When Palestine Becomes an Ideological Compass: Feminist Fractures, White Feminism, and Internalised Antifeminism in Brussels

This paper examines how certain contemporary forms of antifeminism operate not only through explicit opposition to women’s rights, but also from within feminist spaces themselves, through mechanisms of exclusion, hierarchisation, and discursive appropriation. Focusing on the Brussels context, it argues that the question of Palestine functions as what I call an “ideological compass,” revealing and intensifying internal fractures within feminist movements while reshaping the boundaries of what is recognised as legitimate feminism. Drawing on three years of immersive ethnographic fieldwork within feminist and pro-Palestinian activist circles, this research highlights a growing polarisation within the local feminist field. On the one hand, some actors mobilise a universalist and secular feminist framework underpinned by racialised and colonial assumptions, positing an incompatibility between Islam, the Palestinian cause, and women’s rights. This position often leads to the recurrent disqualification of Muslim and arab women’s voices, the depoliticisation of their experiences, and the naturalisation of power relations under the guise of defending gender equality—thus constituting a form of internalised antifeminism. On the other hand, feminists adopting critical and intersectional perspectives explicitly articulate struggles for gender justice with the Palestinian cause, situating both within broader analyses of race, power, and colonial domination. The paper further shows how feminist and queer discourses may be instrumentally mobilised to legitimise Zionist political projects, producing configurations of femonationalism and reinscribing exclusionary logics within ostensibly egalitarian frameworks. These tensions reflect not mere internal disagreements, but fundamentally antagonistic conceptions of feminism, its subjects, and its political alliances.