Moms, please read and share with your daughters.
By Eve Barlow
I have struggled with something all week. Well that’s a lie. I knew the whole time I advocated alongside the global feminist movement this past decade that the day would come when I’d feel made to be an outcast by my commitment to fighting for Jewish survival and the rights of all women, including Jews. I did it anyway because I’m a feminist and I care about women’s right. I was compelled to do the right thing.
The demographic of person I have by-and-large muted, blocked or simply unfollowed from my feeds since the war between Israel and Hamas began are the woke millennial moms. Believe it or not, the woke millennial moms have become the biggest propaganda pushers for Hamas. There was a point last week when I thought perhaps the woke millennial moms might be the end of civilization. I mean, they do know that if Hamas/ISIS/Iran win this thing, then liberation in America looks like us all skipping our college educations and wearing hijabs, right? How the hell did this happen?
Turns out, as expected, my fellow feminists – authors, journalists, lawyers, professors, etc – are very invested in the rights of all women, except Jewish women. Let’s wind back to the BLM days: After the death of George Floyd, nobody demanded to see corroborated statistics of police killings of Black people in America. No they accepted it. At the height of the Weinstein scandal, nobody demanded to see rape kits or photographic evidence after more women came forward with stories of sexual assault. No they accepted it. But when it came to Jewish women in Southern Israel during the terrorist attacks by Hamas… “Well can it be proved?” they asked. The feminists of the world kept deathly silent in the aftermath of the pogrom on Israelis in Sderot and its surrounding Kibbutzim on October 7. They did not feel compelled to express outrage over the gang-raping and brutalizing murders of women, or the fact they were being dragged as trophies through the streets of Gaza, despite videos being shared all over the internet. No, they were all out at brunch. Bottomless mimosas and avocado toast.
Until approximately mid-morning Nespresso time on Tuesday when the anti-Israel PR machine was in earnest after retaliative attacks on Gaza. That’s when the feminists of the world decided to chime in, first by suggesting that the rapes didn’t happen. Or that they needed proof of the rapes. Despite the overwhelming amount of proof. Despite the fact that Hamas live-streamed the barbaric acts, including the parading of their female victims. Those who accepted the proof still had quibbles. They meandered towards an idea that the rapes were… justified? Violence against women was just a means to an end here, you see. Come again?
It seems that when it concerns Jewish women, all feminists (ok not all feminists) revert to misogyny. Zionism is a dirty word the way feminism once was. Anything that happens in Israel is the fault of the woman who happens to be inside Israel; the land is verboten for feminists, apparently. If Israel is a girl, she’s the girl who wore her skirt too short, went out into the dark night and asked for it.
The irony is that there’s not a single feminist in the world who should not be a Zionist. Zionism and feminism are true soul sisters. Not only is Israel the safest and most equal society in the Middle East in which to be a woman, Zionism’s ideology is deeply feminist in nature. As Dr Einat Wilf – badass feminist and Zionist intellectual – writes below, Zionism successfully turned displaced Jewish people of the Diaspora who were victims of a Holocaust into self-determined survivors in their own land.
That’s feminist as fuck. Like feminism, Zionism is a living, breathing movement that exists to challenge thousands of years of power structures that have been built to oppress minorities/second citizens. Who are the original minorities? What are the oldest forms of hate? Ever since Eve, there has been misogyny, and ever since Egypt there has been Jewish enslavement. And both feminism and Zionism emerged as ideologies to escape servitude and determine that how we Jews, how we women, arrive into this world is not necessarily how we have to leave it.
As deranged as the LGBTQ+ community’s insistence on supporting Hamas-controlled Palestine are the feminist free thinkers who are hellbent on bringing their sole focus to the civilian casualties on one side: Gaza. The lack of empathy towards any Israeli casualties is frightening. How can a feminist care about one woman or child’s life more than another just by random chance of which side of a border either were born upon? That doesn’t feel very righteous to me.
No. It feels rather more like indoctrination. It feels like feminists/woke millennial moms are the perfect bait for Hamas propaganda. First of all, they’re online all day, stressing about what to say on Instagram Stories. I see them, uploading posts, deleting them an hour later, then re-posting some other source, slightly differently. It gives: Am I getting it right yet? I see them writing these multi-page notes that they post or the little videos they upload (lips pouting), waiting for the plaudits from commenters:
“OMG Stacey, what you said is purrrfection! Slay bitch, you got this exactly right – so proud of you. You did it, gurl! Can you say peace in the Middle East?!”
These woke millennial moms are desperate to make themselves the main character in a millennia-old conflict thousands of miles away. A conflict, by the way, that is not keeping them awake at night the way it is us. It’s all about the woke millennial moms, didn’t you know?
So yes: the woke millennial moms are prime advocates for the job of Hamas shills. Online, bored, ready to post for the likes endorphins.
But the second piece is more twisted. These so-called feminist “girl boss” types are truly Hamas autobots who have fallen victim to a predatory narrative, invented by perpetrators of violence and oppression (just ask the people of Gaza about that). And they’ve fallen prey because they’re women. They’re in a cage with the door open. They have ideological Stockholm Syndrome. They think a Free Palestine will liberate them from… what exactly? Unreasonable beauty standards? Midlife anorexia? An overwhelming number of dating apps? Oh – a Free Palestine will liberate them from that alright! Try doing all of that while head to toe in a black maxi with a niqāb over your entire face.
The propaganda tactics employed by the Iranian terror regime are straight out of a classic misogyny handbook. Hamas have more in common with Andrew Tate than any progressive philosopher (probably why Andrew Tate, alongside ISIS, Al Qaeda and the IRA, loves Hamas). Think of Hamas like an abusive man with narcissistic personality disorder, whose expert skills include coercive control, blame-shifting and reversing of victim and offender.
Read this tweet, as an example, and I’m gonna do an edited version of it beneath re-framing Israel as a woman and Hamas as a male predator:
SHE is held to the highest standard of scrutiny in her global communications and reporting, while HE is able to spread baseless lies round the clock. No matter how effective HER PR efforts may be, the world’s bias leads it to embrace HIS lies instead of meticulously documented truths.
Are you all online yet?!
Remember how there’s no such thing as a perfect victim? Well then why does Israel have to be one? Is she not allowed to defend herself? She was just attacked by a terrorist regime after all.
See, it seems that Israel has been forgotten by the world’s feminists. And as a result, every woman who sets her heels inside Israel is also forgotten. Instead of having the support of the global women’s movement, we Zionists are instead gas-lit by other feminists who are aghast that we actually managed to escape our gendered dhimmitude. We achieved what so many didn’t. Self-actualization in our indigenous homeland.
Proud and celebrated feminists have spent the past week mocking Jewish people online. Our concerns are overblown, in our heads. We are attempting to victimize ourselves. We’re hysterical, right? We’re kerrrazy. And you know what the world does to crazy-ass bitches… Bring the stakes!
Feminists of the world, listen carefully: Gaza had eighteen years without Israeli presence. The Jewish people were driven out of Gaza in 2005. In those eighteen years, Gaza has failed to create an equal society for women. That has nothing to do with Israel. Gaza had eighteen years to allow all of its women to pursue higher education. The sky-high unemployment rates for women in Gaza don’t demonstrate a particularly girlboss-adjacent terrain. But did the feminists of the world ever voice concern about that? Are they doing it now? They’ve forgotten the basis for their identities to be pawns for Hamas terrorists.
My dear friend Dr Charlotte Proudman, a non-Jewish feminist barrister in the UK who has had her own experiences of trolling for the past decade, has relentlessly and courageously posted about the atrocities committed by Hamas, without any apology this past week. Like the rest of us who have risked our livelihoods to tell the truth about Israel/Palestine for years, Charlotte has been met with screeds of threats and insults by the usual brigade of woke sheep calling into question the very essence of her feminism. The hypocrisy of it all.
Please follow Charlotte and support her wonderful work.
The hard pill for these antizionist feminists to swallow is that Jewish women have fundamentally built feminism. We are the OG liberals, and they’re mad.
Golda Meir. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Andrea Dworkin. Gertrude Stein. Naomi Klein. Adrienne Rich. Kathy Acker. Emma Lazarus. Susan Sontag. Gloria Steinem. Peaches. Einat Wilf. To name a few.
And lest we forget our Matriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.
Eve Barlow is a journalist. You can support her work and subscribe to her substack http://www.evebarlow.substack.com