There is nothing interesting anymore about discovering that a top-ranked sociology journal has published a one-sided polemic against Israel. Entire fields have been ideologically captured by anti-Zionist rhetoric. I've documented this many times, both in individual papers and in academia as a whole.
What is interesting is watching a respected journal abandon every substantive standard in its own rulebook to publish a blatantly anti-Israel piece— and watching it do so eagerly, in the open, with editorial solicitation on the record.
The article is Sarah Ihmoud’s
“Hunger and the Palestinian Womb,” published online March 25, 2026 in
Gender & Society, a SAGE journal that describes itself as “a top-ranked, peer-reviewed, sociological journal” that “publishes less than 10% of all papers submitted to it.”
Here is the abstract, in full:
This article theorizes the Palestinian womb as both a site of Zionist colonial violence and Palestinian futurity through the story of Shema, a young woman who became pregnant and gave birth during Gaza’s ongoing genocide. Drawing on decolonial Palestinian feminism and Indigenous feminist scholarship, I argue that Israel’s weaponization of starvation constitutes a gendered assault on Palestinian social reproduction, targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity. Shema’s narrative — from her interrupted wedding in October 2023 through forced displacement, miscarriage, and ultimately the birth of her son Youssef amid bombardment and acute malnutrition — reveals how genocide operates not only through military violence but also through the systematic destruction of life’s conditions. Her testimony illuminates what Shalhoub-Kevorkian terms genocidal “unchilding” and what I theorize as the colonial targeting of reproductive futures. Yet Shema’s story also embodies revolutionary mothering as insurgent care work, refusing to cede the future despite engineered hunger and psychic siege. Situating her experience within genealogies of anti-colonial resistance, I argue that storytelling itself becomes decolonial praxis — a refusal of erasure and a sacred map toward collective liberation. Grounded in intimate testimony and critical analysis, this work demands feminist engagement with starvation as reproductive violence and Palestinian life-making as radical resistance.
Every sweeping factual claim in this abstract — “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” a deliberate campaign “targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity” — is stated as established fact rather than as a hypothesis to be tested. All of the evidence in the piece, by the author’s own description, is a series of WhatsApp messages from one 23-year-old woman in Gaza.
The bias is unmistakable from the abstract alone. How this got published is the real question. Even a cursory review of both Gender & Society’s own stated standards and the standards that the journal claims to adhere to as a COPE member shows that this article doesn't just violate these rules - it tramples them.
The political content is treated as settled fact, which the journal’s standards forbid
The Gender & Society submission guidelines describe what the journal publishes: “empirical articles, which are both theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous,” or occasionally “theoretical articles that meaningfully advance sociological theories about gender.”
An empirical article argues from evidence to a conclusion. It states its hypothesis, describes its method, presents its findings, and discusses what the findings can and cannot support. Ihmoud’s piece inverts this entirely. The conclusions — genocide, weaponized starvation, deliberate gendered targeting of Palestinian wombs — are the premises from which the analysis begins. The abstract announces them as established descriptive categories. The sections that follow do not argue for these conclusions; they illustrate them through selected excerpts of one woman’s messages.
This is backwards. If the claim is that Israel has a policy of targeting pregnant women, the claim must be defended with evidence of intent, policy, and outcome, with engagement of contrary evidence. Instead the article treats each claim as self-evident and reaches for ever more extreme restatements: “engineered hunger,” “psychic siege,” “colonial unchilding,” “the machinery of death.” No reviewer trained in empirical sociology could have permitted this as a finding rather than as an opinion. The guidelines require “methodologically rigorous” work. There is no methodology here to even test as rigorous.
The abstract uses “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” and “engineered hunger” as neutral analytical vocabulary - assumed fact - not as positions being argued for.
The article could have stated an argument in a form that scholarly conventions recognize: “I argue that the conditions in Gaza are best characterized as genocide, for the following reasons…” It instead assumes the characterization as a starting premise. This is what distinguishes advocacy from scholarship. A paper published in a top-ranked sociology journal that treats the Israel-Hamas war as “Zionist colonial violence” in the abstract, without argument, has set the vocabulary of one side as the scholarly default.
The editor invited the piece — and the journal itself could not have applied its own peer review to it
The acknowledgments reveal the mechanism. Ihmoud thanks “Sharmila Rudrappa and Patricia Richards who invited her to contribute this piece to a symposium in Gender & Society.” Sharmila Rudrappa is the current editor of the journal; Patricia Richards is a former editor. The piece was solicited by the journal’s own editorial leadership.
Invited contributions exist at many journals, but COPE Core Practice 9 requires that “all peer review processes must be transparently described and well managed.” Gender & Society does not disclose anywhere on the article page what review this piece actually received, whether it was sent to external reviewers, whether those reviewers were blinded, or whether they were asked to apply the same methodological standards the journal applies to the roughly 97% of submissions it rejects.
One part of the ordinary process was structurally impossible. The submission guidelines require that review be anonymous, with authors cited in the third person (“As Collins (2014) has found…” and explicitly NOT “As I previously demonstrated…”). Ihmoud’s article contains exactly the forbidden first-person construction: “as Palestinian feminist analysis insists, and as I have argued elsewhere, genocide operates… (Ihmoud 2025).” She self-cites this way three times. The piece had already appeared five months earlier at Decolonial Hacker under her name, so any reviewer with a web browser would have known who wrote it.
The procedural question matters less than a deeper one: how anything calling itself peer review could have looked at this article and cleared it. A scholar competent in qualitative sociology, applying the journal’s stated methodological standards, would have returned this manuscript with comments on the n=1 sample, the absence of a methods section, the treatment of the conclusion as a premise, the lack of engagement with contrary evidence, and the circular self-citation. None of those comments made it into the published piece, which means either they were never made or they were ignored. Either way the “peer-reviewed” label at the top of the article page is doing work it cannot support.
The journal’s own rule against prior publication was waived — and the author said so in print
The journal’s submission rules are explicit: “Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content.”
The author’s note reads: “This piece was first published in Decolonial Hacker in October 2025… and is reprinted with permission here.” She adds that she “made the decision to stop updating data after its original publication.”
A side-by-side comparison confirms the two versions are the same article with trivial edits. Gender & Society apparently insisted that the word "Zionist" be capitalized. Otherwise, the piece is fundamentally identical to that published in an unapologetically biased source.
This is textbook redundant publication, which COPE Core Practice 7 requires every member journal to police. Gender & Society has the policy in its own submission guidelines. The editors simply ignored it, took a piece already running at an activist outlet, and reprinted it with a SAGE imprint.
A scholar submitting original, blinded, empirical research through the ordinary queue would be rejected immediately on this ground alone. For this piece the rule was waived. The reason, on the evidence available, was that the editors wanted its conclusions in their journal.
Worse, an article published as activism was republished verbatim as scholarship.
The author’s political commitments are not disclosed as a competing interest
We see this often, but it is worth highlighting.
COPE Core Practice 4 requires “clear definitions of conflicts of interest and processes for handling conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers.”
Ihmoud is a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, an advocacy organization with an explicit political mission. She has published in activist outlets including Decolonial Hacker and Jadaliyya, where the same arguments appear without the scholarly framing. The article’s conclusions are effectively identical to the political positions of the organization she co-founded.
This affiliation appears in her biography but is not flagged as a competing interest. Scholarly norms require that the conflict of interest be disclosed and managed. The journal made no such requirement of her.
The article’s analytical foundations are circular self-citation
The load-bearing theoretical claim — that “genocide operates not only through bombs and bullets but also through the slow, grinding destruction of life’s conditions” — is cited to Ihmoud 2025, while the claim that “decolonial Palestinian feminism refuses this futurelessness” is cited to Ihmoud 2022. The concept of the “Palestinian womb” as a theoretical object traces back to Ihmoud’s 2021 chapter.
Self-citation is normal in academic writing. Load-bearing self-citation for every core analytical move, with no serious engagement with contrary scholarship on any of these points, is not — it makes the piece a restatement of Ihmoud’s own prior positions rather than an original contribution. The journal’s guidelines are explicit that it publishes work making “original contributions to gender theory.” This article just rehashes.
The smaller violations
Several further breaches of the journal’s own rules and of COPE Core Practices are worth listing briefly, because each would on its own justify desk-rejecting an ordinary submission:
- No methods section. The article does not describe how the interview material was collected, verified, coded, or analyzed. The sample size is one. The journal’s guidelines require empirical articles to include “discussions of both theory and method.”
- No data availability statement. COPE Core Practice 5 requires journals to have data-availability policies. The raw data — in this case, WhatsApp messages — cannot be examined, verified, or independently interpreted. The research design is unfalsifiable.
- No ethics review statement. COPE Core Practice 6 requires policies on research involving human subjects, particularly vulnerable populations. The article publishes a named, identifiable 23-year-old woman in an active war zone — her full name, her child’s name, her pregnancy history, her displacement history, and private photographs. The College of the Holy Cross, Ihmoud’s employer, has an Institutional Review Board; the article is silent on whether it was consulted.
- Abstract 35% over the word limit. The submission guidelines specify 150-200 words; the published abstract is 265. Small on its own, but telling about how carefully anyone read this.
What this adds up to
The failures here all point in the same direction: the editors wanted this piece, and each rule that stood in the way was waived. The prior-publication rule was waived. The anonymous-review requirement was, by construction, impossible to honor. The methodological-rigor standard was not applied. The requirement that theoretical articles make original contributions was waived. The conflict-of-interest norm was not enforced. The ethics-oversight expectation was not raised.
Journals do bend their rules for invited contributions. What makes this case diagnostic is how thoroughly the rules were bent, how many were bent at once, how openly the violations are documented in the article itself, and how reliably the bending ran in one political direction. Gender & Society did not publish an imperfect essay despite its standards. It published this essay by suspending its standards.
This is how bias functions inside institutions that still think of themselves as impartial. The infrastructure of impartiality — the submission rules, the peer-review process, the COPE membership, the low acceptance rate — remains fully intact as a set of public claims. It is only when you check whether any of it was applied to a particular piece that you discover that standards can be ignored when the journal wants.
Which means Gender & Society has no standards at all.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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