***Women of color wrote this statement, and we invite all allies in global development and humanitarian assistance to sign and share                       

Call to Action for Gender-Based Violence and Gender Inclusion Professionals: Solidarity with Palestinian Women, Girls, and LGBTQIA+ People

As women of color in and adjacent to global development’s gender-based violence (GBV) and gender sectors, we are inspired by the action and resistance of Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Indigenous, Islander, Black, Brown, and intersectional activists. We sign on to the Feminist Manifesto for Palestine and the Palestinian Feminist Collective statements. We support the Regional Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders in the Middle East and North Africa’s reclamation of the 16 Days of Activism Against GBV to reconnect with its roots in the struggle against all forms of oppression against women and girls. We reaffirm the call for a permanent and enduring ceasefire, condemn the unfolding genocide, and call for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine with the feminist peace coalitions Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun. We stand with the Call for Global Development Professionals to Collectively and Unapologetically Raise Our Voices for Ceasefire.

We recognize that since 1948, Palestinian women’s and girls’ bodies have become a battleground of colonization. In the current conflict, Palestine’s women and children are more than 70% of the death toll. Palestinian women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people are being arrested and detained with threats — and realities — of sexualized abuse, torture, and physical harm. Pregnant Palestinians are giving birth without access to clean water, food, medical supplies, health services, or anesthesia for Caesarean sections. Women and girls, in all their diversity, are at increased risk of sexual, physical, and verbal harassment, exploitation, sexualized violence, and the claws of patriarchy. Palestinian men’s and boys’ masculinity is being targeted, sexualized, and dehumanized.

As our sector knows too well, these are not disparate individual acts. These acts are deeply intertwined with social, cultural, economic, and political factors rooted in patriarchy and the abuse of power. For women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people, violence is systemic, constant, and designed to perpetuate inequality, oppression, and exclusion. These acts are weapons of war developed and refined over time. Sexualized violence and GBV are a strategy — a well-worn tactic in global colonial, imperial, and capitalist campaigns. We’ve seen it before. We are seeing it again in Palestine.  

Colonialism is a key driver of GBV. Globally, colonized countries are 50 times more likely to have a high prevalence of intimate partner violence against women, which cascades into intergenerational trauma and increased violence at community, family, and interpersonal levels. This global trend plays out as life and death for women and girls in Palestine. We recognize that the systemic forms of GBV waged against Palestinian bodies are inseparable from the broader context of settler-colonialism. In Palestine, socioeconomic disparities, cultural norms, power dynamics, and state-sanctioned violence — such as military occupation, apartheid, displacement, restrictions on movement, and the erosion of fundamental rights — underpin the prevalence and perpetuation of violence against women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people. For example, the United States and India have collaborated with Israel to design, test, import, and use surveillance technology, such as cameras and drones, to monitor and control the movements of Palestinians. Human rights organizations have cited Israel as a major exporter of cyber and civilian monitoring technologies, including NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware, to countries such as Colombia, India, and Mexico. 

It is no accident that attacks against activists and human rights defenders, including women, girls, and LGBTQIA+  people, in Palestine and around the world have risen in recent years. In Palestine, surveillance technology removes the right to privacy and restricts their freedom, making it difficult to access basic resources or safe spaces. Israel uses surveillance to intimidate, threaten, harass, imprison, and abuse Palestinian activists, journalists, development workers, and others by monitoring their communications, activities, and networks.

Furthermore, Israel continues to use “pinkwashing” — presenting itself as a progressive LGBTQIA+ haven — to distract from the systemic violence and discrimination it inflicts on Palestinian women and LGBTQIA+ people under its occupation and how militarized conflict exacerbates GBV. “Pinkwashing also perpetuates a biased narrative that falsely creates a progressive image of Israel with a racist portrayal of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim societies as backward, repressive, and intolerant. This recycles classic colonial logic that paints Western colonizers as saviors or liberators for peoples that are too 'uncivilized' to rule themselves” (USCPR).

Despite copious documentation of Israel’s continuing atrocities against women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people in Palestine — and despite persistent calls for decolonized feminism — Global Minority and Western feminist and organizational narratives continue to negate human rights and gender equality principles, with lethal consequences. We are witnessing NGOs/INGOs, and prominent people refuse to frame current events within the broader historical context of a predatory Israeli-colonial system of occupation, apartheid, and militarism against Palestinians, with the financial and political support of Western governments, principally the United States and the United Kingdom.

Also apparent are the non-responses or tepid press releases by global institutions and funders that allegedly work on gender equality or GBV. For fear of being labeled anti-semitic, these institutions have chosen to ignore the well-documented historical context that led to the violence on October 7th, to speak out against Zionism, or to advocate for Palestinians. This narrative reinforces a double standard in which Global Minority and Western feminist and women’s rights-focused organizations proactively or complicitly align their position with governments and policies that support Israel or maintain strategic partnerships. Their refusal to critique or condemn the Israeli occupation erodes the accountability due to Palestinian women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people.

This double standard, one that aligns development priorities with national security interests, has been carried out systematically over decades by the United States and the European Union with Israel, and it has hardened into a colonialist international policy that dehumanizes and silences Palestinians and other groups, purposefully increases Palestine’s international isolation and moves the “international community” into apathy and complicity. The result is a selective and warped focus on certain women's rights issues in particular regions while downplaying or entirely disregarding the lived experiences of women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people of the Global Majority.

We also observe how the Western media and self-identifying white feminists in power are only now decrying sexualized violence against Israelis to justify the policing, colonization, and genocide of Palestinians. This rhetoric doubles down on colonial “feminism.” We condemn all forms of GBV, including against Palestinians and Israelis. We see and denounce the tactic of using Israeli GBV survivors to distract from the violence caused by Israeli occupation and apartheid. Palestinian women and girls are fatally caught in the privileged discomfort of the Global Minority feminist sectors’ inability to take a stand on human rights and relinquish their power. We acknowledge that speaking up is complex and nuanced in an era of severe backlash and the closing of feminist space.

Yet, the resistance is global. We are witnessing unprecedented solidarity from those of the Global Majority, who are risking their safety, livelihoods, and lives to advocate for human rights and against colonial, imperial, and capitalist Western governments. We are witnessing Black, Brown, Indigenous, Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Islander, queer, disabled, immigrant, low-income, and over-policed communities around the world putting their jobs, families, and safety on the line to take a stand against the atrocities in Gaza. As far away as Fiji, there have been serious threats against the lives and properties of feminists and women’s human rights defenders holding the line of universal human rights. With or without Global Minority and Western organizations and funders, feminist activists of the Global Majority will continue to stand for the rights, freedom, and liberation of marginalized people. Privilege, discomfort, racism, and white fragility must be challenged. As a professionalized GBV and gender sector that claims to adhere to feminist values and seeks the structural transformation of oppressive structures and systems, we must do better.

Palestine is a microcosm of the colonial structures and systems that underpin international development and humanitarian assistance. The justification of militarization and violence in the name of defense and democracy, the war on women’s bodies, and many other issues prevalent in Palestine are a continuation of broader historical patterns of colonization, governance, and aid distribution in many crises and conflicts, including the Congo, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Yemen, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Tigray, West Papua, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Continued silence and complicity in the horrific Israeli attacks against Gaza and Palestinians reverse any prior gains toward a safer, freer, and more just world for women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people. It is imperative to actively decolonize — by dismantling unjust power structures, ensuring accountability, and embodying radical solidarity while building just, feminist futures for all. The practice of decolonizing the GBV and gender sector should be unsettling. Colonialism is an ongoing system, not a historical event. Decolonization, too, must be an ongoing practice — one that is inherently raw and challenging. It requires us all to question our conditioning and increase our capacity for plurality.

As we conclude yet another year of the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, we ask GBV and gender professionals, leaders, and others in the sector: How did we push governments, donors, our leadership, and global institutions to actively and unapologetically stand with Palestine’s women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people? How did we leverage this moment to connect the scale of violence experienced by Palestinian women and girls and the devastating conflicts affecting women and girls in Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, West Papua, Iran, and so many other places? How did we center and elevate the agency, vision, and brilliance of feminists of color? How did we push our institutions, leaders, and ourselves to accountably use money, influence, privilege, and power?

It’s time to do things differently. Check out the CALL TO ACTION for GBV and Gender Inclusion Professionals!​ 

For more information and to support each other in these efforts, we are sharing this toolkit with an invitation for collective dialogue and discussions.