on and verify independently (Al Jazeera journalists, notably, were not invited to attend). Amongst those invited, journalist Owen Jones saw no ‘conclusive evidence’ for torture, sexual violence, rape, or beheadings. Furthermore, despite calling on the UN to condemn Hamas’s acts of sexual violence, Israel refuses to cooperate with a UN commission of inquiry into sexual violence committed by Hamas on the ludicrous basis that the UN has ‘an anti-Israel bias.’” Due to the dearth of such evidence provided to journalists by Israeli officials, TRNN can neither confirm nor deny the substance of these allegations. Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden The Real News is an independent, viewer-supported, radical media network. Help us expand our in-depth analysis and coverage from Baltimore to Bangladesh by subscribing and becoming a member today! Donate: Sign up for our newsletter: Like us on Facebook: Follow us on Twitter: