NEW YORK, Apr 28 2026 (IPS) - The veil has been lifted—but not the one you think.
Not the veil the West has spent decades weaponizing. The veil now exposed is the one that concealed Western feminism’s selective solidarity—its silence on the women it was never truly fighting for. The “othering” of women from the South West Asian and North African region. In other words: us.
In Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria offers a powerful critique of how mainstream feminism often reinforces white supremacist, colonial, and patriarchal logics. The suffering of women of color becomes useful—deployable.
The image of the veiled, victimized woman, waiting to be saved, has long justified wars, interventions, and foreign policies driven not by liberation, but by imperial ambition. When these women resist on their own terms, they are ignored or discredited.
This pattern is not new. It is structural. Discrimination is embedded in the system. Palestine has simply made it undeniable. The silence that followed stripped away any remaining illusion that “we are in this together.” Feminist solidarity, it turns out, has limits—and some of us were never included.
That is the veil we lift today.
We speak as Arab women aged 50–65, activists and feminists with over a century of combined experience across 90 countries. We now live in the United States, where these contradictions are stark. We have paid a price for insisting on integrity. So have many others.
Across conversations with colleagues and communities, the message is consistent: the system is not broken—it functions exactly as designed.
Early feminist movements everywhere have grappled with patriarchy, sometimes resisting it, sometimes accommodating it. In the West, this struggle has often aligned uncomfortably with white supremacy.
In formerly colonized regions, patriarchy cannot be separated from colonialism, racism, or imperialism. These systems are intertwined; dismantling one requires confronting them all. This is where Western feminism consistently falls short.
Today, little has changed. The language is more polished. The imagery more diverse. But the underlying structures—and the values sustaining them—remain intact. Nowhere is this clearer than in how women from the South West Asian and North African region are treated by movements that claim to champion them.
The same logic that invoked Afghan women to justify military intervention now watches Palestinian women document their own destruction while offering silence—or excuses.
The data reflects this reality.
In the United States, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination rose sharply in 2024. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 complaints—the highest since it began tracking in 1996. Employment discrimination alone accounted for 15.4% of cases. In 2025, these numbers climbed again. Rhetoric has consequences.
But numbers only tell part of the story. Women’s voices tell the rest.
One Arab aid worker described being sidelined after speaking publicly about Palestine following October 7:
“When I spoke about Ukrainian women, it was welcomed. When I spoke about Palestinian women, it was suppressed. I lost my work.”
Others describe being silenced on social media, accused of saying too much—or too little. Some were advised to remove their hijab for safety. Others were warned to avoid expressing views altogether to protect institutional reputations.
Yet another was denied the right to exercise leadership among her own staff, because as a Muslim from the Arab region, her ability to clearly articulate opinions, exercise judgement, and make decisions, was deemed ‘abusive’. One woman was denied employment because her call for “ceasefire and humanitarian aid” was deemed “too political.”
Western feminism often recoils at these truths. Yet Palestine is not only a political issue—it is a feminist one. All struggles against oppression are interconnected. Justice cannot be selective, even if its application often is.
Feminism demands confronting power, violence, and dehumanization wherever they occur. Palestinian women live at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression—patriarchy, occupation, militarization—and resist across all of them.
A feminism that ignores this reality is not feminism. It is complicity.
As Teju Cole describes, this is the logic of the “white savior industrial complex.” It operates through what can be called gendered orientalism: women from the South West Asian and North African region are portrayed as victims of culture, religion, or men—but rarely of bombs, sanctions, or occupation. This framing preserves the West as liberator while erasing its role in producing violence.
In the United States, the language differs but the outcome is the same. Conservatives fear Islam; liberals seek to save us from it. Both deny our agency. Both silence our voices.
We are rarely represented as we are: organizers, scholars, community leaders, mothers, activists, feminists.
This silence must be named clearly. It is not neutrality. It is complicity.
The credibility of any feminist movement rests on whether it stands with all women—especially when doing so is politically inconvenient.
We have paid the price for this failure: in erasure, in exclusion, in lost friends, in being told our grief is too complex and our politics too divisive.
What passes for solidarity is often conditional. It appears when it costs nothing and disappears when it demands accountability. Women from the South West Asia and North Africa were welcomed when our oppression reinforced dominant narratives. We became inconvenient when our liberation required confronting Western power itself.
Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality to describe how overlapping identities produce compounded forms of discrimination. What we are witnessing now is an intersectional crisis: women from those regions face discrimination based simultaneously on race, religion, gender, and geopolitics. The very movement best equipped to confront this has gone largely silent.
From decades of work in conflict settings, one truth is clear: women from South West Asia and North Africa do not need to be singled out for ‘saving’.
We need the violence to stop.
We need colleagues to speak our names when it is difficult. We need those marching for human rights to recognize that feminism that excludes Gaza, Beirut, or Tehran is neither feminism nor human rights. It is branding—a convenient narrative that avoids confronting deeper structures of power.
Palestine has revealed a deeper truth: these systems were never designed to serve everyone. They were built by—and for—those in power.
What is required now is not reform at the margins, but a reckoning.
Solidarity demands accountability. If women’s rights are human rights, then they must apply to all women—without exception.
Lina AbiRafeh – Better4Women – Azza Karam and Henia Dakkak– Lead Integrity: House of Wisdom.
IPS UN Bureau
