CSW68: Solidarity with Palestine echoes in the halls of diplomacy

Activists attending the Commission on the Status of Women refused to be silent on the carnage on Gaza, and its impact on women and children

Between the start and end of the 68th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the UN estimated that the Israeli military would kill a further 756 Palestinian women in Gaza.

This was the shadow under which government ministers, diplomats, academics journalists, and hundreds of activists from across the world met in New York for two weeks to consider the global situation for women and progress towards equality.

Save from the recent interruption of Covid-19, the calendar of international diplomacy remains something of a constant. Wars, famines, natural disasters, even genocides, almost nothing halts the never-ending meetings, procedures, declarations, councils or committees in their tracks.

Next to the vast buildings on the New York skyline that seem to shoot up higher each year, the pristine white marble and blue glass of the United Nations seem almost austere. Perhaps it’s fitting for an institution that remains locked in a mostly imagined past, a bastion of rules written by rich countries, enforced or ignored on their whims.

At this private club, the states are the members, and we, the people, are just guests. In the most formal of surroundings, all formalities are observed, it is convention that conventions be disapplied to allies, states resolve to allow conflicts to go unresolved, for all standards to be double, for unfair treatment under treaty, and for the only things longer than the speeches to be the queues to get through the front door.

Amidst these surroundings, the energy that the thousands of women activists who sweep into CSW each year bring is an extraordinary contrast to the institution that hosts it. It is the work of we activists to disrupt the unfair, discriminatory, and often violent status quos in which we live, this is what has brought us to the organization in which decorum rules: a body designed to preserve and maintain a “peace” that the world has never truly enjoyed.

The vital contrast of the dynamism of activists and the staid surroundings at the UN is something that we always sense when we are at CSW, an event that feels so different to any other similar diplomatic process - General Assembly, COP, the Human Rights Council - but rarely have I ever felt the same energy as I did over the past two weeks.

In every event considering the situation for Palestinian, every seat was taken, every Palestinian voice was heard in wrapped silence, and the words shouted Free, Free Palestine! were shouted in every accent you could imagine.

For as much as the international community has been obstructed and confounded into inaction by its members, the voice of global women’s civil society has been as clear and consistent as possible. There can be no peace, no equality, no justice globally, without peace, equality, and justice for Palestine.