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Ain’t I a Woman?

Ain’t I a Woman?

Published  November 7, 2023 

 

By Jon Jeter

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A recent national poll found that two-thirds of Americans support Israel in their war against Hamas. That one white settler project–founded on ethnic cleansing–would support another white settler project–founded on ethnic cleansing– is hardly surprising.

But a few things stand out in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. First there are sizable age and racial gaps. Less than half, 48 percent, of Generation Z and millennials told pollsters that the U.S. should publicly support Israel, compared to 63 percent of their parents generation, or Generation X, and a whopping 83 percent of baby boomers.

Concomittantly, 51 percent of nonwhites said the U.S. should publicly side with Israel, while 72 percent of whites thought so. The gap did not break out specific racial groups but if it had, I would imagine the gap between African Americans and whites would have been far wider.

But what truly floored me was that the poll found that the group most critical of Israel’s retaliation to Hamas’ October 7th offensive was Democratic men, as in not women.

The conventional wisdom among both white and Black American has always fetishized white women as kinder, fairer, and less hateful than white men. But what if white women are every bit as bloodthirsty as white men?

Scores of women in Hollywood endorsed an open letter denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization while making no reference to Israel’s illegal occupation that human rights groups describe as an apartheid state. Signatories included Debra Messing, Mayim Bialik, Gail Gadot, Sharon Osborne, Jamie Leigh Curtis and the comedian Amy Schumer, who recently shared a video clip on social media of Martin Luther King Jr. denouncing antisemitism and defending Israel‘s right to exist.

King’s youngest child, Bernice King, responded thusly on Twitter or X or whatever we’re calling it these days.

Certainly, my father was against antisemitism, as am I. He also believed militarism (along with racism and poverty) to be among the interconnected Triple Evils.”

I am certain he would call for Israel’s bombing of Palestinians to cease, for hostages to be released and for us to work for true peace, which includes justice. He said: ‘Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.’

Concluding Bernice King wrote:

We have much to correct.

King’s diplomatic reproach of Schumer underscores the yawning gap between white women’s bourgeois feminism and Black women’s transnational feminism, which advocates for a broader swath of humanity.

This is Kim Kardishian voicing her support for Israel on social media:

 I love you. I support you. I have heard about how scared you feel during this time, and I want you to know you are not alone in this.

Now imagine that you are a Palestinian woman who has lost her family’s home to Zionist settlers, who has lived her entire life under Israeli occupation enduring checkpoints that are meant to humiliate and degrade you; who has lost her child, or her husband or her father or her entire family to Israeli bombs, or who is hungry and thirsty because of Israel’s blockade, and who must hear your oppressor describe you as a human animal.

Might that Palestinian woman be justified in asking of Kardashian, and Schumer and all the liberal white women who claim to champion feminism, the very same question that Sojourner Truth asked of white women suffragists more than a century ago when their plans to procure the ballot did not include African American women:

Ain’t I a Woman?

 

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