Greater than the sum of our parts
Nada Elia, Greater than the sum of our parts
Nada Elia’s book approaches the Palestinian question from a distinctly decolonial and feminist perspective, grounded in the understanding that colonialism always has gendered effects. By examining the differences between Israeli apartheid and South African apartheid, while exploring parallels with settler colonialism in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, the author focuses above all on global alliances and interconnected struggles among oppressed peoples around the world.
Review by Claudia Mazzilli
Nada Elia, the daughter of two Palestinians who fled their homeland in 1948, is a professor of Global and Gender Studies in the United States and an activist with the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She published the English edition of her book on Palestine in January 2023, ten months before October 7. The Italian edition “La Palestina è una questione femminista”, was published by Alegre in 2024. It stems from the conviction that the struggle against colonialism is always an anti-racist, environmental, and feminist struggle. Colonialism always affects people differently according to gender and is invariably sexually violent, especially toward women, children, and gender-nonconforming people. One example of the gendered trauma experienced by Palestinian women at the beginning of the Nakba is the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, which remains deeply rooted in Palestinian oral tradition and therefore in a fragile memory whenever it is not preserved in written form.
In the preface, sociologists Francesca Coin and Sara R. Ferris argue that feminist movements play a crucial role in challenging authoritarian regimes, from the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement led by Iranian women to the Kurdish women of the YPJ; from Black Lives Matter, born from the intersectional struggle of Black lesbian women, to Argentina’s “Ni Una Menos” movement and the International Women’s Strike, as well as the recent Italian demonstrations on November 25 against male violence toward women.
Nada Elia examines the Palestinian question through a thoroughly decolonial lens that goes beyond the “two peoples, two states” solution because it challenges the very concept of the nation-state, which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and permeated the Zionist project even before the Holocaust. The author demonstrates this through an analysis of the writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky, among others, the leading figure of Revisionist Zionism in the 1920s.
Elia highlights the differences between Israeli apartheid and South African apartheid while exploring the similarities between Israel and settler-colonial projects on Turtle Island (the term preferred in the book for North America), in Australia, and in New Zealand. Tracing Palestinian history from ancient times to the present, with particular attention to the period from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate and the First and Second Intifadas, Elia argues that Israel has clearly surpassed the threshold of what can be defined as apartheid under Article 2 of the 1976 International Convention on apartheid and later under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Israeli apartheid, denounced by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, is presented as a consequence of settler colonialism. According to the author, these are two complementary systems of oppression: settler colonialism operates through land dispossession and ethnic cleansing, while apartheid provides the legal infrastructure that guarantees privileges for Israelis and militarily enforces the denial of Palestinians’ rights.
Israel, she notes, still lacks a formal constitution, whose drafting has been repeatedly postponed since 1950, relying instead on a set of Basic Laws. Through a crucial distinction between Israeli citizenship—which can also be granted to Palestinians born within Israel’s 1948 borders—and Jewish, Arab, or Druze nationality, Israel maintains privileges exclusively for those of Jewish nationality while denying rights to those who are dehumanized. Within a patriarchal and highly militarized context, Israel has also sought to reduce its reliance on Palestinian labor by importing foreign workers whose living and working conditions are, according to the author, even worse than those endured by Palestinians (pp. 91–95).
Israel presents itself internationally as open, tolerant, and cosmopolitan through carefully crafted public relations campaigns. Elia devotes considerable attention to these forms of propaganda. Greenwashing refers to environmental initiatives that, for example, promote the planting of pine forests in terrain ill-suited to them, at the expense of native species such as olive trees. “Plant a tree in Israel,” after all, was a slogan launched by Theodor Herzl in 1901. Irrigating these forests, the author argues, diverts water resources from Palestinians, reinforcing what she describes as “water apartheid”: an Israeli is estimated to have access to around 300 liters of water per day, while a Palestinian has only about 20 liters—well below the 100 liters per day recommended by the World Health Organization.
Redwashing includes what Elia describes as revisionist indigenism, which exploits trends in healthy eating, vegetarianism, and veganism by marketing traditional Palestinian dishes as Israeli cuisine, thereby undermining Palestinian food sovereignty. She compares this process to the transformation of Indigenous American diets after colonization, which contributed to increased rates of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.
Pinkwashing and “gay friendliness” concern LGBTQ+ rights. While an openly gay figure such as Hen Mazzig has served as an officer in the Israeli military, Elia argues that Palestinian LGBTQ+ individuals who have not come out are sometimes blackmailed through a practice known as isqat siyasi, whereby they are threatened with exposure to conservative family members unless they provide information or collaborate with Israeli security agencies. In this way, Israel presents itself internationally as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” while obscuring the work of numerous Palestinian LGBTQ+ organizations and promoting the image of a “liberal Israel” (which, according to the author, exists only within the Tel Aviv bubble) in contrast to a supposedly “homophobic Palestine.” This, she argues, alienates queer Palestinians from their communities and encourages a depoliticized gay identity aligned with Zionism while diminishing the anti-colonial struggle.
Settler colonialism dehumanizes a people in order to destroy and replace them. It demolishes villages, fills water wells with concrete, destroys farmland, rapes and kills malnourished Palestinian women, forbids them from giving birth at home while making Israeli hospitals nearly inaccessible through exhausting checkpoint procedures, thereby complicating childbirth, increasing miscarriages, and contributing to neonatal deaths. Yet Palestinian women continue to bear children. Where Israeli bulldozers destroy their homes, they create shelter in caves. They teach reading and writing where schools have been demolished. They devise desalination systems to use seawater. They preserve the seeds of their land in order to feed their families.
For Nada Elia, Zionism is incompatible with justice, disarmament, sustainability, feminism, and liberation. Above all, she emphasizes global alliances and interconnected, solidaristic struggles among oppressed peoples around the world.
“Black solidarity with Palestine has a long history and reached some of its highest expressions during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, Angela Y. Davis, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Muhammad Ali, among many others, declared their support for the Palestinian cause, alongside African leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah. More recently, Black-Palestinian solidarity has gained new momentum in response to the hyper-militarization of U.S. policing, due in no small part to joint training programs with Israeli security forces. A recent statement by The Red Nation begins with the assertion that ‘Palestine is the moral barometer of Indigenous North America.’” (p. 38)
Similarly, during the 1990s and 2000s, RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) and groups such as INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence supported—and continue to support—the liberation of Palestine by endorsing the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign. In doing so, they have marked a clear distance from what Elia describes as the white feminism embodied by Hillary Clinton, who frequently declared that women’s rights are human rights while “continuing to express admiration for Israel” (p. 112).
Tal’at (a collective founded in Palestine whose Arabic name means “to come out” in the feminine plural), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and the Palestinian Feminist Collective—all organizations rooted in Palestine and the diaspora—have forged alliances with Indigenous, Black, labor, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and queer movements while also criticizing what Elia calls the “deeply patriarchal” character of the Palestinian Authority (p. 138).
These movements have helped develop a transformative and intersectional feminist vision aimed at radical liberation, building upon the work of thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks. Such a vision reimagines citizenship, sovereignty, and belonging, moving beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and beyond postcolonial studies, which have largely focused on nationalist struggles for independence from traditional imperial powers such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This, Elia argues, demonstrates Palestine’s central place within settler-colonial studies, despite “the absence of Palestine from postcolonial studies, even though this discipline owes much of its existence to the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said” (p. 203).
Wherever struggles against colonialism and white supremacy exist, Indigenous peoples and queer communities raise Palestinian flags. Throughout the world. Among the many examples of this transnational solidarity, Elia repeatedly recounts one in particular: in 2016, when the first baby was born at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, her mother, Black Owl, wrapped her in a Palestinian keffiyeh and described the birth as an act of resistance against assimilation and the denial of Indigenous women’s reproductive rights. Because, Elia concludes, the only sustainable future is Indigenous.
For further information:
https://www.lunadigas.com/riflessioni/ricette-di-palestina-il-cibo-narrato-dai-territori-occupati/
https://www.lunadigas.com/riflessioni/riscrivere-lidentita-la-spiritualita-la-realta/
