For months, around the country and the world, signs and flags have popped up at protests and encampments signaling queer and trans solidarity with Palestine. Tents at encampments proudly displayed signs like “Dykes for Palestine,” and cities including New York saw protests organized to unify the queer community and the struggle to free Palestine. This is a clear rejection of Israel’s pinkwashing of its genocide. One of the most common refrains queer people get online when they express support for Palestine and opposition to the ongoing genocide is some version of “in Palestine they would kill you for being queer.” This trope has been parroted by Israeli media, which have made “comedy” sketches making this same argument: that it is a contradiction for queer people to support Palestine. This is often counterposed with the argument that Israel is a queer haven. This narrative, which has been ongoing for years, is exactly what gave rise to the term “pinkwashing”; it was developed to describe the process whereby Israeli crimes and the occupation are justified by pointing to the supposedly positive conditions for queer people in Israel as compared to Palestine. This process is an extreme manifestation of “progressive neoliberalism” — in which certain members of minority groups are offered improved conditions as a way of making neoliberalism seem more progressive and socially minded than it is. Pinkwashing has enabled Israel to become a queer tourist destination and even a prominent tour spot for artists with a queer audience, such as drag queens.
The past several months, however, have shown the emergence of a post-pinkwashing generation of activists who have taken the streets around the world for Palestine and against Israel. This generation includes people of all genders and sexualities, a large proportion of anti-Zionist Jewish activists, and a sizable contingent of queer and trans people. Yet the argument remains prominent that it is a contradiction to be both queer and pro-Palestine.
This narrative often relies on conjuring an apocalyptic vision of Palestine for queer people. It erases the existence of queer Palestinians and attempts to boil all of Palestinian culture down to just the anti-queer politics of Hamas and other religiously conservative organizations in Palestine. In reality, this is just a racist trope. The viral posts of “Queering the Map,” focusing on queer Palestinians, shows that there are queer people in Palestine and they are just as much targets of the genocide and oppression from Israel as straight Palestinians. The bombs falling on Gaza, the bullets from IDF guns, and the famine imposed on the population do not discriminate according to people’s sexuality, gender, or political position on queer liberation. The IDF’s ideology of supposed “equality,” in practice, amounts to the equal slaughter of all Palestinians. Israeli soldiers can raise Pride flags in the rubble of Gaza as much as they want, but it won’t erase a basic truth: you cannot claim to be pro-queer when you are overseeing a genocide that is killing queer people. You cannot paint rainbows on bombs and act as if that makes the bombing progressive.
Indeed, Israel is not some queer haven, despite what the marketing would have you believe. Anti-queer religious extremists sit in government and anti-queer violence has seen a sharp increase in Israel. The IDF has a practice of blackmailing queer Palestinians into acting as informants under threat of being outed, and Israel has sold surveillance technology to extremely anti-queer governments like that of Uganda.
The notion that the Arabic world is inherently anti-queer relies on a blend of Islamophobia, which tries to present Islam as uniquely anti-queer, and historical revisionism, which erases the history of secular movements in Palestine and the Middle East more broadly. In reality, it is Western imperialism’s interventions in the Middle East — upholding right-wing political leaders, helping topple secular governments, starting wars that set up the religious organizations as the only opponent to imperialism, and bankrolling anti-Soviet Islamists like Osama Bin Laden — that have made the Middle East a bastion of organizations which promote theocracy.
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In Palestine, the hold of organizations with a theocratic program results from Zionism and imperialism’s attempts to discredit and destroy secular resistance. Also culpable are the leaders of the (nonsocialist) secular Palestinian resistance groups, such as the PLO, who betrayed Palestine by agreeing to the terms of Zionism and imperialism. Queer struggle — like, for that matter, socialist struggle, — is not foreign to the Middle East. Indeed, the anti-sodomy laws in Palestine were imposed by the British mandate.
The Middle East is neither inherently nor universally anti-queer, as suggested by the existence of Palestinian queer organizations. But the anti-queer ideology that is present was imposed and enforced by imperialism. So, to free the queer people of Palestine, we need to remove the material conditions that give rise to conservatism in Palestinian society, that give power to anti-queer organizations, and that sustain the idea that queer rights are separate from the struggle for national liberation. In other words, to free queer people — in Palestine or elsewhere — we need to change the material conditions that create that oppression by overthrowing the economic and political system (capitalism) that governs them. This speaks to the fact that only a socialist revolution led by workers of all genders, sexualities, and ethnicities can truly liberate Palestine.
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For a Palestine Where Everyone Is Free
While we must reject all attempts to pinkwash the state of Israel, it is important that we soberly assess the situation for queer rights in Gaza, which is far from liberatory. We need to be clear about this if we are to fight for collective liberation together. This means that we cannot, as some organizations and individuals in the movement do, offer support to leaderships with a theocratic program and terrible positions on queer rights, women’s rights, and many other issues like Hamas, the government of Iran, Hezbollah, and others. While it is vital to be anti-imperialist — and we should defend these organizations from persecution and imperialist attacks — anti-imperialism shouldn’t drive us into giving unconditional political support for organizations and governments that do not share our program of liberation. Opposing the U.S. doesn’t have to mean supporting organizations like Hamas simply because they are in conflict with U.S. interests. Our anti-imperialism should hold two ideas at the same time: (1) that the U.S. and Israel are terrible, oppressive states that must be brought down and (2) that we must bring them down with a movement that supports liberation for all, including queer and trans people.
To be clear, the problem with Hamas isn’t — as some on the more liberal side would like to claim — that they use violent resistance against the occupation. We support resistance to Israel from the occupied Palestinians. Rather, the problem with Hamas is political: its vision of a free Palestine isn’t the same as ours. In fact it is the opposite of ours.
Hamas gained the sympathy of the youth and workers of Gaza as a result of the betrayal of nationalist leaderships such as the Palestinian National Authority, which was willing to accept the occupation. Hamas is not the same as Iran, a capitalist state with an army and repressive forces that it has used against feminist organizing, and it is an active part of the resistance against the genocide. But it is politically and financially dependent on capitalist states, and it has shown its unwillingness to seriously challenge the occupation in its own right, even going so far as accepting the framework of a two-state solution under pre-1967 borders. Its version of a free Palestine is one where capitalism still exists and a theocratic program is enacted, which would entail the subjugation of women and queer people. This isn’t a truly free Palestine, and it is not betraying or weakening the movement to be clear that Hamas’s vision isn’t ours.
These leaderships — like Hamas and the so-called Axis of Resistance — are capitalist in their framework and ideology. This shapes their politics toward everything, including queer liberation. The opposition these organizations and governments have toward queer rights doesn’t stem solely from a religious moral aversion to queer sex and identity, but arises from a capitalist need to divide the working class. So by holding up queer workers as the enemy, it allows these leaderships to divide the cis-hetero working class from the queer-trans working class. This has the result of maintaining working-class consent for the bourgeois and counterrevolutionary project of capitalist theocracies.
What we are fighting for — the thousands who have taken the streets and the queer people among them — is a free Palestine from the river to the sea, where everyone, regardless of their gender, sexuality, religion, or ethnicity, can live full lives with the rights to self-expression and self-determination of what their life looks like. To win this, we will need to set our horizon of struggle further and understand that only the fall of imperialism — which will require the fall of capitalism — can achieve our goals. So we must build a powerful force that fights as one fist, uniting our struggles with the understanding that none of us are free until all of us are free.
Originally Published: 2024-06-30 07:00:00
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