Mainstream Feminism’s Silence on Collective Punishment Practices in the Gaza Genocide

This study aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of the positions adopted by Western mainstream feminist organizations, neoliberal feminist figures, and states that claim to pursue a feminist foreign policy during Israel’s military operation against Gaza, which began in October 2023 and has continued into 2025. In addition to academic literature, the study focuses on the testimonies of women with first-hand experience, reports by civil society organizations, and field data, and demonstrates that feminist theory and practice have undergone a historical rupture in the face of the genocide in Gaza. The issues examined suggest that (a) the silence of mainstream feminism regarding the systematic reproductive genocide and femicide in Gaza may be less a matter of passive omission than the outcome of a structural complicity forged through neoliberalism, colonialism, and imperial state interests, (b) the way these actors have, while rightly condemning violence against Israeli women, legitimized the killing of tens of thousands of women in Gaza through the rhetoric of the right to self-defence can be understood as a practice of erasure, and (c) due to the continued military support provided to Israel by states that describe their foreign policy as feminist, particularly Germany, such policies can in fact be conceptualized as imperial instruments. Finally, it is argued that this historical rupture has irreversibly shattered the myth of global sisterhood.