The Equality Forum, an annual LGBTQ conference held in Philadelphia, has announced that Israel is their featured nation for 2012, and they have invited the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, to deliver the keynote speech.

Ambassador Oren, who personally has an atrocious record of supporting Israel’s war crimes and was the object of a demonstration by students in 2010 at UC Irvine (the Irvine 11), has no business delivering the keynote speech at a conference dedicated to social justice and equality.  This year’s Equality Forum conference, which is partnered with the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, is a flagrant form of Pinkwashing.

What is Pinkwashing?

Pinkwashing is the appropriation of queer voices from Israel and Palestine and the gay rights struggle to distract from and normalize the numerous human rights and international law violations and the colonial and apartheid policies that the Israeli State has established on the ground.

Pinkwashing is meant to cover up these violations with a facade of progressiveness and equality. In short, Israeli Pinkwashing aims to change the standard of a progressive, civilized nation from one that respects and protects human rights to on that respects and protects gay rights, while deliberately ignoring basic rights to a repressed and occupied population (rights to water, movement, speech, education).  From Pinkwatchingisrael.com

Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or PQBDS, a coalition of Palestinian LGBTQ groups, has released a statement in which they call for a boycott of the Equality Forum 2012.

Please write to the Executive Director of the Equality Forum, Malcolm Lazin (mlazin@equalityforum.com), and the Chair of the Board, Professor Debra Blair (dblair@temple.edu), to tell them not to allow the Equality Forum to pinkwash Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Feel free to use the letter below – or to write your own!

Dear Malcolm Lazin and Debra Blair:

I am writing to express my grave concern that the Equality Forum has chosen Israel as its “featured country” for the 2012 Summit in May, and will feature Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., as the Keynote speaker at the International Equality Dinner.  By partnering with the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, the Equality Forum has become part of a well-funded rebranding campaign undertaken by the Israeli government to improve its international reputation after being severely criticized by a wide range of entities, including the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, for serious human rights violations in its treatment of Palestinians.  Their aim is to market their gay-friendliess so that they can “change the subject,” from the negative condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to a positive discussion of how pro-gay Israel state policy is.  This campaign, called “Brand Israel,” aimed to respond to the growing movement against apartheid in Israel by portraying Israel as “relevant and modern.”   Queer and trans activists around the world who oppose occupation and apartheid have called this strategy “pinkwashing” because it is a direct effort to conceal the extreme violence and harm that Israel inflicts on Palestinians, including queer and trans Palestinians, by promoting Israel as “gay friendly.”

Michael Oren as the choice to keynote the Summit dinner is particularly offensive, not only for the way in which his selection furthers Israel’s pinkwashing campaign, but also in light of his public statements justifying the disproportionate use of force and violence against Palestinians.  For this reason he has received severe criticism by, among others, the Atlantic magazine, http://bit.ly/GCaCsL.  In light of these problems with his record, I am offended that a heterosexual man with no history of gay rights work was selected to keynote such an important event.

As someone who supports the social justice aims of the Equality Forum, it is important to me to share my concerns with you and share resources that may help you to build greater awareness about pinkwashing so that the Equality Forum and its 2012 Summit is not used to forward an agenda that seeks to mislead people concerned about homophobia and transphobia into supporting the horrifying violence of apartheid Israel.  I strongly urge you to reconsider your selection of Israel as the Summit’s “featured nation” and Michael Oren as the keynote speaker at the Summit’s International Equality Dinner.  Please know that you would not be the first human rights or gay rights organization in the U.S. to back away from involvement in a pinkwashing event, for instance the Seattle LGBT Commission recently canceled an event it had scheduled with Israeli LGBT leaders which was sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism.  The Equality Forum’s domestic and international reputation is tarnished by its willingness to be used as a part of a foreign nation’s public relations campaign to distract attention from its well-documented human rights abuses.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

This is the Open Letter members of the first LGBTQI delegation to Palestine wrote after they returned from their trip in January 2012 - please sign on to the letter.

This is an op-ed about pinkwashing that Sarah Schulman published in the New York Times.

This is a recent article by Jasbir Puar about pinkwashing.

This is a recent article by Katherine Franke responding to a pinkwashing event that PFLAG hosted.

This is where you can find information about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctionsmovement and the many people and organizations who have joined its work.

Here are links to Palestinian queer/trans organizations working against homophobia, transphobia, occupation and apartheid:

Palestinian Queers for BDS

alQaws

Aswat

This post was originally published here. 

The State of Israel realizes that its crimes have been exposed to the world. Israel is one of the largest violators of United Nations resolutions and has committed major atrocities against countless innocent civilians. Palestinians—both queer and straight—who live in Israel suffer from significant discrimination and displacement and are denied fundamental rights merely because they do not belong to the Jewish ethno-religious group. Additionally, those Palestinians who live in the Israeli-occupied territories of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank have faced decades of a brutal apartheid regime. Israel also denies millions of Palestinians who live in exile or in refugee camps the right to return to their ancestral homes as enshrined by United Nations Resolution 194.

Rather than end its ongoing ethnic cleansing and military occupation, Israel has instead pumped millions of dollars into the “Brand Israel” campaign which includes state propaganda aimed at altering its image around the world. A central pillar of this has been “pinkwashing,” or the shifting of discourse away from Israel as an apartheid state to Israel as a so-called gay haven.

In response, queer Palestinian and Arab grassroots organizations and initiatives, including alQaws, Pinkwatching Israel, and PQBDS, have worked tirelessly to highlight the myriad forms of persecution that we face, including Israel’s denial of our basic rights such as freedom of movement.

Rather than stand in solidarity with queer human rights activists who are resisting Israeli state hegemony, the Equality Forum has designated Michael Oren as its keynote speaker. In addition to being a propagandist for war crimes, Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This is akin to the Equality Forum inviting a white South African ambassador as a keynote speaker during the apartheid era. We condemn the Equality Forum’s direct links with the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism.

PQBDS and Pinkwatching Israel also denounce the decision of the Equality Forum to aggrandize Israel by rendering invisible the gay-rights violations within Israel as well as the oppression of queer and straight Palestinians. The Equality Forum is flaunting its disregard for decades of Palestinian and Israeli anti-occupation activism, including the 2005 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions call. As a result, many people of conscience are joining the chorus criticizing the Equality Forum, including Sherry Wolf and Uri Horesh.

If the Equality Forum chooses to proceed with this agenda of Israeli state-sponsored propaganda and to promote gay tourism in an apartheid state, then we request that speakers and participants—who are genuinely committed to equality, social justice, and human rights—boycott the 2012 Equality Forum Summit.

Palestinian Queers for BDS

Pinkwatching Israel

In June 2011, 15 Arab sexual rights and human rights organizations, and more than a dozen individual activists, signed a statement condemning the website Gaymiddleeast.com for lying about itself, its origins, and its politics. It’s unusual to see so many groups and activists getting together on anything in a fractured region, so this unanimity was something of an event. It’s been six months since the statement, which “Gay Middle East” never answered.  But the website has started creeping back to life. It’s time, I think, to remind ourselves exactly what its lies were, and why they were and are so dangerous.

This statement wasn’t the first time the activists had to tried to ask “Gay Middle East” to clarify basic facts, including where it was founded and based.  The website’s editor, Dan Littauer, earlier responded to criticisms (in a press release written for him by British activist Peter Tatchell) simply by dismissing the questions as “smears.” “Gay Middle East” had denied that it had any links to Israel. The activists responded that GME “presents lies so blatant that a simple Google search is enough uncover the truth.” And they offered the evidence and the truth they had uncovered.

In summary, they found:

• GME’s claim that it was “not owned or run by an Israeli” was completely untrue: the site had been founded in Israel, registered to an Israeli, and owned by an Israeli.
• As late as 2009, in fact, it was still registered to an Israeli address.
• Littauer, its “executive editor,” who when confronted in 2011 claimed he was “a German citizen (with only a German passport),” had in fact repeatedly identified himself as an Israeli in the past.

You can read their research in detail in their statement. What a lot of people outside the region don’t quite grasp, though, is exactly why this is so important.

The activist statement raises a range of political issues.   Those involve, at a basic level, Arab queers’ and Arab activists’ need to reclaim their own voices, rather than submitting to the ventriloquism of others — others who may or may not share their values, may or may not sympathize with their work, but should not in either case be arrogating the right to interpret their struggles to the world.   I’m not going to recapitulate all their concerns here, although I agree with many: they’re already laid out articulately and clearly.  I’m going to address the one that resonates most with me: safety, the safety of activists and ordinary queers. Littauer and “Gay Middle East” have been putting people across the region who work with them in danger.

To be clear: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Israelis working on LGBT issues elsewhere in the Middle East. Plenty of Israeli researchers have produced important academic information on the region. (Among things I’ve read in recent years, Ze’ev Maghen’s work on the concept of purity in Islamic jurisprudence struck me as important, despite the fact that I can’t stand most of what I gather are his politics; and Ofra Bengio‘s study of Ba’ath Party rhetoric, Saddam’s Word, seems to me much better than Kanan Makiya.) But they didn’t do it by denying being Israelis.

Even in Egypt, formally at peace with its neighbor for three decades, Israel remains an enemy in both the state’s rhetoric and the population’s opinions.  Giving sensitive information — and human rights information is clearly “sensitive” to any government — to an Israeli-based group or an Israeli citizen would easily be seen as practicing espionage, almost anywhere in the region.

The khawal as traitor: From state media, 2001

This isn’t a light or abstract threat. It is particularly dangerous for members of groups that are already despised. When the lead defendant in Egypt’s famousQueen Boat case was put on trial, prosecutors claimed he had learned all about homosexuality in Israel. The press carried, and people believed, ludicrously doctored photos of him sitting before an Israeli flag, wearing an Israeli army helmet. In 2007, a Cairo court sentencedMohammed al-Attar to fifteen years, for recruiting gay Arabs in Canada to spy for Israel.  Prosecutors alleged he was “a gay Zionist, who turned his back on Islam and worked to undermine the security of his homeland.”  He later said that police electroshocked him to extract a confession, and forced him to drink his own urine. There are plenty of other stories.

Israel is proud of its espionage, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Not only has it long kept up spy networks around and beyond the Middle East, it publicizes the fact just enough to keep governments off-balance. Objectively, in the Great Game, this is sensible. It’d be dumb to do otherwise. The prevalence of espionage makes a general paranoia on its neighbors’ parts perhaps excusable. Targeting gays is not excusable. But when the general rhetoric already sees them as subject to outside influence, treating them as traitors is simply a next step.

If “Gay Middle East” is hiding its real origins, it’s putting the people in Arab countries who choose to work with it and give it information at grave risk. Does it want to keep them at risk of arrest and torture? Does it simply not care? Its duplicity shows contempt for their safety and well-being. It owes them honest answers, which it so far has refused to give.

Networking: Michael Lucas pictures Israel

Many odd things about GME were already on the public record before the Arab activists’ statement. Ben Doherty used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to survey content produced by GME from 2003 through 2008. He found it started as a tourism site for non-Middle Easterners, with a seeming emphasis on sex tourism:

Some of the people currently or previously associated with the site – namely Dan Littauer, Avi Ozeri, and Scott Piro [the latter two also Israelis], –have a background in the tourism industry and public relations, and until 2009, GME tried to be a tourism resource. Before 2009, their site had a section about tourism to Arab countries with cruising tips. The site offered up coming out stories that were both implausible and prurient. They noted sodomy law and age of consent information for each country.

Beyond this, there was Littauer’s obvious political bias against reporting negative information about Israel; his refusal to talk to some of the most respected activists in the region; and his odd association with Tatchell in the UK, a figure known for his Islamophobia.A key moment came in April 2011, when “Gay Middle East” boasted of how Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office had invited Littauer to contribute information on LGBT issues in the region, for its regular human rights reports.  Littauer was setting himself up to speak for Arab LGBT activism –without speaking to the activists. He seemed indifferent to their opinions on whether, or what, they wanted to contribute to the rights representations of an former imperial (and currently invading) power. The activists’ statement observes:

GBT organizations and activists in the Arab region have always approached requesting foreign intervention very carefully, and it has been the topic of much debate both within activist communities and between them and international organizations that have come to understand the complexities involved and possible backlash that such action would entail.

Meanwhile, GayMiddleEast.com seems to have an open door with the UK Foreign Office and do not think twice about asking them to intervene at any given opportunity. These issues were raised with GayMiddleEast.com by several people, but they refused to engage.

When I visited the region in June 2011, several people voiced increasing fear of “Gay Middle East.” Some were afraid of being blackmailed: Littauer had extracted information about their groups or movements, including names of activists working undercover. They were uncertain how he would use the information, or where it might go.  As these issues were raised with GME, its answer was to turn to Tatchell; the response Tatchell wrote for Littauer’s website contains his signature move of interpreting any criticism as a “smear.” As the activists’ statement says,

GayMiddleEast.com’s disingenuous response to what it sees as a “smear campaign” against it …. obfuscates the legitimate reasons many queer Arab activists take issue with its work.

“We invite Gay Middle East to respond,” the activists wrote. An answer never came. Neither Tatchell nor “Gay Middle East” have ever understood that there are criticisms that demand response and dialogue, not just “smears” that deserve dismissal and rejection.   That inability to answer, to be accountable, to speak to rather than for, leaves them in the end without any credible claim to being activists: just self-promoters, gardeners of their reputations, driven by the passion for publicity.

So six months later, the question still stands: Has “Gay Middle East” got anything to say for itself?

Littauer, at least, has been busily tweeting about those who “smeared” him. His tweets reveal a bit more about GME’s vision. He recently wrote that my old colleague Rasha Moumneh, of Human Rights Watch, is “well known for her loony left militancy – she has a good mentor one shamed ex-HRW…”

The last bit of gibberish I think may refer to me; and, as a Virginia boy, I didn’t know that the German-British-Israeli Littauer, so presumptuously protean, also spoke Southern. But to adopt his demotic Alabaman, I’d just note that I’m ‘shamed, deeply ‘shamed, to be thought Moumneh’s mentor. I’m still young enough to be learning from other people, not mentoring them.

The more interesting point, though, is what Littauer thinks is “loony left militancy.”  He’s referring to a quote Moumneh gave to an article in IPS News. It reads, in its entirety:

“Repression of Arab LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) individuals under previous regimes no doubt existed. Having a non-Islamist government is no guarantee against the persecution of individuals for sexual and gender non-conformity,” Middle East and North Africa researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) Rasha Moumneh tells IPS. ”However, the fear over what is being called an Islamist ‘takeover’ completely ignores what is actually happening on the ground. The Tunisians had free and fair elections for the first time in decades. In Egypt, the primary concern is the abhorrent behaviour of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and not the Islamists.”

Now, both these points are true. The crackdown on homosexual conduct in Egypt from 2001-2004 — when hundreds, probably thousands, were arrested, almost certainly the worst such campaign in the region in modern times — took place under a secular government, enforcing a secular law that was a product of a secular-nationalist revolution. You don’t need the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists to start a moral panic and target despised groups. All you need is a vulnerable government looking for a distraction.

SCAF, with bloody hands

On the second point: the new Tunisian government isdemocratically elected (which should make it less vulnerable, rather than more).  If Tunisia is to become a normal democracy, its citizens and its self-appointed friends have to stop being paranoid about the passage of power. The election of a party may anger or disappoint its opponents, but it shouldn’t create fear for the system itself, any more than a Tory victory in Littauer’s adopted homeland entitles Labour to claim democratic process is collapsing.  When Littauer indicates that, he’s expressing his contempt for the revolution, and his fear of democracy. Meanwhile, in Egypt, it’s the armed forces and not the Islamists who are busily violating the population’s human rights, subjecting 12,000 people to miltary trial, and shooting unarmed civilians on the streets. To pretend that they are not the most urgent threat to freedom (as well as life) is wilfully to disregard the reality.

So what defines the “loony left,” for “Gay Middle East”? They tell the truth, and they respect democracy and democratic process.

And what defines the “reasonable right,” for “Gay Middle East”? I shudder to imagine.

That seems to say it all.

We are a diverse group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans activists, academics, artists, and cultural workers from the United States who participated in a solidarity tour in the West Bank of Palestine and Israel from January 7-13, 2012.

What we witnessed was devastating and created a sense of urgency around doing our part to end this occupation and share our experience across a broad cross-section of the LGBTIQ community. We saw with our own eyes the walls—literally and metaphorically—separating villages, families and land. From this, we gained a profound appreciation for how deeply embedded and far reaching this occupation is through every aspect of Palestinian daily life.

So too, we gained new insights into how Israeli civil society is profoundly affected by the dehumanizing effects of Israeli state policy toward Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. We were moved by the immense struggle being waged by some Israelis in resistance to state policies that dehumanize and deny the human rights of Palestinians.

We ended our trip in solidarity with Palestinian and Israeli people struggling to end the occupation of Palestine, and working for Palestinian independence and self-sovereignty.

Among the things we saw were:

• the 760 km (470 mi) separation wall (jidar) partitioning and imprisoning the Palestinian people;
• how the wall’s placement works to confiscate large swaths of Palestinian land, splits villages and families in two, impedes Palestinians from working their agricultural land, and in many cases does not advance the ostensible security interests of Israel;
• a segregated road system (one set of roads for cars with Israeli plates, and another much inferior one for cars with Palestinian plates) throughout the West Bank, constructed by the Israeli state and enforced by the Israeli army; these roads ease Israeli travel to and from illegal settlements in the West Bank and severely impede Palestinian travel between villages, to agricultural land, and throughout a territory which is and has been their homeland;
• a system of permits (identification cards) that limits the travel of Palestinian people and functionally imprisons them, separating them from family, health care, jobs and other necessities;
• militarized checkpoints with barbed wire and soldiers armed with automatic rifles and the humiliation and harassment the Palestinian people experience daily in order to travel from one place to another;
• the reconfiguration of maps to render invisible Palestinian villages/homelands;
• harmful living conditions created and enforced by Israeli law and policy such as limited access to water and electricity in many Palestinian homes;
• violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, and the ongoing growth of illegal settlements facilitated by the Israeli military;
• homelessness as a result of the razing of Palestinian homes by the Israeli state;
• home invasions, tear gas attacks, “skunk water” attacks, and the arrest of Palestinian children by the Israeli military as part of ongoing harassment designed to force Palestinian villagers to give up their land;

While travel restrictions prevented us from directly witnessing the state of things in the Gaza Strip, we believe the blockade of the Gaza Strip has produced a humanitarian crisis of monumental proportion.

Our time together in Palestine has led us to understand that we have a responsibility to share with our US based LGBTIQ communities what we saw and heard so that we can do more together to end this occupation. In that spirit, we offer the following summary points in solidarity with the Palestinian people:

• The liberation of the Palestinian people from the project of Israeli occupation is the foremost goal of the Palestinian people and we fully support this aim. We also understand that liberation from this form of colonization and apartheid goes hand in hand with the liberation of queer Palestinians from the project of global heterosexism.
• We call out and reject the state of Israel’s practice of pinkwashing, that is, a well-funded, cynical publicity campaign marketing a purportedly gay-friendly Israel to an international audience so as to distract attention from the devastating human rights abuses it commits on a daily basis against the Palestinian people. Key to Israel’s pinkwashing campaign is the manipulative and false labeling of Israeli culture as gay-friendly and Palestinian culture as homophobic. It is our view that comparisons of this sort are both inaccurate – homophobia and transphobia are to be found throughout Palestinian and Israeli society – and that this is beside the point: Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine cannot be somehow justified or excused by its purportedly tolerant treatment of some sectors of its own population. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian queer organizations like Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS) whose work continues to impact queer Palestinians and all Palestinians. (http://www.alqaws.org,http://www.pqbds.com/)
• We urge LGBTIQ individuals and communities to resist replicating the practice of pinkwashing that insists on elevating the sexual freedom of Palestinian people over their economic, environmental, social, and psychological freedom. Like the Palestinian activists we met, we view heterosexism and sexism as colonial projects and, therefore, see both as interrelated and interconnected regimes that must end.
• We stand in solidarity with queer Palestinian activists who are working to end the occupation, and also with Israeli activists, both queer and others, who are resisting the occupation that is being maintained and extended in their name.
• We name the complicity of the United States in this human rights catastrophe and call on our government to end its participation in an unjust regime that places it and us on the wrong side of peace and justice.
• We support efforts on the part of Palestinians to achieve full self-determination, such as building an international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which calls for the fulfillment of three fundamental demands: (http://www.bdsmovement.net/call)
  • The end of the Occupation and the dismantling of the Wall (jidar).
  • The right of return for displaced Palestinians.
  • The recognition and restoration of the equal rights of citizenship for Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent.

Signed, January 25, 2012:

Katherine Franke Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, Columbia University; Board Member Center for Constitutional Rights

Barbara Hammer Filmmaker, Faculty at European Graduate School

Tom Léger Editor, PrettyQueer.com

Darnell L. Moore Writer and activist

 Vani Natarajan Humanities and Area Studies Librarian, Barnard College

Pauline Park Chair, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

 Jasbir K. Puar Rutgers University, Board Member Audre Lorde Project

Roya Rastegar Independent artist and scholar

Dean Spade Assistant Professor, Seattle University School of Law and Collective Member, Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Kendall Thomas Nash Professor of Law, Columbia University

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz Intersections/intersecciones consulting

Juliet Widoff, MD Callen-Lorde Community Health Center

All organizational affiliations are listed for identification purposes only and in no way indicate a position taken by such organizations on the issues raised in this statement.

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.

Mideast Youth is one of many prominent organizations endorsing a statement recently released by the group Pinkwatching Israel that addresses a trip to Palestine/Israel organized under the banner of interfaith dialog and LGBT solidarity. The three organizations involved in the trip Beit Haverim, David and Jonathan, and HM2F are supposedly embarking on a purely spiritual journey to visit various spiritual sites in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The trip is explicitly “non-political”.

Pinkwatching Israel’s statement calls them out on that. By claiming to be non-political they are making the very political decision to ignore the plight of the Palestinians. By claiming to be non-political, they are accepting the apartheid wall around Bethlehem, and the illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. There is no such as thing as non-political. What these groups really mean is that they have the privilege of ignoring discrimination against Palestinians, and that they will take advantage of that privilege because their interfaith and LGBT “solidarity” efforts must fit within a specific agenda of Israeli occupation.

LGBT solidarity and interfaith dialog are admirable goals, and will certainly be a core part of creating a stronger, more just Middle East. However, true solidarity and dialog will not amplify one set of voices will continuing to silence the voices of the Palestinians. As an organization dedicated to amplifying all voices for change, Mideast Youth endorses this statement.

A number of LGBTQ activist organizations from across the world have called upon three French religious organizations to cancel an upcoming interfaith delegation to Israel because it violates the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Asserting itself as a “vanguard of a dialogue among spiritualities for reciprocity and solidarity with local LGBT movements,” Beit Haverim, David and Jonathan, and HM2F are French LGBT groups of Jews, Christians and Muslims respectively whose tour next week is partly sponsored by the City of Paris.

Arab / Palestinian LGBTQ groups have expressed concerns about the wisdom of such a visit, against a backdrop of claims that the French organisations have not discussed or collaborated effectively with local organisations.

Writing at Pinkwatching Israel, the local activists explain:

The organizations claim that the trip is “non-political,” but a brief look at theirprogram clearly shows the political dimensions of the trip. Meeting with an Israeli MK [Member of the Knesset], an official from the municipality of Tel Aviv, and French Cultural Attaché in Israel to discuss “cultural relations between Israel and France” are political by nature. Violations of BDS guidelines constitute a conscious political choice. Beit Haverim, David and Jonathan, and HM2F are clearly willing to engage only in certain forms of politics which they deem safe, while ignoring questions of their responsibility, as religious tourists, to refrain from legitimizing occupation and apartheid.

This denial is so powerful that none of the material produced by the organizations for the trip mentions the word “occupation” even once. The only West Bank city on their itinerary is Bethlehem, currently surround by the apartheid wall which segregates 15,000 dunums of agricultural land. Ironically, the wall around Bethlehem serves to isolate and annex the very same religious areas that the organizations plan to visit. Around Rachel’s Tomb and the Bilal Ibn Rabah Mosque, hundreds of Palestinians are isolated between two walls, further strengthening Israeli control of historic, religious, and deeply significant places and strangling the city economically.

In particular, activists questioned the solidarity of HM2F (Homosexuels musulmans de France) with Muslim LGBT people in Palestine.

According to the program, they claim to be in touch with “Muslim LGBT” organization Al-Qaws, when in fact, HM2F only contacted them for a meeting on the 1st of November. This lack of concern is evident not only in their misidentification of alQaws as a Muslim group, but also in their decision to bypass any prior consultation with the Palestinian queer groups they claim to be in solidarity with. In particular, HM2F’s participation comes as a disappointing surprise to the organization’s partners as their involvement directly risks the safety of activists and groups located in Arab societies. HM2F is currently a member of several coalitions along with different Arab and Muslim queer groups, and is planning to join several anticipated coalitions along the same lines. By leading this initiative, HM2F is unfortunately neglecting calls for solidarity and further burning its bridges with these groups, several of whom have criticized them for similar actions in the past. 

Major Palestinian organizations that work on LGBTQ and sexuality issues, and many others, have shared and endorsed the statement.

• PinkwatchingIsrael.com
• Palestinian Queers for BDS (Palestine)
• Abu Nawas (Algeria)
• OMNIA (North Africa)
• Engender (South Africa)
• MidEast Youth (MENA)
• alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society (Palestine)
• Meem (Lebanon)
• Nasawiya (Lebanon)
• Decolonize Queer (International)
• Muntada, The Arab Forum for Sexuality, Education, and Health (Palestine)
• Bedayaa, Organization for LGBTQI of the Nile Vallye Area (Egypt & Sudan)
• GAYa NUSANTARA (Indonesia)
• Indonesian Legal Aid for Women Association (Indonesia)
• Helem (Lebanon)
• Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies
• Salaam, Queer Muslim Community (Canada)
• The Safra Project (UK)

Imaan shares the concerns of our brothers and sisters and calls upon the organisers of the proposed tour to explain their position more clearly. However, our belief is that a queer group considering an LGBT interfaith tour in Israel is quite troubling. Interfaith LGBT outreach is important and extremely rewarding for LGBT people of faith, but we draw a line at what appears to be a fairly uncritical event inside Israel and inclusive of elements of the Israeli body-politic: a regime that maintains a facade of socially progressive policy as one of the ways in which it seeks to present itself as a normal and benign nation-state. A “tour” of the sort described would add undeserved credence to Israel’s assertion of “normal” statehood and would be a press-bonanza. We do not believe that LGBT groups, let alone those representing Muslims should be seen, even, to be applauding a state for its largely empty platitudes towards queers, when that same state can’t respect the most basic of human rights – such as the right to life – of its citizens and neighbours.

We hope that these three groups will reconsider their plans and enter a constructive dialogue with Palestinian groups working on the ground, about the best way to achieve valuable local interactions that first and foremost respect and maintain solidarity with the Palestinian people

Blinkered defenders of Israel have run out of credible arguments. To defend their ongoing repression of Palestinians, they have decided to double down on crazy and are resorting to a policy of throwing enough shit at their opponents in the hopes that something—anything—will stick.

These days, defending the rights of Palestinians virtually guarantees that you will be called a supporter of Hamas, the elected leadership of the Gaza Strip. One of many examples is the recent publication of a hit piece on Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Gay City News  where its pro-Palestine contingent in NYC’s Gay Pride parade was slandered for its non-existent “alliance” with Hamas. The same is being written about the courageous Flotilla 2 attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza this week.

No doubt, it would come as a great surprise to Hamas that, according to Zionists, they have bands of queer supporters in cities all over the world, some of whom—like myself—are Jewish Marxists.

What the argument lacks in facts, it attempts to make up for in rhetorical flourish. After all, what could be more politically titillating than the suggestion that Jewish queers are marching in the streets calling for our own “destruction?”

Westerners who know little of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and even less about Hamas are supposed to wince and run in response to the charge of this stealth alliance. In the media, Hamas is depicted as crazed Islamists who oppose all modernity, aim to destroy Israel and are misogynistic and homophobic to the core.

The David Project, a pro-Israel propaganda group, trains students in the art of deflecting pro-Palestine arguments by counseling: ”don’t focus on the substantive arguments they make.” Defenders of Israel are told to “name and blame” supporters of Palestinian rights, charge them with anti-Semitism or attempt to smear activists as supporters of Hamas, which supposedly calls for “killing Jews.”

While I am not now, nor have I ever been, a supporter of Hamas, it is worth asserting a few facts about this political party that came to office by winning a landslide victory in the elections of the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 2006.

The most basic reality for anyone who supports the right of self-determination is that, unlike George W. Bush in 2000, Hamas won a free and fair election. This is not disputed by independent observers, it is simply a fact to be avoided by those who aim to discredit all things Palestinian.

In the same vein, it is also worth noting what Palestinian queers themselves say. In a statement written last year in response to another pro-Israel propaganda campaign, queer Palestinians argue:

While Stand With Us is quick to point out the oppression of queer Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, it conveniently forgets that those same queers are not immune to the bombs, blockades, apartheid and destruction wrought upon them daily by the Israeli government, and that Israel’s multi-tiered oppression hardly makes a distinction between straight and gay Palestinians.

Since its founding in 1987 at the start of the first Intifada, Hamas has combined the aspirations of a national liberation movement with those of modern Islamism. It holds positions that are homophobic and sexist, as do orthodox Jewish and evangelical Christian groups; though unlike evangelical Christians, it is not anti-science.

From most reliable accounts, Hamas’s socially reactionary positions are not the basis of much of their support among a large swath of Palestinians. This is not to ignore those positions, but to place them in the broader context of a society fighting occupation, joblessness and brutality at the hands of Israel.

In the wake of the failures of the secular nationalists, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas came to represent defiance to occupation and dispossession. In addition, Hamas provides extensive health, food and housing charity, all the more crucial as Palestinian society is strangled by the occupation and siege.

Historian Khaled Hroub explains, “Many Palestinians support the nationalist/liberationist and social work of Hamas, but not its religious ideal…. Christians and secular people voted for Hamas side by side with Hamas members and exponents in all constituencies.”

Hamas’s 1988 charter, rarely cited by them, conflates anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist stances, which is anti-Semitic and cannot be supported by any pro-Palestine progressives. Period.

However, since 1990, historians of Hamas attest—along with anyone who can Google—that the party has made a clear distinction between Zionism and Judaism. “Being Jewish, Zionist or Israeli is irrelevant, what is relevant for me,” one Hamas leader explained to Hroub,”is the notion of occupation and aggression.”

Today’s Zionists conveniently ignore their own history of support for Hamas. Middle East expert, Anthony Cordesman, explains Israel’s reasoning for direct aid to Hamas’s earlier incarnation in the late 1970s: “the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.“  One ex-CIA official argued that Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.”

For socialists, there are many contradictory elements of Hamas, including its mixed class composition and worldview, that limit its ability to act as an effective liberation force for Palestinians. The best hope for Palestine liberation lies in the revolutionary struggles of ordinary people of the Arab world taking place right now.

It is clear that like the charge of anti-Semitism, which I have taken up elsewhere, this latest ruse is just another attempt by racists to deny the obvious. Of course you can stand up for the social, political and economic rights of Palestinians without being tied to any political entity.

It is a testament to the diminishing support for Israel’s apartheid and growth of Palestine solidarity that Zionists must resort to such vacuous lies.

COMMENTARY: Why would a gay-porn star and mogul, Michael Lucas, want to squelch the right to free speech at a sanctuary for the oppressed and marginalized, New York City’s LGBT Center?

Lucas’s wealth and fame as an entrepreneur in the gay adult entertainment industry would be inconceivable without the right to free speech, including for those with controversial opinions. Yet on February 22 he used his money and connections to slander groups of social justice activists in order to pressure the center to cancel an Israeli Apartheid Week event and ban a small group of pro-Palestine activists, the Siegebusters Working Group, from ever meeting there again.

This is an outrageous abuse of power and influence that should be opposed by everyone who believes our community centers must remain liberated spaces of democracy and debate. Keep in mind, the LGBT Center has hosted a range of non-LGBT-related groups in its 28-year history — from Overeaters Anonymous to antiwar organizations — so the stated excuse about the political content straying from the “mission of the center” is just a ruse.

Besides, what could be more within the mission of a haven for diversity than groups of Arabs, Jews, blacks, and whites of every sexual orientation gathering to challenge a humanitarian crisis?

Which brings us to the crux of the matter — Lucas’s odious charge that people who argue that Israel is an apartheid state are “anti-Semitic.” Lucas is welcome to his own opinion, but not his own version of the facts.

Please, don’t take my word for it — here is the former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, describing Israel’s history and laws in 2002:

“We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one — progressive, liberal — in Israel; and the other — cruel, injurious — in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”