International Women’s Day is for the few, not the many

Every year on March 8th, the world is saturated with glossy promotional campaigns calling for us to "accelerate action" and "inspire inclusion." International Women's Day has become a carefully packaged, PR-friendly event, where corporate sponsors talk about empowerment, while the women most in need of solidarity and mutual support are left behind, isolated and helpless.

I can only hope that this year's call to "accelerate action" means taking action for all women, not just those who perfectly fit into corporate feminism, media-friendly activism, and elite success stories. However, if history is any guide, the only action that will be accelerated is the branding of feminism as a saleable commodity, while women suffering from war, occupation, and systemic violence face erasure.

Year after year, International Women's Day is promoted as a moment of global solidarity, but its priorities are carefully curated. Feminist institutions rally behind causes that are palatable, media-friendly, and politically convenient, where women's struggles can be framed as individual success stories rather than systemic injustices.

When Iranian women burned their hijabs in protest, they received widespread support in the West. When Ukrainian women took up arms, they were hailed as symbols of resilience. But when Palestinian women dig through rubble, pulling the bodies of their children from the ruins of their homes, they are met with silence, or worse, suspicion. Feminist institutions that mobilize against "violence against women" can barely bring themselves to say the words "Gaza" or "genocide."

In the UK, on the eve of this year's International Women's Day, a member of parliament and some feminist organizations held an event on "giving a voice to the silent women of Afghanistan," inviting feminists who have been calling for a boycott of the Afghan cricket team for months. Of course, that's how you fight the Taliban—by making sure they can't play cricket. This is international solidarity in action: symbolic gestures that do nothing to help women suffering under oppressive regimes, but make Western politicians feel morally superior.

Let me be clear: Afghan women deserve every bit of solidarity and support. Their struggle against an oppressive regime is real, urgent, and devastating—and yes, they are suffering gender apartheid. But acknowledging their suffering does not absolve the hypocrisy of those who weaponize feminism, who voice solidarity with Afghan women while remaining silent about Palestinian women being starved, bombed, and abused before our very eyes.

The rise of the Taliban was not some act of nature, but a direct product of British and American intervention. After 20 years of occupation, after handing Afghan women back to the very people the West once armed and supported, these same voices now weep for their fate. Where were these female MPs, these celebrated feminists, and mainstream feminist organizations when pregnant Palestinian women gave birth in the streets of Gaza because hospitals had been bombed? Where were the protests when Israeli snipers targeted female journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh? Where are the boycotts when Palestinian girls are pulled from the rubble of their homes, killed by American-made bombs?

We see the same pattern again and again: feminist outrage is conditional, activism is selective, and solidarity is reserved only for those whose struggles do not challenge Western power. Afghan women deserve support. But so do Palestinian women, Sudanese women, Yemeni women. Instead, their suffering is met with silence, suspicion, or outright erasure.

International Women's Day, once a radical call for equality, has become a hollow performance—where feminist organizations and politicians pick and choose which women deserve justice, and which can be sacrificed on the altar of Western interests. Feminism has long been used as a tool by those in power to justify empire, war, and occupation—all under the guise of "saving women." During the Algerian War of Independence, France launched a campaign to "liberate" Algerian women from the veil, showcasing unveiled women in propaganda ceremonies while brutally torturing and raping them in detention centers.

Of course, France never cared about gender equality in Algeria; they readily restricted Algerian women’s access to education and employment. Their actions under the guise of helping women were about domination. This narrative of helpless brown women in "need of a white savior" has also been used to justify more recent Western military interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Today, we see the same playbook being used in Palestine.

The West portrays Palestinian women as victims—but not victims of bombs, displacement, or starvation. No, we are told, the real problem is Palestinian men. Israeli officials and their Western allies repeat the same old Orientalist tropes: Palestinian women must be saved from their own culture, from their own people, while the actual suffering they endure under occupation is ignored or dismissed.

The systematic slaughter of women and children is treated as an unfortunate footnote to the conflict, rather than the central atrocity it is. We see the same pattern again and again—caring about women's rights only when it suits a political agenda, and remaining silent when those rights are crushed under the weight of Western-backed airstrikes and military occupation. This is not solidarity. It is complicity wrapped in feminist rhetoric.

So, who will truly benefit from International Women's Day this year? Will it be the women whose oppression neatly fits the Western feminist narrative, allowing politicians, feminist organizations, and mainstream women's advocacy groups to bask in the glow of self-congratulation? Or will it be the women who are silenced, erased, and dehumanized—for whom "accelerated action" means 17 months of genocide and 76 years of colonial violence? Is this just another "feel-good" exercise in which you can claim to support women around the world without having to confront the fact that your feminism has its limits? Because if this is truly about accelerating action, then after 17 months of bombing, starvation, and displacement, we should finally hear you support Palestinian women.

But we know how this will go. Speeches will be given, hashtags will trend, panel discussions will be held—but the women of Gaza will remain buried under the rubble, their suffering politically inconvenient to mention. As for me, I will join feminist marches today—but let's be clear, our agendas are not the same. I will march for every Palestinian woman who is not only struggling to be heard, but is being so brutally dehumanized, their suffering in a genocide being livestreamed to a world that refuses to see or hear.

I—and countless other women who refuse to be silent—will be thinking of every mother cradling the cold body of her child, every daughter forced to become a caretaker overnight, every sister searching through the rubble with her bare hands. We—the women who believe in true feminist solidarity and reject selective outrage—will not merely "hope" that this call to action means something; we will make sure that it does.

We will make sure that Palestinian voices are heard. We will make sure to boycott those who profit from the oppression of Palestinians. We will make sure to challenge every platform and every feminist who normalizes the suffering of Palestinians, holding them accountable for their complicity. To our Palestinian sisters: we feel your pain. We have carried your struggle in our hearts for the past 17 months, and we know that your fight did not begin there—it is 76 years of resistance, survival, and refusal to disappear.

Remember: next year, on March 8th, we will not only mourn your suffering, we will celebrate your victory. Not the so-called "liberation" from your own men that Western feminists like to portray, but your liberation from colonial occupation. We hear you. We see you. And we will not rest until we make sure the whole world does too.