Israel protects women's rights, while Palestinian society oppresses women.

Without the right to live in freedom and dignity, women's rights cannot be meaningfully realized. Palestinian women live under the same settler-colonial regime of occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing, bombardment, arbitrary detention, torture, rape, and sexual violence as every other Palestinian. This systemic colonial violence disproportionately harms women. Israel also exploits and reinforces existing patriarchy as another mechanism of colonial control. No meaningful discussion of women's rights can begin without dismantling the colonial structure first.

Far from protecting Palestinian women, Israel has repeatedly weaponized their sexuality and exploited patriarchy through intimidation, blackmail, and threats. A 200-page report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective documents Israeli sexual violence since the Nakba of 1948, including rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, threats of rape, coercion, blackmail, and attacks on reproductive health across detention centers, military raids, checkpoints, and prisons. The report concludes that these abuses are not isolated acts but part of a broader settler-colonial system that weaponizes gender and sexuality to dominate Palestinian society. This conclusion is reinforced by Israel's inclusion on the UN blacklist of governments responsible for conflict-related sexual violence in 2026.

Colonial violence does not only destroy bodies and land. It also reshapes the social and psychological conditions of the colonized society. Decades of colonization and occupation have heightened women's exposure to gender-based violence by destroying homes, livelihoods, healthcare, social institutions, and family and community support systems. Israel's genocide in Gaza has left tens of thousands of women widowed, displaced, or solely responsible for caring for families without adequate shelter, healthcare, food, or sanitation. Colonial violence entrenches the conditions that make gender inequality harder to challenge.

Palestinian society is not monolithic. Like every society, it has gender inequalities. Yet Palestinian women have never been passive in confronting either gender inequality or the colonial structures that deepen it. As early as 1893, they founded charitable societies, organized protests, convened the first Palestine Arab Women's Congress in 1929, established the Arab Women's Executive, and played a central role in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt. Since then, they have remained at the forefront of political organizing, feminist movements, legal advocacy, labor organizing, and community relief. Palestinian feminists insist that dismantling structural colonial oppression is a prerequisite to ending patriarchy.

European empires routinely portrayed themselves as civilized "liberators" rescuing Indigenous women from supposedly violent, backward, and patriarchal societies while occupying their lands, ethnically cleansing them, and relying on sexual violence to displace, destroy social cohesion, and weaken resistance. Israel draws on the same colonial script. Invoking women's rights serves two purposes: to deflect attention from its settler colonialism and to undermine women's political agency in the collective struggle for liberation. Mainstream liberal feminism reproduces this colonial narrative by treating colonized women as victims of their own culture while ignoring the structural gendered and sexual violence inherent in colonial domination.

Even if this claim were true, it would not justify military occupation, apartheid, siege, genocide, or the denial of an entire people's right to self-determination. Many societies continue to struggle with gender inequality and violence against women. None of that grants another state the right to colonize, bomb, or dispossess another people.