By Trimita Chakma
On 3 November a heavy and sombre spirit filled the virtual space as South Feminist Futures gathered feminist activists from around the Global South for a “South Feminist Solidarity Assembly for Palestine”. As Nigerian feminist scholar and moderator Amina Mama stated in her opening remarks, “The Palestinian struggle is our struggle, a struggle against racism, imperialism and settler colonial apartheid.” Over 140 feminist activists came together to mourn the thousands lost in the ongoing Nakba and find ways to support Palestinian liberation.
Palestinian filmmaker Samaher Alqadi shared a raw and emotional testimony about her lifelong experience of occupation. “My mother was shot in her face in front of me. My father, my brothers were tortured and beaten and arrested all the time,” she recounted. Samaher went on to describe the horrific reality for Palestinians under Israeli attack: “We are being massacred under the eyes and the noses and the cameras of the whole world.” She made an impassioned plea, saying “I beg you I beg you all to stop distracting yourself. This is a cycle. We have been there. We have been used and consumed for decades against other ancient countries that had been destroyed like Iraq under the name of fighting terrorism.”
Mena Souilem, a feminist from Western Sahara, gave a scathing critique of the lack of solidarity from global feminist movements. “What happened in Gaza now highlighted the fear of being associated with political movements of feminists, who have a strict political line of what it means to seek liberation,” she implored. “I don’t think right now, in this age, and in this specific time, we have the luxury of saying we cannot be too political,” she added.
Speakers urgently stressed the need for concrete actions to support Palestinian liberation, including economic boycotts, lobbying governments, protesting, and countering propaganda. Rama Salla Dieng, a feminist academic from Senegal, called for building transnational feminist solidarity, proclaiming that “The liberation is a common project and we should do everything for self-determination.” She drew attention to the glaring double standard applied to Palestinian lives, stating plainly, “If we only had five people who had been killed, from France, from the United States or from Germany, I do not think that people would have stayed silent.”
Echoing this call for unequivocal solidarity, Brazilian feminist researcher Mona Perlingeiro, declared, “We cannot normalise the dying of so many people and kids and women, a lot of families are losing their lives. So we cannot be silent, we cannot be afraid of speaking up.”
Strategic communication was also emphasised by Melisa Trad, an Argentinean feminist journalist, who advised, “So we need to speak about it strategically, and we have to speak up for Palestinian women and people and they are the ones who will put adjectives to the situations they are experiencing.”
During the open discussion, feminists from Jamaica, Kenya, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, and across the Global South shared perspectives connecting the Palestinian struggle to their own experiences under colonialism and occupation. They proposed various strategies, including joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, pressuring their governments to sever ties with Apartheid Israel, teaching, sharing Palestinian voices, and joining existing social justice movements.
In her closing remarks, moderator Amina Mama emphasised that decolonisation is the feminist issue, stating that none of us are free until Palestine is liberated from colonialism.
This was an inspiring space of communal grieving, truth-telling, feminist memory work, and solidarity. The struggle for Palestinian freedom is interconnected with all global struggles for justice. There can be no liberation for any of us until military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid end in Palestine. The assembly for Palestine demonstrated the power of feminists across borders banding together with radical love to uphold one another’s dignity and humanity. As long as racist, colonial and imperial oppression persists, our work will continue.