Why are so many GC women pro-Israel?

[Krakinou]

This is a feminist forum. It’s in the name. I’m a feminist, therefore logically atheist and frankly anti-religion. Certainly against any kind of religious nationalism (Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, etc.)

But surely feminism is about liberation for all women, not just the ones we agree with? The destruction of patriarchal structures, not of women and children who are conditioned by them?

I constantly see snarky comments in GC articles about Gaza and dehumanizing comments about Palestinians and Muslims generally on this board. And minimizing of the suffering of the tens of thousands of people being murdered in an internationally recognized genocide. I don’t get it. It seems out of sync with the general mumsnet feeling too - I get the impression most people on mumsnet are pretty horrified by Israel’s actions.

Does anyone else get the same impression? If so, what is the connection between being Gender Critical and being anti-Palestine? Is it just that the leftist terfs aren’t so represented here?

I’m in a feminist group in Spain and it doesn’t have the same issue at all.

OP, isn’t there already a pile of Isreal/Palestine threads on a dedicated forum on this site to discuss colonialism, terrorism, etc? I can see you’ve happily gone looking for someone to engage here on it.

This is a forum for women across the political spectrum to wonder at how the hell we ended up with all our institutions insisting that men can be women if they say they are, and the impacts this magical thinking has on the rights women have had to fight for. Trying to start a fight club over Isreal/Gaza here will likely just get this thread moved.

But I’m pretty sure Palestinian women have been getting raped and tortured (and killed, and their infant children killed) for years. It’s just that they are treated by the western media as lesser, so it’s not been widely reported on.

I’ve been wondering the same thing as @Krakinou . Especially on X, very many of the GC / terf accounts have Israeli flags.

Both are complex issues, it’s not really helpful if one is associated with the other.

Do you think it is somehow impossible to be appalled by both?
And “parrot genocide”? What an awful thing to say.

So you obviously have some examples to share, because without them how can anyone comment?

Hey ladies.

We are going to give you a 'sex and gender' board where you have to keep all your 'sex and gender discussions' and carefully monitor you and your words and don't say anything that might upset anyone's applecart.

Then:

Why are all GC women silent on a topic that is nothing to do with sex and gender? You must all be right wing bigots.

Sigh.

Using the word colonialism rather suggests you're completely ignorant of the history of the area and should be doing a lot more research before you speak on the subject.

This is a great post. For most of us we don’t have a connection to this conflict and it’s a very complicated, historical situation which most people don’t truly understand, and I think is why some hesitate to comment. Anyone with an ounce of humanity can see that there is horror and suffering involved, especially for women and children, which no one would condone.

I had a very interesting conversation with a Palestinian young woman I met recently, and she said one of the things that upsets her the most is people in the public eye spouting their views on this issue, on either side, when it’s clear they really don’t understand the nuance, and are just whipping up more hatred. There’s a lot of bullying behaviour these days where it’s demanded of people that they pick a side on absolutely every issue, otherwise you are seen as a terrible person who isn’t bothered about suffering. The little prick Owen Jones harasses JKR on a regular basis about this issue, ‘why don’t you condemn x,y, z, why are you so hateful, you don’t care about ALL women’ etc. etc. We don’t all have to have a vocal opinion on everything, it doesn’t mean people don’t care if they stay silent.

I’m neither right wing nor racist, and am GC and pro-Israel. In my view, there is no contradiction between the latter two. I believe in self-determination for biological women, and for the Jewish people to have a homeland in the place that’s central to our religion and culture. The violence of the TRA movement is akin to that of the pro-Pal/pro-Hamas movement.

I understand the hostile reaction because there are a tedious amount of posts desperately trying to suggest that being critical of gender is akin to racism, despite the stupidly illogical nature of that argument.

And yes, feminism has been forced into a corner on this board and many posters name change for other topics.

But I have encountered what OP speaks of in real life. I think that there is a similarity between people protesting Israel's treatment of Palestinians being wrongly smeared as pro Hamas, and women protesting for their rights being wrongly smeared as anti LGBTQ. Horrificly biased reporting on Israel in the right wing press and feminism in the left wing press really doesn't help.

It also doesn't help that the aggressive macho protest TRAs appropriate every other cause for their agenda as PP mentioned. It puts me off attending various protests and marches.

I've noticed that GC accounts on Twitter are a bit more likely to be sympathetic to Israel. TRAs tend to be almost entirely anti Israel. So I've seen the same correlation the OP has although it certainly doesn't mean GC=Pro Israel (and I don't know that's what the OP was saying).

As to why that correlation exists, I think it's that GCs have learned that you can't rely on organizations like Amnesty International and unfortunately the BBC often misrepresents things. If you're GC you're most likely clued into the fact that rights aren't actually a pie and sometimes ethical problems have no feel-good answer.

The OP and one or two others seem to think being pro-Israel is racist or means you like oppression. Israel is by no means perfect and there is a dangerous right-wing component. But it grants equal rights to people of all religions and none, women and gay people. There are Muslims and Arab Christians in the Knesset. Many of the people brutally murdered on 7th October were leftwing and deeply sympathetic to Gazans, like Vivian Silver who regularly drove Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. Hamas invaded on 7th October using information from Palestinians who worked with the people who were to be murdered.

Someone in the thread said Israelis demonstrate against their government but Gazans can't. Tragically, they have. A few times. There were demonstrations in Gaza against Hamas before 7th October. Gazans took their lives in their hands and held signs that said "We want to live". They were protesting Hamas' oppression of Gazans and the fact that is extremely difficult to get a decent job if you are not a member of Hamas. Nobody seemed to care, it was barely reported and was ignored by Al Jazeera.
One protestor was Hamza Howidy who was imprisoned twice by Hamas before being smuggled out of the country. He's given interviews about what it's like living under Hamas. The one with Jasmine Mohammed on YouTube is quite good.

Regarding the idea that Israel is colonial, Israel exists because Jewish people had nowhere else to go. In the early years of the movement for European Jews to settle there, most Jews weren't interested. It was after sustained pogroms across Europe, and after America closed its doors to Jews in I think 1908, that in desperation European Jews ended up there. Many Israelis aren't of European descent at all, they are Jewish people expelled from Arab countries. There are barely any Jews living in any Arab countries, because they can't. The recent attacks on Jews in America and Europe has only convinced some Jewish people of the need for Israel.

I care about Palestinians, and I don't see how they can ever have a chance if Hamas continues to exist. I care about Israelis and I think Israel has a right to exist. The death toll and suffering of this war is immense. I wish Israel had better leaders. All of these things can be true at the same time.

I'm not pro-Israel, I'm anti-Hamas.

I'm pro-Palestinian and always have been.

That doesn't mean I'm totally unsympathetic to the Israelis. I understand why Israel was founded. I can see that october 7th was a horrific attack.

But the way Israel has behaved, including long before october 7th, is awful.

Don’t conflate two entirely different issues op. GC does not = racist. Obviously. Don’t talk shite there’s enough of it about!

What Hamas did to the Israeli people they caught on October 7 was disgusting and appalling. What the Israeli government is doing now to the Gazans is also disgusting and appalling. These views are unconnected to my GC views thank you. B@&ger off with your “all GC people think like this” crap.

Probably down to GC feminists not being the type to falsify preferences.

To be publicly GC, you've already had to push back against prevailing social pressure. You've already met the challenge of voicing a view that puts your social capital at risk.

One suspects lots of people actually silently understand Israel's response to an act of terrorism. i.e. The assumed general population support for Palestine isn't as high as one might estimate at first glance.

This isn't to say that all GC feminists support Israel's response. It's to say that's why you might observe higher relative rates of open Israel support amongst the cohort.

It's not about colonialism or religion, it's about the need, for the safety of all Jews, for Israel to be both democratic and majority Jewish. It's not an ideal situation to have ended up in, but it is what it is.

Wishing for a single multiethnic state is wishing for the death of the Jews.

Criticising Israel's actions is not antisemitism, but it isn't anti-Zionism either. The many Israeli Jews who are against the relentless squeeze that the Palestinians have been subjected to since 1967 would be appalled to be described as anti-Zionists.

Jews and women don't have a common cause, but they do have some common enemies, including the sort of self-regarding nitwit who always supports the underdog, but is utterly callous as to the POV, or even basic safety, of the people (Zionists, TERFs) that he has cast in his own mind as the all-powerful bullies.

As a woman, I know that I would prefer to live in Israel rather than Palestine.

I know that wars are bad (Gross oversimplification), but that 'just stop fighting' isn't an answer, and that for nearly a century, they've been trying to find one without much success.

I also know that murdering young people at a music festival, slaughtering and kidnapping families to start a war, then continuing to refuse to return the hostages to end it requires a response that is more than words.

I also know that there's been a continuous propaganda war around Palestine, even before this (describing fully fledged cities as 'camps'), and now with the sheer number of lies (both blatant, and carefully worded half-truths), AI pictures etc. that as a result I can't trust anything anyone says about it. So I fall back to the fact that Hamas committed an atrocity and continues to hold hostages at the expense of their own population.

I'm GC and strongly pro-Palestine.

I think it is false to claim that GC women are more likely to be pro-Israel.

What I do see on Mumsnet quite often is women who are both GC and pro-Israel attempting to denigrate pro-Palestinian voices by referencing something called the 'Omnicause' -- claiming (on zero evidence) that leftists who speak out against Israeli aggression are also rabid TRAs, etc.

It is just one of the many ways in which pro-Israeli voices attempt to problematise support for people who are being subjected to the most appalling aggression in Gaza.

I've always just silently tutted and moved on when I see this garbage about the omnicause. But this thread has brought home to me how it can be exploited by TRAs to tarnish GC voices.

There are loads and loads of pro-Palestinian GC women. I hope that as many as possible of them shout about it on this thread.

Jews and women find themselves in the bizarre position of being told they are aggressors when all they have tried to do is protect themselves from a very vocal existential threat coming from the people who have traditionally aggressed THEM over millennia.

Jews and GC women are natural allies in having been forced to fight hard for their position in the world.

Right wing views
daily mail

There's no real logic behind force-teaming Palestine with the left. That's omnicause polics, not rational analysis. Palestine, after all, is not a country with a left-wing ethos even though there's always been an undercurrent of the worst Left ising it as an excuse for their racist antisemitism.

There's also a sense of cosseting as though Palestine is totally innocent and without agency and just suffering from whatever Israel does to it - the current war was started not only with Palestine's unspeakable terrorist attack but also with what Palestine claims was 5000 missiles fired on Israel. The Israeli death toll from the tens of thousands of missiles Palestine has fired since they started the war would be extremely high, except Israel has invested in a highly effective defence system for its people.

I do think there’s an element of forced teaming. I also think people are really fucked off. Being kind doesn’t seem t get you anywhere. I believe that men who grow up in mysoginistic environments are more likely to abuse women. I don’t think it’s necessarily to do with race or religion. It’s impossible to say in a way that doesn’t sound really racist though!

Certainly in my own pasty white, Christian or communist ( there was a fair bit of communism in the 1930’s in industrial areas of Scotland) family there was a strong line in wife/ child beating 60 years plus ago. I’m not saying all men did this but it was a common way to deal with problems. Misbehave in school and you’d get the belt / caning then you’d go home and get the belt again. No tea on the table when you get home, football team lost, smack your wife, or rape her as consent was assumed legally speaking.

Our society has changed for the better, however it’s slow going and there is lots of backsliding. I used to be more tolerant as I assumed there was a relentless push towards, equality and fairness and essentially we’d all become Scandinavian over the years. I don’t think that’s the case anymore, democracy is on the decline, people are quite happy to chuck women’s rights under a bus. Polite and middle ground discussion just gets shouted down and condemned so people either shut up or it becomes more vitriolic and divisive.

I genuinely miss the days where you could disagree with someone and have a bit of reasoned debate in the pub and still be friends. Agree to disagree about x or y but in agreement about many other issues. Society seems much more polarised than it used to be before the rise of the internet reduced capacity for critical analysis.

Isn't tribalism part of thr problem and the reason we got into this mess in the first place.

Beliefs shouldn't come as a ''set'.

Let's say my favourite breakfast is avocado and eggs, that doesn't mean I have to also love salmon and salad for lunch and lentils for dinner.

I can love eggs and avocado for breakfast, whilst having a sausage sandwich for lunch and nachos for dinner.

I noticed this more at the beginning of the conflict, when there were a lot of hard leftists who thought it was absolutely fine for Hamas to rape, kill and imprison thousands of people. There does seem to be a significant crossover between these leftists and the worst TRAs. So I absolutely understand why GC women were primed to notice these people's horrible prejudice and provide some balance. I wonder if the TRAs' desire to destroy women's sex-based rights and the very concept of woman has also made GC women understand and be horrified by the Western Hamas supporters' desire to obliterate Israel and Israelis.

I've noticed it much less recently as the Israeli government has become ever more crazed and brutal; very few GC women are in favour of indiscriminately killing and starving civilians.

I'm so sick of the narrative of one of the most most complex geo-political issues to exist being turned into a football match. Are you pro-Israel? Pro-Palestine? Pick a team, pick a side!

Don't try to see nuance, and definitely don't say you'd need to understand more to form an opinion! Watch this 20 second video on TikTok, read this single post on Twitter and then choose your team, wear the shirt, pick your flag.

Politics as a form of tribalism to fit in with your dinner set. How utterly fucking depressing.