On Israel, Hamas, and Refusing the Binary

Maryam Namazie spoke about the undoubted harm that militaristic, Islamic organisations such as Hamas pose to women—that was the bit that proved contentious because, while there wasn’t much there to disagree with, it felt too much like the way the defenders of genocide have tried to push the blame for Israel’s crimes back onto Hamas.

– Kay Green

My speech at the #FiLiA2025 conference in Brighton is being misquoted to portray me as a supporter of Hamas to suit Zionist agendas.

– Rahila Gupta

The landscape of modern political activism has become a moral minefield, where universal values are routinely sacrificed on the altar of narrow, identity-driven loyalties. Multiplicity is treated as betrayal, and simplicity is weaponised. What should be a principled commitment to universal women’s rights is increasingly overwhelmed by rigid binaries that demand allegiance to one power bloc over another.

Nowhere is this tension more evident than in debates around women’s rights and the question of Palestine. The essential opposition to Israel’s occupation and genocide is conflated with a defence of Hamas and anti-Semitism. Conversely, opposing Hamas and Islamism is recast as defending the Israeli state and Islamophobia. It’s a false binary that ignores the lived experiences of women.

Acknowledging multiple forms and fronts of harm, or recognising that rights can and are violated across opposing sides, is seen as an affront to group loyalty. A commitment to universal women’s rights is treated as treachery by both sides, suffocating our movements, our solidarities, and the possibility of liberation itself.

The fringe ‘Palestine Liberation is a Feminist Issue’ event and the grassroots feminist group FiLia’s October conference, at both of which I was a speaker, perfectly encapsulate this moral incoherence.

At the fringe event, organised by the Anti-Imperialist Feminist Network to coincide with the FiLia conference, my contribution on the necessity of liberation from Hamas as well as Israeli occupation was denounced with cries of ‘shame’. Per Kay Green in the Morning Star, apparently only another speaker was able to ‘soothe tensions’ by reminding the audience that I was in no way ‘a genocide apologist’. (Organisers are not releasing the video footage under the bogus claim of security concerns.)

That a principled critique of Hamas could trigger such hostility is not surprising. I have seen this played out for many decades now: defend apostates and you are ‘Islamophobic’. Oppose anti-Muslim racism and you’re an undercover Jihadi. Condemn the Islamic regime of Iran and you’re accused of legitimising US militarism. Oppose Israeli attacks on Iran and you become pro-regime. (I have previously discussed identity politics as a breeding ground for division and dehumanisation here.) The script is always the same: refuse the binary and you are automatically placed into the ‘enemy’ camp.

You are either for us or against us. And depending on who us is, you will either excuse Israeli rape, occupation, and genocide as self-defence or you will defend Hamas’ rape and terrorism as resistance, even though it is well established that rape has always been used as a weapon of war. (See the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict’s conclusion of reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred during the 7 October attacks and the allegations of sexual torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli security forces documented by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.)

Even if you have made a career of opposing violence against women, you will magic away the rape and sexual assaults of Hamas or IDF forces depending on your politics. Those who oppose the Christian right in their own country, will defend Islam, the veil, Sharia law, and theocracy in ours or a Jewish fundamentalist state in Israel. Political violence, rape, fundamentalism, and misogyny become acceptable as long as it is carried out by one’s own ‘side’. Feminism is conditional, depending on which tribe of women is being sacrificed.

This is not only because of a refusal to engage with nuance and multiplicity or due to a false sense of tribal loyalty. Fundamentally, this is because many people everywhere have bought into the oldest political con: the myth that those in power and the ruling class somehow embody ‘their’ people, and that opposition to one system of domination obliges allegiance to another. Tribal or identity politics homogenises societies so completely that elites become the ‘authentic representatives’ of the people through this manufacturing of acquiescence and consent.

The political swindle ensures that real solidarity is substituted with allegiance to power.

Certainly, there are those who are not merely accused of supporting a power bloc but openly and unapologetically do so. Some defend the Israeli state, the machinery of occupation, dispossession, starvation, and mass killing behind the language of protecting ‘Jewish women’ or ensuring ‘Jewish safety’. By collapsing the distinction between a people and a state, they treat any criticism of Israeli policy as a threat to Jewish existence itself. Likewise, there are those who have a real ideological affinity with Islamism and hide behind Palestinian suffering to defend a misogynistic, theocratic, authoritarian force. They invoke the language of liberation while shielding a movement that would deny women, LGBT people, ex-Muslims, secular Palestinians, and dissenters their most basic rights. In both cases, the suffering of women becomes a political alibi used to whitewash the power of states and fundamentalists.

This selective solidarity is not confined to Palestine. On parts of the Western left, white nationalism is rightly condemned, yet Islamist fundamentalism in power is romanticised as anti-imperialist. Meanwhile, the Western right warns obsessively of Sharia law while championing their own Christian nationalism that attacks abortion rights, LGBT rights, and women’s rights.

Clearly, liberation cannot be built on the backs of competing ruling classes. If our politics cannot condemn both the Israeli state and Hamas, if we cannot stand with women rather than their tyrants, then our frameworks do not merely fall short; they reproduce the very harm we claim to resist.

Of course, the Israeli state and Hamas are not equal in power. Israel is an occupying force, with huge military and economic might backed by Western states. Yet, the crimes of the Israeli state do not erase the crimes of Hamas, a misogynistic, theocratic force that emerged to undermine the Palestinian struggle and is supported by powerful regional and international regimes such as Iran, Russia, and Qatar.

It is important to note that critiquing Hamas does not mean collapsing the Palestinian struggle into Hamas. Palestinians have long resisted occupation through feminist, secular, labour, and grassroots movements that Hamas actively suppresses. Likewise, there is a rich history of resistance by Israelis and Jews against occupation and the atrocities committed in their name.

A feminist position on Palestine must oppose Israeli occupation and genocide and oppose Hamas’s misogynistic, theocratic rule. This is not contradictory. These are inseparable, principled stands.

A principled approach must target all authoritarian forces that oppress women, not side with one over another. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend. The fight for liberation has always meant fighting on many fronts.

In their 2024 Statement on the Genocide in Gaza, Feminist Dissent did exactly that by condemning Israel’s genocidal campaign while also naming Hamas as a fundamentalist, anti-democratic force whose repression of women and minorities cannot be excused in the name of liberation.

As Palestinian academic Nahla Abdo argues, Palestinian women’s struggle necessarily combines ‘gender issues with the national and anti-colonial struggle’, showing that liberation must confront both internal patriarchy and external colonial domination.

This is a lesson we have learnt in Iran. Women were told to wait ‘until after liberation’ from the Shah’s dictatorship to demand their rights. That time never came. Women’s liberation postponed is liberation denied. Also, liberation without women’s liberation is meaningless.

Militarism, colonialism, and fundamentalism are not separate systems. They feed off of and mirror each other, always at the expense of women. During the Cold War, the US empowered fundamentalist movements as a bulwark against communism. Israel itself enabled the rise of Hamas to weaken the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

The same pattern of tribalism appeared in attacks on Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters, whose speech at FiLiA’s plenary condemned Israeli genocide as well as fundamentalism. Uproar ensued, and she was instantly labelled anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas.

Across the ideological divide, accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia serve the same function: to silence criticism of power. Both hatreds are real (though I prefer the term ‘anti-Muslim hate’ to ‘Islamophobia’) and must be confronted. But when they are used to shut down criticism of the powerful, they protect the ruling class, not women.

When solidarity is replaced by tribal loyalty, feminism ceases to challenge power and begins to mirror it. The task before us is not to choose the lesser of two authoritarianisms (the lesser always being subjective), but to refuse the terms on which the powerful demand our allegiance.

A universalist women’s liberation movement recognises that liberation can be undermined from within as well as attacked from without; that anti-colonial struggle without women’s rights doesn’t bring about fundamental change; and that the fight against religious oppression is inseparable from the fight against military and state violence. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran (drawing on the Kurdish slogan first developed within the Kurdish women’s freedom movement and popularised in Rojava) embodies this principle: liberation without women’s liberation is meaningless.

To truly defend women’s rights is to hold every power—state or fundamentalist, local or foreign—to the same standard. The strength of internationalism lies precisely here: in refusing the false binary between rival oppressors and standing instead with the women who are refusing and resisting every day.