pinkwashing palestine

Over a decade ago, Palestinian activists adopted the term “pinkwashing” to describe how the israeli state and its supporters use the language of gay and trans rights to direct international attention away from the oppression of Palestinians.

Pinkwashing is expressed through the exploitation of LGBTQI+ culture and identities for public relations purposes and can be carried out by any state, organization, political entity or individual, in order to deflect attention from that entity’s harmful practices.

Pinkwashing emerged as part of an ongoing international propaganda effort, which aims to rebrand israel as a liberal and “modern” state in the face of the growing Palestine solidarity movement.

Crucially, the promotion of “gay-friendly israel” depends on presenting Palestinians (and Arabs more generally) as the exact opposite: sexually regressive and therefore undeserving of solidarity.

These stereotypes draw on the long history of efforts to demonize Palestinian narratives and resistance using political strategies anchored in anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.

And pushes the racist idea that sexual and gender diversity are unnatural and foreign to Palestinian society, erasing the agency of Palestinians, especially the progressive forces inside Palestine – including the achievements of queer Palestinian movements.

israel uses a pro-LGBTQI+ agenda – weaponizing LGBTQI+ identity – to mask or distract from all elements of its ongoing zionist settler-colonial project, and deploys homonationalism* to justify its own exceptionalism and violent oppression of the “other”– in this case, Palestinians.

*Homonationalism and Pinkwashing go hand in hand. Homonationalism argues that western LGBTQI+ movements are often bound up with upholding the racist sovereignty of the nation state... using sexual diversity and LGBTQI+ rights to peddle or maintain nationalist stances – such as anti-immigration policies which are based on prejudices that the “other” are homophobic and western societies are more egalitarian.

Recognizing pinkwashing as colonial violence can help us understand how israel divides, oppresses, and erases Palestinians on the basis of gender and sexuality.

S O U R C E S

We are grateful to the works of Al Qaws (2020), Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence; Jahshan & Chalabi (2023), What is Pinkwashing?, Shado Magazine; Decolonize Palestine (n.d.), Pinkwashing; Evangelista (2020), Mess up the empire: Deploying and disrupting homonationalism, Sexualities; direct excerpts of which informed the content for this blog post.