During UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, National Review is featuring 15 women’s organizations that have either supported Hamas’s violence against Israeli women or remained silent about it.
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is an international foundation that operates under the lesbian feminist vision. As an organization rooted in “resistance,” Astraea said of Hamas’s October 7 attacks against Israel, the foundation “stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
“We are firmly against all forms of oppression, colonization, and displacement of all people — our collective liberation is intertwined,” Astraea said in a statement. “We join our queer and feminist communities, grantee partners, and funders in calling for an immediate ceasefire, resourcing the humanitarian response to provide immediate aid and relief for Palestinians, and ending of the occupation of Palestine.”
The organization has supported hundreds of global grassroots efforts to bolster LGBTQI human rights, to the tune of $40 million in the past four decades. Astraea tacks on the fight for Palestinian liberation to its overarching goal of funding LGBTQI political organizations. Like other women’s groups National Review has profiled this week, Astraea is funded by the Dobkin Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Levi Strauss Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the New World Foundation, and the George Soros–backed Tides Foundation.
Through one of its token grant programs, Astraea funds intersex activists who work to “ensure the human rights, bodily autonomy, physical integrity and self-determination of intersex people.” Examples of Astraea’s intersex-activist groups include Roma Women of Vojvodina in Serbia, which educates Roma youth about the intersex population, and the Bangladesh Intersex Forum, which equips “intersex people with the resources, support, and information they need to break the cycle of trauma that is a result of ‘correctional’ surgeries.”
Astraea funds a number of U.S.-based organizations that focus on “the liberation of queer, trans, two-spirit and intersex people of color and [challenge] the criminalization of 2SLBTQI BIPOC, migrants, women of color, mothers, sex workers and youth, among other constituencies who experience high levels of violence and oppression.” That sex-worker liberation relates to Palestinian liberation is not a belief held only by Astraea. The United Kingdom’s Sex Workers’ Union announced its unequivocal support for Palestinians in October, saying that “as sex workers, we stand against the violence of borders, imperial and colonial violence, and all state sanctioned violence against oppressed and marginalized peoples.”
Astraea mourned “the death of all those killed in Palestine and Israel by military and civilian violence” but has not yet condemned Hamas or professed support for the Israeli women — intersex or otherwise — who were slaughtered on October 7.
Susana Fried is on Astraea’s board of directors. Fried is a fellow at Yale University’s Global Health Justice Partnership whose work “focuses on building cross-movement strategies and advocacy to challenge criminalization of sexual and reproductive rights, sexuality, HIV, sex work, sexual orientation, gender identity and drug use.” Fried has worked in senior roles at Soros’s philanthropy, the Open Society Foundations, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the World Health Organization, according to her biography.
Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is another member of Astraea’s board. Lewis worked for eight years at the U.N. Development Fund for Women and was the first president of UN-GLOBE, a group that advocates for LGBTQ U.N. employees. Darcelle Lewis, also on the Astraea board, is a senior official at the anti-Israel feminist group FRIDA.