During Israel’s ongoing genocide, in less than two years, more than 28,000 Palestinian women have been killed and every woman in Gaza has been displaced, writes Tamam Abusalama. [GETTY]
Days before International Women’s Day, the European Commission presented a new Gender Equality Strategy 2026-2030. Its language, filled with ‘intersectionality’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘gender mainstreaming’, projects an ambitious vision. It promises progress, yet it deliberately omits the EU’s complicity in Israel’s assault on Palestinian women.
The strategy builds on five familiar priorities: ending gender-based violence; challenging stereotypes; closing gender gaps in pay, employment, pensions, and care; and advancing women’s leadership.
New elements respond to threats such as online abuse, deepfakes, and cyberviolence, while demanding stronger engagement of men and boys as allies. The Commission also plans to collaborate with the World Health Organization (WHO) on women’s health, referencing global crises from “armed conflicts” to “geopolitical fragmentation.”
The strategy promises to safeguard sexual and reproductive rights in emergencies and to launch an EU Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security focused not only on protection of women but also prevention of structural causes of violence. The strategy notes that gender equality will remain a ‘pillar’ of the EU’s external and trade policy.
But that promise rings hollow. The document is silent on how EU external policies themselves sustain systematic violations against women – from those on the move forced to make deadly journeys to seek asylum in Europe, to Palestinian women resisting and surviving occupation.
White feminism
Without confronting these contradictions, every promise will remain empty.
During Israel’s ongoing genocide, in less than two years, more than 28,000 Palestinian women have been killed and every woman in Gaza has been displaced. Their families have been targeted, their homes and workplaces turned to rubble, and hospitals deliberately bombed, leaving women without basic care amid siege and starvation.
Even on International Women’s Day, Israel marked the occasion by killing two Palestinian women and one little Palestinian girl. Yet the European Commission President tweeted that she ‘pays tribute to girls and women everywhere who continue to fight oppression with relentless strength and unbreakable courage.’ She conveniently obscures the EU’s role in funding and sustaining violence against women including in Palestine through its association agreement with Israel.
Across the West Bank, Jerusalem, the 1948 territories, and refugee camps, Palestinian women confront overlapping layers of colonial oppression that dictate every aspect of their lives.
This violence is neither new nor random. It stems from Israel’s colonial logic of domination and erasure, driven by the demographic obsession that views Palestinian women as a threat to be contained and as bodies to be controlled.
For decades, Western and Israeli institutions have upheld this framework, portraying Palestinian women either as “mothers of terrorists” or helpless victims awaiting rescue, stripping them of agency to fit racist and imperial narratives.
In this context, the silence of the Gender Equality Strategy on Palestinian women is no coincidence. For decades, the EU has ignored the gendered dimensions of colonial violence, including the tools of Israel’s settler‑colonial regime. Even as Brussels continues to proclaim gender equality as a pillar of its foreign policy, it maintains its Association Agreement with Israel, granting it preferential trade access despite the inclusion of an explicit condition that such ties depend on respect for human rights and democratic principles.
Those principles have been soaked in the bloodshed of thousands of Palestinian women and their loved ones. Yet trade between the EU and the genocidal state of Israel persists, reaching €42.6 billion in 2024.
The hypocrisy and complicity run deeper within Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship research programme. Between 2021 and 2024, Israel received roughly €1.1 billion in grants, much of it benefiting institutions tied to Israel’s military-industrial complex. These funds contribute to technologies used in surveillance, population control, and warfare.
These systems directly oppress Palestinian women, families, and communities, all under the guise of “scientific cooperation”.
Indeed, the EU’s support for militarised technology is anything but gender‑neutral.
By sustaining Israel’s war machinery, European institutions and member states empower the very forces that destroy women’s lives. Between May and September 2024 alone, over 1,000 US arms consignments, totalling more than 13,000 tonnes, passed through Spain’s Algeciras port bound for Israel’s Ministry of Defence.
In Belgium, the port of Antwerp handled tank components and weapons until a court-imposed arms embargo in July 2025.
The contradiction will again be on display on this week, at the Brussels European Defence Exhibition and Conference (BEDEX), backed by the European Commission, the European Defence Agency, and defence ministries. Among the sponsors: Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms manufacturer and a company named in UN reports for complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Its F-16 and F-35 jets are the very aircraft raining bombs on Palestinian women, men and children.
Women’s rights should mean ending EU complicity
The EU cannot credibly claim to defend women’s rights while enabling the genocide and ethnic cleansing of a people, and of the women, who hold their society together and continue its fight for dignity and rights. If the Union is truly committed to gender equality, it must act with consistency: suspend the EU–Israel Association Agreement, end Israel’s participation in Horizon Europe, and uphold its own values and obligations under international law.
Feminist movements, organisations, institutions, and political parties across Europe must understand what Palestinian women have said for decades: Palestinian women’s rights are inseparable from the broader struggle for liberation and dignity.
No one can credibly champion gender equality while excusing, concealing, or funding atrocities. Feminism that fails to name, shame, and hold perpetrators accountable is not progress; it is mere propaganda.
Overlooking the gendered colonial violence inflicted on colonized women, including those in Palestine, is not feminism; it is supremacy.
Framing Palestinian women’s plight solely through humanitarianism offers no solution; it is depoliticization that entrenches their oppression. And speaking of their suffering while justifying the slaughter of their partners, children, and brothers is not empowerment. It is colonialism.
Tamam Abusalama is a Palestinian-Belgian communications professional, born and raised in the Jabalia Refugee Camp. She is currently leading the strategy for the European Citizens’ Initiative Justice for Palestine, which calls for the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
Follow her on Twitter/X: @TamamBeitJirja
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
