Every March 8, the world is flooded with glossy campaigns urging us to “accelerate action” and “inspire inclusion”. International Women’s Day has become a polished, PR-friendly spectacle where corporate sponsors preach empowerment while the women most in need of solidarity are left to fend for themselves.
I can only hope that this year’s call to “accelerate action” means action for all women – not just those who fit neatly into corporate feminism, media-friendly activism, and elite success stories.
But if history is any guide, the only action that will be accelerated is the branding of feminism as a marketable commodity, while the women enduring war, occupation, and systemic violence face erasure.
Year after year, International Women’s Day is paraded as a global moment of solidarity, yet its priorities are carefully curated. The feminist establishment rallies behind causes that are palatable, media-friendly, and politically convenient- where women’s struggles can be framed as individual success stories, not systemic injustices.
When Iranian women burned their hijabs in protest, they were met with widespread Western support. When Ukrainian women took up arms, they were hailed as symbols of resilience. But when Palestinian women dig through rubble to pull their children’s bodies from the ruins of their homes, they are met with silence or, worse, suspicion. The same feminist institutions that mobilise against “violence against women” struggle to even utter the words “Gaza” or “genocide”.
In the UK, in the run-up to this year’s International Women’s Day, an MP and feminist organisations have hosted an event on “Giving a Voice to Silenced Women in Afghanistan”, featuring feminists who had spent months calling for boycotts of the Afghan cricket team. Because, of course, that’s how you take on the Taliban – by making sure they can’t play a game of cricket.
This is what passes for international solidarity: Symbolic gestures that do nothing for the women suffering under oppressive regimes but make Western politicians feel morally superior.
Let me be clear: Afghan women deserve every ounce of solidarity and support. Their struggle against an oppressive regime is real, urgent, and devastating – and yes, what they are enduring is gender apartheid.
But acknowledging their suffering does not excuse the rank hypocrisy of those who wield feminism as a political tool, showing up for Afghan women while staying silent on the Palestinian women being starved, bombed, and brutalised before our eyes.
The Taliban’s rise was not some act of nature – it was a direct product of UK and US intervention. After 20 years of occupation, after handing Afghan women back to the very men the West once armed and enabled, these same voices now weep over their fate.
Where were these women MPs, prominent feminists, and mainstream feminist organisations when pregnant Palestinian women were giving birth in the streets of Gaza because hospitals had been bombed? Where was the outcry when Israeli snipers targeted women journalists, like Shireen Abu Akleh? Where were the boycotts when Palestinian girls were pulled from the rubble of their homes, killed by US-made bombs?
Time and time again, we see the same pattern: Feminist outrage is conditional, activism is selective, and solidarity is reserved for those whose struggles do not challenge Western power. Afghan women deserve support. But so do Palestinian women, Sudanese women, Yemeni women. Instead, their suffering is met with silence, suspicion, or outright erasure.
International Women’s Day, once a radical call for equality, has become a hollow spectacle – one where feminist organisations and politicians pick and choose which women deserve justice and which women can be sacrificed at the altar of Western interests.
Feminism has long been wielded by the powerful as a tool to justify empire, war, and occupation – all under the pretence of “saving women”. During the Algerian War of Independence, the French launched a campaign to “liberate” Algerian women from the veil, parading unveiled women in propaganda ceremonies while simultaneously brutalising and raping them in detention centres.
The French, of course, were never concerned about gender equality in Algeria; they readily restricted education and employment for Algerian women. Their actions under the guise of helping women were about domination.
This same narrative of the helpless brown woman in need of white saviours has been used to justify even more recent Western military interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Today, we see the same playbook in Palestine, as well.
The West frames Palestinian women as victims – but not of bombs, displacement, or starvation. No, the real problem, we are told, is Palestinian men. Israeli officials and their Western allies rehash the same Orientalist trope: Palestinian women must be saved from their own culture, from their own people, while their actual suffering under occupation is ignored or dismissed.
The systematic slaughter of women and children is treated as an unfortunate footnote to the conflict, rather than its central atrocity. We see the same pattern again and again – concern for women’s rights only when it serves a political agenda, silence when those rights are crushed under the weight of Western-backed airstrikes and military occupation. This is not solidarity. It is complicity wrapped in feminist rhetoric.
So, who will actually benefit from International Women’s Day this year? Will it be the women whose oppression fits neatly into Western feminist narratives, allowing politicians, feminist organisations, and mainstream women’s advocacy groups to bask in their self-congratulatory glow? Or will it be the women who have been silenced, erased, and dehumanised – those for whom “accelerate action” has meant 17 months of genocide and 76 years of settler colonial violence?
Is this just another “feel-good” exercise, where you can claim to support women across the world without confronting the fact that your feminism has limits? Because if this is truly about accelerating action, then after 17 months of bombing, starvation, and displacement, we should finally hear you stand for Palestinian women.
But we know how this goes. The speeches will be made, the hashtags will trend, the panel discussions will be held – but the women of Gaza will remain buried under the rubble, their suffering too politically inconvenient to mention.
As for me, I am joining the feminist movement’s march today – but let’s be clear, our agendas are not the same. I will march for every Palestinian woman who not only struggles to be heard but has been so brutally dehumanised that her suffering amid a genocide is being broadcast live to blind eyes and deaf ears.
I – along with countless other women who refuse to stay silent – will think of each mother cradling the lifeless body of her child, each daughter forced to become a caretaker overnight, each sister searching through the rubble with her bare hands. And we – women who believe in real feminist solidarity and reject selective outrage – will not just “hope” that this call to action means something; we will make sure it does.
We will make sure Palestinian voices are heard. We will make sure to boycott those who profit from Palestinian oppression. We will make sure to challenge every platform and every feminist who normalises Palestinian suffering, holding them accountable for their complicity.
To our Palestinian sisters: We feel your pain. We have carried your struggle in our hearts for the last 17 months, and we know your fight did not begin there – it has been 76 years of defiance, of survival, of refusing to disappear.
And know this: Next year, on March 8, we will not just mourn your suffering – we will celebrate your victory. Not your so-called “liberation” from your own men, as Western feminists like to frame it, but your liberation from settler-colonial occupation. We hear you. We see you. And we will not rest until the whole world does, too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
