NEW YORK, Apr 28 (IPS) – The curtain has been lifted – but not what you think. Not the veil that the West has spent decades weaponizing. The veil now exposed is that which has hidden the selective solidarity of Western feminism – its silence on those women for whom it was never really fighting. The “otherness” of women in the Southwest Asian and North African region. In other words: we.
In against white feminismRafia Zakaria offers a powerful critique of how mainstream feminism often reinforces white supremacist, colonial, and patriarchal logics. The suffering of women of color becomes useful – deployable.
The image of the veiled, suffering woman waiting to be rescued has long justified wars, interventions, and foreign policies motivated not by liberation, but by imperial ambition. When these women protest on their own terms, they are ignored or stigmatized.
This pattern is not new. This is structural. Discrimination is inherent in the system. Palestine has made this undeniable. The peace that followed dispelled any remaining confusion that “we are in this together.” It turns out there are limits to feminist solidarity – and some of us were never meant to be included.
This is the curtain that we lift today.
We speak as 50-65 year old Arab women, activists and feminists with over a century of combined experience in 90 countries. We now live in the United States, where these contradictions are stark. We have paid the price for insisting on honesty. So have many others.
In conversations with colleagues and communities, the message is consistent: the system is not broken – it functions exactly as designed.
Early feminist movements everywhere struggled with patriarchy, sometimes opposing it, sometimes accepting it. In the West, this struggle has often become uneasily associated with white supremacy.
In formerly colonized areas, patriarchy cannot be separated from colonialism, racism, or imperialism. These systems are interconnected; To eliminate one one has to face them all. This is where Western feminism continues to weaken.
Today, a little has changed. The language is more sophisticated. Imagination more diverse. But the underlying structures—and the values that sustain them—remain intact. Nowhere is this more evident than in how women from the Southwest Asian and North African region are treated by the movements that claim to champion them.
The same logic that invoked Afghan women to justify military intervention now sees Palestinian women documenting their destruction forced into silence or offer excuses.
The data reflects this reality.
In the United States, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination increased sharply in 2024. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 complaints – the most since it began tracking in 1996. Employment discrimination alone accounted for 15.4% of cases. In 2025, these numbers increased again. Rhetoric has consequences.
But the numbers tell only part of the story. Women’s voices tell the rest.
An Arab aid worker reported being sidelined after speaking publicly about Palestine after October 7:
“When I talked about Ukrainian women, it was welcomed. When I talked about Palestinian women, it was suppressed. I lost my job.”
Others describe being silenced on social media, accused of saying too much or too little. Some were advised to remove their hijab for safety. Others were warned to avoid expressing views altogether to protect institutional reputation.
Yet another was denied the right to lead among his own employees because, as a Muslim from the Arab region, his ability to clearly express opinions, make decisions and make decisions was considered ‘disrespectful’. One woman was refused employment because her calls for a “cease-fire and humanitarian aid” were deemed “too political.”
Western feminism often retreats from these truths. Yet Palestine is not just a political issue – it is a feminist issue. All struggles against oppression are interconnected. Justice cannot be selective, even if its application is frequent.
Feminism seeks to combat power, violence, and dehumanization, wherever they occur. Palestinian women live at the intersection of many forms of oppression – patriarchy, occupation, militarization – and resist them all.
Feminism that ignores this reality is not feminism. This is collusion.
As Teju Cole describes, this is the logic of the “white savior industrial complex”. This operates through what might be called gendered orientalism: women from the Southwest Asian and North African region are portrayed as victims of culture, religion, or men – but rarely of bombs, sanctions, or occupation. This framing preserves the West as liberator while erasing its role in creating violence.
In the United States, the language is different but the result is the same. Conservatives fear Islam; Liberals want to save us from this. Both deny our agency. Both of them stop our voices.
We are rarely represented as we are: organizers, scholars, community leaders, mothers, activists, feminists.
This silence should have a clear name. This is not neutrality. This is collusion.
The credibility of any feminist movement depends on whether it stands with all women – especially when doing so is politically inconvenient.
We have paid the price of this failure: in erasure, in ostracization, in losing friends, in being told that our grief is too complex and our politics too divisive.
What is done for solidarity is often conditional. It appears when it costs nothing and disappears when it demands accountability. Women from Southwest Asia and North Africa were welcomed when our oppression reinforced dominant narratives. When our liberation became necessary to confront Western power, we became uneasy.
Kimberly Crenshaw introduced intersectionality to describe how overlapping identities lead to mixed forms of discrimination. What we are seeing now is an intersectional crisis: women in those regions face discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and geopolitics simultaneously. The movement most capable of countering it has been largely silenced.
From decades of work in conflict situations, one truth is clear: women in Southwest Asia and North Africa do not need to be left alone to be ‘saved’.
We need to stop the violence.
We need coworkers to speak our name when things are tough. We need those marching for human rights to recognize that feminism that does not include Gaza, Beirut or Tehran is neither feminism nor human rights. This is branding – a convenient narrative that avoids confronting deeper structures of power.
Palestine has exposed a deep truth: these systems were never designed to serve everyone. They were built by and for those in power.
What is needed now is not reform at the margins, but accounting.
Solidarity demands accountability. If women’s rights are human rights, they should apply to all women without exception.
Lina Abirafeh – better4women – अज्जा करम And Henia Dakkak– Lead Integrity: House of Wisdom.
IPS UN Bureau
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