A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today (original) (raw)

Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution!

Palestinian woman carries her child amid buildings destroyed after Israeli attacks on Al-Maghazi refugee camp, Gaza, 6 November 2023. (Photo: Belal Khaled / Anadolu)

The following is based on a presentation by Hannah, Luca, Mateo and Max at the CUNY Internationalist Clubs’ International Women’s Day 2024 event “From Vietnam and Haiti to Gaza Today: Women and the Struggle Against Imperialism.” Incorporating additional points and information as we go to press, it has been expanded into an article by Joseph.

Women in Gaza today – under the bombs supplied to Israel by U.S. imperialism’s Biden-Harris administration – face a desperate daily struggle for survival. Driven from one part of the besieged enclave to another, feeding their children becomes nearly impossible. Homes, hospitals and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, with families buried beneath the ruins. With critical water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure devastated, disease is rampant. Famine looms, and the starvation is intentional.1 To students here who wonder about students there: in Gaza as of the end of July, almost 10,000 students and 500 teachers and university professors had been killed, according to U.N. statistics. The massive overall death toll grows daily. This is a genocidal U.S./Israel war.2

The sealing off of Gaza and mass killing of its population build on the blockade in place since 2008, which Israel imposed as yet another phase in its efforts to make life unlivable for Palestinians. As for U.S. backing of the Zionist state,3 this is not just some kind of misunderstanding – it is a strategic part of imperialist domination of the Middle East. U.S. rulers arm and fund these crimes while feigning sympathy for the women and children who are the most vulnerable targets of the bombs and fighter jets they supply.

Now bourgeois feminists who wanted Hillary Clinton to become Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism in 2016 hope to pass that torch to Kamala Harris. On college campuses this fall, promoters of the Democratic Party will be ramping up the hype for the VP of “Genocide Joe” Biden. Against them and in solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, we will not cease to put front and center the fact that she shares responsibility for the slaughter with him and the whole two-headed Democrat/Republican capitalist government.

Many students, as we have seen across the country, want to take action to stop the mass murder in Gaza. Many have become increasingly politicized as they questioned the “official story” of the U.S. role in the world that they were taught, in which the crimes of the capitalist rulers around the globe are presented in humanitarian garb, “human rights” rhetoric,4 or sometimes in feminist garb. This highlights how crucial it is to see that the slaughter won’t be stopped by looking to the very same U.S. capitalist class that backs and perpetrates it. But looking to them is, frankly, what most current strategies boil down to.5

Instead, we need to turn to the power of the working class. The workers whose labor makes everything run in capitalist society have the power to carry out strikes and labor actions against the shipping of arms to Israel – an urgent call that Internationalist supporters in the unions are fighting for. This points to the need for a revolutionary political program, for unchaining workers’ power and breaking with the Democrats and all capitalist politicians. As part of this, we fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. And we call for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

Where Should the Birds Fly? and Fatenah

Fleeing Israeli air strike, Gaza City,
12 October 2023. Most of those killed
in the war are children and women. (Photo: Mohamed Zaanoun / Middle East Images)

At the City University of New York and elsewhere, we in the Internationalist Clubs work to bring this revolutionary program to students, who here at CUNY are mostly the sons and daughters of New York City’s working class. Last year’s fall semester highlighted the conflict of interests between CUNY’s administration and trustees – who are hand-picked by the city’s rulers and committed to U.S. imperialism’s alliance with Israel – and the students, faculty and campus workers who should control the university. When the acting president of CUNY’s Hunter College, Ann Kirschner, unilaterally canceled a screening of the film Israelism, we protested together with other students and faculty. As a result, the ban was struck down. (See article on page 5.)

As part of asserting student/faculty rights to hold on-campus Palestine events, we and other activists followed up by organizing a showing of two Palestinian films right before final exams in December 2023. Drawing over 50 students and faculty members, though we only had a day to build it, the event’s impact was underlined during the discussion period by participants’ intense, thoughtful comments on the films. The first was Fatenah (2019), a short but powerful animated film about a Gazan woman seeking treatment for breast cancer. The second film shown that evening was Where Should the Birds Fly?(2013),a documentary about Israel’s 2008-09 war on Gaza.

Watching the two films, we saw that the current genocidal war draws on and escalates many of the deadly tactics that Israel used previously against the Palestinians. In late 2008, it launched an attack that killed at least 1,400 Palestinians and devastated large swaths of Gaza. As background to that attack, Where Should the Birds Fly? shows several aspects of Israeli oppression: the attacks on farmers working their fields, the violent harassment of fishermen, the use of bulldozers and U.S.-made missiles to attack Palestinian homes.

The heart of the film focuses on a ten-year-old girl named Mona, from the Zeitoun district in Gaza, who lost 21 members of her extended family during this time. Because of the Israeli attack, she and her family members, along with about 100 others, sought refuge in a building that was then targeted in an Israeli missile strike. When asked, “Were many people killed in your family?” Mona replies: “Not many, just my mother, my father, both my sisters-in-law and my nephew … my cousin and my neighbor.” Over and over again, the annihilation of Palestinian families has been a feature of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

Fatenah, which was the first-ever animated Palestinian film, also depicts unendurable realities of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Inspired by a true story, it is about a young Palestinian woman struggling to receive proper medical care. “Last year I was very busy,” she says at the start of the film, “but now I am free and I can tell you my story.” Six months after finding a lump in her breast, Fatenah is finally diagnosed with breast cancer and begins her medical treatment.

However, she repeatedly runs up against Israeli restrictions, barriers and checkpoints, where she is delayed, harassed and humiliated by the Israeli military. Her parents try to visit her but are forced to turn back when they cannot pay the money demanded. When her tumor spreads, the Red Crescent ambulance transporting her comes under fire. The film ends with Fatenah dying in bed, surrounded by her parents as she looks out at the sea one last time.

“We know from the start that Fatenah does not make it through the film,” a prestigious British medical journal stated in its review.

“She dies from breast cancer. But that is just the final cause…. She dies because the soldiers at the checkpoint will not let her cross into Israel to attend the hospital where she can get the care that she is entitled to. She dies because her local hospital does not have a constant supply of chemotherapy (it does not even have a constant supply of electricity). Fatenah dies because she falls ill and she lives in Gaza.”

– The Lancet Oncology, October 2009

And remember, this came out fourteen years before the present genocidal war.

Women Face the Genocidal Onslaught

A mother holds one of her two newborn children who were killed in Israeli air strike in Rafah,
Gaza, next to their wounded father in one of the few functioning hospitals in the enclave.
(Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters)

Today, amidst Israel’s onslaught armed and funded by the U.S. government, only about a third of Gaza’s hospitals are even partially functioning, while medical and aid workers are continually being targeted and killed. For pregnant women, the situation is increasingly dire: from October 2023 to July 2024, 15 percent of childbirths had complications, while the incidence of premature childbirth increased by 30 percent – and miscarriage rates shot up by a staggering 300 percent.6 Many women have to give birth in public bathrooms or in tents, with little to no medical assistance or privacy. Some have been subjected to Caesarean sections with no anesthesia due to widespread destruction of medical facilities and scarcity of surgical supplies.

The double oppression of women, as we Marxists emphasize, is a fundamental part of capitalist society. The effects of women’s oppression are further compounded by imperialist domination and national oppression, as Club members discussed in their presentation on Haiti during our International Women’s Day forum. Even before the current war on Gaza, women and girls there faced enormous burdens. And now, together with the rest of its 2.3 million people, they are in the crosshairs of this genocidal war.

Even the most intimate aspects of daily life are intertwined with the struggle for survival. The lack of clean water has made maintaining hygienic conditions for personal health, food and medical care extremely difficult. Basic personal hygiene supplies like soap and shampoo are increasingly rare and, if available, they are many times more expensive than before. There are reports of desperate mothers resorting to the use of sand to clean their children.7 Israel has prevented most aid from entering Gaza, and what little aid that does get through rarely includes menstrual hygiene products. Some women on their periods have had to resort to cutting up diapers, scraps of tents and other cloth to use instead, and this has put them at risk for infection. Painkillers are near impossible to obtain.

As part of the war on Gaza, women face multiple forms of sexual harassment and assault, including being stripped naked, searched by male Israeli officers, threatened with and sometimes subjected to sexual violence. This reality has been downplayed by the bourgeois press, while imperialist politicians have used their vast resources to spread every accusation or rumor that they find useful in dehumanizing the Palestinians. While Joe Biden dutifully parroted lies about having seen photos of beheaded Israeli babies, a falsification typical of imperialist war propaganda, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller claimed he could not “independently confirm the reports” that Palestinian women and girls had been sexually assaulted and threatened with rape by Israeli army officers.8

“Ethno-State” of Oppression

Israel’s apologists have long pitched it as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” even trying to dress up its predations in the garb of “democratic values” like women’s rights. For example, according to propagandists for Zionism, the conscription of women into the “Israel Defense Forces” supposedly proves that the country is a liberal democracy that safeguards “civilized” treatment of women. In fact, it is a religiously and ethnically based state and, as such, inherently discriminatory to Arab Muslims and Christians, who within Israel are second-class citizens, and in Gaza and the West Bank have no rights at all. As a religiously based state it is, moreover, inherently oppressive to Israeli Jewish women as well.

With religious obscurantists’ ever-increasing weight in Israeli society, even the bourgeois press reports: “Growing Segregation by Sex in Israel Raises Fears for Women’s Rights” (New York Times, 12 August).9 Religious rightists in Israel are, of course, also virulently hostile to gay, lesbian and trans rights, while some liberal Zionists try to depict it as an “LGBT rights oasis.” Some even seek to use this claim as ammunition for backing the genocidal war. In November 2023, a photo was posted on social media showing an IDF soldier holding a rainbow flag inscribed “In The Name of Love” – while standing over ruins in Gaza.10 “The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza,” stated the post on X, in yet another revolting attempt to present Zionist terror as the expression of some kind of liberatory force.

On July 29 of this year, ten Israeli soldiers were arrested due to a leaked surveillance video showing the gang rape of a male prisoner at the military’s Sde Teiman base. The Sde Teiman “detention facility,” where thousands of Gazan prisoners have been held, is notorious as a torture site. In reaction to the arrests, rightist mobs stormed the facility in support of the soldiers, while members of the cabinet and other Israeli politicians defended them.11 So much for “civilization.”

Defend Gaza – For International Workers Action!

Internationalist contingent in May Day 2024 NYC march calls for workers action to stop military cargo for genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. (Internationalist photo)

The genocidal war on Gaza represents the barbarism of the entire capitalist system, a system built on oppression, racism and war. It is being carried out in the context of U.S. imperialism increasingly threatening to engulf the planet in a Third World War. This is the reality of what we’re being asked to support when they tell us to vote for the latest imperialist candidate to supposedly save the world. In Revolution, we’ve discussed how the Democratic Biden-Harris administration has accelerated that drive toward WWIII, in which the U.S./Israel war on Gaza and the U.S./NATO Ukraine war against Russia are way stations toward war against China. To stop this, the working class must intervene, which means we must fight for a socialist revolution here in the United States and internationally, including in the Middle East.

One of the central aspects of Marxist politics is that we draw a class line between the oppressed working-class masses around the world and the capitalist rulers that oppress and exploit them. In the U.S., the Democratic Party arming and funding the Gaza genocide has its feminist “frontwomen” such as Kamala Harris, her close friends Hillary Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al. Our opposition to them goes beyond helping educate youth about their real record and policies, though of course it’s important that we do that.

But something even more basic is involved: the class line we just mentioned. We and they are on opposite sides of it. They, like Biden, Trump and all bourgeois politicians, are representatives of the capitalist ruling class, and of the capitalist state that protects the capitalists’ property and social system. We stand for independent class politics, revolutionary Marxist politics, representing the interests of the working class and oppressed. They boast of being the “proudest patriots” of U.S. imperialism. We’re internationalists: we say, “Arab, Jewish, black and white – Workers of the world, unite!” And neither Harris, Clinton, AOC and the U.S. Congress nor the U.N. or “international community” of bourgeois states can be turned into forces for liberation, in Palestine or anywhere else.

But there is such a force. As we have emphasized, it is the_power of the working class_ that must be brought to bear. Faced with the war on Gaza, that power must be unchained from support to any and all capitalist parties and politicians, and brought into the struggle to defend Gaza and to defeat the U.S./Israel genocidal war. Struggles for workers action against the war have been and are being carried out. Dock workers in Italy, for example, have carried out actions in defense of the Palestinian people. Four [now five] Portland, Oregon unions have adopted resolutions for U.S. workers to stop arms shipments to Israel. Internationalist supporters in the union movement fight for this – it needs to be spread and put into effect. All this shows the need for revolutionary leadership.

The people of Gaza are imprisoned in a small enclave, with the Zionists’ threat to drive them into the desert looming over them. The attempt is to cut them off and isolate them in order to carry out Israel’s deadly ethnic cleansing campaign. But millions of workers in Egypt, Turkey, Iran and the rest of the Middle East have enormous potential power that can and must be brought into the struggle to break through this and defeat this horrific war. With regard to the Hebrew-speaking workers in Israel, revolutionary internationalists understand that to defeat Zionism it is necessary that they be broken away from the capitalist rulers running the deadly “garrison state” of Israel. This is no easy task, but it can and must be done as part of revolutionary upheaval throughout the region. All this is connected to our call for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state as part of a socialist federation of the Middle East.

We are up-front in putting forward our perspective that to win, the struggle needs to be international, and that this means it needs an internationalist program. Zionist and imperialist oppression and war can’t be defeated through a nationalist program. We are also up-front in saying that Marxists’ militant defense of Gaza in this war does not imply political support to the existing leadership, governmental or religious authorities. To give an example, after becoming the governing party in Gaza, Hamas – which Israel originally helped set up12 – launched an oppressive religious “Virtue Campaign” to have gender segregation in schools, impose use of the hijab by women students at Al-Aqsa University and other restrictive measures.

As revolutionaries, we fight for the full emancipation of women everywhere, through class struggle. This is a central part of the program of socialist revolution. Over the next period, we will face the challenge of sharply exposing and opposing efforts to keep workers, youth and oppressed communities subjugated to U.S. imperialism through the genocide-arming Democratic Party of Biden, Harris & Co. For us, this is indispensable to our struggles as revolutionary internationalists – in solidarity with the heroic women of Gaza.■