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Palestinian Feminism, a Conversation with Sarah Ihmoud and Zinaida Miller

Sarah Ihmoud and Zinaida Miller

The following conversation took place through SquadCast in May 2026. An edited transcript is below.

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Zinaida Miller: It is a pleasure to be here with you, Sarah, and I’m so delighted that we have a little time to have a conversation today at such an important moment. I want to get started by asking you a little bit about Palestinian feminism in broad and distinct strokes. You’ve written a lot about its distinctiveness and also about the linkages and solidarities with other movements of liberation and struggle. I’d love to hear you speak to the ways in which you see the role of women over time, and maybe a little bit about social revolution and how all of this connects to the development and support of everyday life and broader survival of Palestinian society.  

Sarah Ihmoud: Thank you so much, Zina, and thank you to the journal for bringing us together in conversation. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.  

I want to begin by insisting that Palestinian women are first and foremost defenders and architects of Palestinian life and future. In other words, as women, we want ourselves alive, right? We want our children to be alive in the same way that we want our communities alive and thriving. We want to be free in the way that we want our homeland to be free. That is our birthright as Indigenous people. That, to me, is the essence of Palestinian feminism. It is to allow ourselves as women to be in touch with the power of our life force in the midst of a world so invested in our collective death and disappearance, allowing our power and our care for each other to shape how we understand ourselves and how we act upon the world. In that sense, Palestinian feminism is about the embodiment of a life-affirming politics and ethics. It’s about an orientation toward Palestinian livability and future, both in terms of daily life and in terms of collective liberatory struggle.  

If we think with this imperative that Palestinian feminism is an invitation to consider the force of Palestinian livability, the capaciousness of that as a daily embodied praxis, what does that do? It displaces Zionism from the center of our thinking, which is important. It ruptures these violent Western colonial discourses that are so invested in our disappearance. But also, representations of us either as criminals or as victims in need of rescue from our supposedly dangerous Indigenous men (or rescue from religious or cultural pathologies) continue to abound. So what happens when we inhabit this revolutionary demand? What does a Palestinian feminist lens allow us to see? My approach has been following an intergenerational archive and feminist praxis to examine the everydayness, the intimate spaces of daily life—to consider, as you asked in your question, the revolutionary labor that has always been the foundation of social reproduction. To think about Palestinian feminism in relation to revolution isn’t a rhetorical move. It is a methodological provocation. Because what a feminist lens reveals is that the social revolution I gesture toward is not separable from the political revolution. It is its precondition. The most recent phase of Israel’s genocidal project has made this absolutely undeniable in the most devastating way. This is the context in which I and many others are now thinking about women’s roles in resistance and survival, because what we are witnessing in Gaza is not a military operation in any conventional sense. Palestinian women’s stories highlight, of course, the centrality of gender and sexual violence, of psychological warfare, of continuous and multiple forced displacements, of the mass killing of children, of the destruction of our homes and land as calculated inflictions, of intersecting forms of violence inflicted on not only the gendered Palestinian body and collective but our sense of being as a people.  

And yet in the midst of this, Palestinian women are doing what we have always done, right? Protecting and rebuilding home, even when that home is the tattered remains of a tent, even when that home is a psychic space of relief for our children. When it’s a lullaby, when it is the care work that is daily, after giving birth, without the medical necessities that we take for granted in the West. Caring for the next generation, maintaining the conditions for collective survival—that is an insistence on the future, a refusal of the colonial grammar that would render women’s lives simply as casualties. And I, of course, do not share this in any way to romanticize this labor. I think there’s a danger in that. These are absolutely excruciating conditions that none of our people should be made to survive.  

And part of what Gaza is revealing very clearly for the world to see is that gender and sexual violence were never peripheral to Zionist genocide in Palestine—that what we’re seeing is not exceptional, not a breakdown of an otherwise functional order, but the systematic and gendered logic of settler-colonial elimination. And if that is the form of the violence, then women’s resistance to it is not supplementary. It is the heart of the matter. That is to say, Palestinian women have never been peripheral to our liberation struggle. They have always been among its most generative architects. And if we look at the long history of anticolonial organizing in Palestine, we see women constituting the social fabric through which resistance becomes possible at all. I think that is the really foundational thing that I want us to think with. Our people have been struggling against a brutal colonial project for over a hundred years, a project whose central insistence is to erase us as a people.¹ And so I think that’s worth underscoring, and it is very blatant for all the world to see right now that Zionism is a war against life. And here I want to be precise about what that means structurally because Palestinian feminism as a revolutionary praxis cannot stop at theorizing life-making. It must also name unflinchingly the infrastructure that makes the mass extermination of our people possible and demand its dismantlement. These are not two separate projects. The reproduction of Palestinian life and the destruction of the colonial architecture that targets it are two movements of the same struggle. 

ZM: That’s incredibly powerful, thank you. I want to come back to the question about futurity and care work, because I think that is really central to thinking about reproduction and how that is a mode of resistance in and of itself.  

But maybe first we could look at what you term in your work “reproductive genocide,” the targeting of women’s wombs, and just ask what you think it is about? This is a broader question, really, about colonialism. It’s not only about this context but the mode of colonial projects targeting women’s bodies and sexualities and the ways in which that plays out. And then maybe we’ll come back also to some resistance to that kind of violence.  

SI: Like many colonial projects—obviously Palestine is not exceptional here—women’s bodies and sexualities have been a central target because of the ways that, of course, women’s bodies are always symbolically tied to the periphery of the nation. And because of the fact that as Indigenous people, we have the power to birth the next generation of Palestinians on our homeland, we are the embodiment of the life force. And that makes us incredibly dangerous to the colonial project. And this is why the Zionist colonial project has both historically and in the present moment targeted our wombs, targeted the infrastructure that makes life possible, that makes reproduction possible: the home space, the medical infrastructure, the educational infrastructures that allow us to persist in terms of our knowledge as an Indigenous people, and the collective memory that enables our future making. It is this very formation that has enabled the state to target our bodies in particular ways with rape and sexual violence, with the murder of our children, the debilitation of our bodies en masse.  

What we’re also seeing and understanding in a very explosive way right now is the extent to which rape and sexual violence are being used against our men as well. And the most recent reports—for example, by the United Nations and by Euromed Human Rights Monitor, in their report, “Another Genocide Behind Walls”—document the absolutely horrific conditions of systematic sexual violence and torture of men, of women, and children within Israel’s detention centers. What is the aim of sexual torture of our men? It is about the destruction of our capacity for social reproduction as a people. It’s about the attempted fragmentation and destruction of our most intimate bonds, our social relations.  

I think that Palestinian feminist analysis is unambiguous about this: that rape and sexual violence are not incidental to this colonial project. They are structurally constitutive of it. Mass sexual violence against Palestinians is not a byproduct of war. It’s not a matter of individual soldiers acting outside the chain of command or outside of legal norms. It is an instrument of territorial dispossession. It is an instrument of population elimination and of the destruction of Indigenous futurity. And a Palestinian feminist analysis makes this visible not simply to bear witness, though bearing witness matters enormously, but because understanding sexual violence as structural, as colonial infrastructure, clarifies what dismantlement actually requires. You cannot end an institutionalized culture of rape and sexual violence without ending the conditions that produce it. And you cannot theorize Palestinian life-making without accounting for the organized killing and violation of Palestinian bodies and socialities that life-making must contend with and overcome.  

Which brings me to something that I think we also have to speak about directly: the international community’s systematic silencing of Palestinian claims around rape and sexual violence in particular. The denial, the deflection, the demand for a standard of proof that is never applied elsewhere. It’s not a neutral failure. That in and of itself is an enabling condition. It is part of the infrastructure. And the impunity that flows from that silencing does not and will not stay contained to Palestine. This is why, in part, this question is so urgent for feminists across the globe. The normalization of mass sexual violence against a people whose lives are deemed ungrievable creates the conditions for its replication across the globe. And so Palestinian feminist analysis, then, is not only a framework for understanding the Palestinian experience, but it’s also becoming more and more visibly a diagnostic of what international structures of power protect and what they sacrifice.  

ZM: I have a question that I think links to some of that. You gestured toward the ways in which youth are caught up in this. And it made me think a lot about the processes of not just the killing of Palestinian children but of course the long-term modes of incarceration.  

We can think about territorial prisons, and then we can think about imprisonment as a broader concept. I work on Palestine and teach criminal law. So these are meeting points that I think about a lot. I know you’ve talked about carceral power in the Palestinian context. Can you speak a little bit about carceralism and abolition and how you think about these in relation to Israeli colonial control of Palestinian life?  

SI: I’m thinking of course with other scholars who have been doing this work for a long time. Scholars such as Rashid Khalidi, who has argued that the entire machinery of settler-colonial power and the occupation regime established after 1967 can be understood as a carceral enterprise because of its design to control, to confine, and to dominate Palestinian populations across these various areas. These technologies include the ID regime, the permit system, the checkpoint, the separation wall, the modalities of siege. All of these are distinct expressions of carceral logic, of holding Palestinian bodies in managed captivity in service of eliminatory violence. What is crucial here, and I think what we also learn from, for example, the Black radical tradition and feminist abolitionist scholarship are the tools of naming this carceral infrastructure that do not merely restrict movement or punish dissent. We have to name that this infrastructure operates as a total environment that organizes Palestinian life and reproduction and death under conditions of permanent colonial siege. This is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insight about the prison as geographical solution to political crisis scaled to the level of the captivity of an entire Indigenous population.  

One of the ways that I understand carcerality in Palestine is as a violent technology of colonial warfare aimed at disrupting Palestinian kinship or social relations. This has been the work of the Israeli prison system all along, and this is why, I believe, 40 percent of Palestinian men have been in prison.² The number may be higher now with recent transformations, given the genocidal conditions that we’re living under. But this scale alone demands that we reckon with the prison not as a peripheral institution but as a central weapon. Orisami Burton’s recent scholarship compels us to see the prison as a site of warfare against racialized populations–a space in which the colonial state perpetrates its eliminatory project through captivity, through torture, and through the destruction of the social bonds that make collective life possible. Today, as we speak, there are approximately ten thousand Palestinians being held captive in what human rights organizations have referred to as torture chambers, where they are systematically held without charge or trial, where they are starved, where they’re beaten, abused, again, systematically raped and violated.³ And we’re talking about men, women, and children.  

So the prison in the settler-colonial context is not a site of punishment or even of containment in any ordinary sense. It is a technology of war. And the mass sexual violence being perpetrated against Palestinian detainees that has been documented by human rights organizations as systematic has to be understood within that frame as well. It is not abuse that happens inside the prison. It is the prison functioning exactly as designed, as a mechanism for the annihilation of Palestinian personhood, Palestinian kinship, futurity. The recently proposed Knesset legislation that enables the execution of Palestinian captives by hanging—a law that will apply exclusively to Palestinians as a racial group—only makes this eliminatory logic more explicit, juridically ratifying what has long been the operative reality inside these detention centers.  

My most recent work has sought to extend this analysis in a direction that I think is necessary and undertheorized, which is the relationship between carcerality and reproductive violence. And one of the ways that I have sought to explore this is through the experience of women with forced starvation. In that work, I try to understand forced starvation not as a collateral effect of war, but as a deliberate tactic that targets an entire people. To make more explicit—and I think this is what many scholars in the field of Palestinian studies are doing right now—to make more explicit that genocide does not only operate through bombs and mass killing, but also through the slow, grinding destruction of life’s conditions that we often see in the so-called “ceasefire” moment, right? Starvation is a carceral technology. The total siege of Gaza is a carceral technology. They confine, control, and destroy not just individual bodies but the conditions of social reproduction itself. The ability to conceive, to carry, to birth, nourish, and raise our children. And in this sense, Palestine joins a long genealogy of Indigenous communities subjected to hunger as a weapon of conquest. We can look to many different examples of that. But the central idea here is that the carceral management of Indigenous reproductive life is not unique to Palestine. It is a grammar of settler colonialism as such. 

What Palestine offers to abolitionist scholarship, I think, is a case in which the relationship between Indigeneity and captivity, between reproductive violence and eliminatory colonialism, becomes theoretically visible in its most extreme and systematic form, unfortunately. And there’s another aspect that I think we often don’t discuss—that the abolitionist demand cannot end with the dismantlement of the colonial architecture of the prison as such. As necessary as that is, there’s something equally important and more difficult to name about the ways in which a carceral logic itself is embedded within Israeli society. A society that openly rapes, that openly starves and legislates the execution of a captive people is a genocidal society. And the majority of Israeli society has supported this genocide. The society is now openly enabling the expanded colonization not only of the occupied West Bank but of southern Lebanon. This is not an aberration. It is the political and moral expression of a colonial project that has required for its own reproduction the dehumanization of Palestinians as its foundational condition. And it has had transformative effects on that society itself.  

What I find myself thinking about sometimes, and I raise this more as a provocation than a conclusion, is what we might call a carceral captivity of a different order: the captivity of the colonizer within the ideological infrastructure of settler colonialism. Zionists in Israel and across the globe are held within a particular kind of captivity, a captivity that is tethered to white supremacist Enlightenment-era civilizational beliefs that have fundamentally disfigured their own humanity. The prison that Zionism has built for Palestinians has also built something in its architects and beneficiaries, an incapacity for the recognition of Palestinian life, a sort of stunted moral world, a self that can only be constituted through the negation of an other. Our preeminent decolonial scholars, like Frantz Fanon, always understood this. He understood that the violence of colonialism damages the colonizer, deforms their subjectivity, forecloses their own liberation. How do we abolish that? How do we dismantle not just the wall, the checkpoint, the detention camp—but how do we abolish the civilizational formation that makes these structures feel, to those who built them, not only acceptable but righteous in this moment? That, I think, is one of the deeper abolitionist questions that Palestine forces onto the table. And I don’t think we can answer it without confronting the global architecture of white supremacy and anti-Palestinian racism. 

ZM: So now we have another form of reproduction on the table. We have a multiplicity of forms of reproduction in our conversation. We have the mode of reproduction in its most obvious material form, which is giving birth, right? We have reproduction in forms of violence and subordination. We have modes of reproduction that happen within a colonizing society in terms of effectively reproducing the sense of inferiority and supremacy.  

As you were speaking, I was thinking a little bit about—what do we mean by “carcerality”? And you had a couple of different ways of thinking about it that were useful. So one of the things you said was a system of confinement—a system of confinement of people but also confinement of the collective reproduction, again, of that people.  

Then, of course, it’s impossible for me as a lawyer not to think about this as a carcerality that is really imbricated through and in law. Over and over again, I think we see the need for getting away from logics of individual action and instead understanding these within structures, and part of that structure is, of course, that this was an occupation that was architected by lawyers. It is a set of military court systems. It is a set of prisons. Understanding that these are legalized modes of dispossession, displacement, destruction, and death that are happening. Sometimes it happens, you know, in the outskirts of the law, or in violation, but all too often it’s happening very directly through those legalized structures. It’s a little bit my own preoccupation and bias, but I do think it’s an important piece of why carcerality is a useful concept. That seems to me to be inextricable from also understanding these as legal logics. 

SI: I wonder if I could ask you a question: Given the ways that the genocide has exposed the failure of the international and legal-political order of our time, what do we do with that? What should we be organizing toward, as feminists? 

ZM: I would say a couple of things. One is effectively what I was gesturing at, which is that there is often a sense that law solves problems, but we have to always keep an eye on the ways in which law creates and constitutes the problem. 

That doesn’t mean, I think, that we dismiss all of these ways of thinking or tools. We should separate them out and understand them in a bunch of different ways. The most obvious one is international criminal law, which I’ve been quite critical of, along with many other folks in my field. Palestine has presented a really evident moment for that in the last few years because there was a strong push for indictments to happen at the International Criminal Court. And they went forward with that and it made a lot of news. And it has, for many people, this feeling of, “Finally, there’s something happening.” And of course it has an expressive function, of saying, “this is wrong”—about war crimes and crimes against humanity, for example. But actually, I would say indictments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant of Israeli leadership are actually a perfect example of the limitations of that mode as an answer. So it is a form of justice, if you will, that is individualized. It’s quite anemic in what it can accomplish. It is, of course, slow and expensive, but more importantly, it’s often a displacement of attention and resources from all of the broader structures you’ve been so eloquently describing into this very narrow thinking about these kinds of agendas, types of violence, and methods of change. And it’s punitive, so it also builds us back into the same modes that we’re talking about trying to escape, certainly as feminists. 

For me, a lot of this has to do with listening, right? So actually, actively, what does it mean to listen to people? Lawyers think through law. Everything looks like a nail if you’re holding a hammer, which is why I think these kinds of conversations are so generative, because the way you’re coming to these questions with who you are and how you’re trained and where you’re coming from is incredibly compelling and important and makes me think about how we can  be in this moment of urgency, of this latest form of genocide, of destruction of the conditions of life, of infrastructure, displacement and death and destruction in the West Bank and Gaza and Southern Lebanon—but also try to have a more capacious and expansive set of thoughts about justice.  

And maybe I’ll use that to come back to something in your work that I was really quite taken with and inspired by, which is that you have an attention to futurity and the future that is really hard to hold on to right now. I am interested to hear about it from you. I will say, in my own work, in the world of transitional justice and truth commissions, we’re very past-focused. It’s something that I’ve actively been trying to think about in my own work—how we can be a little bit more future-oriented, use these histories and memories to propel us, to keep us thinking about the future in these different ways. That’s what a focus on love, on care, on queer politics, on reproduction can do in certain ways. It’s extremely hard, right? And the ways in which you’ve talked about forced starvation, how that’s part of the colonial project, the prevention of births, all the kinds of destruction we’re talking about. How, in terms of feminism, in terms of liberation–how are you keeping an eye toward this? How do you make your way through these thickets of destruction to just keep–not in a romanticized way, but in the mode of active resistance that you are putting forward in your work? How can you help us think through that? How can you help me think through that?  

SI: I think it is both incredibly important to hold on to the temporality of future in this moment, and also incredibly challenging. Because part of that has to do with being committed to the refusal of our own despair in a moment when the entire global political, social, cultural, economic order is committed to our collective annihilation as a people. And yet, I find myself listening deeply to the seeds of future making, of worlding that are always inherent in the present—in the stories, in the memories, in the embodied testimonies of survivors. And that has really been my intellectual, moral, ethical compass in this moment.  

Living through going on three years of escalated genocide is teaching me about my own commitments as a feminist scholar. The past orientation of so much critical scholarship has always been essential to Palestine studies, of course, because our Nakba has been ongoing for nearly a hundred years. Memory, archive, testimony: the formation of our critical intellectual traditions has always been a central imperative in our liberation movement because we understand that in order for future generations to carry forward our lineage, we have to be deeply connected to the memory of our ancestors, to their ways of life, to their incredibly capacious ways of being in the world in relation to other communities that has really been a central aspect of who we are as a people.  

And Palestinian feminist practice, I think, has always been simultaneously oriented toward the future. What the “reproductive genocide” framework allows me and I think other feminists to say with a new force in this moment is that this future orientation is itself a site of colonial violence and decolonial struggle, that we continue to contest, that we continue to refuse to give up on.4 So our feminist praxis inherently refuses this futurelessness. It insists that even in the face of genocide, even in the face of mass starvation, we carry forward the memory, the lineage, the struggle of our stories, of our people’s lives, that we continue to fight for the future that is within the present.  

In a recent piece, I wrote about a young woman named Shema, who is still surviving the genocide in Gaza today. At the time that I started writing this piece and being in conversation with her, she was pregnant with her son Youssef, who is, I believe, nearly a year old now. But part of how I have been contending with thinking about future is thinking alongside stories like that of Shema. In the piece that I wrote about her and her family, I begin with a letter that she wrote to her son before he was born, where she speaks to the challenges that she’s faced in carrying him, in surviving mass starvation, and in the face of not having a stable home space to bring him into. In all of the ways that I’ve been trying to theorize across my work, she’s enacting all these things in everyday life: The insistence on Palestinian presence as the very ground of our liberation. She and her now-husband chose to affirm life and future. Marrying even though their wedding was canceled due to the beginning of the bombings; protecting their love under siege. Her refusal to surrender the future is not something that’s sentimental. It’s an active form of embodied resistant subjectivity.  

Her story testifies to this intergenerational labor of Palestinian survival, which is a genealogy of the everyday struggle of Palestinian women to defend their reproductive capacities, not only biologically, but also socially and politically. That is the horizon in which I understand this demand to think with future, the demand to make the connection between the intimate and the structural absolutely explicit. Because feminists of color, Black, Indigenous, women-of-color feminists have theorized these things for a really long time: how the destruction of reproductive life is always central to broader racialized projects of eliminatory violence. They’re intellectual genealogies that allow us to understand the Palestinian womb, for example, not as a metaphor but as a literal site of colonial contestation and future-making of decolonial possibility. So, within this framework, I think the past is not behind us. It is carried in the body, of course, in the intergenerational memory. And the future is not ahead of us in some abstract sense. It is being made right now in the most material and intimate conditions. That is what I think a sense of Palestinian feminist future-making means to me. It’s not an aspiration beyond the present. It is a practice that is embedded within the present.  

ZM: I find it so interesting how antilinear, on some level, that thinking is. Which of course, many Indigenous literatures and other forms of literature have drawn our attention to the ways in which the linearity of past, present, and future is both inaccurate, just in the ways in which we all exist in the world, and harmful when thinking about the realities of life under violence, life in a subordinated position. It’s interwoven: the future is resistance and also resistance is building that future. 

I think methodologically you’re pointing to that, as well, and I would venture to say it is in part the ethnographic and anthropological disciplinary idea, which is the intimate and the structural being drawn together, which in its best forms can allow us to move back and forth from the very specific granular life of a woman under siege and the ways in which that is an embodiment of these larger stories, histories, and structures. Feminist studies, and queer theory as well, is a big site of that resistance to these modes of temporality that keep us in this  linear pathway.  

As we move toward the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask about how you’re thinking about different forms and formations of solidarity. It’s really an open question in the sense that on the one hand, there is this very specific set of dynamics that we’ve been in since October 2023. Those are dynamics both about genocidal violence and displacement but also, global solidarities and increased institutional repression of pro-Palestinian speech 

You’re obviously someone who’s working in solidarity with a multitude of communities, coming from a multitude of communities, so I wonder if you could speak to us a bit about as a Palestinian feminist working on Palestine as an anthropologist, as someone living in the United States, how are you thinking today about solidarity, about community, and about how things have shifted and changed in the last few years and how they haven’t?  

SI: Thank you so much. That is a really important question. You’re right to name that there has been a massive global shift over the past three years. There’s been a mass shift in relation to not only people’s understanding and consciousness but also the moral and ethical and political sensibilities that produces or does not produce. And what that means about who we are as human beings, as members of a broader global community. Shireen Seikaly, who’s one of our most prolific feminist historians in the space of Palestine studies talks about Palestine being a paradigm—basically that Palestine is not just a geographic space but a paradigm for understanding the enduring power of colonial relations in the world today and also for understanding the possibility for its undoing, right?  

Part of what I find myself holding as a Palestinian feminist scholar based in the United States, of course, is a particular grief, but it’s also a particular form of diasporic feminist consciousness, if you can call it that. I am documenting a genocide in real time while operating within an institution and within a political order that is materially enabling that genocide, and that is increasingly hostile to the very act of naming it. The severe censorship currently faced by Palestinian scholars in the US academy (and any scholars who align themselves with Palestinians in this moment) does not silence. It creates an imperative to write differently, to think in refusal, to insist on modes of engagement that the institution cannot fully contain. What we are witnessing in part is that this repression has intensified and generalized. Palestine has become, as many people have been saying for years now, the test case for a broader project of disciplining dissent and policing the boundaries of who belongs, of who can speak, and of what counts as speakable.  

There’s something here, too, that lives at the level of the body, of embodiment as feminist praxis, as the daily labor of refusal. I encounter it in the testimonies of women that I think with, that I’ve been fortunate to listen to. I encounter it differently within myself as a Palestinian woman in the far diaspora. The despair, the real and recurring sense of defeat, watching from afar, organizing from afar, and refusing nonetheless to be defeated. This is not a heroic refusal. I don’t mean to say that. It is ordinary, right? It is a daily practice that we continue to commit ourselves to. We do not have the luxury of feeling a sense of defeat. And I wrote recently  that I refuse to be a passive documentarian as an anthropologist of my people’s annihilation. Instead, I choose to be a witness to the triumph of Palestinian intergenerational survival. And I think this is also my response to the pressures of the US institutional context, to continue to insist on the epistemological authority of Palestinian women’s testimony. To treat their words not as data that needs to be processed, not as raw material for scholarly production, but as analysis, as theory, as political intervention in their own right. This is something that’s really important to me. And that brings me to a question that I cannot let go of, one that I feel with particular urgency given our moment and our field: in the context of a global political order that sustains a Zionist state, that is invested in the erasure of Palestinian voices and memory and scholarship, how do we practice feminist solidarity without transforming survivors into objects of sympathy or into representations that quietly serve our own professional institutional legitimacy? It’s a painful question to contend with, but we have to keep holding ourselves to account. How does the academy, how does feminist studies hold itself accountable to these broad conceptualizations of justice? Rather than to the more comfortable labor of bearing witness from a safe, critical distance? These are not rhetorical questions. I think they’re the ethical grounds on which our work either stands or falls. And in that sense, right, this is a horizon, and this is a moment that is a critical moment for the future of our field.   

ZM: I could not agree more. As a human rights scholar, it really resonates because the project of human rights for so long has had this endemic issue of reproducing people only as victims. It’s the very projects we do, with the hope of doing good, that we often have to take a step back from and think about very critically and in ways that are incredibly difficult, in fact—what we are foregrounding and who we are backgrounding and who we are engaging with as partners and when people are being, represented rather than actually effectively having their own voice.  

The work that goes in not only to doing the work but also then reflecting on the work all the time is incredibly difficult. I think it has been something that in Palestine studies has been so important, for people to just take a moment and understand just how egregiously hard it is to do this work right now.  

SI: Thank you. I think this has been an incredible conversation and I just appreciate the intentionality of your questions, the thoughtfulness, and the space to think together.  

ZM: Thank you. Me too. All of your work has been so generative. I really want to thank Signs for bringing us together in this conversation because it was really important, I think, and has done a lot for my own thinking. And I’m just really glad to be in conversation. So thank you for taking the time and for thinking through all of these complex questions and for your incredible work.  

SI: The feeling is mutual. Thank you.  

Notes
1. This is a gesture towards not only Zionist but also British colonial occupation.

2. According to a 2017 report by Palestinian human rights organization Addameer, approximately 40 percent of Palestinian men and boys in the occupied territories have been arrested or detained by Israel at some point in their lives. 

3. See “Torture and Genocide”, a report by the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, March 23, 2026, United Nations General Assembly.