How are Middle East and transnational feminist scholars and activist to respond when antiracist discourses in all their gendered dimensions are weaponized, fashioned to fit political agendas that are antithetical to liberation and peace? This paper explores the politically reactionary uses of the critiques of anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism in the context of colonial and national projects of rule spanning Turkey, Israel/Palestine, and the US. Here I think about the mobilizations of these discourses to justify rather than critique racial state violence and to silence rather than assist academic and social movement critiques of state violence. I emphasize how those reactionary forces that seek to censor and criminalize progressive critiques of state violence by falsely accusing them of being anti-Muslim or antisemitic are often the very same ones that seek to censor and criminalize feminist and LGBTIQ academic and activist voices. This does not only reveal the hypocrisy of their pseudo-progressive wielding of anti-racist discourses, but also reminds us that racialized state violence and heteropatriarchal violence are co-constitutive. In other words, retrieving our critical antiracist discourses from reactionary weaponization is crucial to Middle East and transnational feminist scholars. In a time of acute escalation of racist violence in Palestine and acute rise of authoritarian state violence in Turkey, and in a time of violent repression of dissenters in academia and beyond in Palestine/Israel, Turkey, United States, and beyond, my hope is that thinking together about different but connected forms of colonialist and nationalist violence and repression might help counter exceptionalism and decontextualization. Decontextualization and exceptionalism are primary mechanisms through which the weaponization of charges of antisemitism in the US and Palestine/Israel as well as the instrumentalization of charges of anti-Muslim racism in Turkey operate. In response, I call for analyzing pseudo-progressive appropriations of our critical discourses, whether it is critics of antisemitism or of anti-Muslim racism, in their historically and geographically situated relationships to power and in their entanglements with projects of rule and violence, including projects of racialized, gendered, and sexualized domination. Doing so, I hope, might help us move away from formulaic assignments of essentialized positions of being oppressed to monolithic categories of people such as “the Muslims” and “the Jews,” and reorient our solidarities with “the oppressed” as actively constituted social, historical, and political subjects.

The official dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh on January 1, 2024 reminds us that genocidal and ethnic cleansing campaigns are very real; the annihilation of existing political, social, and communal entities is very, very possible. The U.S. position in all of this was to "express concern" over 9 months of blockade in Nagorno-Karabakh during which the Lachin corridor was closed and no food, medicine, or other supplies could make it into the region. After a military assault on the region by Azerbaijan in September 2023, the U.S. decided to work with the Armenian government to provide aid for displaced persons, which essentially amounts to working to make an ethnic cleansing campaign somewhat smoother and less violent. Some Armenians in the U.S. have raised issue with the fact that while there are marches of thousands across the U.S. in support of Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of the Nagorno-Karabakh region was swift and with little to no attention. Through relationships built on what Ather Zia calls "affective solidarity," or a mode of solidarity that is inspirational and cathartic and lends itself to one's own movement (2020) - established on feeling, empathy, and aesthetic productions that are also sometimes co-produced - Armenian feminists have been clear that competition between oppressions does not lead to anyone's liberation. Zia, Ather. 2020. "'Their wounds are our wounds': a case for affective solidarity between Palestine and Kashmir." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power no 27(3): 357-375.

In early February, 2024, the French minister of Gender Equality criticized French feminist groups alleging that they were insufficiently critical of Hamas for the unverified claims of violence against Israeli women by Hamas during the October 7 attack. As Aurore Berge, the French minister stated. the government is scrutinizing the lack of response from feminist groups to what she considered the “thousands of women who were exterminated, murdered, burned or raped by Hamas.” Feminist groups must either accept this interpretation of what happened on October 7 or risk their funding. As feminist groups repeated over and over that they condemned all violence against women and legitimately wanted to consider the evidence in this instance, their protestations fell on deaf ears. Even when the extent and description of the violence held by those such as the French minister were demonstrably false, feminists still remained censored for any efforts to call into question the evidence, and more significantly, for expressing any kind of condemnation of the violence being visited on Palestinians. The same repression of speech is visited on anyone critical of Israel. One way to understand the mines buried in the geopolitical field in which feminists find ourselves today is to examine how race and gender are co-constituted in the question of Palestine, how, that is, that race is given content through gender and operates to produce situations where it is not possible to speak about the loss of Palestinian life. We can also ask: how is gender given content through race, making it possible to only imagine the existence of Israeli women and not Palestinian women? Finally, when we understand this co-constitution, what are the implications for solidarity?

Many Iranian women's rights activists in the diaspora who were mobilized in solidarity with the tragic death of Mahsa Amini in Iran are either standing with the Israeli's brutal genocide and the killing of masses of women in Gaza or staying utterly silenced. In this paper, I interrogate the convergence of feminism, militarism, and imperialism by arguing that a feminist imperialist discourse has increasingly taken to the global stage, supporting imperialist war, occupation, and intervention in the name of freedom and democracy. The selective solidarity of many Iranian women's rights activists and their public standing with the Israeli genocide urges an interrogation of the relationship between women and the empire. The woman's question has been part and parcel of the discourse of imperialism and Orientalism since colonial modernity. Yet, the current politics of solidarity have become militarized with the blurring of the boundaries between imperialism and feminism.

This paper centers the forms of transnational feminist kinship and care work that Palestinian women perform within and beyond the geographies of the Palestinian homeland through letter writing as an abolitionist feminist praxis of decolonial love. I begin by offering an overview of Zionist colonialism as a genocidal project that holds Palestinian bodies, socialities, intimacies, and subjectivities captive for eliminatory violence and removal. Grounded in the testimonies of Palestinian women surviving genocide in Gaza collected by Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies, and letters written in response by members of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a Turtle Island based movement organization, I examine the resuturing of feminist intimacies through love as a critical feminist consciousness and praxis that transcends colonial borders, boundaries and fragmentation of territories and people imposed by the Zionist regime. The letters to Gaza themselves as material archives, and the Palestinian sensorium they evoke labor in service of transforming grief into radical hope, a key catalyst for emancipatory struggle against colonial violence, marking possibilities for ecologies of life, and giving shape to an ethical transnational community of feminist praxes of resistance.