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Abstract

This piece introduces a critical framework for understanding how feminism — particularly Western and settler-colonial feminisms — operates as both a site of solidarity and a mechanism of domination in relation to Palestinian women. Delivered at the inaugural Palestinian Feminist Conference at the University of Toronto (Oct. 10, 2025), the address examines how Palestinian feminist scholars and activists center epistemic resistance and collective feminist self-determination. Through the notion of Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism (Gendered APR), the work extends analyses of Orientalist and imperial feminisms to describe a trinity of how Palestinian women are simultaneously hyper-visible — as dangerous mothers and divisive/disruptive feminists; patriarchally oppressed victims, bound by their passivity; and finally as non-existent (through the Anti-Palestinian Racisms’ turn to erasure — that is — they are erased as Palestinians and as women entirely). The address situates this triality within longer genealogies of colonial feminisms, tracing continuities between British “maternalist” projects in Palestine and contemporary white feminist interventions in activist spaces, such as university encampments. By recounting instances where “colonial solidarities” reproduce power hierarchies under the guise of allyship, these remarks expose how feminist institutions sustain epistemic injustice and active ignorance toward Palestinian life-worlds. The conference, therefore, through its focus on Palestinian women’s feminist theorizations, functioned as a praxis of epistemic intervention—a reclamation of Palestinian feminist voice, pedagogy, and interconnection—as well as a site of refusal against co-optation and fragmentation. Ultimately, this address asserts that to love Palestine without Palestinians is a colonial gesture.

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