Why are so many GC women pro-Israel?

"The inequality in women's rights in...... Israel is due entirely to Hamas and Gazans" 🤔

If you read what I said properly you'd see that I don't defend Hamas.

I’m going to have to go back to the beginning and read again more carefully, but thank you to all the women pushing back against purity spiralling and blanket condemnation of whatever we’re supposed to condemn.

As for the opening post, I’m a Christian. I didn’t realise that meant I couldn’t be a feminist. I must tell my colleagues working to dismantle remnants of patriarchy in the church. That patriarchy wasn’t baked in by the religion, but by the culture the religion existed in. Acts and the gospels are radical statements of equality. Inevitably the development of the institution in a sexist world leaders to sexism. That’s the church, not the faith. And like every other institution it takes a while to reform.

Writing off swathes of people for having the wrong beliefs is not very progressive.
Accusing women of racism for not buying the party line about the mess in Israel and Gaza.

We have seen how unreliable and one sided the press can be. We aren’t prepared to take our opinions on faith anymore, or trust views spoonfed by the newspapers. No thanks.

Am I "pro-Israel" if I think the current ongoing actions of the Israeli government are horrific, and the Palestinians should have independence, but also a state of Israel should continue to exist and many leading Palestinians are also terrible people?

A big chunk of the popular left (the same is true of the popular right) does not like nuance, or independence. It thinks the world is made up of goodies and baddies. You agree with it as to who the goodies and baddies are, or you are yourself a baddie - unless you are a goodie anyway by virtue of your extremely oppressed status. These extremely oppressed goodies, it has been decided, include trans people and the Palestinians. The fact that some trans people, and some Palestians, might be murderous rapists, can be safely ignored.

GC people on the other hand are capable of nuanced, independent thinking. They don't decide who is good or bad on the basis of whatever list is being passed around: so they haven't fallen into the "trans people are angels" trap. But this way of thinking might lead to some dangerous views like "maybe we shouldn't imply that indiscriminately killing Jewish people is OK, actually". And those kind of views cannot be accepted by the inflexible left.

There is also ethnic cleansing in the West Bank that is not even controlled by Hamas

You should write a play about that 😉

Its not annihilation though is it? We both hear people condemning Israel for telling civilians to move to avoid being killed in oncoming military action, and we hear people condemning Israel for civilians that are killed in military strikes. This means the only option that these critics will leave open for Israel is not defending itself and its citizens. And that is shameful. To think Israel, unique amongst countries of the world should not defend itself from attackers, is shameful.

And the condemnation you never hear from these critics of Israel is of Hamas for not shielding its citizens in the tunnels it has built all under Gaza for its fighters, but not for its own civilians. Its astonishing and shameful that Hamas is not being condemned by those who think they are pro-Palestinian. Where are the placards on the marches condemning Hamas for that? Where are the placards on the pro-Palestinian marches demanding Hamas hand back the hostages?

It is shameful to compare how Israel has conducted its military campaign to the way Hamas has. Hamas is not only trying to murder Israelis, but it regards the death of its own civilians, due to the conflict it caused, as a propaganda boon.

As for the imbalance in life, do you never consider where much of that imbalance comes from? Israel left Gaza in 2005. Hamas has since used the billions it got in aid to enrich itself, arm itself, build a huge tunnel network only for itself, and to prepare to start a war by massacring and torturing Jews on October 7th. It has not used those billions to build up Gaza into a successful, peaceful country that proves it can live prosperously alongside Israel in a genuinely two state solution. Instead, it used the aid to prove that cannot happen.

And the inequality in women's rights in Gaza and Israel is due entirely to Hamas and Gazans. And the inequality in LGBT rights is due entirely to Hamas and Palestinians. And the inequality in democracy is due entirely to Hamas.

I think that women on all sides who want peace should have solidarity and act to stop wars by holding a sex strike and refusing to have more children to be used as cannon fodder. But then we see as feminists who actually have the right todo this and who doesn’t have control of their reproductive rights. Says a lot really .

Indeed. That's real intersectional feminism from Grammarnut. It's so very very difficult sometimes 😫

Why has this not been moved to the Conflict in the Middle East forum yet, I wonder? Usually MNHQ is so quick to move anything about sex and gender here.

To not realise that you sound one sided shows a lot.
Netanyahu may not be recognised as a terrorist group but his annihilation of ordinary people and children in response to the awful atrocities perpetrated by Hamas are as bad. The footage you saw didn't show every single palestinian supporting Hamas, just as not every single Irish Catholic supported the IRA or every single Protestant supported the UVF or the UDA.
There is no excuse for the actions of Hamas but have you ever looked in to the unbalanced life Palestinians live in in the occupied territories?

I support the twats too, they need help.

@busybusybusy2015

An anti-Hamas demonstration in Palestine is entirely unimaginable

There was such a thing a few months ago. This is the sort of fate that befell these protestors. Oday Nasser Al Rabay was the name of one of the protestors. A 22 year old man. He was abducted off the streets by Hamas, tortured and beaten, stripped and dragged through the streets by a rope around his neck and dumped with his family who were told that this is the fate of everyone who defies Hamas. He died shortly afterwards in hospital.

Do you know what the Israeli government has been doing to the protestors in Israel against them? Nothing.

I just wanted to pop up and say any GC "pro-Israel" (whatever that means) women are of course welcome in this forum.

I'm not going to tell a woman who could have been a rape victim of Hamas, or know someone who was, that she's wrong to support Israel.

Not gonna. If you are OP, take a really close look in the mirror.

Yep. Approved list of causes. Why aren't we in the streets advocating for the dying children of the Sudan? MiLLIONS of them. Nobody cares. Absolutely nobody. Probably because they're African and therefore expected by our prejudices to starve to death. Probably because there's so little news footage and we only react to images. Estimates of numbers starving herein https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/where/africa/sudan_en#:~:text=Despite%20these%20critical%20needs%2C%20humanitarian,Sudan%20via%20multi%2Dmodal%20transport.
You may not want to read it. You may not want to chase down further information about raped women and dead children. Why do we behave as if Palestine is the worst conflict, the most important conflict? Would you be shocked if I simply.ignored it completely, and talked only about the refugees of the Western Sahara? (I'd bet my house that most people have never even heard of these lost people, living out their lives in camps, exiled from their homeland by an invader. Which, as it happened, wasn't Israel. But noone gives a toss about that landgrab, do they?) Hamas is wicked, Netanyahu is wicked, and around 500,000 Israelis went into the streets this week to say so. That's 5% of the entire population. A demonstration of an equivalent % in the UK is near-unimagjnable and would certainly bring down a government. An anti-Hamas demonstration in Palestine is entirely unimaginable. I am consumed with anger at governments, Hamas, the uninformed public, and The Omnicause.

This 👆 👆 👆

It's threads like this that make me a sporadic visitor to MN.

No evidence offered for a premise that is far from being a generally acknowledged fact.

A highly complex conflict, with a long history, on which most MNers are insufficiently informed to comment with any authority, is reduced to a binary: pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, no nuance permitted.

The violent, murderous conflict between Israel and Palestine is being perpetuated by men, and it is overwhelmingly women and children who suffer the consequences. I'm on the side of the latter. Choosing between two teams of male-driven aggressors is nonsensical.

I think it's unfair to suggest OP is deliberately throwing accusations around or being inflammatory. Some people may not have seen any evidence of this but many of us have, and I welcome it being brought up. It's a valid question, even if your answer is that you don't agree for this that or the other reasons.

If nothing else, I think it is good to be aware of and guard against omnicause-like thinking – I think we all should ideally, but just for myself I appreciate threads that reflect on it. That doesn't mean that if you do support either Israel or Palestine, you're doing so in an unthinking, omnicause-type way. As PPs show, many people have thought it through and have a considered opinion. But I have wondered if some GC people are "omnicausing" a bit. It's OK to ask the question and discuss it.

This. Have seen absolutely zero sign of what you 'describe'.

I haven’t seen that connection at all, though I should qualify that by adding that in RL there are very few people both feminist and not who I know who are positive in any way about Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians. The vast majority of pro Netanyahu’s Israel are on line and I think mostly not from the uk. Those that are from the UK I would imagine have Israeli family etc.

In my youth in the 80s it was like this (as no one had heard of gender identity or transactivism, and trans people were rare, almost exclusively male and not portrayed as the most oppressed marginalised victims evah) - Palestine supporters were likely to also be women's rights supporters - think brown-rice-eating, CND-marching, section 28-protesting types who also went on worthy exchange trips to East Germany and praised the feminist credentials of Chairman Mao. (Many were also Militant tendency)

I grew up in this milieu and these people also supported women's rights, genuinely so, despite the actual deep misogyny inherent in lefty structures. It was from women in this movement that I learned about people like Greer and Dworkin, borrowed Spare Rib, was exposed to ideas about pornography and prostitution that still inform my thinking now.

One of the most stunning coups transactivism has pulled off is turn women against women's rights by convincing them that tW are the saddest, most persecuted women of them all – thereby giving males back the control. Now, you can have "women's rights" and yell "smash the patriarchy" but conveniently they are not actually women's rights as they include women's oppressors - and furthermore any women who isn't on board with that can be righteously witch-hunted.

But ask a TRA or well-meaning ally and they will insist they care about women's rights. They just don't mean women, they mean "women".

OP, it is really noticeable that you are looking for any reason why a GC woman would be pro-Israel other than we perhaps have some valid points. You have only responded to people shoring up you view that we must be motivated by something other than sound reasons and arguments leading us to be pro-Israel's right to exist. Its possible to disagree with someone but still think they have valid arguments. But you don't seem to believe this.

Instead you ask a question but show no interest in engagement with anyone posting anything that does not concur with your pre-held view.

You have demonstrated a complete lack of curiousity for alternative viewpoints and I cannot respect that. Don't ask questions if you have not genuine interest in the answers. That's just a form of intellectual dishonesty.

Excellent post.

Queers for Palestine sums it up, they seem oblivious that Hamas throw them off of buildings.

Someone blamed Palestine's homophobia on Israel (the country that has Pride) and if Israel didn't treat Palestine so badly there would be no homophobia. 🙄

Only israel is expected to tolerate this, and only israel are never allowed to win.

Only israel is never allowed to defend their people.