Between June 14 and June 23, 2011, a delegation of 11 scholars, activists, and artists visited occupied Palestine. As indigenous and women of color feminists involved in multiple social justice struggles, we sought to affirm our association with the growing international movement for a free Palestine. We wanted to see for ourselves the conditions under which Palestinian people live and struggle against what we can now confidently name as the Israeli project of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Each and every one of us—including those members of our delegation who grew up in the Jim Crow South, in apartheid South Africa, and on Indian reservations in the U.S.—was shocked by what we saw. In this statement we describe some of our experiences and issue an urgent call to others who share our commitment to racial justice, equality, and freedom.

During our short stay in Palestine, we met with academics, students, youth, leaders of civic organizations, elected officials, trade unionists, political leaders, artists, and civil society activists, as well as residents of refugee camps and villages that have been recently attacked by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Everyone we encountered—in Nablus, Awarta, Balata, Jerusalem, Hebron, Dheisheh, Bethlehem, Birzeit, Ramallah, Um el-Fahem, and Haifa—asked us to tell the truth about life under occupation and about their unwavering commitment to a free Palestine. We were deeply impressed by people’s insistence on the linkages between the movement for a free Palestine and struggles for justice throughout the world; as Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted throughout his life, “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Traveling by bus throughout the country, we saw vast numbers of Israeli settlements ominously perched in the hills, bearing witness to the systematic confiscation of Palestinian land in flagrant violation of international law and United Nations resolutions. We met with refugees across the country whose families had been evicted from their homes by Zionist forces, their land confiscated, their villages and olive groves razed. As a consequence of this ongoing displacement, Palestinians comprise the largest refugee population in the world (over five million), the majority living within 100 kilometers of their natal homes, villages, and farmlands. In defiance of United Nations Resolution 194, Israel has an active policy of opposing the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes and lands on the grounds that they are not entitled to exercise the Israeli Law of Return, which is reserved for Jews.

In Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in eastern occupied Jerusalem, we met an 88-year-old woman who was forcibly evicted in the middle of the night; she watched as the Israeli military moved settlers into her house a mere two hours later. Now living in the small back rooms of what was once her large family residence, she defiantly asserted that neither Israel’s courts nor its military could ever force her from her home. In the city of Hebron, we were stunned by the conspicuous presence of Israeli soldiers, who maintain veritable conditions of apartheid for the city’s Palestinian population of almost 200,000, as against its 700 Jewish settlers. We crossed several Israeli checkpoints designed to control Palestinian movement on West Bank roads and along the Green Line. Throughout our stay, we met Palestinians who, because of Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and plans to remove its native population, have been denied entry to the Holy City. We spoke to a man who lives ten minutes away from Jerusalem but who has not been able to enter the city for twenty-seven years. The Israeli government thus continues to wage a demographic war for Jewish dominance over the Palestinian population.

We were never able to escape the jarring sight of the ubiquitous apartheid wall, which stands in contempt of international law and human rights principles. Constructed of twenty-five-foot-high concrete slabs, electrified cyclone fencing, and winding razor wire, it almost completely encloses the West Bank and extends well east of the Green Line marking Israel’s pre-1967 borders. It snakes its way through ancient olive groves, destroying the beauty of the landscape, dividing communities and families, severing farmers from their fields and depriving them of their livelihood. In Abu Dis, the wall cuts across the campus of Al Quds University through the soccer field. In Qalqiliya, we saw massive gates built to control the entry and access of Palestinians to their lands and homes, including a gated corridor through which Palestinians with increasingly rare Israeli-issued permits are processed as they enter Israel for work, sustaining the very state that has displaced them. Palestinian children are forced through similar corridors, lining-up for hours twice each day to attend school. As one Palestinian colleague put it, “Occupied Palestine is the largest prison in the world.”

An extensive prison system bolsters the occupation and suppresses resistance. Everywhere we went we met people who had either been imprisoned themselves or had relatives who had been incarcerated. Twenty thousand Palestinians are locked inside Israeli prisons, at least 8,000 of them are political prisoners and more than 300 are children. In Jerusalem, we met with members of the Palestinian Legislative Council who are being protected from arrest by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In Um el-Fahem, we met with an Islamist leader just after his release from prison and heard a riveting account of his experience on the Mavi Marmara and the 2010 Gaza Flotilla. The criminalization of their political activity, and that of the many Palestinians we met, was a constant and harrowing theme.

We also came to understand how overt repression is buttressed by deceptive representations of the state of Israel as the most developed social democracy in the region. As feminists, we deplore the Israeli practice of “pink-washing,” the state’s use of ostensible support for gender and sexual equality to dress-up its occupation. In Palestine, we consistently found evidence and analyses of a more substantive approach to an indivisible justice. We met the President and the leadership of the Arab Feminist Union and several other women’s groups in Nablus who spoke about the role and struggles of Palestinian women on several fronts. We visited one of the oldest women’s empowerment centers in Palestine, In’ash al-Usra, and learned about various income-generating cultural projects. We also spoke with Palestinian Queers for BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions], young organizers who frame the struggle for gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of a comprehensive framework for self-determination and liberation. Feminist colleagues at Birzeit University, An-Najah University, and Mada al-Carmel spoke to us about the organic linkage of anti-colonial resistance with gender and sexual equality, as well as about the transformative role Palestinian institutions of higher education play in these struggles.

We were continually inspired by the deep and abiding spirit of resistance in the stories people told us, in the murals inside buildings such as Ibdaa Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, in slogans painted on the apartheid wall in Qalqiliya, Bethlehem, and Abu Dis, in the education of young children, and in the commitment to emancipatory knowledge production. At our meeting with the Boycott National Committee—an umbrella alliance of over 200 Palestinian civil society organizations, including the General Union of Palestinian Women, the General Union of Palestinian Workers, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [PACBI], and the Palestinian Network of NGOs—we were humbled by their appeal: “We are not asking you for heroic action or to form freedom brigades. We are simply asking you not to be complicit in perpetuating the crimes of the Israeli state.”

Therefore, we unequivocally endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to pressure Israeli state-sponsored institutions to adhere to international law, basic human rights, and democratic principles as a condition for just and equitable social relations. We reject the argument that to criticize the State of Israel is anti-Semitic. We stand with Palestinians, an increasing number of Jews, and other human rights activists all over the world in condemning the flagrant injustices of the Israeli occupation.

We call upon all of our academic and activist colleagues in the U.S. and elsewhere to join us by endorsing the BDS campaign and by working to end U.S. financial support, at $8.2 million daily, for the Israeli state and its occupation. We call upon all people of conscience to engage in serious dialogue about Palestine and to acknowledge connections between the Palestinian cause and other struggles for justice. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University*

Ayoka Chenzira, artist and filmmaker, Atlanta, GA

Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz*

Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz*

G. Melissa Garcia, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University*

Anna Romina Guevarra, author and sociologist, Chicago, IL

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, author, Atlanta, GA

Premilla Nadasen, author, New York, NY

Barbara Ransby, author and historian, Chicago, IL

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University*

Waziyatawin, University of Victoria*

*For identification purposes only

For press inquiries, please contact feministdelegation@gmail.com.

The video showcases achievements in women’s rights in Lebanon and examples of what remains to be done.

The message of the video is simple: Change is possible. We just have to work on it.

If you’d like to us to take the training program to your university, school, organization or group, please write to farah[at]nasawiya.org.

The video was produced for our training program “Ghayreh 3adtik Bitzeed S3adtik – Feminist Tools for Change” which aims at empowering women with the knowledge, tools and resources to bring about change from a feminist perspective.

The message of the video is simple: Change is possible. We just have to work on it.

If you’d like to us to take the training program to your university, school, organization or group, please write to farah[at]nasawiya.org.

هذه المدخلة غير متوفرة باللغة العربية

As feminists, we strive to recreate a world free from sexism, and all other forms of exploitations and discriminations that collaborate with it: classism, racism, sectarianism, heterosexism, capitalism, etc. We wee all these problems as interrelated and equally oppressive, yet we insist on addressing them from a progressive grassroots feminist perspective.

Here below we offer six very basic notions about Nasawiya‘s feminism.

6 Things You Should Know About Nasawiya‘s Feminism

1. Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.
2. Feminism is about choice. It’s simply the idea that women are free to choose to be whoever they want to be, and do whatever they want to do.
3. Feminism focuses on gender rather than the restrictive fight for women’s rights. And as such, it makes the distinction between sex and gender. While sex is biological, gender is acquired and learned, changes over time and varies widely within and across cultures. Gender is relational and refers not simply to women or men but to the relationship between them. Gender is not natural and is acquired through socialization. It’s constructed through societal roles and expectations, stereotypes, media portrayals, profession… And so, feminism is not about pitting women against men, but rather challenging what’s expected of women and what’s expected of men.
4. Feminism is for both men and women. Think about it: Every time you liberate a woman, you liberate a man.
5. Feminism is a personal and political struggle that covers intersecting issues including class, race, sexual identity, different forms of oppression such as patriarchy, state control over citizen’s bodies, particularly women’s bodies, sectarianism, capitalism, consumerism, fundamentalism, etc. And as such, it is an all-or-nothing approach.
6. Feminism is simply a tool that allows us to achieve gender justice and ultimately social justice. And as such, it is at the heart of our training program “Ghayreh 3adtik Bitzeed S3adtik – Feminist Tools for Change.”

June 12 is Global Day of Action to Free Prisoners of Conscience in Iran.

Why June 12?

Almost a year has passed since the flawed presidential election in Iran, which spurred to action the people of Iran, who joined together, regardless of demographic, to protest their stolen votes, and later to advocate for their civil & human rights. Movements like these are rarely witnessed in Muslim countries.

June 12, 2010 will mark one year since the initial systematic human and civil rights crackdowns following the election, which has led to the arrests and detainment of thousands of activists, students, writers, minorities, and everyday citizens.

For the day, prominent international human right NGOs, grassroots groups, networks, university campuses, and individuals will join forces to support the civil and human rights movement in Iran and call the Islamic Republic of Iran on its blatant human rights abuses.

In addition to promoting this Global Day of Action, we at Nasawiya have taken it upon ourselves to call for  the release of Hengameh Shahidi, about 35, a journalist and political activist who is currently serving a six-year sentence in Evin Prison, Tehran. The six- year prison term includes five years for “gathering and colluding with intent to harm state security” and one year for “propaganda against the system.” She is a prisoner of conscience.

In April 2010, Shahidi, while meeting her mother in Evin prison, sent a message despite the trend of illegal detention, interrogations and also an approved heavy sentence from Court of Appeals, she respects what is defined as punishment for her and have prepared herself for serving a 6 year sentence. (You can read her full message here.)

On June 12, whether you’re tweeting, blogging, writing, thinking or talking to friends, please take a few moments to remember all the imprisoned Iranian activists and freedom fighters, our partners in the struggle for justice.

The title of the training program, which translates into "Change Your Habit To Be Happier" is a pun on a traditional Arabic proverb.

After a series of sessions in schools and universities, we’re bringing our training program on feminist tools for change “Ghayreh 3adtik Bitzeed S3adtik” (Change Your Habit To Be Happier) to you.

On Saturday, April 24, 2010, we’re holding an introductory session between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM at our office in Mar Mikhael. (Call 01-447 192 for directions.)

Primarily targeted at young women, the program is designed to provide participants with the knowledge, tools and resources to bring about change from a feminist perspective.

This is your chance to learn more about feminism and how it can be used as a positive and empowering tool for change. The session will also include an open discussion, during which you can share your thoughts on the program and addressing women’s issues in our part of the world.

So mark your calendars, and join us this coming Saturday for our interactive session on feminism and activism.

Please confirm your attendance to farah[at]nasawiya.org.