Credit: Flickrcc/bsolah

Recently a pro-gay ad from Israel popped up on my Facebook feed. It used the metaphor of the closet to push Israeli parents to accept and support their queer kids. I’m queer. I’m Jewish. And I care deeply about queer issues. So why didn’t the ad spark even an ounce of excitement in me? Because I am wary of my queerness being used by Israel. For some time now, Israel has been promoting gay rights to “pinkwash” its image in an attempt to divert attention away from its treatment of Palestinians.

Why Brand Israel? Why Make It Gay?

As Israel’s reputation becomes more and more unpopular around the world because of its increasingly publicized violations of Palestinian human rights, the Foreign Ministry and other Israel advocacy organizations have been attempting to bolster its image with a “Brand Israel” campaign that promotes Israel’s innovation, culture, and tourism. In the last few years, this effort has started including Israel’s support for gay rights as part of its “cosmopolitan” culture.

While emphasizing the thriving gay community in cities such as Tel Aviv in order to portray Israel as an oasis of gay freedom and democracy in the Middle East, Israel advocacy groups use colonialist language to suggest that Israel is surrounded by “backwards” homophobic, uncivilized Arabs, including Palestinians. Blaming “fundamentalist Islamic beliefs,” groups such as Stand With Us (SWU), a Right Wing Israeli advocacy organization highlights the violence that gay Palestinians face from their families and authorities in Palestine. Of course, they never mention the violence all Palestinians, whatever their sexual orientation, face from the Israeli government.

Israel, they proclaim, is a sanctuary for the LGBT community because of its gay pride parades, LGBT themed TV shows (seriously?), and civil rights. Gay Palestinians, according to SWU, find “refuge” in Israel; however, Palestinians living under Occupation are specifically ineligible for asylum under Israeli law. Claiming that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights, SWU explicitly asks gays around the world to support Israel. SWU and other advocacy groups attempt to recruit gays by creating concern for some universal category of GLBTQ folks. Queer Palestinians can only be a part of this category if they disavow half of their identity; as queers, they can be oppressed by homophobic Palestine, but as Palestinians, they cannot mention oppression by the Israeli government. SWU never acknowledges the work queer Palestinians are already doing as they simultaneously fight homophobia and Israeli oppression.

In 2009, SWU brought a group of gay leaders from around the world to attend a five-day seminar called iPride, which centered on Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade. Noa Meir, coordinator of iPride, claimed that the idea for the festival came about because of reactions to Operation Cast Lead (Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008/2009 that killed over 1400 Palestinians): “We know that gays around the world are liberal usually and they tend to identify with Palestinians…and we find it a bit ironic because you can’t really be gay in the Palestinian territories.” Queer activists in Israel protested the event’s appropriation of gay rights to promote an anti-Arab propaganda, pointing out that it’s a bit hard to take SWU’s interest in gay rights seriously given its past collaborations with several homophobic organizations.

Aside from recycling tired Orientalist tropes portraying Arabs as uncivilized, Israeli PR groups are ignoring the homophobia rampant in Israel (as it is in all countries). A 2009 poll by the newspaper Haaretz indicated that 46% of Israelis believed homosexuality to be a perversion. Furthermore, the lack of separation between religion and state means that official spokespeople for the Israeli government, such as Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai, can claim in an official capacity and with little reprisal that gays have a “normative defect” and are “sick.” In fact, the same year as the iPride conference, Yishai called for the cancellation of the pride parade in Tel Aviv, and called homosexuality an “abomination.” And In July, 2010, Deputy Mayor Yitzhak Pindrus of Jerusalem applied to hold a “donkey parade” alongside the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade. Pindrus wanted to greet parade participants with donkeys to represent the “bestial” nature of the pride march. When the police rejected his request, he arranged for his group of protesters to hold cardboard cut-outs of donkeys at the parade instead.

Queers Reject Pinkwashing

Queers have protested and thwarted many Pinkwashing attempts, but two prominent instances from last summer highlight common Pinkwashing tactics that have begun permeating conversations about Israel, particularly discussions of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While these tactics would be laughable if they weren’t so offensive, they have proved popular nonetheless. I have heard this rhetoric at more than one local event. For example, at a community discussion of a proposed boycott of Israeli goods at a neighborhood co-op, one man argued against the boycott by claiming that “homosexuals” were treated very poorly in Palestine. Hmmmmm. At the time, I scratched my head, wondering where this logic came from, but after this past summer, it became quite clear. He had somehow gotten the message that Pinkwashing should be used to deflect criticism of Israel. As queers and allies, we need to recognize these strategies in order to expose them for what they are: cynical attempts to manipulate and distract our attention.

SWU At The US Social Forum?

Last year SWU managed to get its workshop entitled “LGBTQI Liberation in the Middle East,” accepted for the 2010 US Social Forum. They claimed the workshop’s purpose was to help participants connect with “Middle Eastern LGBTQI non-profits,” and offer “information collected by such organizations as Amnesty International for participants to walk away with so that they can better educate their own communities about the realities of the Middle East.” While SWU may have used Amnesty International reports on other countries, they almost certainly were not going to offer information from Amnesty’s extensive documentation of Israeli human rights abuses.

When word got out about the proposed workshop, many folks started to protest. A group composed of queer Arab organizations (Helem, Al Qaws, ASWAT, and Palestinian Queers for BDS) issued a press release, “Arab Queers say NO to Pinkwashing at the USSF,” announcing that they were “appalled by the US Social Forum’s decision to allow Stand with Us to utilize the event as a platform to pinkwash Israel’s crimes in the region.” They went on to 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.”

Queers for Palestine Credit: Flickrcc/cleita

On June 23rd, the leadership of the US Social Forum voted to cancel the workshop “for violating the submission procedure and transparency requirements for all workshops, and for being in violation of the anti-racist principles central to the US Social Forum.” It is clear from SWU’s response to the cancellation that the workshop would have portrayed Arab countries as homophobic and backwards: its focus would have been “the persecution, honor killings, torture, and execution of gays in most Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Palestinian communities.” SWU claimed that Palestinian activists protesting their workshop were afraid of showing that Middle Eastern governments are the “worst perpetrators of crimes against gays. They happen to be the very same governments and people who want to destroy Israel.” So SWU’s agenda (surprise, surprise) was that anti-gay = anti-Israel. How convenient. And Israel? SWU describes it as a “beacon of light” for all gays in the Middle East.

Pride Toronto Forced To Back Down On Censorship

After two years of lobbying the Pride Toronto organization, several Israeli advocacy groups succeeded in pressuring the Gay Pride committee to censor the term “Israeli Apartheid” from all Pride related events and thus kick Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) out of the annual Pride march. QuAIA has marched in the Toronto Gay Pride parade since 2008 to protest Brand Israel’s campaign targeting Toronto.

The first two groups to question QuAIA’s presence in the pride parade were B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress, both of whom have been unsupportive of gay rights in the past. Calling the words “Israeli Apartheid” hate speech, the Simon Weisenthal Center also got involved. Under pressure from these groups, the City of Toronto threatened to take away funding from Pride Toronto if they did not banish QuAIA from participating. When Pride Toronto announced its censorship decision in May 2010, they claimed that the use of the words “Israeli Apartheid” made participants feel “unsafe” and that they were obligated to respect the anti-discrimination policy of the City of Toronto.

After this decision was announced, a massive backlash occurred within the queer community: the founders of the 1981 Toronto Lesbian and Gay Pride Day issued an open letter opposing the decision and showing solidarity with QuAIA. The Grand Marshal and the Honored Dyke of Pride Toronto both refused their appointments, and 23 past and present awardees returned their statuettes to Pride Toronto. Many queer leaders and organizations urged Pride Toronto to reverse its decision; a group called “Pride Coalition for Free Speech” worked to create protests and alternative events to Pride Toronto.

One week before its annual parade, Pride Toronto announced that it would no longer censor the phrase “Israeli apartheid” from the parade. Why did they give in? As Naomi Klein argued at a fundraiser for QuAIA, “they messed with the wrong community.” The Canadian queer community has a long history of fighting censorship of everything from gay porn to nudity at pride parades. As Andrew Brett argues in “A case study in failure: the Israel lobby at Toronto Pride,” while the Israel advocacy groups lobbied leaders behind closed doors, anti-censorship queers turned to the grassroots community by holding a variety of community events, including a town hall discussion about Pride Toronto. The publicity surrounding Pride Toronto highlighted what the controversy was really about: attempts to stifle debate about Israel/Palestine. The media attention backfired and resulted in hundreds of people joining QuAIA — the largest group marching for Palestine solidarity in the parade’s history.

Toronto Pride Credit: Flickrcc/loozrboy

Inspired Opposition

Not allowing our queerness to be separated from other aspects of our identities, queers are bringing creativity and humor to protests. For instance, this past December in New York, queers protested the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) gay fundraising effort with a wonderful “Just Not Fabulous” theme. Holding a banner saying “Jewish National Fund: Just Not Fabulous,” protesters also held signs with pink triangles reading “Using Queers to Oppress Palestinians: Just Not Fabulous,” “Supporting Palestinian Queers: Fabulous,” and “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: Fabulous.” My favorite chant was “High femmes are super fine! Israel out of Palestine!”

I love how we are bringing a queer sensibility to resisting Pinkwashing attempts to co-opt queer struggles. I’m hopeful that as we refuse to be complicit in oppressing Palestinians and continue to draw attention to Israeli human rights abuses, we can help hasten the end of Israel’s destructive policies toward Palestinians. This is how queers can support liberation for all Palestinians, including liberation for Palestinian queers.

Many thanks to Cecilie Surasky for brainstorming this with me.