As life continues to be erased in Gaza, the UN has no excuse for its silence

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women — 25 November — was launched by the UN 25 years ago and sees 16 days of international and local activities. This year’s campaign adopted the hashtag #No Excuse, “to draw attention to the alarming escalation of violence against women, to revitalise commitments and to call for accountability and action from decision-makers.”

Around this time in 2021, I wrote an opinion piece in which I concluded, while reviewing the relationship of this occasion to what women are going through in invaded and occupied Iraq. Taking a look at the official activities of international and local organisations reflects the reality of double standards and the application of international law to some countries but not to others.

State violence is the most comprehensive against women

Here I am, once again, looking at the same occasion to see what the UN has defined as violence against women and what it proposes in order to eliminate it. What is violence? The UN website tells us that violence “can manifest in physical, sexual and psychological forms, encompassing: intimate partner violence, sexual violence and harassment, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, and child marriage.” This is an important definition, were it not for its blatant selectivity in ignoring state violence, which is the most comprehensive against women.

This is the essence of the problem when reading laws and agreements from a local perspective, especially when the great powers that determine the laws find no issue with either committing the “violence” themselves, in the forms of invasion and occupation, as in Iraq; contributing to its commission, in cooperation with racist settler regimes, as in Palestine; or turning a blind eye, while providing economic and political support to oppressive regimes, when the rights of the people, including women, are violated and infringed, and women are treated as if they are creatures, completely isolated from other human beings.

READ: UNRWA says scale of suffering witnessed in Gaza has shaken faith in human rights

While the role and responsibility of states in committing violence against women could be expressed vaguely in reports by international organisations in previous years, what is happening in Palestine today cannot stand any rhetorical lack of clarity, no matter how its language is wrapped in glittery “humanity”. What is happening in Gaza goes beyond the definition of violence adopted by international and feminist organisations, as it has made the entire world a witness to the most heinous crime against humanity: genocide. Laws, concepts and terminology all fade when it comes to the crime of genocide unless they are accompanied by real action.

Is there a convincing excuse for the UN not to be explicit and clear about what Palestinian women are being exposed to in its statements marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and its definition of violence? If the occasion is concerned with women’s rights, how can we convince women in our countries of the value of human rights and international law while they are living a reality that is getting worse day after day? They are made to feel as if they live and die in another world, far removed from the life lived by women in other countries, especially the countries that control actual decision-making in the UN and international women’s organisations that are in line with their political and economic interests regardless of the gender and age of the victims in our countries.

What does “eliminating violence against women” mean?

How can “the other world” understand women’s rights in “our world” when the umbrella of international days for this and that, and other special occasions, has hundreds of holes in it because of the daily bombing that essentially erases women’s existence? How can we explain the celebration of “humanitarian” occasions while the extermination of humanity is ongoing? How can we understand the nature of opposing violence against women when “the other world” is witnessing the real time genocide of Palestinian women, the killing of their children and loved ones, and the dismemberment of them and their lives? What does “eliminating violence against women” mean when women in Gaza listen in shock to those responsible for burials when they are told, “I will put both of your children together in the same grave,” or when they say hollow-eyed, “We have more room in our tent after our children were martyred”?

How can “the other world” — a world which presents Arab women, in all its institutional reports and media outlets, as victims of a (terrorist) man with harsh features, a thick beard and a keffiyeh — understand when it sees a Palestinian man, with a thick beard and keffiyeh, embracing his little granddaughter after her martyrdom, calling her with a broken heart, “Soul of my soul”? Doesn’t “the other world” realise that our world is a man, a woman and a child, all together, and that the soul of the soul is everyone and Palestine resisting the Zionist genocide? Don’t they see how “everyone” is being exterminated, every minute, in our world; that the growl of hunger spares no one any longer; and that the daily meal has been soaked in death?

How many Palestinians need to be killed in Gaza for the world and its international organisations to understand the meaning of “eliminating violence” and do something about it? Are the lives of 44,786 martyrs and 106,000 wounded, mainly women and children, not enough to transform the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women into immediate international action to stop the violence, end the genocide and prevent the further ethnic cleansing of a people whose blood has soaked into their land so deeply?

In the face of these inhuman crimes, aimed at erasing the Palestinian people who are walled in by death, international silence and the complicity of Arab governments, can we still believe that the world is the same; that children are the same; that women’s rights are the same for all women; and that the definition of violence is the same, regardless of who commits it? As life continues to be erased in Gaza, the UN has no excuse for its silence and inaction.

This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 9 december 2024

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