The Long Century of Egyptian Feminists’ Solidarity Movements with Palestinian People

While the genocidal war against Palestinian people in Gaza, including explicit plans of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, as well as continuing assaults by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank are unfolding, the International Feminist Journal of Politics hosts a poignant Conversation titled “Why Palestine is a feminist issue: a reckoning with Western feminism in a time of genocide” (Pratt et al., 2025). This question echoes equally important historiographical ones. Some of them have been discussed by feminist historians, namely, those surrounding the complicity between European feminism and colonialism (Burton, 1994), and the link between feminism and nationalism in colonial contexts, (Jayawardena, 1985; Badran, 1995, Thompson, 2000; Baron, 2005; Jad, 2018). Others have been less studied: if Palestine is a feminist issue – as argued by the authors of the abovementioned conversion (and I agree with them) – when did it became such? Who were the feminists who first framed the issue of Palestine as an issue of both colonialism and feminism?

My contribution to this conversation focuses on the long history of solidarity with Palestinian people expressed by Egyptian feminists in the interwar period. Looking at the correspondences between Egyptian leading feminist figure Huda Shaarawi and the leadership of the International Women Suffrage Alliance about Palestine, at the proceedings of the Eastern Women Conference in Defense of Palestine (1938), and of the 1939 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Copenhagen, I trace the link between framing Palestine through the lens of colonialism and building South-South networks of feminist solidarity. My discussion contributes to the debate about the construction of gender and sexuality in the context of colonialism and colonized women’s resistance to it.