Women in Gaza held a demonstration in front of the ICRC headquarters there ahead of the occasion, but their issues with spouse abuse took a significant back seat to the accusations that somehow Israel is treating Palestinian women badly.
The women raised Palestinian flags, pictures of prisoners in the occupation prisons, and placards calling for an end to the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people.Bisan Abu Jiyab, a feminist activist for Ma'an, said that the eighth of March comes in light of the repeated Israeli violations against female prisoners behind the occupation prisons.Abu Jiyab called on the international world to stand in front of its stances against the occupation policies practiced against the female prisoners and the daily policy of repression, blatant violation and denial of phone calls and family visits, and in light of the deliberate medical neglect of female prisoners.
Buried later in the article is the grudging admission that, yeah, Palestinian women are beaten by their husbands, and the Palestinian leadership is not adhering to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, but that is only a side issue. Female prisoners are the overarching human rights issue.
Another article about International Women's Day in Ma'an looks at the numbers of interest to Palestinian women. It identifies exactly how many female prisoners there are in Israeli prison.
32.
It also highlights the amazing fact that roughly half of Palestinians are women.
And, by the way, it also mentions that (as of 2019, because how important are these statistics anyway?) that 13.4% of Palestinian women are married before age 18, 57.2% of women were subjected to psychological violence “at least once” in the previous year, 18.5% of women were subjected to physical violence “at least once” in the previous year, and 9.4% of women were subjected to sexual violence “at least once” in that timeframe.
This means that literally hundreds of thousands of Palestinian are being raped or beaten by their husbands - but the 32 female terrorists in Israeli prisons are what Palestinians want to talk about. Which means that this obsession with attacking Israel actually hurts Palestinian women by making issues of actual abuse secondary to their insatiable drive to make everything about Israel.
Which Western feminists are calling attention to this problem?
The UN adds that 50% of Palestinian women and 63% of Palestinian men agree that a woman should tolerate violence to keep the family together. But that cannot be spoken about because it takes away from the discussion about how awful Israel is.
