Aswat
Palestine lesbian organization
Aswat - Palestinian Feminist Center for Gender and Sexual Freedoms, also known as Aswat (Arabic: أصوات, lit. 'Voices'), is a feminist organization that advocates for lesbians and other LGBT women in the Palestinian community. The group started as an online platform in 2000, started having the regular meetings in 2001 and was joined Kayan-Feminist Organization in 2003 as an independent project, making it the first Palestinian organization for Queers and lesbians (LBTIQ). It was initially membership-based, but has since transitioned to a movement-based structure. It is based in Haifa, Israel.
The organization was cofounded by activist Rauda Morcos, who received the Felipa de Souza Award from OutRight Action International for her work with the group. Today, Aswat engages in advocacy work and education while also hosting monthly support group meetings that address sexual orientation, gender identity, and nationality. As of May 2016, its co-director was Ghadir Shafie.
History
Morcos said that: "When we started Aswat, I remember the Islamic Movement issued a boycott against us as well as a fatwa [an Islamic religious legal order] against me personally, because according to them I was ‘the snake’s head.’" In 2004 the group had 14 members. In October 2004, Rauda Morcos spoke at the Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Duke University in her capacity (at the time) as the coordinator of Aswat.
In 2007, when Aswat had about 30 members and held its first conference, the Islamic Movement in Israel (a grouping of Arab Muslims) publicly called for the meeting to be cancelled and urged its community "to stand against the campaign to market sexual deviance among our daughters and our women." Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsur, head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, said: "Our community does not tolerate this kind of behaviour.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Aswat” is palestine lesbian organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Aswat, Palestine and lesbian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18191375. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aswat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.