Queers in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) urge LGBTQ groups, organizations and youth leaders to boycott the World LGBTQ Youth Leaders’ Summit to be held this December in Tel Aviv, Israel. We hereby endorse the call from pinkwatchingisrael.com and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS) not to partake in this event.
The Israeli occupation might seem far-removed from the queer struggle. However, Palestinian queers have made clear that the struggle against the occupation is ultimately a queer struggle, because it strives for social justice. As queers, we fight for social equality, we fight for a society where all desires, all bodies and all lives are deemed of equal worth.
The Israeli Gay Youth’s world leadership summit lacks this commitment. Their proposed conversations about “human rights” in relation to what they coin “a hot issue” transforms the fight for social justice into a “conversation” that disregards the bodies that are targeted by a daily occupation and apartheid, which is far from “hot.” The annual “Human Rights March” that is on the summit’s program is supposed to soothe your conscience. However, we do not see an annual march ending or affecting an occupation that has lasted 63 years, 365 days a year in any sense. Attending such a march does not exempt us from taking responsibility and engaging critically with this occupation.
While some gay people enjoy their parties and their human rights in “pink” Tel-Aviv, just 40 miles away people of all ages, genders, sexual orientations (among which queer Palestinians!) are living under atrocious conditions in the open air prison of Gaza or in the Occupied West Bank. Palestinians are stopped and humiliated at checkpoints; Palestinian houses are demolished; people of color are subject to racial profiling practices and intense interrogation at Ben Gurion Airport; illegal settlements expand; international solidarity activists are deported from Ben Gurion Airport because they care, and the list continues. Even inside the ever shifting borders of Israel’s “gay h(e)aven,” once you are out of the Tel-Aviv bubble, the binary gender-system and all the violence, oppression, exclusion such a clear-cut system entails is still prevalent in Israel. “Gay” Tel Aviv, conceals a fully militarized society. IGY deems this militarism as a necessary feature of Israeliness and does not refrain from popularizing the Israeli Defense Forces amongst Jewish-Israeli gay youth. Critical voices are silenced and by lending your voice and body to IGY’s Leaders’ Summit you contribute to the silencing of these voices.
We therefore support the boycott of this event because we, as queers, refuse to be co-opted by the state of Israel in promoting its image as an exceptional civilization when it comes to “gay rights”; thus pinkwashing its violations “human rights.”As queers, we need to reject IGY’s ambiguous logic of fighting for “gay rights” while at the same time normalizing the colonial relationship between Israel and Palestinians. As long as the organizers of the summit participate in branding Israel as a democratic and tolerant country (because of its engagement with gay rights), conceal the structural inequality at the basis of Israeli policy, promote militarism as an integral aspect of Israeli identity, and remain to have close ties with the apartheid Israeli government, participation n the summit is a form of complicity to this pinkwashing agenda.
Israel presents itself as a “beacon of freedom,” a “gay h(e)aven” in the Middle East, whereas Palestinians and Arab are portrayed as “homophobic” and ”backward.” In the name of protecting its Jewish-Israeli gays from these “barbarians,” Israel pursues to legitimize its acts even if it directly violates international law by violently displacing of thousands of people, building illegal settlements, implementing apartheid policies and discriminatory laws, perpetuating social marginalization, and massacring Palestinian civilians.
To attend this summit is to harm the struggle for social justice. Even the claim to neutrality is a form of choosing sides for as long as Israel’s occupation is a daily reality. By endorsing the Palestinian civil society call forBoycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, we feel that we can create new forms of solidarity that move beyond the narrow spectrum of LGBTQ identity politics. Queers in the Netherlands are too familiar with how the Dutch government tries to instrumentalize our bodies to fend off immigrants and increase its racist border control. Nationalists propagandize xenophobia in the name of women and gay rights. Worldwide the “war against terrorism demonizes Islam as the only source of repression and non-freedom while those committing this war (USA, UK, The Netherlands, Sweden, etc) kill and rape in the name of “freedom.” Oppression against queers, against Palestinians, against minorities is based on a shared line of reasoning: some lives are considered less, worthy, infinitely susceptible to expulsion and/or exclusion without any consideration of basic human rights.
Israel is one of the many states that abuse queer struggles in order to pinkwash their crimes. We, as queers, need to be wary of the abuse of gay rights, and expanding forms of homonationalism. Critiquing pinkwashing is part of our job in a struggle for social justice. We reject the position that critiquing Israel equals anti-semitism. Such rhetoric harms any anti-racist struggle because it equates criticism of a criminal government with discrimination/racism against an entire population. Fighting racist ideology is at the core of critiquing pinkwashing and supporting the international BDS campaign. We therefore ask you to support this call and say NO to the World LGBTQ Youth Leaders’ Summit.
Before you attend this summit, consider that by your participation in this summit you enhance Israel’s pink face. You let your bodies and struggles be co-opted by a criminal government. Don’t let yourself be pinkwashed!
Our fight against the oppression of queers can never succeed if it is used to justify the oppression of other minorities.
Join the global struggle for queer empowered calls for BDS!
Join the struggle against pinkwashing and homonationalism. Join a global queer movement to support calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Queers in Amsterdam
30 November 2011