by PERMANENT ASSEMBLY AGAINST THE WAR
On March 8th we, as Permanent Assembly Against the War, will strike, demonstrate, and organize together with millions of women and queers uprising against patriarchy. Everywhere, feminist movements are making the opposition to genocide in Palestine a watchword. Everywhere feminist struggles are contesting the militarization of society and its effects caused by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Not only the logic of war is spreading worldwide. Struggles against the war are spreading likewise, and women and queer workers of every nationality are organizing across the borders to be stronger. This is a transnational politics of peace in action.
On March 8th we will stand with the women in Palestine and shout, together with those who are mobilizing worldwide, that the genocide must stop. We will shout with the Palestinian and Israeli women who will mobilise together in Israel. Theirs is a challenge to the State of Israel, which is repressing opposition, fueling racist divisions, and enlisting women and queers as military agents of its murderous plan, while those who dare to refuse receive rape and death threats. The struggle for the end of genocide must be feminist. Dozens of thousands of Palestinian women have been killed and injured by the IDF. We know that rapes and sexual abuses are weapons in every military conflict. We refuse the instrumentalization of the brutality on October 7th to justify the indiscriminate massacre of women, men and children that Israeli has been perpetrating, as something done to defend “our women”. We likewise refuse to accept that even one rape, killing or humiliation of “their women” is legitimized, no matter how long the history of violence it is the consequence of, and we refuse to have to choose between the struggle against occupation and the struggle against patriarchy.
On March 8th we will take to the streets filled with the feminist revolt against militarism. Militarism is a material force that feeds the armament industry at the expense of social protection. Europe is preparing to war, in the name of a democracy based on sexualized hierarchies. Women must work harder while men are on the battlefield. Ukrainian migrant women have seen their wages and remittances devoured by the costs of war. Many women among those who remained in the country are fighting to grant soldiers the opportunity to go back home after two years of desperate war. In Russia, women are challenging repression by denouncing that only the poor men have been forced to fight and die, while the rich escape. Hundreds of Ukrainian women have been raped by Russian soldiers to symbolically mark their possession of conquered territories. Queer people who refuse to be enlisted are regarded as traitors of both nature and the nation and as such persecuted. This is the patriarchal order required by militarism: sexual division of labour, worship of masculinity and violence, a disciplined sexuality and masculine authorities to keep things in order. We need to fight against the war to oppose this militarized capitalist patriarchy.
On March 8 we will strike, demonstrate and organize with those who, from Latin America to Israel and Poland, from Italy to Greece, from the Czech Republic to France, from Kurdistan to Iran, from Germany to Turkey and the UK are making of the claim for an end to genocide, war and militarism a feminist issue, in connection with the women’s and queers’ struggles against masculine violence and femicides, racism and the rising of the far right, the privatization of social services and the impoverishment of wages caused by the war. These struggles are our transnational politics of peace, and there’s no peace without feminist struggles.
