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Mae Ryan

Jewish feminist Kate Raphael Bender spoke Tuesday night about her experiences in Palestine.

In continuation of its speaker series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI) hosted activist Kate Raphael Bender last night at the Women’s Community Center. Bender, co-founder of Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!), reflected on her experience as a queer Jewish feminist campaigning for Palestinian rights in Israel, Palestine and the United States.

Bender is the most recent speaker in SCAI’s “Women Under Fire: Jewish Resistance Against Israeli Apartheid” series.

Bender, who has traveled in Israel and Palestine extensively, spoke about how her previous activism involving human rights in Central America and South Africa, coupled with her Jewish identity, fueled her desire to be involved with the plight of Palestinian refugees.

“I had done Central American solidarity work, South African solidarity work,” Bender said, “but somehow because of the level in which I had been in active support of the State of Israel, I felt that I should really go and give more active support to the Palestinian people in their struggle for justice.”

Bender — who was jailed twice and subsequently deported from Israel — highlighted many of the difficulties she faced as a Palestinian rights activist. On her first trip to Palestine in 2002, her group’s activities were interrupted by an Israeli raid in the West Bank. She decided to stay in the refugee camps in Bethlehem in the hopes that an international presence would deter Israel’s presence.

Bender said that her queer feminist identity was pivotal in her decision to become a Palestinian activist, despite the fact that many of the people for whose rights she was campaigning may not have supported her views.

But Bender said that her stance as a queer feminist encouraged her to seek justice for marginalized people. She said that she learned that there were many opportunities for Palestinian women to take active roles in society through protest.

“Some of the things that I felt best about being able to do were give support to women who themselves were trying to break out of the restrictions in their communities,” Bender said. “Quite often, it was the case that just seeing us do something made other women feel that they could be at the front of demonstrations.”

The question and answer session with Bender sparked moments of heated debate. Several audience members grilled Bender over the sensitive issues of suicide bombings and the state of gay and lesbian rights in conservative Muslim societies.

In response, Bender said that oftentimes Americans fail to recognize potential differences between the views of political entities and those of individuals.

“Because of the anti-Islam climate in this country, people believe that it’s OK to punish any Arab for what any person, what any government does in a part of the world they loosely consider the Middle East,” Bender said. “It’s important not to try to hold Palestinians responsible for what any Muslim or any Arab does that we don’t like.”