On the same day that we learnt of Palestinian nurse Razan Al-Najjar’s murder by an Israeli sniper, Amani Al-Khatatbeh (founder and editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl) appeared in Maroon 5’s top trending music video for the song Girls Like You.
Amani shares the spotlight with many recognisable female figures,including incredible people like Colombian-American immigration activist Angy Rivera, Somali-American Muslim politician Ilhan Omar, and Mandan, Hidatsa, Mnicoujou Lakota Indigenous activist Jackie Fielder. However, she also shares it with ex-Israeli Defence Force soldier and so-called Wonder Woman Gal Gadot.
While as a Palestinian woman I am hurt that Amani would accept to be featured in a video normalising Gadot as an ally and female role model when our people in Gaza are being gunned down by the IDF, I am surprised by the lack of accountability towards Levine himself and the other women who are also guilty of allowing themselves to be featured with Gadot.
This is a point Amani raised in her response commentary today, ‘The Public Hijabi Syndrome’, where she argues:
The visceral reaction was quick to dismiss me as a “fame whore” and left behind any space for nuance. People did not care to acknowledge that the award I rejected was in celebration of Gal’s new makeup campaign. I would have been the only individual to receive it on her platform, which indeed would have normalized my participation as a Public Hijabi, especially as a minority woman negatively impacted by her vocal stances.
Amani knows best that she should not be in this project because it is derailing of female advocacy for many reasons, including the centring of a liberal man as a benevolent uplifter, but I would like to propose that her compromise illustrates what happens when the burden isn’t shared: when instead it is placed on the shoulders of the oppressed group to always stand up, alone, against dominant power structures.
I would like to ask you, isn’t it a possibility that after actually being the only public voice to refuse to share a platform with Gal Gadot, (and you can fact-check me on this) that Amani let go of the fight because she found herself isolated among even intersectional feminists in her support of a Gadot boycott? That maybe this comes from defeat and a sense of deficiency that gets further validated by the double-standard?
It is an error and a decision that is difficult for us Palestinian women to forgive because many of us have grown up making personal sacrifices for our Palestinian advocacy. We cannot comprehend why it would be important to choose visibility over Palestine. For us, it is a raw betrayal and something we just don’t need to deal with right now; this whole Amani with Gadot thing is an extra annoyance I wish didn’t even exist, you know, because—why is it a thing?
So, as a Palestinian woman, I will bring Amani to account and I will question her engagement openly and strongly.
At the same time, I don’t understand where all these targeted attacks by non-Palestinians on Amani are coming from given that over twenty other women also featured with Gadot.
I cannot comprehend how Gadot flutters like a butterfly from one platform to another under the guise of empowerment when she herself is a militant ex-soldier who approves of the murder of girls like Razan. That the critical mass who are meant to be the closest to being pro-Palestinian supporters completely neglect this fact about Gadot. They celebrate her while they condemn and would neither share a platform nor spare a moment to praise Ivanka Trump. To us, Gadot’s feminism is no different to Ivanka Trump’s: it is just a front for supremacy and privilege.
Can’t Palestinians decide who to label zionist?
It leads me to ask, why are Palestinian female figures the only ones expected to stand up for BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against celebrity feminists? That’s what the attacks on Amani in the aftermath of this music video’s release show us. Because she is Palestinian, people think they possess legitimacy to dictate what she should do; that they can drag her down and label her a zionist normaliser despite her well-recognised position on Palestine.
The expectation that Palestinians should prove their commitment to the Palestinian struggle to non-Palestinian supporters is outrageous in itself. Even the most sell-out of Palestinians, those who entered into negotiations with the zionist state itself, still hold legitimate space within the Palestinian resistance movement—and no one can exclude them from it, or fight them on it, except us Palestinians ourselves. Yes, Palestinians see themselves as a model for resistance, but that should not mean that they are scapegoated for failing to uphold this resistance by people who can take this demand for resistance to more powerful and privileged institutions, organisations and figures.
Assuming that the targeting of Amani is driven by concern over the consequences of Israeli normalisation for the Palestinian struggle, it seems appropriate here to refer to some principles of allyship. Much has been written on how allies of any other Indigenous/Black movement should not participate in the scapegoating of problematic figures within those communities. We have been taught, for example, that non-Black people should not be making Kanye ‘choice’ memes, and that “vitriolic criticism of Barack Obama highlights Black voters’ problems with the far left”. From the latter, the author explains the disconnect that can exist between those within the affected community and their ‘allies’ on support for Obama:
You might not agree with everything he has done, and I certainly haven’t agreed with everything, but you have to respect him for what he means to Black Americans — making it to the height of American politics and withstanding eight years of racist attacks. Sanders and his movement see Obama as symbolic of evil neoliberal corporate interests. Therein lies the disconnect.
Palestinians appreciate Amani’s voice
While criticising Amani’s appearance in the #girlslikeyou video, it is important for supporters to respect that she is widely acknowledged among Palestinians in the US and in western diasporas for her efforts in amplifying pro-Palestinian voices.
It would be easy for us to just ignore Amani’s consistent work in amplifying the Palestinian struggle in our critique of her appearance with Gadot.
Amani has not only refused to take an award from Revlon and created much valued and subversive publicity which finally juxtaposed women’s advocacy against Wonder Woman, she also withdrew from the Muslim Girl nail polish line on accounts of ORLY’s CEO having zionist and racist public statements. Both acts of refusal further entrenching her magazine to the margins.
In refusing the Revlon award in January, an act she did without any community pressure, Amani gave us a much needed win and a way to kick back against all the violent discourse we kept encountering every time we saw a Wonder Woman poster.
“I cannot accept this award from Revlon with Gal Gadot as the ambassador,” Amani wrote in an Instagram post:
Her vocal support of the Israeli Defense Forces’ actions in Palestine goes against MuslimGirl.com’s morals and values. I can’t, in good conscience, accept this award from the brand and celebrate Gal’s ambassadorship after the IDF imprisoned a 16-year-old girl named Ahed Tamimi last month, an activist who is currently still incarcerated.
Her refusal of this award was covered in the Daily Mail, even, bringing the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement to the forefront of conversations around Gadot when these conversations may have previously been reserved to intra-community spaces. Amani also wrote “Dear Gal Gadot: #TimesUp for Invisible Girls, Too”; an open letter to Gadot criticising her for failing to stand up for girls like Ahed Tamimi. Amani found a way to ‘talk back’ to Gadot by creating self-generated news in a landscape that is increasingly censors Palestinian and non-apologetic Muslim voices.
It is this desperation for a platform and a voice that led to the creation of Muslim Girl after all, a platform where ‘Muslim women talk back’. And where Palestinian Muslim girls have had many opportunities to talk back (just look at the search results on ‘Palestine’ and the diversity of articles that appear on the Muslim Girl website).
Although I disagree with Amani Al-Khatatbeh actions in this particular project, I cannot erase her obvious commitment to Palestinian advocacy in my commitment to BDS. Doing so would harms the struggle by applying unfair expectations on who should carry its weight.
Holding the feminist normalisers to account in the #girlslikeyou video
You know who can carry some of the boycott burden? You know who actually is a zionist normaliser in this scenario? As Amani responded, it’s Adam Levine! Isn’t he the one who extended the invitation to Gadot?
Who else is a zionist normaliser? DC Comics! Aren’t they the ones who selected her as Wonder Woman in the first place and made us bear with vomit-inducing, inescapable publicity surrounding its release? Lebanon, Tunisia and Algeria boycotted the movie while the rest of the world enjoyed it with Gadot as its lead. It was and still is a huge slap in the face, that in an era of improved representation of race issues on the big screen, Palestinians are still being re-traumatised by the elevation of their killers as peace-makers.
Who else can we account for participating in the normalisation of Gadot? The much beloved Superwoman Lilly Singh for her open embrace and fangirling over being merged into Gadot. While Amani purposefully didn’t share or tag Gadot in any of her posts, while still inexcusable, her friend Superwoman completely disregards Palestinians, brown Muslim girls following her and even Amani’s sensitivities. Lilly Singh has been marginally criticised for her neo-liberal politics and disregard for anti-racism while profiting off of a racialised identity, and her appearance and proximity to Gadot here is a further violation of women’s advocacy.
Did you catch Wonder Woman turning into Superwoman in the latest @adamlevine @maroon5 music video? Such an honour to be included alongside @iamcardib @GalGadot @JLo @milliebbrown @TheEllenShow and so many other queens. #GirlLikeYou https://t.co/EF3MzjXNWW pic.twitter.com/3Iad4TFziO
— Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) June 1, 2018
Amani has a point when she suggests, “Rather than critics expressing their feedback to Maroon 5 about why Gal’s inclusion was alienating to those fighting for human rights, which would have been more effective to their cause, many directed vitriol and blame onto me for taking up space in the video. This is similar to when the CEO of ORLY, the company with which we launched the first brand deal for Muslim women with halal-certified nail polishes, was exposed for making racist social media posts. Many blamed, attacked, and ostracized our young minority and women-led team rather than hold the partner company accountable for the transgression. What we are doing here is cultivating an environment that destroys the Muslim women who dare enter it”.
Why does Levine, Superwoman and the other women making appearances get to maintain their image as role models when they are not only appearing with but celebrating an unapologetically pro-IDF ex-soldier? Why do they get to escape accountability for their normalisation of zionism when they, arguably, have even more power and freedom by virtue of their fame and access to platforms than Amani Al-Khatahtbeh?
Being that Palestinian Muslim all the time
In her response, Amani expressed that the legitimate and important calls for BDS should be taken up with Adam Levine to be effective and powerful. She affirms the need for BDS against Gadot. In her response, it seems she is saying: I am tired of having to carry this responsibility, you take the baton. I see her response as just that; weak, because an activist shouldn’t give into the zionism. But it’s important to acknowledge that it’s exhausting and that that’s how it is, and that sometimes we do become weak to the pressures of white supremacy. It’s important to acknowledge also that it would get hard for her to not participate in a diversity built on capitalist notions while the access she is seeking to bring greater success for Muslim Girl necessitates white-washing, commercialisation, celebrity-cult participation and objectification. When so-called allies want the token hijabi and not diverse cultures, knowledges, voices, visions, it sets a standard where have to navigate from an already marginalised positioning.
In this way, I feel for Amani, but I do not accept her decision. I can understand how it can be easier for her to hide behind an (American) Muslim Girl identity that gets fetishised, exoticised and consumed than to be that Palestinian Muslim Woman who doesn’t transcend her political positioning as an anti-zionist, suspicious, threatening, biased, extremist, poor, dispossessed un-feminine voice.
Unlike DJ Khaled, who humiliated the Palestinian struggle with his comments: “Listen, the key to success is simple: put Khaled at the top, and WeTheBest-istan will always pop. No more violence and hatred – under my enlightened rule, Israelis and Palestinians will be breakdancing, not bleeding and dying, in the streets” and Israeli-Settler Sabra endorsements, Amani has not only used her voice, but created a platform for Muslim women to stand firmly against white supremacy and Israeli occupation. She has continued to make references and advocate publicly about topical Palestinian issues.
Amani is an intelligent woman aware of the limitations and boundaries she encounters within white supremacist structures, and well read on post-structuralist feminist writing. She has been committed not only to highlighting the Palestinian struggle, but to working intersectionally in speaking about systemic racism in the US. In these ventures and confrontations with dominant power structures, she may be wondering: can the Amani who is a Jordanian-Palestinian speak? Can the Palestinian speak? She can do better—but the conversation should centre dismantling the power structures that are racist and Islamophobic against diverse women of colour.
While fingers get pointed at her by non-Palestinians, it is important to bring to the forefront how marginalising and excluding the current political space is for vocal anti-zionist Palestinians, and the toll this takes on Palestinian figures who should be entitled to public participation outside of just ‘Palestinian work’. But then, we Palestinians aren’t even allowed to speak on Palestine. Opinion pieces on the conflict are often given to white spokespeople or leftist Israelis. The novels and plays we author get petitioned and questioned as legitimate texts by ministers, and our authors get dropped from speaking at events. Our academics lose their positions, get censored and sued for their work. Our BDS movement gets threatened with bans on university campuses.
It’s no wonder some of us may burn out and flee, let go, compromise. Moments of weakness like Amani’s video appearance should invite a commitment to making zionism less acceptable so Palestinians can survive and exist without falling to pressure.
Palestinian leadership should be worth something
To support young Palestinians like Amani in their advocacy, I would like to suggest that the load be shared more evenly, so that we aren’t alone in facing the repercussions of the zionist hasbara machine.
We need you to demand that all the other women in the video should not have appeared with Gadot either. We needed you to not have bought tickets to Wonder Woman, to have told your friends not to watch it. We needed you to not show it to your daughters; to not have screened it, to have fought your school for taking girls on an excursion to watch it, and fought with news outlets for portraying her as a ‘feminist’.
We Palestinians need you to join us in our hurt, to fight and to resist with us. Otherwise, politically, what’s the point of Amani alone erasing herself from that video for the sake of the BDS movement? Yes, even without Gadot the video is problematic, in its objectification of women in the lyrics by reducing them to their desirability before a good woke man’s gaze, but with Gadot it re-violates us by reminding us how unworthy and excluded our narratives are as Palestinian women.
Amani can argue this is why she put herself there, as a reminder that we’re still here, we still exist: there despite Gadot’s dominance, despite the erasure of Palestinians and pervasive control of the white feminist narrative, despite the shooting of our women in Gaza by snipers, we exist.
It’s a stretch, but it illustrates just how marginalised Palestinian women are as women, as human beings, that some of us feel we need to force your gaze onto us. After all, we are ignored, whether as Amani or as Razan. We are subjected to either an eternity of suffering and genocide by siege and bullets, or by assimilation and lateral violence.
The unpleasant truth is that Amani not being in the video would have done nothing for the BDS movement. No one would have even known she was extended the offer, and to have an effective response she would have needed some of the other women to refuse with her. It’s this failure from so-called allies that can push leaders like Amani to act from a place of less-than.
How can Amani lead a BDS action against Gadot if none of the people involved in the video support BDS? The accountability for this falls on the producers, and on the other celebrities who haven’t said a single thing against Gadot, just as it does on Amani.
The BDS movement was not created as a movement for individual Palestinians to support Palestine. We already do, and without question we have to be the first to take the lead. BDS is a movement for non-Palestinians to commit to working together to isolate Israel culturally and economically. To sustain the BDS movement, I plead with you to follow our lead when we Palestinians do take the lead and do boycott. You need to show us, and show Amani, that our leadership is worth something.
As an educator and researcher, I need to show young Palestinian men and women that our anti-zionist professional self-sabotage is warranted and valued. And you need to offer us ways to overcome the silencing of our voices. Ways to talk back. Otherwise neither Amani, nor Razan, nor Ahed, nor I, nor can any of us Palestinian women alone speak or boycott or make any progress for justice.
I’d like to remind Amani, first and foremost, and all our supporters of her words in relation to Gigi Hadid: BDS isn’t easy, and those who do uphold it are brave and deserve to be loved and enabled.
Cover image via Instagram
Image 1 via Feminisminindia
Image 2 via IMDb
About the author
Tasnim Sammak is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, Monash University (Clayton). She's a spokesperson and founder of Solidarity for Palestine - Narrm, Melb.