Israeli Pinkwashing





As LGBTQ communities around the world struggle to gain advancements in obtaining legal rights, their causes are sometimes exploited by malignant self-interests. In particular, such self-interests use the celebration of LGBTQ rights as a means to mask systematic acts of oppression. This is known as pinkwashing. The Israeli Government broadcasts itself as a haven for LGBTQ Jewish people, often in contrast to the policies of other Middle Eastern countries.  Following its 2005 marketing initiative “Brand Israel,”  the Israeli government spent over $100 million to re-brand itself as modern and progressive.1 In 2010, it spent an additional $94 million on gay tourism ads in Germany and England.2

This government-lead campaign functions to cover up the long standing human rights violations against the indigenous Palestinian people, and against Sudanese and Eritrean refugee immigrant populations. After Zionist forces depopulated over 300 Palestinian Villages in 1947 and 1948, the Palestinian people have lived under a harsh apartheid regime.3 The day-to-day experiences of a Palestinian living under apartheid include navigating through Israeli military checkpoints within Palestinian territory, taking segregated Palestinian-only highways and buses, and living under complete and separate racial laws. Furthermore, the Israeli military conducts unwarranted military raids, violently suppresses peaceful protests, imprisons and tortures Palestinian civilians, demolishes Palestinian homes, and confiscates Palestinian natural resources.

Pinkwashing creates the illusion that Israel is bringing progressive ideals into a fundamentalist region. However, pinkwashing fails to account for the fact that these ideals are widely publicized while the internationally condemned Palestinian human rights abuses are overlooked. Furthermore, any non-Jewish residents of Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza are not qualified to reap the rewards of the Israeli LGBTQ movement.

The idea of pinkwashing has angered many both inside and outside Israeli and Palestinian queer communities, culminating in the creation of organizations such as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Pinkwatching Israel, and Queers Against Israeli Pinkwashing. Israeli queer rights organizations point out that despite the propaganda, Israeli LGBTQ continue to lack many fundamental rights, including the right to marry. For example, Israeli LGBTQ activist and Professor Dalit Bam rhetorically asks:


“Why all of a sudden do you care about gay and lesbian Palestinians when you don’t care about them any other day of the week? It’s preposterous how this is used as a form of propaganda...when people hear how Israel actually treats, for example. queer Palestinian youth looking for asylum--they don’t give these people any kind of asylum. There’s seven million Israeli citizens and then four million Palestinians who have no civil rights but are controlled by the same government--that’s a very flawed democracy.” 4
Finally, not only does Israel do little to nothing to support the struggles of Palestinian queers and queers elsewhere in the middle east, it also uses its supposed queer-friendly image to promote hatred  all Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, including queer Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.5 And hence, that is why pinkwashing is so concerning.




1. “Israel Aims To Improve Its Public Image”, by Nathaniel Popper. Jewish Daily Forward.  October 14, 2005.
2. “Israel Promotes Gay Tourism In Berlin.” Ynet. March 9, 2011
3. Benny Morris (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
4.  http://psnedmonton.ca/2012/03/04/dalit-baum-interview-in-vue-weekly/
5. http://queersagainstapartheid.org/faq/#03


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is Israel scared of accusations of apartheid?

Why is Israel scared of accusations of apartheid? By: Nathan Feldman               Recently, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) released a human rights report on Israeli practices that concluded, from Reuters, that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. This report, published by Richard Falk, is the first of its kind originating from the UN. Soon after, the Israeli government, the Trump administration, and the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pressured Rima Khalaf, the head of ESCWA, to rescind the report. She refused and instead resigned in protest through a series of actions thoroughly outlined by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept (article linked at bottom).               Now, my personal view is that this report is both accurate and long overdue, and it was a pleasant surprise that a UN age...
Read more

Palestine 101

The Palestinian Occupation can seem massively complex at first glance, so we've compiled a list of "Palestine 101" resources to help you understand why we're so passionate about Palestine solidarity work.  http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/content/israeli-palestinian-conflict-101 This youtube video and accompanying Q&A section gives a brief overview of the history of the conflict and current human rights violations occurring in Occupied Palestine.  http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ Breaking the Silence is an Israeli organization composed of former Israeli Defense soldiers (IDF). This website posts stories of what these soldiers have seen and done in Palestine.  http://mondoweiss.net/ Mondoweiss is a prolific blog and news source that focuses on the Middle East and specifically the Israeli Occupation. http://badil.org/ The Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights provides a lot of great historical and statistical info...
Read more

End Hate Speech in the Diamondback!

Image
Sign the petition here *Updated 1/29/15* Racism has been allowed to cozy up to our student paper. The Diamondback has published a series of advertisements paid for by a far-right think tank called FLAME (“Facts and Logic About the Middle East”) that whitewashes the documented human rights violations of Israel. These ads are anti-Arab, Islamophobic propaganda. One ad, published in the September 30 th , 2013 edition of the paper, begins by denying the existence of the Palestinian people—it characterizes all Arabs as a monolithic group of people with no cultural, historical, or linguistic distinctions. So, it follows, the Palestinian people don’t exist —therefore Israel really is a land without a people for a people without land. Except that, inconveniently for the FLAME’s narrative, Palestinians have lived on that land for centuries, and are in fact a distinct people with a rich culture.   The ads continue by denying that the West Bank or the Gaza Strip have ever bee...
Read more