PWI

By Mikki Stelder
January 4, 2012

Why is it that every time we speak of sexuality [in Israel] we also have to speak of the occupation [of Palestine], and not also the opposite?

Can we be able to ever speak on sexuality in Israel without talking about the occupation?

Aeyal Gross, 2011 (+972MAG)

Gross (Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv) has often been cited as an expert on what he frames as the spectrum “between queer politics and homonationalism” in Israel. His earlier work focuses on the way the Israeli government uses gay rights achievements as “a fig leaf for Israeli democracy.” On the other hand, Gross’ reluctance to adopt the term pinkwashing has created a shift in his priorities. His multiple attempts to denounce the term pinkwashing coincide with his public celebration of Israeli gay rights achievements as national achievements – most recently in his speech at the International LGBTQ Youth Leaders’ Summit in Israel for the celebration of International Human Rights Day. Besides that the celebration of human rights as individual privileges normalizes power relations and preempts discussions of social justice, the Israeli occupation and Palestinian struggle for self-determination are now but a mere footnote in Gross’ enumeration of Israel’s human rights standards.

Gross’ participation in the Summit is emblematic of a recent shift within left wing liberal queer politics and mainstream LGBT organizing in Israel. Whereas gay rights were first selectively disconnected from the human rights discourse, the occupation now turns into a footnote running alongside LGBT events on gay rights in Israel. Palestinian queer groups articulate that it is problematic that gay rights are singled out to mark Israel’s entry into something we could apprehensively call “Western modernity,” which can only occur in conjunction with deeply rooted Islamophobia and Arabophobia. In these liberal politics a human rights language is deployed, but instead of engendering responsibility, this language is used, again, to divert attention from pinkwashing and occupation. This empty sloganeering purports an even further depoliticization of queer struggles and denies the reality of a prevailing identitarian politics. The occupation is often referred to as a “tension” or “hot issue.” to supposedly include human rights into the gay agenda, while at the same time pinkwashing Israel’s human rights standards. What is fallacious about this logic is that the gay rights struggle occupies a central position. The centralization of gay rights in the human rights debate erases the axes of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. The gay struggle becomes the plane from which all other forms of oppression can be understood, in a top-down way.

Over the last decade, Palestinian queer groups have developed a comprehensive discourse on the relationship between sexual rights and the occupation, and the way in which the selective gay rights narrative in Israel can not be separated from the reality of occupation. Instead of a direct engagement with this discourse, liberal queer organizations now turn to a supposedly comprehensive understanding of human rights. However, they refuse to reflect on why they are called out by Palestinian queer activists. This refusal of the former transforms into the increased silencing of the latter, as is exemplary in the Summit’s and Gross’ invalidation of the anti-pinkwashing discourse.

The paradoxical relationship between speaking about human rights, while ignoring the anti-occupation discourse developed by Palestinian queers, characterizes recent events such as the Summit. According to this logic, Palestinian queer groups’ refusal to violate the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions call, is transformed into a stubborn reluctance on their end to be in solidarity with the “universal” struggle for gay rights and participate in Israeli LGBT events. But, as alQaws: for gender and sexual diversity in Palestinian society has argued since 2007, whenever the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian queers is mired in a patronizing attitude of the former ignoring the discourse of the latter, cooperation is impossible and undesirable. The attitude in which Israeli queers will save Palestinians queers, from Palestinians, reiterates a colonial and Arabophobic attitude which denies that Palestinians are indiscriminately oppressed by the occupation.¹

This paradox that is dependent on the negation of the Palestinian queer voice also characterizes the work of Gross. By saying this, I do not mean that the discussion on the structures of pinkwashing, nationalism, racism, and gay rights is based on a policing of thought, whenever we are not interested in gay rights in Israel, as Gross has argued here. I rather point to the slippery slope on which the structure of arguments such as Gross’ balance. Gross argues that because Israel has seen advancements in gay rights, the term pinkwashing would not be equipped to properly criticize the use of gay rights by the Israeli state. According to Gross, pinkwashing derives from greenwashing, which is used to call out companies who pretend to be green to make more profits. If we follow Gross’ argument, Israel has gay rights (to an extent), and therefore it does not pretend to be pink. Yet, if gay rights are celebrated as the epitome of human rights, not only to brand Israel as pink, but also to brand it as democratic, modern, tolerant, diverse, and based on human equality, pinkwashing would be exactly the term we are looking for. In order to understand the rhetoric of the Israeli occupation (and possibly also the rhetoric of Gross) pinkwashing is indispensable. The state profits from the instrumentalization of gay rights, if we regard the state’s profits as the shift in attention from the occupation and inequality (and from gay rights in Israel itself for that matter) to wonderfully commodified gay Tel Aviv.

Rather than expanding his analysis on homonationalism in Israel, Gross is preoccupied with the way pinkwashing critiques “deny” the pink progress that actually took place. However, upon critical examination of the anti-pinkwashing discourse, it is clear that this is not a discussion about gay rights. Nor is there the desire to talk about gay rights, because gay rights for (Jewish) Israeli citizens, are irrelevant to Palestinians living under occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel who are denied equal rights. When Gross seems to argue that the failure of pinkwashing is to allow for a critical distinction between gay rights and their representation, he himself does exactly that; he conflates the distinction between existing gay rights in Israel with their celebration in the public sphere. Whenever Palestinian queers and allies raise the issue of occupation, Gross transforms the discussion into why we should not use pinkwashing because Israel has gay rights. Why do we need to celebrate Israeli gay rights or constantly refer to them, when we are developing a critique against the use of the gay rights discourse by the state and Zionist queer groups?

Pinkwashing is not about gay rights, or against gay rights, or against the right to talk about gay rights and fight for them. In pinkwashing, what Gross euphemistically refers to as the “fig leaf,” gay rights are not a priority. The anti-pinkwashing discourse is not preoccupied with gay rights, nor does it pretend to do so. What Gross refuses, or fails to connect, is the different narratives that circulate within the human and gay rights discourse in which rights are implied, but not imposed. Gross, in his work, feeds the argument that Israel has gay rights and is therefore more advanced than “the rest of the Middle East.” He makes this claim implicitly when he asks: why is it that every time we speak of sexuality, we also have to speak of the occupation, and not also the opposite?” (my emphasis). In other words, shouldn’t we talk about sexuality in Palestinian society when we speak about the occupation? Such a question ignores the discourse created by Palestinian queer groups who develop an intersectional understanding of struggles and have been working on sexuality related issues in Palestinian society for 10 years now. Moreover, such a question re-iterates patronizing attitudes characteristic of the way in which Palestinian queer groups are regarded. If an indigenous population, which in its entirety, is oppressed, why would this hail a discussion about sexuality (as if sexuality issues in Palestine would legitimize the occupation)? And why, when an entire population are denied human rights, or rather social justice, would we want to celebrate gay rights as human rights? When we celebrate gay rights in Israel, it is almost impossible to focus on the human rights abuses taking place on a gross scale.

The discussion whether pinkwashing is a valid term or not is irrelevant to the discussion on social justice, human rights, and (queer) Palestinian self-determination. When it comes to language, a more interesting question would be: How are concepts used and how do they travel through different layers of power and signification. How are they mobilized politically? What would happen if we use a different term, but re-iterate the same argument, would this argument be more or less valid, because we change the name?

If we look at the political and historical travels of the term queer, Gross’ argument – that pinkwashing is a wrong term – seems rather silly. For decades (if not longer) queer has been used as a derogatory term, but it has been transformed into a term of empowerment, in a predominantly US context. Nowadays the term shifts again and becomes extensively embedded in a neoliberal and exceptional sexual politics that creates both the good queer, normative citizen, and marks Arabs and Muslims as perversely queer (in the sense of non-normative, deviant behavior). Nonetheless, queer has been re-appropriated in different contexts, defying the project of the gay international.

Gross’ choice of the term “fig leaf” to describe Israel’s pinkwashing project, is an interesting choice of terms, because it recalls the biblical story of Adam and Eve covering their genitals, their sex, disguising their organs of desire, disguising something that is private and shameful. So if gay rights become a fig leaf for Israeli democracy, then what are these gay rights hiding? Are they hiding democracy or its failure? The euphemism of the fig leaf distracts attention from the fact that the occupation is not something which is shamefully hidden by gay rights in Israel. Pinkwashing is a clear and well funded public strategy.

So, “why is it that every time we speak of sexuality, we also have to speak of the occupation?”

When we make a radical distinction between gay rights as they exist in law, and the use of the gay rights discourse of equality and freedom by the state and Zionist groups, then No. No we don’t have to talk about the occupation every time we talk about sexual rights in Israel. However, when the gay rights discourse of freedom and equality – as an emancipatory rhetoric, – serves the purposes of the Israeli state in its current configuration, rather than those of the queer community, and when Palestinian citizens of Israel are still second class citizens, the Palestinian Territories are still occupied, and the “separation wall” is still standing, then Yes. Yes, we have to always talk about the occupation also, whenever we use human rights as a gay emancipatory rhetoric.

Although Gross condemns the use of celebration to mark Palestinians and Arabs as “backward” and “homophobic,” in contrast to the exceptional Israeli nation-state, he implicitly reproduces the same representational logic. Why is there a need to underline the achievements of the Israeli LGBT community, implicitly marking it as Jewish-Israeli (and thus inaccessible to non-Jews), separating it from the geopolitical context on which such a celebration takes place? If social achievements are celebrated as national achievements then why would we even want to single out gay rights in Israel from the larger discussions on equal rights and social justice?

Gay rights can not be isolated. We need to be wary of the articulation of the queer struggle as continuous. Furthermore, Gross’ has the luxury to ask if we can separate gay rights from talking about the occupation, because he is speaking from a position of privilege allotted to him within the context of the occupation.

Gross finishes his address to the Youth Leaders’ Summit with his hopes of a future in which Palestinian queers will agree to cooperate as equals with Israeli gay groups. He renounces the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions call because it would stifle dialogue. He relies on the assumption that because of a shared non-normative sexuality, we queers should be in solidarity with each other always, as if it is impossible for queers to reproduce the norm. Can we perceive of sexual solidarity as disconnected from other forms of oppression? If not, then besides reflecting on internal dynamics in gay communities, unequal power relations need to be addressed, before a cooperation based on sexual solidarity will be desirable. This is the reason why Palestinian queer activists, for the last 4 years, have refused to co-operate with Israeli gay groups, whenever these dynamics single out sexuality as a separated struggle. This is also why queer alliances might be rethought as something more, or else than sexual solidarity.

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1. A good example of this attitude is the report “Nowhere to run: Gay Palestinian Asylum Seekers in Israel.” This report is aimed at analyzing human rights violations of gay Palestinian men in the Occupied Territories under the (partial) control of the Palestinian Authority. It then moves on to recommend how Israel can save these gay men from their homophobic surroundings. The report uses language such as “the lives of innocent men will be put in danger,” and “no state may discriminate on nationality with regard to refugee protection.“ The report remains rather silent on the gross human rights violations at the hand of the Israeli state who is responsible for maintaining the occupation and the fact that the right to return of Palestinian refugees in general is not granted. The aim is to show that gay friendly Israelis can save Palestinian gays from their homophobic surroundings.