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Opinion
Embrace of Fossil Fuels Isn't Helping Kamala Harris
Trump represents an existential threat and it remains imperative that Kamala Harris win this election. But to do that, she would be well-advised to stop embracing fracking and return to her roots of confronting the coal, oil, and gas companies head-on.
Oct 16, 2024
The impacts of climate change are all around us—hurricanes battering Florida and Appalachia, extreme heat in October baking the West, and a continual stream of new temperature records. It’s pretty clear what needs to happen. We need to rapidly move away from fossil fuels. But for some reason, rather than taking on the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis, Vice President Harris’s team has determined that it's good politics to tout fracking and increased oil and gas production. This is not a winning approach, and it could actually cost Harris an election we desperately need her to win.
Embracing fracking and fossil fuel production is bad politics in addition to bad policy. D.C. conventional wisdom holds that in order to win Pennsylvania, candidates need to embrace fracking—but like much of D.C. conventional wisdom, this is wrong. Food & Water Action has worked on the ground in Pennsylvania for years. We’ve seen up close the dark underside of fracking - polluted water and air, cancer, and other social ills. Working with impacted communities, we have passed dozens of local measures restricting the practice in the state. Pennsylvanians don’t love fracking. In fact, they want to see it reined in rather than further unleashed.
The science is clear: We need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground. No amount of investment in renewable energy by itself will avert worsening climate change as long as we are simultaneously continuing to increase fossil fuel production.
Polling reflects this deep concern. A recent survey from the Ohio River Valley Institute showed that 74% of Pennsylvanians support stricter regulations on fracking due to concern about health risks, while 90% or more want expanded setbacks from schools and hospitals, stronger air monitoring, and more rigorous regulation on transportation of fracking waste. Ignoring these concerns and instead framing fracking as a virtue makes little political sense in the Keystone state.
Further, in Pennsylvania and beyond, Harris needs a groundswell of support from young and progressive voters—people most likely to care deeply about climate change and preventing it. In a recent survey of young people in swing states from the Environmental Voter Project, 40% said that “a candidate must prioritize ‘addressing climate change’ or else it is a ‘deal breaker.’” More significantly, 16% said they would definitely not support a candidate that talks about “increasing U.S. use of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal,” yet this is exactly what Harris has been bragging about. This election will be decided at the margins, and these are the type of hesitant voters we need to be motivated and engaged to put Harris over the line..
When she ran for president in 2019, Harris advocated for a much different agenda. She was one of several major candidates to call for an outright ban on fracking, she embraced a Green New Deal, and she championed a quick transition to a clean energy economy. These are the policies that would give her a great platform to address the climate crisis and talk about building a new energy economy based on good, unionized clean energy jobs.
They also have the advantage of being in line with what scientists are telling us is necessary to avert worse and escalating climate chaos. The science is clear: We need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground. No amount of investment in renewable energy by itself will avert worsening climate change as long as we are simultaneously continuing to increase fossil fuel production.
Based on her prior statements and record (she went after fossil fuel companies as California attorney general) Harris knows this. And, she has an opportunity to draw a stark contrast with Donald Trump, whose record is the epitome of climate denial and fossil fuel industry pandering. But now, if she is elected, Harris will face tremendous pressure to work with the fossil fuel industry and support its pet projects. It will be up to all of us to provide a loud and clear message from day one that this approach is unacceptable.
The stakes in this election could not be higher. Trump’s agenda poses a severe threat to our environment and our climate, as well as our democracy. It is imperative that Kamala Harris wins this election. But to do that, she would be well-advised to stop embracing fracking and fossil fuels, and return to her roots of confronting the oil and gas industry head-on. A large and powerful movement is ready to back her if she does, or hold her accountable if she doesn’t.
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No More Texts From My Sister, A Doctor in Gaza Murdered by Israel
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
Oct 16, 2024
“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her murder—or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors—arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.
“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.
It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.
“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.
The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.
She was just a child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a U.S.-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.
A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.
She did not charge the poor and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.
Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.
She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when Aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women—doctors, nurses, and other medical staff—would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope.
“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.
But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.
To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.
This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.
“I am exhausted. All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.
“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.
A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate.
My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.
Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
No more messages from her.
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Donald Trump's MAGA Death Cult Is Coming for Us All
Any serious discussion of Trump leads to one conclusion: something terrible, vast, and irredeemable has befallen us and we have no language to describe our predicament.
Oct 16, 2024
On the night of November 8th, 2016, the greatest soul singer of all suffered a stroke while watching the presidential election returns. Sharon Jones had, by virtue of her legendary talent, achieved fame despite "some record label" telling her that she was "too short, too fat, Black and old." Jones had one thing going for her—a voice so powerful, subtle and inhumanly flexible that she had no peer in a professional niche blessed with a ridiculous abundance of magnificent singers. She sang in harmony with world class horn players, but Sharon Jones' voice could soar and shame trumpets and saxophones. The brassy, tensile fierceness of her singing sometimes resolved into a whisper—like a virtuoso flautist drifting into silence.
Sharon Jones had held pancreatic cancer to a draw for several rounds, but metastatic cancer was one thing, and Trump's electoral college victory another. One easily imagines that Sharon Jones, the triumphant conqueror of a heartless music industry, came face to face with a terrifying and immovable barrier - the entire world had been swept into an inescapable vortex. I am not simply speculating—Jones' election night stroke did not kill her on the spot. She died ten days later, but not before identifying her assailant to her friends and bandmates. It was Donald Trump.
Sharon Jones death provides something of a blank slate - a place for the projection of our own anxiety. She may arguably be the first person to pass through the invisible threshold separating the misery and dislocation of life in neoliberal America from the fascist uncertainty to follow. You might think of her as American fascism's first casualty.
We can only speculate about what she endured on November 8th eight years ago, as we prepare to relive her trauma in a few weeks. Sharon Jones, because she did not meet the superficial standards—the image—of a peerless singer, once worked a day job. Before she achieved the big time she supported herself by working at the “correctional facility” on Rikers Island. Did she anticipate that Donald Trump would turn all of creation into an enormous Rikers Island? Sharon Jones, as both a legendary singer and a former prison guard (in one of the most notorious outposts within the prison industrial complex) had access to the whole continuum of human curses and virtues.
She only stood 4’11” but somehow survived the proximity of men at their worst. She must have seen beatings, threats, blood and humiliation until it all congealed into an existential blur. Rikers Island might have hardened Sharon Jones’s heart like a stone, but it did not. When Trump's apparition came to her on November 8th she might have stared him down like he was just one more Rikers inmate. We know that Sharon Jones had a full range of human emotions and vulnerabilities. You can hear it in her voice, and we know her story. Trump and death converged, and she went with them before anyone else.
But it wasn't just Sharon Jones—a suicide hotline serving the LGBTQ community experienced an enormous spike in calls on November 8th, 2016 as the election results imposed a cascading profusion of fearful thoughts. An awful world had suddenly morphed into something improbably worse. Millions of the most ordinary people looked into the abyss eight years ago—suicide hotlines everywhere received a glut of anxious calls. I am not Black, not gay, not Trans, not Central American, not poor, and not at all a supporter of Hillary “neoliberal stooge” Clinton, but my wife and I stared with stricken, numbed, abrupt distress at the 2016 computer screen. A nation that had been destined to drift toward fascism since a collection of white, male slave-owners signed The Declaration of Independence had bizarrely been shocked at how quickly it finally happened.
Neoliberalism has conditioned us to accept abraded environmental protections, minimal health care, defunded schools, human rights abuses, horrific military violence inflicted far away and supported by local propaganda, arbitrary police power, and expanding, privatized prisons. But fascism adds something new...
As a mental health outreach worker in small town Franklin County, Massachusetts, I expected that my poor clients (Franklin County is a collection of mostly decaying mill towns) would have responded to Trump’s 2016 victory with barely an indifferent shrug, but I was wrong. Poor people generally believe that voting is a waste of time—they rather conclude that no nexus exists to connect their struggles with the political theatrics that occasionally murmur as background noise on their TV screens. One of my clients, let's call her Alicia, caught me by surprise on November 9th when she asked, "Phil, can he send me back to Puerto Rico?" No, I told her, Puerto Rico is part of the US. That makes you a US citizen. Alicia may not have heard me at all. Her ex-husband had moved back to the Island. "If I get sent out my ex is going to kill me.”
Neoliberalism has conditioned us to accept abraded environmental protections, minimal health care, defunded schools, human rights abuses, horrific military violence inflicted far away and supported by local propaganda, arbitrary police power, and expanding, privatized prisons. But fascism adds something new—the performance of violence as a public spectacle. George Monbiot has deemed both neoliberalism and fascism as corporate responses to the problem of democracy. A society driven by the collective power of the public will inevitably collide with corporate hegemony. Whereas neoliberalism depends on an oblivious citizenry, lobotomized by the surgical blade of corporate media, fascists have less faith in brain washing alone. Fascism requires a stronger incentive for public obedience—naked fear.
A society driven by the collective power of the public will inevitably collide with corporate hegemony.
One cannot weigh and measure aggregate levels of anxiety, depression, hopelessness or fear. Some of the worst suffering that fascism inflicts takes place in the private spaces inside of our skulls. Sharon Jones was not struck in the head with a truncheon—she had been assaulted by an inevitable and widely shared vision, a sense that Donald Trump was not just another ghoul in the long line of presidential succession, but something even more rapaciously hostile, violent and unstoppable.
It is a tribute to Trump’s cultural power that he entered the awareness of my poorest clients in ways that no other political figure ever did. Over and over again I was asked if Trump’s election would end rent subsidies, Mass Health medical insurance and food stamps. I had no way to honestly reassure my clients and I resorted to platitudes about the rule of law and protections in the constitution.
Poor people are the only category of the public having the ability to experience unrestricted state violence—even within a nominally functioning democracy. Think of poverty as a paradoxical privilege—the power to see beneath the opaque curtain of capitalism. You might also think of the public housing project is an experiment in fascism—a laboratory where force and intimidation can be refined and honed for expanded use as society collapses. People in housing projects witness police beatings, local crime, evictions, arrests and child protective services taking custody of children. My poor clients had a sophisticated intuitive sense of what Trump might do. Anyone with daily exposure to arbitrary and capricious power knows that things can get worse.
Trump, if we consider him as a peculiar human/political specimen—apart from his convenient label as a fascist or authoritarian – rather stymies our efforts to analyze him. He is inarticulate, notably stupid, illogical and self-oblivious, and yet there he is – plain as a granite boulder, centered eternally within the public eye. His prominence in the media forced the invention of the term “sane-washing.” Any serious discussion of Trump leads to one conclusion—something terrible, vast and irredeemable has befallen us and we have no language to describe our predicament. Few things highlight our depths of decay more aptly than our upright, formal, straight faced, intellectualized reflections on utter madness. We talk about Trump as if he were a math equation with a correct answer. Imagine three or four pundits in free fall from atop the Grand Canyon discussing their dinner plans—that conveys the Trump-centered discourse on the nightly news.
Think of poverty as a paradoxical privilege—the power to see beneath the opaque curtain of capitalism. You might also think of the public housing project is an experiment in fascism—a laboratory where force and intimidation can be refined and honed for expanded use as society collapses.
It is as likely as not that Trump will be president within a few months. On election night there will be strokes, heart attacks and suicides in the wake of Trump’s election as people anticipate the expansion of Trump’s fascist death cult. Last time Trump occupied the throne, suicides spiked to unprecedented levels in 2017 1nd 2018. Fascism will unleash a mental health catastrophe. Obviously, the most targeted victims, sexual minorities and people without U.S. citizenship, or citizens related to those without citizenship, will be overwhelmed with anxiety.
Paradoxically, Trump’s own base will be prominent death cult victims. White men living in rural areas kill themselves at a rate higher than any other demographic, and more often than not they employ an iconic symbol of Republican Party violence —fire arms. We never know if deaths of despair involve a disproportionate contingent of Trump’s acolytes, but the COVID contrarian death event that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives defined Trump’s legacy. A death cult propaganda empire, largely funded by the oil industry (that lost profits during Covid-19 economic slowdowns) urged the public to fight back against the “emasculating” decrees of public health agencies. Research conducted by Dr. Ryon McDermott, a psychiatrist from South Alabama has linked anti-vax beliefs to fanatic masculine tropes:
“What we find is that men who endorse these beliefs are much less likely to engage in proactive health behaviors, like getting a vaccine, because it’s somehow seen as being feminine, or being weak.”
Dan Patrick, the elderly lieutenant governor of Texas, said the quiet part out loud during a COVID spike when he offered himself, and all elderly people, as a sacrifice to the greater cause of the US economy. His COVID death would be well worth the economic benefits, he argued. Patrick’s alleged bravery was nothing more than narcissistic prancing. But the strident, bellicose, confrontational display of performative anti-vax voices on social media demonstrated that macho contempt for the "decadent," fearful, feminine voices of public health drove the movement. Picture Donald Trump, the bone spur, draft dodger of the Vietnam War era, preening without a mask and boasting about it. Trump, the bone spur coward had achieved death cult redemption via Covid-19.
In the 1932 German film “The Blue Light” by Leni Riefenstahl—who would later gain fame as Hitler’s propaganda videographer— played a strange young girl with almost mystical mountain climbing skills (scaling sheer rock faces wearing cloth slippers). High on a rocky cliff, she discovers a grotto filled with magnificent crystals that glow with an ethereal brilliance. The movie juxtaposes Riefenstahl’s pristine, innocent and courageous character with the greedy townspeople who view the sacred crystals as a mere commodity. At the film’s end, the young mountain climber falls to her death after discovering that the crystals have been appropriated by ambitious town’s people. The fascist world view pivots around the eternal battle between heroism and decadence. The hero, according to the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, seeks death fearlessly and avidly, as a means of fascist consecration. Susan Sontag noted that Riefenstahl, at every juncture of her long career, channeled a fascist aesthetic.
One might argue that the doddering figure of a maskless Trump hardly equals the youthful Riefenstahl scaling mountains. But a death cult is still a death cult, even if it teeters precariously close to self-parody.
A death cult is still a death cult, even if it teeters precariously close to self-parody.
It may not be easy to accurately imagine all the details of the Trump death cult in its enhanced 2025 version. To be sure, some of the horrors seem almost certain—the continued Gazan genocide with the Democratic Party blessing for instance. Then there is the anticipated, murderous orgy of roundups, mass transfers to concentration camps and deportations of those without legal status. This will, in and of itself, meet the criterion for genocide. But the most critical consequence will be the obliteration of public mental well being. We should all anticipate the racing heart rates, the suicides, the spiking blood pressures, the strokes and heart attacks as the soul of the American people is mobilized for mere survival.
The public is the last barrier between the U.S. military machine and a dead Gaza. We are the last stand to turn back a planned extermination of our “undocumented” people. That may sound rather dramatic, as we don’t yet know if we can even save ourselves. We would be in slightly better shape if Sharon Jones’ voice still provided refuge. It doesn’t, and she was only the first to fall.
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Does Your Feminism Include Palestine?
A genuinely feminist stance fights for a world where no woman, no child, and no community live under the constant threat of violence.
Oct 16, 2024
Women's Marches are being planned across the country ahead of Election Day to "show the strength of our feminist movement." However, curiously missing from the talking points around the strength of the feminist movement is the women of Palestine—women and girls who have endured the brutality of anti-feminist policies for decades under the illegal occupation by Israel.
Nour, CodePink’s Palestinian-American organizer, shares a story of her grandmother's sacrifice to take care of her children under occupation:
In Palestine, Israeli forces routinely impose curfews on Palestinian villages, forcing Palestinians to stay confined in their homes after dusk. The penalty for the slightest movement outside—or even within their homes—can mean immediate arrest or being shot on sight. My mother often recounts a story of my grandmother risking her life during curfew one night. My uncle, who was an infant at the time, was crying for milk, and my grandmother, with no other choice, had to slip out into the night. She moved silently through the shadows, hiding from Israeli soldiers as she crossed the village to find milk for her baby. My mother still remembers the fear she felt, thinking it might be the last time she'd see her mother alive. But my grandmother returned safely because Palestinian women, shaped by decades of occupation and resistance, have learned to navigate the militarized reality that surrounds them, finding ways to perform even the most basic acts of care under unimaginable conditions.
This story is not new or singular; Palestinian families have faced it on a daily basis for decades. It sparked our reflection on the co-option of feminism in the belly of the beast—where we're writing from.
Feminism may not be definitive, but at its heart is a commitment to family and community care—a stark contrast to militarism, which injects itself into every aspect of human life and erodes these fundamental values.
Nadia Alia wrote about the 2014 Israeli invasion in Gaza, citing many reporters detailing the "disproportionate" number of women and children victims during this violent attack. She then begged the question, what is a proportionate amount of women and children harmed during war and conflict? When did gender-based violence and violence towards the oppressed become an inevitable part of world relations? And if simply men were killed, would the crime scream quieter? When did we start weighing the scale of a tragedy based on gender—and when did we decide Palestinian men being murdered and imprisoned doesn't impact their entire community?
Feminism may not be definitive, but at its heart is a commitment to family and community care—a stark contrast to militarism, which injects itself into every aspect of human life and erodes these fundamental values. Palestinian women embody this incompatible relationship between feminism and militarism through their constant resistance to the occupation's infringement on their health, education, and ability to provide for their families. When the women of Palestine are forced to become breadwinners and protectors because Israel has murdered or imprisoned every man in their family, the necessity for feminism to include the women of Palestine is undeniable.
To narrowly define feminism is to be inherently anti-feminist, as we are building new ways to be just, to be equitable, and to show up for our community every day—just as the women of Palestine do. However, co-opting feminism to enact harm and bring destruction to people and the planet is against all feminist principles and praxis. And to further assume a false sense of superiority over the communities that have been harmed by imperialism is not only inherently anti-feminist, it's anti-human. Feminism, at its core, is antithetical to all forms of oppression, exploitation, and violence. Feminism devoid of intersectionality becomes a weapon for imperialists by depriving it of its otherwise inherently liberatory nature.
Alia's writing from 2014 still rings clear today. We just passed a year marker of the October 7 act of resistance from Gazans defending their homeland and 76 years of Palestinians living in an open-air prison inside their own homes. Meanwhile, we head into an election season using feminism as a gateway towards further surveillance, policing, and genocide, both at home and in all corners of the earth. Women's marches throughout the country won't even utter the names of the hundreds of thousands of women killed in Palestine to date. What is feminist about wanting to be the most lethal force in the world? What is feminist about continuing to arm a genocidal war against Palestine and Lebanon? What is feminist about using our tax dollars that should go towards natural disaster relief and healthcare to fund murder? Supplying militarism under the guise of women's empowerment is again not new. Still, the complacency and ignorance we see from elected officials here in the U.S. and those who appear to care for the well-being of women is always horrific and devastating. It cannot be overstated: there are no feminist bombs, feminist prisons, feminist cops, or feminist wars. There are only paid actors who have convinced people that their eventual demise and the demise of the planet is what will empower their lives today.
Israel's occupation of Palestine creates a constant state of fear and instability, eroding the rights, safety, and dignity of millions, particularly Palestinian women who bear the weight of war and imperial feminism in devastating ways. CODEPINK started as an immediate reaction to the 2002 Bush Administration creeping closer to invading Iraq based on 'saving women and children' only to cause over 15,000 women in Iraq to be killed. The 'rescue' narrative we have seen play out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, and all across the globe from imperial players like the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel has truly shown the lengths that liberal, western feminism will go to justify the oppression of the women and children it claims to save.
To support Palestinian liberation means embracing a vision of feminism that stands firmly against militarism, imperialism, and colonialism.
This destructive narrative reveals the true intent this movement has for feminism: to keep the status quo and to keep marginalized lives, as Marc Lemont Hill describes it, "directly tied to the needs and interests of the powerful." Feminist education, activism, and community care must always come from a place of love and understanding but must also be in steadfast values of abolition and divestment. We cannot let ourselves be co-opted to kill Palestinians. We cannot allow our work to be undermined to kill the people of the Congo, of Sudan, of Yemen, of Ukraine, or of Russia. And we must not let our lives and choices be tied to a small group of people reaping the benefits of war.
To support Palestinian liberation means embracing a vision of feminism that stands firmly against militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. It means committing to fight for the rights of Palestinian women and all women who are oppressed in the name of advancing imperialist interests. Feminism calls us to see the connection between the liberties we fight for at home and the rights denied to women and girls across the globe. A genuinely feminist stance fights for a world where no woman, no child, and no community live under the constant threat of violence. Supporting Palestine is about embodying this vision, standing in solidarity, and fighting for a world where imperialism and colonialism are universally resisted.
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