When Feminism Chooses Politics Over Women

On the difference between declaring rights and defending them

As someone who has long identified as a feminist, that identification has lately come with a sense of unease. The feminism I grew up with was committed to women’s legal protection, bodily autonomy, and civil standing. The feminism I now encounter, one that frames itself as anti-imperial or anti-colonial, has increasingly sidestepped these commitments in favor of a different political agenda, one that frequently aligns with political positions, regimes, and institutions that have historically stripped women of all three.

This framework flattens the world into oppressors and oppressed, leaving little room for complexity or institutional variation. Success becomes suspect. Power becomes disqualifying. Women who achieve positions of influence are viewed with skepticism rather than celebrated as evidence of progress. The result is a politics that quietly discourages women from pursuing agency at all, because agency, in this framework, puts you on the wrong side.

At the same time, this same framework has defined itself through categorical opposition to Israel, condemning flawed but functional democratic institutions while excusing or minimizing regimes in which women have no legal recourse at all. The result is a politics that treats democratic imperfection as disqualifying while overlooking systems that deny women legal agency entirely.

I have come to believe something unfashionable: women’s rights do not last because they are described powerfully or affirmed symbolically. They last when they are enforced. Their durability depends on whether they are written into law, upheld by courts, protected by institutions, and supported by systems that continue to function during crisis.

This is not theoretical to me. It is something I have watched play out in history, and something I think about when I consider what feminism should actually be fighting for.

Consider two countries in the same region during the same period: Iran and Israel in the late 1970s.

In 1967, Iran passed the Family Protection Law, one of the most progressive family law reforms in the Muslim world. The law abolished men’s unilateral right to divorce, required court approval for polygamy, raised the minimum marriage age to eighteen for women, and established special family courts where women could petition for divorce and child custody. By the mid-1970s, Iranian women attended universities in significant numbers, worked as doctors and lawyers, served in parliament, and moved freely in urban areas without mandatory veiling.

These gains, however, depended on the ruling regime rather than on independent courts or entrenched legal protections. The Family Protection Law was a creation of the Shah’s modernization project. It had no institutional foundation separate from his government. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, he had already denounced the law as “contrary to Islam.” The revolutionary government suspended it almost immediately.

The collapse was swift and comprehensive. The minimum marriage age for girls dropped from eighteen to nine. Men regained unilateral divorce rights. Polygamy restrictions were lifted. Mandatory veiling was imposed. When liberal and leftist women, many of whom had supported the revolution, protested on International Women’s Day 1979, they were met with violence. The women who had worn the veil as a symbol of opposition during the revolution discovered it would now be enforced upon them by law. By 1983, the Islamic Punishment Law prescribed seventy-four lashes for unveiled women.

The lesson is not that Iranian women lacked agency or activism. They had fought for the Family Protection Law; Senator Mehrangiz Manouchehrian had proposed an even more progressive version. But their rights existed at the pleasure of the state, not through mechanisms that could survive a change in government. When the regime collapsed, women’s legal status collapsed with it.

Now consider Israel during the same period.

In 1951, three years after independence, the Knesset passed the Women’s Equal Rights Law, explicitly guaranteeing equal legal status for women. The Declaration of Independence had already promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” These were not merely symbolic gestures. They were embedded in legislation from the state’s founding, creating institutional structures that would outlast any particular government.

Israel’s system is imperfect. The relegation of marriage and divorce to religious courts creates ongoing inequities. Women’s organizations have had to fight, case by case and law by law, to expand protections. But crucially, they have had mechanisms through which to fight.

The Israeli Supreme Court has consistently served as a venue for advancing women’s rights. In 1980, it affirmed that marital rape is a crime. In the 1990s, it established precedents on equal retirement ages and affirmative action for women on government company boards. It has struck down gender-based wage discrimination and prohibited gender segregation in public spaces. When Leah Shakdiel was elected to serve on her local religious council in 1987, the Minister of Religious Affairs refused to appoint her, solely because she was a woman. She petitioned the Supreme Court, and the justices ruled in her favor, establishing that religious councils were civil institutions subject to equality principles. A woman had used the legal system to challenge religious authorities, and the legal system had protected her.

These victories were not gifts from a benevolent state. They were won through sustained feminist legal advocacy, the Israel Women’s Network founding a Legal Center in the mid-1980s, women’s organizations forming coalitions, strategic litigation combined with legislative lobbying. The point is that such advocacy was possible. Institutions existed through which women could contest power, challenge decisions, and incrementally expand their protections.

The difference between these two cases is structural, not cultural.

Iran’s advances were granted by an autocrat and revoked by his successor. Israel’s advances were fought for through institutions that continued to function regardless of which party held power. In Iran, women’s legal personhood depended on the ruler’s preferences. In Israel, women’s legal personhood was sustained through institutional participation and enforceable law.

This matters enormously for what happens during crisis. Israel is currently under significant political strain. The judicial reform proposed in 2023 by the Netanyahu government posed genuine threats to the Supreme Court’s independence, and, consequently, to women’s rights that the court has protected. Nearly sixty-three percent of Israeli women expressed concern that the reforms would harm gender equality. Women dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel marched through the streets.

But here is the crucial point: Israeli women could march. They could challenge the government in the streets, in the courts, and in the Knesset. On January 1, 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the reasonableness clause that the government had passed, demonstrating that even under pressure, institutional checks retained force. The fight is ongoing. The threats are real. But the mechanisms of resistance exist and function.

This is the difference between a flawed democracy and a system that denies women legal standing entirely. A flawed democracy gives women tools to contest their own flaws.

I might have continued holding these concerns quietly, as a private discomfort with the direction of a movement I still wanted to believe in. But then came October 7, 2023, and what followed made the contradiction impossible to ignore.

Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, and mutilated Israeli women. We know this because survivors have testified. Released hostages, including Amit Soussana, have publicly described sexual assault in captivity, forced at gunpoint to commit sexual acts, chained in rooms for weeks, beaten and degraded. Fifteen returned hostages have given testimony about sexual violence they experienced in Gaza. First responders found bodies of women and girls with evident semen, injuries to genitals, clothing torn away.

And the world watched as Shani Louk’s body, a twenty-two-year-old German-Israeli woman, clad only in her underwear, her limbs twisted, was paraded through Gaza on a pickup truck while crowds cheered, spat, and shouted “Allahu Akbar.”

It took UN Women fifty days to acknowledge the sexual violence had occurred. When pressed by CNN, the agency’s deputy director refused to name Hamas. The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women reportedly told London’s Victims’ Commissioner that the evidence was “not solid.” This while hostages were still testifying, while forensic evidence was still being documented, while the video of Shani Louk’s desecrated body remained available for anyone to see.

When feminist groups remained silent about documented sexual atrocities, they were not simply failing to “believe women.” They were revealing something deeper about their framework: a categorical opposition to Israel that supersedes any commitment to women’s rights when those rights are asserted by Israeli women.

The justifications offered were discriminatory. Some demanded more evidence, a standard conspicuously absent when allegations are made against other parties. Some denied the atrocities entirely, despite video documentation. Some treated the violence as contextually explicable within “resistance”, an analytical framework never extended to violence against women in other conflicts. And some simply stayed silent, calculating that condemnation would complicate their political positioning.

Each of these responses represented a choice. And the choice was to exclude Israeli women from the category of women whose suffering matters.

This exclusion reflects a broader posture common among liberal and leftist feminists: a reflexive anti-war stance that mistakes moral purity for moral seriousness. Declaring oneself anti-war is far easier from a position of physical safety and stable institutions. It becomes more complicated in places where women’s legal status depends on the survival of the state itself. This is not an argument that war is good or desirable. It is an acknowledgment that in some contexts, institutional survival determines whether women retain any legal standing at all.

For women in Israel, this is not hypothetical. Israeli women serve in the Israel Defense Forces. They defend the borders, operate weapons systems, lead combat units. They do not rely on others to protect the institutions that guarantee their rights. They participate in that protection directly. They live in a region where surrounding powers remain openly hostile and seek to impose systems that would strip women of bodily autonomy, legal standing, and protection under law. To condemn women for defending the systems that sustain their legal rights, while excusing movements that would eliminate those rights entirely, reflects a serious moral failure. It is a judgment made from the safety of stable systems against those who must actively defend theirs.

This is the difference between expression and protection. Expression offers moral satisfaction. Protection requires institutions, enforcement, and responsibility.

When feminism substitutes expression for protection, women pay the price.