FOR over a year now, the world has been inundated with the narrative that Israel has the “right to self-defence,” a claim used to shield and legitimise the relentless violence inflicted upon Palestinians — violence that has reached unimaginable levels.

Women and children bear the brunt of a brutal occupation that erases their humanity while subjecting them to relentless military aggression. In Gaza, the most densely populated strip on Earth, the siege tightens daily, depriving over two million people of the basic essentials of life.

In the West Bank, settler violence, condoned and facilitated by the Israeli state, has escalated to unprecedented levels. Palestinians are not only at the mercy of an occupying force but also trapped in a narrative that dehumanises them and normalises their suffering.
 
Historically, feminism has been a force for justice, taking on patriarchy, inequality, and colonial violence in its quest to liberate women. During the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, women played a pivotal role in resisting both racial and gender oppression, demonstrating feminism’s potential to confront intersecting systems of injustice.

Feminists have long claimed the mantle of those who challenge power structures and stand with the most vulnerable. Yet, when it comes to Palestinian women — who endure unimaginable violence under occupation — this same movement, once defined by its commitment to solidarity and justice, has largely remained silent, or worse, complicit.

Instead of dismantling the rhetoric that sustains this oppression, many feminists have uncritically echoed it or turned their attention to distractions — abandoning the very women they claim to fight for.
 
Feminism, built on the promise of dismantling oppressive systems and challenging entrenched biases, has never looked more hollow than in its silence on Palestine.

How can this ethos hold any weight when Palestinian women, enduring one of the most violent examples of colonial oppression in modern history, are met with evasion by those who claim to fight for justice?

Let me spell it out for you, in case you’ve missed the news — or been in a collective coma: Gaza is a cage, sealed off and bombarded, where over two million people are denied basic human rights under the guise of “security.”

Here, Palestinian women endure the unthinkable: hunger, the absence of clean water, and dire shortages of necessities. Even menstruation becomes a humiliating ordeal, with women forced to use scraps of tents in place of sanitary pads. Pregnant women deliver babies without anaesthesia, risking anaemia, haemorrhage, and death.

Meanwhile, mothers bury the lifeless bodies of their children, digging through rubble to recover what remains. Instead of confronting the systems that sustain this violence, feminist spaces have spent the past year entangled in performative debates and superficial squabbles, letting the movement’s credibility disintegrate.
 
The hollowness of modern feminism becomes even more apparent when we examine the language used to frame Palestinian suffering — a language that dehumanises and sanitises oppression. When feminism still lived up to its principles, it stood as a force against colonialism, challenging the narratives that justified subjugation.

Today, this legacy is absent when it comes to Palestinian women. Israeli hostages are described with words like “innocent” and “victim,” invoking outrage and global empathy. But Palestinian women, enduring siege, bombings, and the unbearable grief of burying their children, are reduced to faceless statistics, dismissed as “collateral damage” or accused of being “human shields.”
 
The injustice deepens when some feminists, instead of opposing oppression, uncritically repeat stereotypes that portray Middle Eastern cultures as backward or oppressive, framing Palestinian women as victims of their men while erasing the colonial violence that defines their lives.

Prominent voices reduce women in Gaza to victims of “Islamic patriarchy” or “extremists,” ignoring the bombs, siege, and systemic violence imposed by an occupying force. Others dismiss the situation as “too complicated” or condescendingly suggest that critics — often women of colour — don’t understand the history, as if a white feminist lens is the arbiter of justice.

This isn’t solidarity; it’s hypocrisy rooted in privilege, a racialised slap in the face that erases Palestinian women’s lived realities. And while Israeli hostages dominate headlines, Palestinian women held hostage by siege, rubble, or prisons are erased.

While there are feminists who have attempted to address these issues, their efforts are too often drowned out by the silence of many others or misdirected by narratives that do more harm than good. Feminism, which once dismantled power structures that marginalised women globally, now props up these very hierarchies, betraying the women it claims to defend.
 
Feminism, once a collective force for justice, has fractured into tribes and power struggles, losing both its credibility and its soul. Instead of dismantling oppression, many feminists now scramble for influence, aligning themselves with agendas that betray the movement’s foundations.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the appalling spectacle of feminists marching alongside far-right figures like Tommy Robinson, twisting “women’s rights” into a shield for racism and authoritarianism. This isn’t feminism — it’s a grotesque betrayal, a cynical weaponisation of liberation rhetoric to uphold the hierarchies it was meant to dismantle.

These betrayals aren’t rare; they’re the inevitable symptoms of a movement in crisis. From the silence on Palestinian women to the parroting of stereotypes that distort their suffering, feminism has become a fractured, compromised entity — defined by feuds and performative battles for relevance. Its flirtation with far-right narratives isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s a damning indictment of a movement collapsing into a hollow shell.
 
Those once regarded as voices of courage and champions of equality have lost their standing, their legacies eroded by a hypocrisy that women of colour, in particular, can no longer overlook.

Their selective outrage and refusal to defend Palestinian women — whether out of fear, allegiance to a version of feminism that aligns with Western political interests at the expense of marginalised women, or the hollow pretence of “neutrality” — expose the limits of their solidarity. This isn’t just a disappointment; it’s a confirmation that struggles like ours will always be sidelined if they fail to fit within a narrow, self-serving agenda.
 
For Palestinian women, the stakes are nothing short of survival — the difference between life and death under the weight of colonial violence. For feminism, the stakes are equally existential: its credibility, its integrity, and its claim to being a force for justice.

Feminism’s path forward lies in returning to its roots: challenging the language that dehumanises Palestinians, dismantling the structures of power that perpetuate their suffering, and reclaiming its purpose as unapologetically inclusive, deeply principled, and firmly anti-colonial. Anything less isn’t just failure; it’s a betrayal of the women feminism once vowed to champion.