Is FiLiA Antisemitic?
Pro-Israel Feminists and Their “State of Exception” for Palestinian Women
Some of its most devoted followers have widely criticised the UK feminist charity FiLiA for participating in a recent large anti-racist, anti-fascist demonstration in London, organised by the Together Alliance. The Together Alliance is a broad coalition of hundreds of people “who might disagree on some topics but are united against the mounting racism, hatred, and bigotry in the U.K.” FiLiA posted a seemingly harmless tweet on X saying it had marched “with our gorgeous banner.” The banner features embroidered text: “Building Solidarity With Women,” “Amplifying Women’s Voices,” and “Defending Women’s Human Rights.” The tweet read: “We are proud to be anti-racist and anti-fascist #feminists; we are not free until all our sisters are free!”
What feminist could object? As it turns out, many do! On X, a woman said that, where FiLiA was once a beacon of light, she would never again grace its doorstep. Another who helped embroider the banner lamented that, if she had known the purpose to which it would eventually be put, she would never have sewn it. But why?
Supporters of FiLiA are united in opposing male sexual violence, rejecting gender identity ideology, and resisting transactivist threats. Many feminists raged that FiLiA had marched alongside misogynists from the LGBTQ community and its allies, who had for years actively campaigned against women fighting for our sex-based rights. Others argued that FiLiA had marched with people flying the flags of an Iranian regime that compels women to wear the hijab and imposes severe legal penalties for defiance. In doing so, they had opposed the Iranians, who want regime change. In short, the march was “Islamo-fascist.” One critic said, “You are being played like a fiddle by some very dangerous men.” Gender-critical male allies chimed in, “FiLiA marching with the despicables. Gays cheering the Ayatollah. Smart people believing obvious absurdities. How the hell did we get here?” The co-founder of LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson, says FiLiA has exposed deep antisemitism. She wrote: “It’s tragic, what has happened to FiLiA.”
The birth of FiLiA
FiLiA was conceived by its current CEO in 2015, though it did not yet have a name. A small group of feminists, including me, came together to form an organisation. Our main focus at the time was male sexual violence, pornography, and prostitution. I was a founder of Resist Porn Culture and became a FiLiA trustee and spokeswoman for violence against women and girls (VAWG).
By 2017, I had also developed a critique of transgender ideology and politics. At the time, all political parties championed the transactivist push to reform the Gender Recognition Act (2004), including the newly formed but now defunct Women’s Equality Party. I argued that enshrining self-identified gender identity in law dismantles the legal foundations of women’s sex-based rights and creates markets for the pharmaceutical and medical industries that profit from lifelong hormonal dependence and “sex change” surgery. Along with my colleague Michele Moore, I was especially concerned about the targeting of children and young people influenced by transactivist propaganda. We were the first to articulate what was then a highly contentious view that there is “no such thing as a transgender child,” that such a figure is an ideological invention and a violence against children and their bodies.
Because of a series of events that happened to me, FiLiA was forced to address the transgender politics and powerful transgender lobby with which it had largely been disengaged. At the time, I also served as WEP’s democratically elected spokeswoman for VAWG. I was accused by a male WEP member who identified as female of being a transphobic, hateful bigot who wanted nothing more than to erase “her” and all trans-identifying people. WEP supported him and concluded that my views brought WEP into “disrepute.” By March 2018, FiLiA issued a public statement in my support: “We were surprised and disappointed by the decision of the Women’s Equality Party to remove her as spokeswoman for WEP.” Its position statement included the following:
… we all know that nobody has ever changed their viewpoint by being told what to think. Persuasion has always come through reasoned argument, the foundations of which are free speech and free thought. FiLiA will continue to encourage all three.
By August 2018, six months later, FiLiA was still hesitant to refer to man who identifies as a woman as anything but a “transwoman.” For example, one trustee, half my age and queer-identified, was assigned to edit my FiLiA article, which was a severe critique of the Green Party’s policies and practices, to remove correct sex-based pronouns. Whether I should have complied is another matter, but what is undeniable is that, by publicly hedging its bets, FiLiA survived the political turbulence caused by the gender identity hysteria and the “be kind” mantra pushed by transactivists and sweeping society and many feminists. As it grew bolder and more politically savvy, FiLiA eventually became an organisation that no longer hesitates to define what a woman is or to oppose the misogyny that grants men the status of being female simply because they identify as such.
Zionist Feminism: Israel is fighting for women’s rights!
It was only a matter of time before another conflict within feminism surfaced within FiLiA. At its 2025 conference, Rahila Gupta, chair of the feminist organisation Southall Black Sisters, ended her talk by calling for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” and explicitly inviting the audience to join her in chanting “Free, free Palestine.” This prompted some Jewish women (and others) to walk out in protest and sparked significant online controversy and debate. The event highlighted deep divisions within parts of the feminist community over Palestine/Israel, with some praising the speaker’s stance and others criticising it as inappropriate or antisemitic at a women-focused gathering.
I had predicted that pro-Israel, gender-critical feminists would backlash if FiLiA ever dared to support Palestine. The most prominent gender-critical pro-Israel supporters signed a pledge of unconditional support for the most far-right and bloodthirsty governments in Israel’s history, “that there would be consequences to 7 October.” Without irony, the gender-critical Graham Linehan writes: “Anyone who celebrates savagery should be your enemy.” For two and a half years, feminists have remained silent as Israel has savagely responded to the deadly Hamas attack by targeting Palestinian children, starving the entire Palestinian population, killing thousands, bombing hospitals and universities, raping their illegally detained hostages, and killing doctors, health workers, and UNRWA staff, as well as over 200 journalists who have borne witness.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, is mandated by the UN to investigate Israel’s violations of international law, humanitarian law, and the Geneva Convention in the Palestinian territories. Her most recent report to the UN, from March 2026, titled “Torture and genocide,” examines Israel’s systematic use of torture against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, covering both custodial (in detention) and non-custodial practices since 7 October 2023. She concludes that Israel has perpetrated a form of collective torture that has become integral to the domination and punishment of Palestinians, part of “the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanisation.” She reports that in detention, detainees are being “forced to eat off the ground, attacked by police dogs, and subjected to brutal sexual humiliation and assaults. She states that the ongoing Gaza genocide is just one pillar of a massive system of apartheid that the US is now helping execute in Iran on Israel’s behalf and that it will not stop on its own but requires collective opposition, including public protest.
Israel and pro-Israel feminists alike have routinely dismissed Albanese’s reports. In October 2025, the Israeli UN ambassador to the UN described her using sexist and misogynistic language, the kind specifically used to demonise women as irrational: “You are a witch, and this report is another page in your spell book.” He accused her of trying to “curse Israel with lies and hatred.” He added variations such as: “Every page of this report is an empty spell, and every accusation is a charm that does not work because you are a failed witch.” The feminist journalist Nicole Lampert, a committed Zionist, has posted numerous times on X, calling Albanese an “antisemite,’ a “Jew-hater,” an “evil woman,” and an “antisemitic conspiracy theorist.”
The same feminists and their followers have said nothing about the illegal Israeli/U.S. war on Iran, the brazen murder of primary school-aged Iranian girls, the slaughter of innocent Iranian civilians, the intentional destruction of infrastructure essential to life, and the bombardment of Iran’s ancient heritage sites. Similarly, they have not commented on Israel’s further lawless bombing of Lebanon, the thousands of civilian deaths in residential areas, including among women and children, such as the poet Khatoun Salma and her husband.
To flip the words of the feminist useful idiot for Western propaganda discussed earlier, I agree that women should not be manipulated by men, specifically Western leaders who pretend the war on Iran is fought for women’s sake to overthrow a regime that does not allow women to dress like Western women. Such men include:
Netanyahu, the secularist, who, to justify the occupation of Palestine, the genocide, and Israeli expansionism, cites the Bible to claim that Jews are God’s chosen people to whom He gave the injunction to slay their enemies like animals.
Ben-Gvir, the far-right National Security Minister, a religious fundamentalist, nationalist extremist, and West Bank settler, plays a key role in the new “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law,” an apartheid law targeting Palestinians under occupation that allows military courts to impose mandatory death sentences without legal redress and mandates the execution of 9,000 hostages within 90 days.
Peter Hegseth, the Zionist Christian U.S. Secretary of Defense, accused of rape in 2017—something he denies and settled out of court—explicitly frames the war with Iran as a Christian crusade, equating the U.S. and the rescue of the downed American pilot with Jesus Christ, citing the pilot’s loss on Good Friday and his rescue on Easter Sunday as somehow akin to Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
Donald Trump, also accused of rape and other forms of sexual abuse by multiple women over several decades (though he has consistently denied all such allegations), justifies the U.S. illegal war on Iran by describing Iranians as animals, despite their millennia of development and contributions to architecture, beauty, art, poetry, and science. Trump openly expressed genocidal intent toward the Iranians by saying we should bomb it “back into the Stone Age.” As a grown man who acts like a demented toddler with no boundaries, to whom one can’t say no, he expressed his frustration on Easter Sunday about Iran’s noncompliance with some of his demands with the vulgar, imperious command:
For years, many gender-critical feminists have lauded Trump because his policies are “anti-woke” and he at least “knows what a woman is” (well, yes, quite!). Many, such as Meghan Murphy, accuse feminist critics of suffering from a psychological condition, “Trump derangement syndrome.” Perhaps such an accusation exemplifies the now-popular truism that accusations can be confessions. Professor of Economics Jeffrey Sachs, an American Jew, describes Trump as “an impulsive, paranoid, psychopathic megalomaniac, completely incapable of rational thought, dragging America into a disastrous war.”
Trump is not “liberating Iranian women”; he is bombing women’s dormitories at universities—places where women outnumber men and pursue STEM subjects, surpassing what Western universities with their DEI policies only dream of achieving. This includes Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where Maryam Mirzakhani (1977—2017), the first woman to win the Fields Medal in 2014 (the highest and most prestigious award in mathematics, often called the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”), conducted her research. Rather than throwing off their hijabs to embrace Trump, women defied his current obscene threats of total annihilation by uniting with men across Iranian society, across all faiths and social classes, to defend their homeland, courageously forming human chains on bridges, power plants, roads, and other infrastructure throughout Iran.
The war against Iran was never about regime change or liberating women from the Islamic Republic, but about Iran as a very powerful country that does not and will not do Israel’s bidding. The thousands of people who marched with Iranian banners were protesting the UK’s complicity in this barbarism.
Zionist Feminists: Palestinian women and the “state of exception”
For years, Israel has been carrying out what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes in *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life* as a form of modern politics, power, and warfare that creates a “state of exception” for certain groups, excluding them from human rights and reducing them to simple, disposable “bare life.” The Nazis were the first to establish this, creating the state of exception for Jews (along with others targeted for their ethnicity, disability, or political beliefs), depicting them as animals, reducing them to disposable bodies for industrial-scale slaughter in concentration camps.
Israel, in its turn, has reduced Palestinians to bare life, stripping them of political and legal rights and reducing them to mere biological existence. In this sense, the sexual objectification of the bodies of Western women and young girls, the transsexual, transgender, and transhumanist exploitation of biological sexed bodies as described by journalist Jennifer Bilek, and Israel’s reduction of Palestinians to biomass are not separate issues but interconnected examples of the same techno-industrial machinery that governs us.
Pro-Israel gender-critical feminists actively participate in “the state of exception” toward Palestinian women and children, colluding with Israel’s anti-humanist, ethically repulsive project. They countenance, without comment, the murder of Palestinian women, the inhumane conditions that force women to recreate family homes in tents, the maiming of children, and state-sanctioned rape by Israeli soldiers. Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current, a gender-critical feminist website and podcast, asks, in apparent genuine bewilderment: “Why have so many people suddenly developed an unhinged obsession with Israel?”
In 2005, a decade before my involvement with FiLiA, I briefly worked in Bethlehem in the West Bank, living among Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Nothing can prepare a Westerner for the reality of what “the only democracy in the Middle East” forces Palestinians to endure—forced displacement, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, the imprisonment of children who throw stones at soldiers, and men in cages at the checkpoint at dawn, waiting to pass through to work as cheap labour for the settlement that steals their land. I am pleased that FiLiA stood alongside those protesting Israel’s brutal racism, and I wish it success in debunking the false claim that this signifies Jew-hatred. To return to the words on the banner, “We are not free till we are all free.”
FiLiA did indeed march alongside Zak Polanski, the current leader of the Green Party. Clearly, the Green Party’s ethos on all LGBTQ issues has remained the same as it was a decade ago, when I first critiqued it. On the stage, next to Polanski, a half-naked, fetish-clad man who looked as if he had just popped over from a Pride Parade sexually gyrated. Despite this, Polanski has been the only leader of a political party to speak against the ideology of Zionism, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and the government’s unlawful extension of terrorism laws to shut down dissenting free speech. Nicole Lampert is currently engaged in an unseemly Twitter spat with Polanski, who is himself Jewish, accusing his opposition to Zionism as an example of “Jew hatred.”
In my view, FiLiA will initially survive this backlash, but deep moral and political divides within feminism about Israel/Palestine won’t go away. Just as transactivists managed for years to dismantle organisations, it is doubtful that pro-Israel feminist activists will let go of the accusation that FiLiA is deeply antisemitic until they reshape FiLiA and what can be spoken or not spoken at it, to their own design. Following the last conference and the concerns that arose during and after it, FiLiA’s trustees self-reported to the Charity Commission, which had also received a separate complaint. FiLiA has now introduced “stronger policies and processes … a Conference Oversight Group, and written agreements for speakers and stallholders.” The next 2026 conference has been postponed while these and other changes are implemented.
To counter Bev Jackson’s horror at FiLiA, as expressed earlier, I use her words but reverse them: “It’s not tragic what has happened to FiLiA”; rather, “It’s tragic what has happened to feminism.” Only time will tell whether my predictions come true and whether views such as hers will, sooner or later, lead not only to the demise of FiLiA but also to the decline of this fourth wave of modern feminism.
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