Pinkwashing refers to when a state or organization appeals to LGBTQ+ rights in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

From university student clubs to queer film festivals to Pride Parades to New York Times editorial pages, the contrived presence of the Israeli flag alongside the rainbow flag has become all too common, despite consistent pushback by queer activist groups. StandWithUs, a Zionist group founded in 2009, is one of the most egregious offenders of this conflation of Zionism and queer liberation. Buoyed by hundreds of millions of shekels allocated to the ‘Brand Israel’ initiative by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, it began a campaign that included brochures that declare Israel a “gay paradise” for queer Palestinians as well as provocative newspaper ads with headlines such as “Hamas, ISIS and Iran kill gays like me”.

This messaging has been deemed ‘pinkwashing’ by queer pro-Palestinian activists; widely in use since at least since 2010 by groups such as Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) as a twist on “greenwashing”, where companies claim to be eco-friendly in order to make a profit. In the case of Israel, pinkwashing is done to salvage its abysmal global reputation of being a colonial aggressor, through exploiting and even encouraging anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia to present itself as a comparatively modern cosmopolitan haven- and boost its tourism revenue in the process. This article will explore in further detail how pinkwashing functions and the detrimental impact it has had and continues to have on all Palestinians, but especially queer Palestinians. It will also push back against the idea, present even in some critiques of Israeli pinkwashing, that Israel would be a queer haven “if only” there was no occupation, or that Zionism and queer liberation could eventually become compatible.

While pinkwashing does quite frequently operate as a propaganda or public relations strategy, a deeper understanding of how it functions regarding Palestine and Palestinians reveals that pinkwashing is also the inevitable manifestation of the intrinsically homophobic and Orientalist nature of Zionism, which itself is a manifestation of European colonial thought. As Palestinian queer rights organization Al Qaws has explained, “pinkwashing is the symptom, settler-colonialism is the root sickness.” The pinkwashing of Israel relies on the understanding that the East remains stubbornly backwards regarding homosexuality because of a refusal to learn from Western progressivism. However, as Joseph A. Boone outlines in “The Homoerotics of Orientalism”, this is ignoring several hundred years of history where “it was the uptight Christian West that accused the debauched Muslim East of harboring what it euphemistically called the ‘male vice’ (sodomy)”. 

The Middle East was associated with ‘sexual deviancy’ and ‘effeminity’ whose mores and values good Christians must remain on guard against. The movements for modern nation-state building in what is now Turkey and Iran actually saw the adoption of heterosexual norms “at least in part as a response to the European representations of its civilizational ‘backwardness’ and sexual ‘irregularities’”. In Turkey, “unabashedly frank references to same-sex acts and desire were written out of the historical record and repressed from collective memory in the name of western style modernization”, while “the price of Persia’s emergence as the new Iranian nation-state was the official eclipse of its long-standing history of male homoerotic bonds as ‘pre-modern’ and the cultivation of heteroeroticism as the new norm.” Overall, the modern West was positively associated with heteronormativity which the Middle East was deemed in need of emulating in order to enter the realm of progressive modernity. 

There is a long, complicated history of homophobic aspersions between not only the constructed binary of the East and West, but also between, for example, the Abbasid Caliphate and the Persian empire, with the former blaming the latter for being a “gay influence”. That today, many Islamic conservatives depict homosexuality as a foreign contagion in the name of nation-building and “cultural authenticity” is merely an outgrowth of the aforementioned historical relations. In the process, the history of homoerotic relations among males once intricately interwoven into the fabric of Muslim culture is being erased and denied. 

This is not to oversimplify how homophobia functions in the Middle East, or to lay blame on the West; rather, it is to understand that current depictions of homophobia in the region as resistance to “Western modernity” obscures how these understandings of sexuality we have today, are in fact modern; they are the result of modern nation-state building and the accompanying construction of the “Other” as inferior, to be stigmatized, exploited and discriminated against. 

It also obscures how the present-day colloquial deployment of “Islamic sexual repression” narratives currently plaguing human rights, liberal queer, and feminist discourses came to be. This paradox at the heart of Orientalist notions of sexuality, where Muslims are simultaneously hypersexual and repressed, informs the dehumanization of Muslims in general and the sexual violence enacted against the prisoners deemed “terrorists” (whether by the U.S. or Israel) in particular. 

Which leads to how the discursive strategy of how racist understandings of sexuality is currently being weaponized in order to uphold present day imperialism and colonial political aims. This necessarily includes the Zionist project in Palestine, which was only possible because of historical processes in Europe. Pertinent to this article, the same European masculine values which deemed Muslims as sexually deviant were also weaponized against Jewish people in antisemitic acts and depictions which deemed Jewish men “effeminate”. Zionist founders were later keen to combat these historic allegations. This has manifested in the conflation of masculinity with the national army, with the dominant masculinity in Israel identified with the Jewish combat soldier and “deemed an emblem of good citizenship” This desire for masculinity is in fact a precondition for the Zionist enterprise—which would later evolve into a violent, militaristic culture. 

While “the Jew had been both feminized and Orientalized in Europe, the Zionist culture similarly feminized and Orientalized the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, who were also seen as inadequate. The Israeli state, then, must attempt to transcend the contradictions in needing to appease homophobic supporters of Israel among, say, Western Evangelicals, who constitute the majority of supporters of Israel in the U.S while simultaneously projecting the image of Israel as a gay haven in certain Western secular contexts. 

These efforts to transcend these contradictions can best be understood through the lens of homonationalism. This term was coined by Jasbir K. Puar in her excellent Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. In it she describes homonationalism as the framework in which certain homosexual constituencies are able to embrace and be embraced by nationalist agendas, including the imperial expansion endemic to the war on terror. Basically, (primarily, but not exclusively) white cisgender queers can assimilate into the nation, such as through openly joining the national army and buying into a combination of ethnic chauvinism, religious nationalism, toxic masculinity, and the Islamophobia so crucial to the war on terror. 

This is evident in multiple Western countries where, for example, gay politicians have risen in the ranks of conservative political parties, all who articulate Muslim populations as an especial threat to LGBTQIA+ communities. Naturally, this is despite the exhortations by some queer Muslims who insist that their religious and family struggles are not much different from those of their Christian or Jewish counterparts. Gay rights, in other words, have been absorbed into what Puar calls the ‘human rights industrial complex’, which operates through the foregrounding of western countries as champions of human rights and non-western (read: Muslim) countries as their enemies. Implicit to this complex is the notion that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist, or that a critique of homophobia within one’s home community is deemed more pressing than a critique of racism within mainstream queer communities. The logic of homonationalism which underpins pinkwashing strategies is not compatible with queer liberation or the elimination of oppression as a whole. Rather, this logic is in service of broader imperialist aims and thus cannot include those queer people who have been racialized or otherwise deemed enemies of the state.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in a joint meeting of the U.S Congress declared that the Middle East is “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted. Israel stands out. It is different.” Missing from this narrative, of course, is how Israel profits from the very persecution he describes through Israeli spyware being used to crackdown on dissidents, including queer people. 

However, what is significant here is how the “Israeli Arabs” were spoken about, rather than to. Similarly, StandWithUs’s previously mentioned advertisements which declared Tel Aviv, a “gay paradise” for Palestinians has nothing to do with what’s best for Palestinians at all. After all, as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) have pointed out, “there is no pink door in the apartheid wall”. Queer Palestinians, like all Palestinians, live under the control of a state that has deemed them demographic threats, obstacles in the way of a Jewish State by and for Jews. Most Palestinians have never set foot in Tel Aviv for this reason, and in general Israel prioritizes ethnicity and demographics above all else, including asylum cases. 

These statements and advertisements are meant to accomplish the following goals: (1) Israel being absolved of its colonial and military policies which has resulted in the loss of countless Palestinian lives. (2) Israel being contextualized by the Middle East but ceasing to be located there; Israel should be judged according to ‘regional standards’ while also being treated as a cultural outpost of Europe (which they get to be! Tickets to see Israel in Eurovision, anyone?)

Israel being praised for supposedly being so ‘queer-friendly’ is dependent on Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims in general) being demonized as uniformly homophobic. This is evident in the report released in 2008 by the Israel Project extolling Israel’s progressive values. The report stated that “There are several explanations about how Israel has come to embrace its gay and lesbian community. One is that the family as an institution is central to Israeli Jewish society. Therefore, parents would rather accept their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children than let homophobia destroy family unity”. As Steven Salaita excellently analyzed in Chapter 4 of his work Israel’s Dead Soul, Sexuality, Violence, and Modernity in Israel: The Paradise of Not Being Arab, the purpose of such a grotesque statement is to imply that Palestinians:

“are neither family oriented nor tolerant; they are willing to sacrifice their own children to their irrational beliefs, or they are so irrational as to be unable to make such a choice. Even in its exaltation of Israeli open-mindedness, the Israel Project betrays its own implicit homophobia: homosexuality is not embraced by Israeli Jews; it is merely tolerated in the interest of family unity. It is not something Israeli Jews would ever accept; it simply presents a difficult obstacle that they are reluctantly willing to overlook.” 

This was perhaps more revealing than the Israel Project intended, but it underscored how the language of LGBTQIA+ rights is being co-opted in the interest of Israeli foreign policy and the tourism industry even as homophobia remains rife in Israeli society. When Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, The Tel Aviv Tourism Board and Israel’s largest LGBT organization, The Agudah, joined together to launch TEL AVIV GAY VIBE, an online tourism campaign to promote Tel Aviv as a travel destination, it was met with the following (verbatim) comments:

1. Surely nothing to be proud of. Shameful
2. Haredim!!!!
3. Gay avek also cute slogan  (Yiddish for go away)
4. Yes by all means bring hordes of aids
5. Inviting destruction full speed

Opposition to Israel’s so proudly touted pride parades has also reached the point of violence, with an ultra-Orthodox man who was imprisoned in 2005 for stabbing several people at a pride parade doing the same in 2015 following his release. 

As Sarah Schulman explains, “Overall, Israel is a profoundly homophobic society. The dominance of religious fundamentalists, the sexism and the proximity to family and family oppression makes life very difficult for most people on the LGBT spectrum in Israel.”, while Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, explains that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.” As Samira Saraya, one of the co-founders of Aswat, an LGBTI+ organization for Palestinian women has further elucidated, “If you are an Israeli gay man who served in the army, looks masculine, acts ‘normal’, and has a secure job, then you are treated well. For the rest of us, things are much less rosy.” That it is to say, if you do not somehow ‘compensate’ for your queer identity in ways conducive to Israel’s ethnonationalist project vis a vis homonationalism, you are even further outside the margins of the Zionist ideal and thus more vulnerable to the brunt of homophobia and racism. 

Zionism’s obsession with ensuring a Jewish majority comes with pressure to produce as many children as possible to resolve what Zionists have outright declared as the ‘demographic problem’, adding another obstacle to those who would prefer same-sex partners. This was attested to by Israeli scholar and queer rights activist Amit Kama, who has worked on a government survey to attract more gay tourists to Israel even as he himself was forced to marry his partner outside of the country. 

Almost lost in all the rainbow confetti and the condescending hand-wringing over Palestinian or Muslim homophobia is how in Israel, all marital issues are under the control of the Orthodox rabbinic authorities; thus, there is no civil marriage in Israel, only religious marriage. Orthodox Rabbinate representatives supporting the law against civil marriage and gay couple being able to be married with cite a wish to “guarantee the Jewish future of the state of Israel” and protect against “assimilation”. 

The weaponized understating of this queerphobic in Israeli society functions through treating Palestinians “as a site onto which queerphobic Zionists may project their queerphobic fantasies”, as articulated in Saffo Papantonopoulou’s excellent article, “Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude”. In it she details transphobic abuse directed her way which demanded she stop criticizing Israel, as it is supposedly the only place in the Middle East where she could expect to be treated “equal to a male or female heterosexual” and not be met with violence that they so graciously went so far as to describe in detail to her. She explains that Zionists’ deflections of their own queerphobia onto Palestinians is meant to “allow the queerphobic Zionist to live out his own queerphobic fantasy while simultaneously deploying a pretext of caring about queers.” 

The identification of Tel Aviv as gay-friendly even by those who harbor queerphobia then is presented as a “gift to all queers” who are in fact meant to feel grateful for being ‘allowed’ to thrive or even live. 

“Under the Zionist economy of gratitude, the transgender subject is perpetually indebted to capitalism and the West for allowing her to exist. The properly delimited space for the transgender subject within this ideology is essentially one confined to an apoliticized space of pride parades and gay bars, but never the front lines of an antimperial or anticolonial project. Hence, the queerphobic Zionist can pass the gift of his racist colonial phobia as well as his queerphobia on to the transgender subject…I am supposed to feel vulnerable, afraid, and attacked, in order that I may pass on that gift of death to the supposedly transphobic Palestinian”.

Pinkwashing is as prevalent as it is because it is not limited to those on the right, with instances of the logic of pinkwashing internalized and regurgitated even by self-professed radical groups. A prescient example of this was seen in response to ‘‘No Pride without Palestinians,’’ a queer coalition based in New York City, who sought to move World Pride 2006 outside of Jerusalem, arguing that Palestinian queers (and many Arabs from neighboring countries) would be banned from the celebrations, and those already present risked intensified surveillance, policing, harassment, and deportation. OutRage! a British queer group, waltzed in carrying placards commanding ‘‘Israel: stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!’’ and ‘‘Stop ‘honour’ killing women and gays in Palestine.’’

This seemingly innocuous and politically correct messaging, stemming from the group’s commitment to protest ‘‘Islamophobia and homophobia,’’ negates the ways in which oppression by a settler-colonial state might sustain or even create the conditions for social ills, including homophobia. Their equation of Israeli oppression of all Palestinians with Palestinian homophobia did so by taking for granted the Israeli state narrative that it does not, in fact, “persecute queers”, foremost among them Palestinian queers. Furthermore, it takes for granted that queerphobia is a more pressing threat to queer Palestinians than colonialism, as if these could ever be separated. 

This is of similar thinking to an Israeli student who asked Palestinian queer scholar Sa’ed Atshan during a pinkwashing panel why he couldn’t log onto Grindr in Hebron, with another queer student asking about the absence of gay clubs in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison which barely has electricity or potable water. 

As Atshan replied “Is whether or not Grindr is used among Palestinians a more important question than the conditions in Hebron that Palestinians endure as a result of the Israeli occupation there? How does use of Grindr become a marker of Palestinian civilizational value?…It perplexed me that the absence of gay clubs in Gaza is more outrageous to some people than is the reality of queer and straight Palestinians in Gaza struggling to survive amid unspeakable conditions imposed by Israel.” 

What pinkwashing also does is obscure how a society under constant assault is put on the defensive and thus cannot undertake the scope of work needed to fully eradicate social ills. With decades of Zionists negating and attacking Palestinian culture and identity as either nonexistent, inconsequential, threatening, or all of the above, Palestinian society as a whole has become very zealous about what it perceives to be its traditions and culture. As Rima with Aswat explained, “The majority of the society rejects behaviors and changes that “threaten” its heterosexuality and patriarchy, since they are perceived as a threat to the continuity [emphasis added] of the uniqueness of our culture”-while obviously incorrect and dangerous thinking, it is fueled by the constant violence against Palestinians in the name of Zionism and the feeling of insecurity this engenders. The ramifications of this thinking to Palestinians themselves is evident when the Palestinian Authority periodically assigns itself the role of morality police to “protect” Palestinian society from being “infiltrated and corrupted by homosexuals and agents of the West”. The threat of Israel and Zionism to Palestinian coupled with the identification of queerness as a Western phenomenon ends up galvanizing reactionary responses, leaving marginalized Palestinian more vulnerable to multiple forms of violence.

[Warning:  Descriptions of sexual assault, torture and queerphobia. Click to skip]

Here it is worthwhile to delineate how Israel also draws upon racialized homophobia and transphobia in its abuse of Palestinians. This includes the blackmailing of queer Palestinians, with a former Israeli Intelligence corps member sharing that in training to disregard Palestinians’ privacy and manipulate their personal lives for Israeli state interests, “we actually learned to memorise and filter different words for ‘gay’, in Arabic.”

Even more horrifically, there are detailed accounts from Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails of verbal and sexual harassment which use homophobia and transphobia as a threat. One 16 year old described a police officer as telling him that “‘I will fuck you and you will sing on my dick’ as part of his threats. Another 23 year old recounted how an Israeli secret service member shouted “you terrorist, I’ll fuck you like a homosexual!”, while another in a separate report described being harassed by an interrogator who asked “Are you a homosexual? You look like a woman. Have you ever fucked a woman?”. Still another detainee described how they were threatened with having their brother undergo a sex change against their will, saying “They put me in an investigation room with a glass partition and on the other side I saw my brother, dressed as a woman, immodest, in a mini-skirt. […] They said that they […] had arranged for him a sex-change surgery in Jerusalem.”

These are not isolated cases, as Israel’s extensive use of sexual harassment and assault as a form of torture against Palestinians are well documented. The reasons for this are betrayed even in the very report most of the aforementioned testimony was drawn from, with the author declaring that “Sexual torture and ill-treatment, including forced nudity and curses with sexual contents, may have particularly deep and sometimes long-lasting humiliating effects among Arab men. This is grounded in the notion of honour, which is basic in social life in much of the Muslim world.” Here the author is taking for granted the idea that Arab and Muslim men (though here he is using the terms interchangeably) are more sensitive to being sexually harassed and assaulted than their western counterparts. He seems to, whether subconsciously or not, believe that the perpetrators of these acts are comparatively enlightened rather than perpetuating the old use of sexual violence against men in armed conflicts and the concurrent bigoted dynamics of emasculation, feminization and/or homosexualization as insult.

[End of descriptions of sexual assault, torture and queerphobia]

To revisit Puar, the paradox at the heart of such an Orientalist notion of sexuality is reanimated through the objectification of the Muslim terrorist as a torture object, who is both sexually conservative, modest and fearful of nudity (and it is interesting how this conceptualization is rendered both sympathetically and as a problem), as well as queer, animalistic, barbarian, and unable to control his (or her) urges but having an innate “indecency” waiting to be released. In Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units, Danny Kaplan argues that this sexualization is neither tangential nor incidental to the project of conquest but, rather, is central to it: ‘‘[The] eroticization of enemy targets . . . triggers the objectification process.’’

Not only are homophobia and transphobia weaponized against Palestinians in such a manner by the magical rainbow state of Israel, it ends up leaving queer Palestinians vulnerable to the ramifications of queerness being associated with collaboration. As Al Qaws has written:

“this pervasive linking of non-normative sexuality and Palestinian collaboration has become a term and identity of its own in the Palestinian imaginary and reality: isqat…this false connection with Israel and collaboration associates queer people with treason, dishonesty, untrustworthiness, and fraudulence, and therefore works to substantiate a very specific kind of homophobic fear within Palestine”.

The use of homophobia and queerphobia as a cudgel on behalf of Israel is certainly not conducive to queer liberation and is an abhorrent practice. It also must be contextualized in the overarching repression and oppression all Palestinians face, with Palestinians regularly extorted for a variety of reasons, from needing healthcare to wishing to hide marital infidelity to wanting to marry and live with a Palestinian with a differently colored ID card. Whatever individual experiences Palestinians have are shaped by the oppressive hold of Zionism.

Through pinkwashing, Palestinians are reduced to either being a victim of internal Palestinian homophobia in need of saving or to a violent perpetrator of homophobia among Palestinians and terrorism against Israelis. They are forced to walk a tightrope between having queerphobia exploited by Israel as carte blanche for their own dispossession and the ways in which Zionist colonialism shapes the queerphobia they face within their own communities. What is needed is dedication to ending all forms of oppression against Palestinians. Queer Palestinian organizers are calling for the promotion of Palestinian LGBTQ rights to be done in a way that challenges the appropriation and weaponization of that cause by Israeli organizations and instead engages first and foremost with Palestinians, rather than perpetuating the erasure of Palestinians inherent to Zionism.

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