Women's Affairs Center

Activities

• WAC accuses Israel of “clear war crimes” and perpetuating a “Nakba.” Supports a Palestinian “Right of Return.”
• In November 2021, WAC was a signatory on a statement urging the United States to condemn the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “The main task of our institutions and of Palestinian human rights defenders is to work towards an end to the occupation, the dismantling of the apartheid regime and towards the realization of our collective human rights to self-determination and the right of return…The undersigned organizations therefore declare that they will not meet with the U.S. Ambassador. We further call upon all other Palestinian organizations to adopt a similar position and demonstrate their clear and principled refusal to refuse the normalization of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”
• Participates in discriminatory campaigns such as “Love in the Time of Apartheid Campaign: The Palestinian Campaign for Repealing Israel’s Racist Law Denying Family Reunification.”
• WAC is listed as an “endorser” of the 2016 Women’s Boat to Gaza, which claims that Israel has “launched countless attacks against the besieged population, turning their life into a nightmare.”
• On February 4, 2016, Naila Ayesh, former General Director of WAC, signed a statement declaring support for “Palestinian feminists living under Israel’s system of colonial and racist oppression.”

Allegations of “War Crimes”

• In February 2015, WAC organized a photo exhibition called “A Witness to the Age,” to display “scenes from the latest Israeli offensive on Gaza in 2014.” WAC Director Amal Syam stated that “these photographs are not the only witness to the crimes of the occupation, every drop of blood spilled on this earth and the lives of the martyrs and the destruction caused by the Israeli military machinery in the whole regions in Gaza is the biggest proof for the crimes that the occupation practiced against the unarmed civilians.”
• Following the 2014 Gaza war, WAC called for the International Criminal Court to prosecute the “Israeli occupation” for “war crimes.”
• Following the 2012 Gaza war, WAC published a “selection of stories” under the headline “Women in confrontation with Israeli occupation” and claiming to document Israel’s “inhumane face” and “the truth about the war crimes the occupation forces had committed during the eight days of the assault.”
• In a statement about the 2009 Gaza war, WAC claimed that the “war has affected everything without taking the lives of the civilians and their safety into consideration.” WAC alleged that it “witnessed the civilians when being killed by the Israeli army especially the women and children.” WAC called the war “brutal” and demands “trying Israel in a military court to punish Israel for being war criminal [sic].”

BDS

• In June 2020, WAC Director Amal Nasser was a signatory on an “Appeal from Palestine to the Peoples and States of the World” calling for States to take “punitive and deterrent measures” against “settlements, settlers and settlement products, including preventing such products from entering their markets.”
• On March 8, 2016, WAC was a signatory to the “Palestinian Women’s Call for Worldwide Women’s Endorsement of BDS,” which called on women and feminists to join BDS campaigns, as “the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid has for decades denied the Palestinian people our inalienable right to self-determination.”
• In February 2013 WAC signed a “Palestinians call for a boycott of Israeli diamonds,” which “may still be blood diamonds if they were cut and polished in Israel where diamond-revenue funds a regime guilty of war crimes.”
• In May 2005 signed a petition calling for the academic boycott of Israel as a means to “isolate Apartheid Israel…forging effective solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, self-determination and sovereignty.”