For Palestinian women, Gloria Steinem's feminism is anything but

Women leaders and cultural icons are held to an impossibly harsh standard, scrutinised for every statement they make, every alliance they’ve ever had, every cause they have embraced, in ways that men are not and never will be. So I am reluctant as I criticise Gloria Steinem, out of concern that what I write might provide fodder for misogynist haters. Nevertheless, I cannot join the crowds that are celebrating her as if she could do, and has done, no wrong.

My criticism of Steinem, whom I have called a “faux feminist” in many of my essays, is grounded in my analysis of her harmful politics. And of course I understand, even assume, that many of us have made mistakes in our youth, and will continue to do so in our old age. I’m also aware that some of my criticism of Steinem dates back to her youth. Nevertheless, recent statements she made before her death suggest she still held the same deeply problematic views.

Faux Feminism, as I explain in Palestine and Feminist Liberation, is a colonial, imperialist ideology that seeks a bigger piece of the pie, without questioning the toxic ingredients of that pie. Genuine feminism wants an altogether different pie, made from healthy ingredients. For decades, I have argued that women knocking down doors or breaking the glass ceiling to enter a violent masculinist space does not qualify as a feminist achievement, and only superficially changes that space. Lipstick on a pig.

Women joining the army do not make it a less murderous force; Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris becoming president of the world’s uber imperial power would not have stopped hypermilitarism, genocide in Gaza, or the disproportionate incarceration of people of colour in the US.

Feminism must be nuanced: the change we need is not women attaining the “equal right” to do what men do. What we need is to stop the harm racism, misogyny, and heteropatriarchy inflict on the world.

So while I do appreciate some of Steinem’s essays, like ‘If Men Could Menstruate,’ and ‘A Bunny’s Tale,’ her expose of the Playboy Bunny exploitation of young girls, and am immensely grateful for every woman, including Steinem, who demanded that we have bodily control and legal abortion, as well as financial autonomy, I also strongly resent her having worked for the CIA, her ardent Zionism, and her lifelong Orientalist views of Arab and Muslim women.  

Let me explain.

Steinem worked for the CIA from 1958 to 1962, heading the “Independent Research Service,” a fully CIA-funded front agency for spying on young activists with Socialist leanings, by sending undercover agents to infiltrate their activities on campuses and at youth festivals. Put bluntly, she was a defender of capitalism, which was her comfort zone.

Indeed, even her fans acknowledge that Steinem’s brand of feminism is deficient in class analysis. Some years later, when asked about her work with the CIA, she did not try to distance herself from it, blaming it on youthful naivete. Instead, she stated that the agency is an “honourable, enlightened, liberal” organisation.

I guess Steinem considers coups, military interventions, political assassinations, human rights violations, and torture to be honourable practices.

Yes, this was in her youth, but bear with me as I trace a pattern.

In 1975, in a major victory for Third World countries who had always understood the reality of Israel, the United Nations overwhelmingly passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Naturally, the resolution met opposition from Israel, the US, and many European countries, and there was a global effort to rescind it, with Gloria Steinem signing a letter decrying it and asserting that “human rights are indivisible.”

"As women committed to the worldwide struggle for human rights and equality," it is "our unanimous conviction that all human rights are indivisible. We are appalled at the ‘racist’ label applied solely to the national self-determination movement of the Jewish people. We decry this implicit denial of Israeli statehood and this incitement to world wide anti-Semitism," her letter reads.

But to assert that human rights are indivisible, while defending Zionism, which dispossesses Palestinians, is to deny the very humanity of the Palestinian people.

Between 1975 and the present, millions of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, have renounced the Zionism they had once espoused. They had been Zionists either because they had specifically been brought up with that ideology by their parents, or because it was the dominant discourse they had not yet sufficiently questioned. But as they developed their own critical thinking, they shrugged off Zionism.

Not Steinem. In late 2023, she was the lead signatory of a statement denouncing the alleged “systematic Hamas rapes” of Israeli women and girls on October 7, which opened with: “As women’s rights activists and leaders, we stand for the right of every woman and girl, of every nationality, religion, and community, to live free of all forms of violence, including rape and sexual assault.”

Not only do these allegations remain unsubstantiated to this day, with many of the specific claims having been debunked, but Steinem never said anything about the meticulously detailed reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, all documenting sexual torture by Israeli security forces of Palestinian men, women, and children.

Palestinians had been documenting and denouncing these abuses for decades, and the Palestinian Feminist Collective recently published A Predatory State, their latest, damning 200-page report on Israel’s longstanding pattern of sexual violence against Palestinians. Yet Orientalism is such that only reports by non-Palestinians are considered reliable.

Amnesty International’s report states: “Palestinian women in Gaza have been subjected to a range of gendered forms of bodily and mental harm, including reproductive and other gender-based violence.” The Human Rights Report, appropriately titled More than a human can bear, states: “There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.”

B’tselem’s report, Welcome to Hell: the Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps, similarly details the pervasiveness of sexual violence and rape of Palestinians by Israeli security forces in Israeli prisons.

There was not a peep from Steinem, despite her earlier assertion that human rights are indivisible.

The pattern of Steinem’s outrage at criticism of Israel, and her utter silence about the oppression of Palestinians, reveals both Zionism and its accompanying worldview, Orientalism.

And ultimately, today, where one stands on Zionism is a political litmus test. Ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse when the genocide of the Palestinian people, perpetrated by Zionists, is livestreamed. Whereas for decades, one could be a Zionist by default, simply because that was the dominant discourse, today, with the widespread availability of evidence of Israel’s savagery, one can only be an ideological Zionist, a committed one, not a “default Zionist.”

Steinem was an ideological Zionist. So if we agree that Zionism is racist, and we know that Steinem was a Zionist, what does that make her? A “flawed feminist,” I am told, with the expectation that I should understand, should not “cancel” her just because of that flaw. We can’t be purists; we must build bridges, I am told, to fight the fascists…

But enough. It is not lost on Palestinians that the one “flaw” we are consistently asked to overlook is the powerful ideology that calls for our eradication.

Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington University, and author of Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.

Follow Nada on X: @nadaelia48 (https://twitter.com/nadaelia48)

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