Why are so many Western women so intensely preoccupied with Palestine and the Palestinians? Across Europe, North America, and Australasia, the spectacle is now familiar: thousands of young women, often university‑educated and in their twenties, marching alongside their Muslim brothers (while Muslim sisters tend to remain conspicuously absent from these street demonstrations), accompanied by the now‑obligatory column of colourful, feminised men. The chants are loud and unambiguous: “From the River to the Sea,” and “Globalise the Intifada!”
These slogans are not vague cries for peace. The First Intifada, beginning in 1987, was largely a grassroots uprising with limited lethal attacks. The Second Intifada (2000–2005), however, was something very different: a sustained campaign of suicide bombings and mass‑casualty attacks deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. I remember it clearly. Buses torn apart. Cafés reduced to rubble. Schoolchildren slaughtered on their way to ordinary days. One of the most vivid examples was the Dolphinarium nightclub attack in Tel Aviv, where a suicide bomber killed 21 teenagers. These were not soldiers; they were kids. Israel responded with force, as any nation would, and the resulting anger echoed across the Middle East and beyond.
Fast‑forward to October 7. Once again, Palestinian militants carried out the mass killing of Jews, and once again Israel hit back hard. And once again, the protests erupted—this time louder, broader, and far more emotional across Western cities from London to Melbourne. But the most striking feature of these demonstrations is not simply their size. It is their gender. Why are so many of the loudest voices women, especially young women?
The answer, uncomfortable though it may be, lies in feminism’s long campaign to sever women from their own biology. For the continuation of the human species, a woman’s primary biological role is to bear and raise children. Men matter too, of course, but we have an almost unlimited reproductive window and are never biologically called upon to breastfeed, gestate, or give birth. A man’s sexual function may diminish with age, but he does not face the same narrow reproductive window that women do.
In a healthy society, something predictable happens: women reach their twenties and feel a powerful instinct to create, protect, and fight for their own children. That instinct does not vanish simply because society tells women they should delay motherhood indefinitely or treat it as optional, inconvenient, or even regressive. When it has no natural outlet, it seeks an artificial one.
This is not a new phenomenon. Childless middle‑aged women have long redirected maternal instincts toward pets—often with genuine love and dedication. “These are my babies,” they will say, and they mean it. It is a noble impulse; animals need care, and in an increasingly urbanised and artificial world, concern for animal welfare should only grow. I say this without irony: though I have children myself, I live very much like the male equivalent of a cat lady. I am a dog man.
But pets are private. Gaza is public.
So why are half of the UK hunger strikers for the Palestinian cause young women? Why, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland—an era defined by hunger strikes and martyrdom—was there not a single female IRA hunger striker? Why do we hear “Mothers Against Genocide” rather than “Fathers Against Genocide”? Why not mass Western movements for Somali pirates, Congolese head‑hunters, or the many brutal conflicts that dwarf Gaza in scale but attract little emotional fixation? Here in Cambodia, only a few miles from me, there are over half a million refugees. Is there a Western movement called Sisters Against Displaced Cambodians? Of course not.
What makes the Palestinians different?
They offer a perfect surrogate object for displaced maternal instinct. When Western media briefly notices conflicts in Myanmar, Sudan, or the Congo, the focus is diffuse. But Gaza is different. The chant is always the same: “babies, babies, babies.” Every war contains children. Every war produces suffering. Yet no other conflict generates this obsessive fixation on infants. Before this hysteria, have you ever witnessed mass demonstrations made up primarily of so many girls attempting to project motherhood by nursing bloodied baby dolls? And one can be certain the vast vast majority of these girls are childless. You’ll never see a pram being pushed and a mother of a young family doesn’t have the time to spend hours every week engaged in this ridiculousness.
Part of the answer lies in contrast. For a Westerner it can be hard to differentiate between the warring populations of Ukrainians and Russians, Cambodian Khmer and Thai people, or the Sudanese and Congolese. Not so in Israel/Palestine. The Jewish people—educated, inventive, powerful, technologically advanced, sophisticated, economically successful—have built a functioning state under constant threat. The Palestinian population, by contrast, is perpetually presented as helpless, trapped, infantilised. Decades of internal corruption, cruel leadership, and destructive cultural practices are ignored in favour of a simplified moral narrative. For young women taught that compassion is their highest virtue, the appeal is irresistible. And for older barren women who can also be seen demonstrating alongside them, the temptation to extend more of the terrible advice feminists have provided their youthful female friends and colleagues, well it’s too enticing to pass up.
Women who should be forming families of their own, protecting children they have brought into the world, instead pour their emotional energy into distant, abstract victims. Gaza becomes the nursery. Protest becomes the cradle. The maternal instinct remains—but redirected, politicised, and weaponised. This is not compassion at its healthiest. It is compassion severed from responsibility, from realism, and from biology itself. And until Western societies are willing to ask why so many young women are marching for other people’s children instead of raising their own, this phenomenon will only grow louder. The Israeli administration has taken absolutely no notice of any of this; in fact, I’ll conclude with a sad observation.
The only achievement of hundreds of thousands of barren females hysterically raging under the clarion call, ‘Internationalize the Intifada’ can be found in the iron stench of blood washing over the once pure sands of Bondi Beach.
Peter Abram 
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