Values.

 "Palestinian women are seen as not sharing the sort of values that are called upon to come to their rescue. The fact that Gaza voted for Hamas 18 years ago has been deployed to prove that there is collective responsibility for the group’s actions on 7 October and that there are no innocents. In another impulse, the entire value system in Gaza is brought into question by raising features such as the lack of LGBTQ+ rights. In addition to reports of sexual violence during Hamas’s attack, these are seen as factors that should void sympathy for those in Gaza and render them suspect and aligned with Hamas, with Israel as the party that shares liberal progressive values. A New York Times letter responding to some US Ivy League students’ blaming of Israel for the Hamas attack captured this collapse. Didn’t 'Hamas’s many followers at Harvard and Columbia,' the letter asked, 'realise that Hamas brutally persecutes the LGBTQ community in Gaza, subjugates women, and tortures and summarily executes dissidents?' The argument may as well simply say: they are not like us, and they started it.

It is an argument that is a race to the bottom of humanity, giving licence to smear a whole population with the crimes of its worst, and abdicate the responsibility to think critically and empathetically about cultures and politics shaped by years of occupation, crisis and siege. In the US, a voter on the news programme Face the Nation said she was concerned about her reproductive rights, but that it would be 'hypocritical' to use those concerns to justify voting for Joe Biden when he is supporting strikes and blockades on a population that have led to calamitous maternal experiences and outcomes. That sort of clarity feels like a lot to ask at the moment, among competing influences of parochialism, tribalism and propaganda. But the details coming out of Gaza are so graphic, so relentless, that now may be the time to think about what progressive values, feminist or otherwise, really mean if they stop at the threshold of what is familiar."

~ Nesrine Malik

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/05/gaza-war-women-west-mothers-babies-medical