Editor’s Note: 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.
Women Win is an advocacy group that supports all girls, women, and non-binary people, with a special emphasis on those who are members of minorities (preferably, the organization says on its website, black women, indigenous women, mestizas, women of color, and LGBTQI+ people). Founded in 2006, the group is a global women’s fund that advances women’s rights through sports.
The organization has published many recent articles on women’s empowerment and why the world should put women “at the centre of the conversation.” Women Win has not yet commented on Hamas’s attacks against Israeli women. It has, however, signed the “Funders for a Ceasefire Now” letter that many philanthropic organizations have endorsed since October 7.
“We [take] seriously our responsibility to address the root causes of what we see unfolding today — the decades of systematic violence, military occupation and displacement that all Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have experienced at the hands of the Israeli government,” the letter reads. “In our own backyards, we are horrified by a recent spike in anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric. We are united in challenging all bigotries rooted in white supremacy.”
The letter’s signatories call for an immediate cease-fire, for humanitarian aid to be let into Gaza, for a halt in U.S. funding for the Israeli military, and for the release of all Palestinians “who have been unlawfully detained.” They also emphasize the importance of flexible core funding for Palestinians, “without donor-imposed restrictions.” Hundreds of groups and individuals have signed the letter.
Women Win spent more than €9 million on various programs in 2022. The organization received funding in 2022 from the Channel Foundation, Comic Relief, the Equality Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Foundation for a Just Society, Girls Forward, the Global Fund for Women, the Luminate Foundation, the New Venture Fund, the George Soros–backed Tides Foundation, the UN Foundation, the UN Foundation’s Resilience Fund, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, as well as from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European Observatoire of Sport and Employment.
On its website, Women Win also lists as its supporters the government of the Netherlands, Fondation Chanel, Gap Inc., Mama Cash, Ladies Circle International, the NoVo Foundation, Primark, Nike, UN Women, and Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
The group also received funding from the U.S. Department of State to “empower the most marginalised youth in East Asia and the Western Hemisphere” through a sports-diplomacy program.
For a women’s fund that “believes in a future where every girl and woman exercises their rights,” Women Win’s silence on the Israeli women whom Hamas killed and raped on October 7 is deafening.