Femonationalism and Homonationalism: Who Gets to Commit Genocide?

“The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza,” read the caption of a picture featuring a beaming soldier raising an In the Name of Love pride flag while standing amidst the rubble and dead children his state and army have carpet bombed.¹ Meanwhile, Noah Schnapp, one of America’s most famous gay actors, shared a post about how unsafe he feels at Penn State and handed out Zionism is sexy and Hamas is ISIS stickers to giggling friends in a montage set to a Taylor Swift song.

Now let us turn to the past for a bit. In 2019, for a short while, the CEOs of four of America’s five biggest defense contractors were women. This was hailed as monumental, celebrated on news sites like Politico, which deemed it “a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.”² Then Chief Operating Officer of Lockheed Martin was quoted in the piece, claiming that representation was possible by “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.” Well, congratulations — we now know gays and women are equally as capable of furthering genocide as the rest of humanity.

In the liberal world order — here I am not referring to the Democratic party but the moral and political philosophy — deciding whether support for Palestinian liberation is justified begins with these fundamental questions: Do they support queers? Do they support women? Do they support intersectionality? It is the “Condemnation Problem,” but in reverse. Homo- and femo- isms are fascisms of a sort; it matters not what issues they are involved in, as long as they are involved. Homonationalism, a term coined by Dr. Jasbir K. Paur, a professor at Rutgers University, refers to the problem emerging from gender ideology and post-colonial studies, highlighting state use of the LGBTQ movement as an appendage for advancing their geopolitical agendas. While some may consider it a “parody of liberalism,” as Murtaza Hussain termed the soldier holding a gay pride flag in a flattened Gaza city,³ it is in fact, perfectly illustrative of the dynamics within liberalism: a manifestation of its deeper, often contradictory tendencies, and inability to tolerate anything but itself. If one understands this, it is obvious why pointing out that “Israel has no pristine record on LGBT either” misses the point by a wide mark. 

Writing in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, political scientist, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, notes, “the woke crowd latches onto the furthest-most limits to manifest just how cutting-edge, how much better and purer, it is.” During the pandemic, we were subject to analysis lamenting how the crisis was uniquely worse for LGBT individuals.⁴ In the Ukraine-Russia war, it was whinging on the surrogacy crisis of abandoned Ukrainian babies because Ukraine disallows same-sex couples to adopt.⁵ Now, the focus shifts to Palestinian treatment of LGBT, because in order for some type of liberation movement to exist or elicit sympathy, if they are not marching in pride parades, the world has reason to turn a blind eye to Israel’s crimes.

Dr. Paur further argues that “in some senses, Israel is a pioneer of homonationalism, as its particular position at the crosshairs of settler colonialism, occupation, and neoliberalist accommodationism creates the perfect storm for the normalization of homosexuality through national belonging.” She notes that while the acceptance of LGBT grew in Israel, concomitantly the “increased segregation and decreased mobility of Palestinian populations, especially post-Oslo,” took place. Yes, pride parades are legal in Israel, but unarmed protests will get Palestinians shot and killed.⁶ To the “try being queer in Gaza” genocide-complicit commentators, try being Palestinian at all. Don’t forget, the only people barred from having anti-liberal family values and determining for themselves what sort of worldview to adopt, too, are Palestinians.

Hand in hand with homonationalism, upholding the measure of teleological progress, is feminism. In this context it is better understood as femonationalism, as coined by sociologist Sara Farris, referring to state feminism which establishes “the equation between Islam and women’s lack of rights by linking gender violence to ostensibly traditional Muslim practices.” While Farris’ book focuses on neoliberal and fascist discourse in European countries, the instrumentalization of women’s issues to divert focus from genocide is a strategy Israel has long employed. Take for example Israel’s shameless promotion and celebration of its all-female infantry that supposedly killed hundreds of terrorists,⁷ while simultaneously crying misogyny when they are justifiably targeted as war combatants. Through mandatory enlistment of women in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the government portrays itself as a progressive and egalitarian state, while also capitalizing on the anti-Islam sentiment against Muslims’ perceived treatment of women. Another example involves the women in Gaza, where Israeli authorities have often pointed to “conservative dress codes” (juxtaposed with their own use of Israeli women’s bodies in propaganda in the form of “sexploitation”) and restrictions on women’s movement imposed by certain factions as evidence of gender-based oppression. Of course, it is far more fashionable and morally sound to criticize Muslim men’s restriction of women’s movement rather than Israel’s decades-long history of restriction, segregation, and blockade of Palestinians.

But all of this is immaterial to the question: Who has a right to an ethnostate? And why does Israel uniquely qualify for one? “Because their women are legitimate combatants and can wear bikinis” is not an adequate answer;⁸ but, a writer for the radical feminist magazine, Reduxx, seemed to disagree.⁹ In response to news of 50,000 pregnant Gazan women lacking access to functioning healthcare services under Israeli bombardment,¹⁰ the writer participated in fueling unsubstantiated alarm over the supposed Palestinian culture of rape, child marriage, and incest. To people like her, the problem was not that Israel was bombing pregnant women, but that Palestinian men were raping or breeding their women to birth swathes of soldiers in a Scarlet Letter-like fashion. Others commented on the apparent lack of female education and disastrously low literacy rates (that remains above Israel’s, and even if it was low cannot somehow be attributed to decades of occupation but instead Islam’s suppression of women’s education).

As the West has supposedly risen above illicit fantasies of the oppression of women since time immemorial, it is now afforded the moral standing to decide who should live and die on those bases. Following the September 11 attacks, former first lady, Lara Bush famously declared, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” The message became particularly prescient in encouraging military response: Since 2001, the United States has directly killed at least 70,000 Afghans and Pakistani civilians¹¹ and is responsible for the slaughter of millions more, numbers that are likely severe underestimations.

The “redemptive” metanarrative of “freedom” and “rights” further obscures this landscape by framing the oppressor’s violence as humane acts of mercy aimed at liberating women, and now LGBT individuals. It makes heroes out of criminals. Slaughter is justified as mercy for the women otherwise doomed for a life akin to slavery, or homosexuals who would have supposedly been murdered anyway. Israel truly considers itself and its raison d’etre as benevolent; nothing could be further from the truth. Just take the case of missing Yemeni children for instance, where Israeli state institutions lied to Yemeni Jewish migrants, informing them their babies had died when in reality they were sent for adoption by Ashkenazi parents in Israel and the United States. Iraqi Jewish Professor Ella Shohat eloquently writes (parts of which I have emphasized):

Transferring babies from the space of premodernity to that of modernity, where they would be raised according to nuclear family values and Western behavioral norms, was perceived to be logical, rational, and scientific. Within this discursive framework, literally tearing babies away from the arms of their mothers seemed only natural, even redemptive. The act of kidnapping babies, therefore, operated on a continuum with the reigning academic discourses of the time. In this intersection of race, gender, and class, the displaced Jews from Muslim countries became victims of the logic of progress, bearing the marks of its pathologies on their bodies.

Within the Israeli framework, the victimization of Yemeni Jews and other Arab Jews unfolds in a simple narrative, conveniently oscillating between accounts of oppression under Muslim rule and an anthropological gaze fixated on folklore and tradition. Israel brands Arabs and Muslims with a certain primitivism, portraying migration to Israel as a celebrated entry into modernity. The shift from “premodernity” becomes an obligatory trajectory, transforming into a moral imperative that women and LGBT individuals who emerge on the other side must carry forth. And where all else fails, the obliteration of a people simply becomes a reset button to renew societal progress. Venture capitalist, Kenneth Ballenegger’s grotesque conclusion, “mass sterilization and re-education camps” for Gazans who “reproduce like rabbits and raise them to be terrorists, creating more poverty [and] misery…”¹² is rather logically aligned with that of the homo- and femo-nationalists, essentially proposing Israel treat Gaza the way China does Xinjiang. 

In the eyes of the West, it is only the Palestinian people who cannot have criminals or be humored by the chance to achieve its precious “progress,” to whatever end, if there is an end, the West wants to define. Liberalism’s pillars of agency, liberty, and free speech are not extolled for the once-made, twice-in-the-making refugee population, puppeteered to the whims of the brutal overlords threatening them at gunpoint, “celebrate what we tell you to, condemn what we tell you to, and perhaps we may find you deserving of a chance at life.”     

---

Disclaimer: Material published by Traversing Tradition is meant to foster scholarly inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published articles and subsequent comments do not necessarily represent the views of Traversing Tradition or any employee thereof.

1. https://twitter.com/leekern13/status/1723807905835585996 [↩]
2. David Brown, How women took over the military-industrial complex, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/02/how-women-took-over-the-military-industrial-complex-1049860 [↩]
3. https://twitter.com/MazMHussain/status/1723841152795693336 [↩]
4. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/the-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-lgbt-people/ [↩]
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/magazine/surrogates-ukraine.html [↩]
6. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/04/israel-arms-embargo-needed-as-military-unlawfully-kills-and-maims-gaza-protesters/ [↩]
7. https://metro.co.uk/2023/10/25/all-female-idf-combat-squad-claims-to-have-killed-100-hamas-terrorists-19716021/ [↩]
8. https://twitter.com/israel_advocacy/status/1715307925772599516 [↩]
9. https://twitter.com/ShayWoulahan/status/1714674571201151138 [↩]
10. World Health Organization, Women and newborns bearing the brunt of the conflict in Gaza, UN agencies warn, https://www.who.int/news/item/03-11-2023-women-and-newborns-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-conflict-in-gaza-un-agencies-warn [↩]
11. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan [↩]
12. https://twitter.com/StopZionistHate/status/1724289816366391802, Ballenegger was fired from his firm. [↩]