PINKWASHING ISSUES - BY MICHAEL LUONGO
Israel is known as the most advanced country in the Middle East on LGBT rights
issues. It has openly gay politicians, a parade and bars in Tel Aviv, open service in
the military, and a burgeoning queer film and arts scene. This positive
atmosphere, however, is largely useful only if you happen to be Jewish and are
living on a certain side of the West Bank separation wall.
For more than a decade, Israeli and Palestinian LGBT activists have debated the
concept of Pinkwashing — whether the Israeli government’s promotion of LGBT
rights is used to deflect attention from human rights violations in the Palestinian
territories.
Almost unknown in the United States, the concept came to widespread attention
in New York when Sherry Wolf and other LGBT activists affiliated with
Siegebusters planned a party last March to mark Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW),
an annual international mobilization by critics of the Jewish state’s treatment of
the Palestinians who live in the territory it controls, at the LGBT Community
Center in the West Village. Under pressure from gay adult film producer Michael
Lucas, who famously made a gay porn video in Israel, the Center canceled the
party and currently bars the group from meeting there.
The controversy would not die. In the nine months since then, a new group,
Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), has pressed the Center on its
exclusionary policy and several times occupied its lobby to hold unsanctioned
meetings. After hosting a town hall meeting on the controversy in the spring, the
Center has put off making a final policy determination and stopped fielding
journalists’ questions, instead referring them to a statement on its website.
The concept of Pinkwashing, likely new to most New Yorkers, first came to my
own attention in 2006 while covering Jerusalem’s World Pride for Gay City
News. Based in one of the most holy cities in the world, with significance for all
three of the main Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — World
Pride was planned as a direct challenge to religious discrimination against
homosexuality.
Originally slated for 2005, the event was postponed a year due to tensions
surrounding Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Fears of violent attacks by
the Israeli Orthodox right wing as well as government security concerns about the
concurrent 2006 war with the Hezbollah in Lebanon almost permanently
sidelined the event. The conflict with Lebanon dampened attendance and media
coverage considerably, as did an international call for a boycott — particularly by
a new Lebanese LGBT rights group HELEM — to protest the ongoing Israeli
occupation.
There was an element of irony about the boycott calls, since World Pride
organizers, most of them from the Israeli left, were also interested in bringing
attention to the damaging impact of the occupation. In coordination with Rabbis
for Human Rights, World Pride officials brought international attendees to the
separation wall and to Palestinian homes demolished by the Israeli military.
During the Jerusalem events, there were also conversations about whether the
Israeli government would offer asylum to gay Palestinians, though I was unable
to confirm that this actually happened. I was never able to meet such men, if they
did exist, in spite of attempting to conduct interviews through Shaul Ganon, a gay
Israeli activist known to work with Palestinian asylum seekers.
The complexity and nuance that World Pride’s history pointed up were largely
absent from last year’s Community Center controversy.
According to Aeyal Gross, an Israeli who is associate professor of law at Tel Aviv
University, the subject of Pinkwashing dates back to 2001, when LGBT activists
created the group Black Laundry — Kvisa Shchora in Hebrew — in reaction to the
Israeli military crackdown following the Palestinians’ Second Intifada. Gross was
part of this early movement, and on a recent blog post described an article about
Pinkwashing he presented at last year’s Amsterdam Sexual Nationalism
Conference.
“I will explore the politics of sexual freedom apparent in Israel’s attempt to brand
itself as ‘gay friendly,’ and as a ‘western’ and ‘European’ country, as opposed to
supposedly ‘backwards,’ ‘homophobic’ Islamic countries which surround it in the
Middle East,” he explained. “One should not deny the progress in sexual
freedoms in Israel, but address the way they serve to cover and legitimize the
denial of other freedoms, especially from Palestinians.”
Gross told me after long battles for LGBT equality, the Israeli government coopted advances for its own agenda, mostly under right-wing regimes. “It is a way
for Netanyahu to talk about gay rights, but not too much,” he said. “He would use
it against Iran and the Palestinians in the UN.”
At least Israelis are willing to talk about the Pinkwashing controversy, he added.
“It is ironic that you could have this debate in Tel Aviv, but you could not have
this debate in New York,” he noted.
At the same time, Gross argued, “the term Pinkwashing is not very successful. It
causes people to misunderstand the situation,” because unlike the use of word
Greenwashing to describe false environmental claims, Israel has had real LGBT
rights advances.
A pillar of the Pinkwashing argument made by Siegebusters and QAIA is that
Israel’s occupation oppresses Palestinian gays. According to Brad Taylor, an
activist with both groups, “We’re a group of queers organizing contingents in
parades on the issues which we as queer people see as important, not only
because some sector of Palestinian society are queer, but because Palestinian
oppression is on the basis of identity with which we as queer people find common
cause.”
The other side of the Pinkwashing issue, however, is just how bad things actually
are for LGBT Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza — there, especially
since Israel’s 2005 pullout and the Hamas takeover. The plight of gay
Palestinians raises the natural question of how willing Israel is to grant asylum to
those who demonstrate persecution.
Anat Ben-Dor is an attorney with the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University.
She and Michael Kagan co-authored the 2008 report “Nowhere to Run” that
looked at gay Palestinians and the asylum question. Ben-Dor addressed the issue
cautiously, aware of the political dimensions of her work. “I am in the field,” she
said. “I am not in New York or in the Knesset. I am not debating these issues
politically. I am surprised how this issue is misrepresented.”
Kagan and Ben-Dor’s report is based on a number of interviewees, all from the
West Bank except for one Gazan. It reveals horrific treatment, often at the hand
of the Palestinian Authority, including one young man who witnessed the
insertion of a glass bottle into the anus of another young prisoner until he bled
and also described his own forced immersion in sewage pits.
Their research, Ben-Dor explained, “was to support asylum cases. When you seek
asylum, you need to show the phenomenon you are talking about in an objective
way.” Issues can be distorted, she said, by “human rights activists, many with a
very concrete agenda — and some would want to downplay and some would want
to exaggerate.”
For LGBT Palestinians, she said, “Gaza is worse and Gaza is closed. The West
Bank, clients can leave.” She mentioned being unable to help a Gazan who
contacted her, explaining, “We didn’t know what to say to him. If he can’t get out
and we can’t get in, what can we do?”
One of the report’s interviewees alluded to the ways in which politics on both
sides of the separation wall play a role. “In Palestinian culture, being homosexual
is not only a great offense on the part of the homosexual, but is also a disgrace to
his entire family and an abomination against Islam,” the man explained. “It is
also viewed as an act against the Palestinian struggle for independence. Known
homosexuals are presumed to be weak and to identify and collaborate with Israeli
Jews. The sanctions are extremely harsh, beginning with physical and verbal
abuse and often ending in death at the hands of one’s own family or others.”
The report’s authors, however, were not willing to ascribe anti-gay attitudes in
the West Bank and Gaza wholly to anti-Israeli suspicions. “Because homophobia
is so widespread both in the Middle East and worldwide, we hesitate to conclude
that Palestinian homophobia results mainly from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,”
they wrote. “However, it does appear plausible that the conflict heightens the
dangers to gay Palestinian men.”
Israel, unfortunately, offers no haven for these endangered men. “If a Palestinian
gay person comes to my office, he cannot seek asylum like any person of any
other nationality,” Ben-Dor said. “He is excluded from the very beginning of the
process. We never managed to get protection for gay Palestinians in Israel. The
solution was to try to resettle them outside of Israel.”
This reality is partly due to Israeli law, which denies some Palestinians the right
to live within Israel, a tragic byproduct of a much larger political conflict —
involving Palestinian demands for the right of return to homes and land lost in
the creation of Israel — that has hobbled the two-state road map.
“I am baffled by this,” Ben-Dor said of Israeli intransigence over the asylum
requests of gay Palestinians. “I think in general, if you don’t look at refugee
issues, not just Palestinians and other gay refugees, I think Israel is quite
generous and liberal with gay rights.” She doesn’t know why some answering the
Pinkwashing argument persist in encouraging the mistaken belief that Israel
offers asylum to gay Palestinians. “Why exploit this issue, which is not true?” she
said.
In my own visits to the West Bank, in particular Ramallah, the de facto
Palestinian capital, I found a relative lack of visible gay life. This is a stark
contrast not only to Tel Aviv, but as well to other Arab cities, including Cairo,
Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and even war-torn Baghdad. In spite of Ramallah’s
cosmopolitan and international atmosphere, it is the only major Middle Eastern
city I have been to where I have been unable to connect to an indigenous LGBT
movement.
A different perspective on gay life in the West Bank, however, was offered by
Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian-American who was a legal advisor to the Palestinian
Authority. “I can honestly say I have no evidence that being openly gay negatively
impacted me,” he said. “I am gay, and if the Palestinian authority is so
homophobic, why would I be working for them?”
Tarazi pointed out he had an Israeli partner while living in Ramallah and
marched in a Tel Aviv gay pride parade carrying a sign saying, “Gay and
Palestinian: Freedom Twice Denied” which appeared in Associated Press
dispatches.
He acknowledged that the freedom he found was “one of class, not one of culture.
It is the same phenomenon around the world. The more educated classes tend to
be more tolerant. I had certainly heard of gay men, particularly from Gaza, with
problems. That doesn’t surprise me. It was much more impoverished.”
Tarazi insisted, however, “I had never heard of honor killings of gay men” within
Palestine by families feeling disgraced.
Tarazi also made a different argument — that how the Palestinian Authority
treats its LGBT citizens is not necessarily an important issue within the larger
debate over the Israeli occupation. Pointing to the role Bayard Rustin, a gay
African-American civil rights leader, played as Martin Luther King Jr.’s right
hand, he asked, “Who knew if blacks at that time would support gay rights? For
me, judging the Palestinians on this issue is out of order. Gay rights didn’t
happen in South Africa until after apartheid ended.”
Oppression of Palestinians, however, should trouble the LGBT conscience, Tarazi
argued. “We as gay people are better positioned to understand oppression and
the need to speak up for those who can not speak up for themselves,” he said.
Rauda Morcos, a Palestinian-Israeli living in Haifa who is the former leader of
ASWAT, a lesbian Palestinian group, voiced a similar view. In an email, she
wrote, “My struggle with Israeli LGBTIQ organizations is also around the issue of
occupation. They are not willing to recognize the occupation. They can be gay and
serve in the Israeli army. For me this is something that doesn’t make sense. How
can you be queer and understand oppression and be aware of it and then also
serve in the military?”
Pinkwashing, Morcos said, “existed long before people became aware of it and
long before the term. When you say you are Palestinian in the West, someone is
bound to stop you and say, ‘Ah, but in Israel there are queer groups and it is the
only oasis in the Middle East.’ But that’s not true, I don’t know what they are
talking about when they say ‘oasis’ or refer to ‘queer rights’ in Israel.”
Sarah Schulman is an activist and author based in New York, currently working
on a book about Pinkwashing for Duke University Press. She has traveled
through both Israel and Palestine, and believes Israel’s LGBT visibility and legal
protections should not mask the occupation.
“If they have gay people in the army and because Tel Aviv has a gay enclave, why
does that mean the occupation is fine?” she said. “No one has been able to make
an argument that one negates the other. And it is only for Jews. In what other
country in the world do we say moderate gay rights that are only for one group
are expressly progressive?”
Schulman’s travels showed her there “is an emerging Palestinian gay movement
in Palestine.” She supports the BDS movement – Boycotts, Divestments, and
Sanctions — against Israel, but encourages visiting. “No one is saying, ‘Don’t go to
Israel,’” she said.
Schulman, who is Jewish, took care to challenge some misconceptions she
believes have plagued the LGBT Community Center debate. “The criticism of
Jews who support Palestinian rights by those Jews who don’t support Palestinian
rights is blown out of proportion” by media and others looking for an easy hook
on the story.
She also said she saw anti-Semitism in the claim that wealthy Jews would pull
funding from the Center over the controversy, a myth she said was based on a
stereotype of Jews in control behind the scenes. “It shocked me,” Schulman said,
“I just kept coming up against the same thing, using Jews who don’t exist to
justify the censorship. If you can find one Jewish funder who has withheld
funding I would be shocked. There is no such person.”
Others saw anti-Semitism behind the Center debate in other ways. Scott Piro, a
former New Yorker now living in Tel Aviv, said of the Center debate, “I felt
threatened just seeing that, and I am sure this is how someone who was my
ancestor would feel in the 1930s.” He added that the concept of “Pinkwashing is
just a new form of anti-Semitism. It’s not really about the lives of people in the
Palestinian territories. It’s about hating Israel.”
Piro, a freelance public relations specialist who has widely blogged on the issue,
believes there is a lack of recognition of how genuinely Israel has embraced LGBT
rights. “Show me the smoking gun that it is the policy of the Israeli government to
talk about its record on human rights to cover the idea of the occupation,” he
said. “Where is the Free Syria?” Piro added, “They have made this a double
standard, so that Israel cannot be proud of its record on gay rights or its role as a
gay destination. No one says to Amsterdam that it is promoting itself as a gay
destination to cover something else.”
Promoting gay tourism has clearly become a goal for Israel. The Israeli English
language publication YNet recently covered Tel Aviv’s official evolution as a gay
destination. Lucas uses his films to promote Israeli tourism and has led gay travel
groups. He argued that the United States can also be accused of Pinkwashing,
noting that some states have same-sex marriage laws even though the country
invaded and occupied Iraq.
Brooklyn-born Russell Lord has lived in Israel since 1981 and was World Pride’s
official travel coordinator. In 2006, he said, “the apartheid Pinkwashing people
were new and inexperienced,” and contrasted their relatively ineffective
opposition to the Jerusalem event against the sophistication of “right-wing
political and religious people — from the Christian side, the Jewish side, and the
Muslim side — as if Sodom and Gomorrah was going to be resurrected in West
Jerusalem.”
By 2009, when Lord coordinated an Israeli symposium for the International Gay
and Lesbian Travel Association, he said, “All of a sudden they took off, the
Pinkwashing people, sending email after email telling people not to come.”
HELEM, the Lebanese group, was once again part of the boycott effort. “HELEM
professes to be pro-Palestinian, but I am trying to bring people to Israel and to
Palestine, to Bethlehem, where we specifically contracted a Palestinian guide,”
Lord said. “Then I brought them to Jordan.”
He added, “I live in Tel Aviv, and I am a Zionist, but I believe in the theory that if
my neighbors have everything they need, they won’t take it from me. I believe in
being a good neighbor. A happy neighbor is a good neighbor.”
Ironically, neighbors Lebanon and Israel, whose borders are closed to each other,
have become gay tourism rivals within the Middle East. The Lebanese gay travel
company LebTour hosted a 2010 IGLTA symposium.
Israel, Lord insisted, is an important gateway to regional gay tourism. “Everyone
on that conference has sent individuals or small groups, because of what they saw
in Tel Aviv, in Israel, in the West Bank, and because of what they saw in Jordan,”
he said. “I would say nine out of ten of those tourists go on to Jordan.”
Lord recommended that people visit the region and decide for themselves.
“Everybody does not have to agree with me,” he said. “Come to Tel Aviv, talk to
Arabs living in Israel, talk to Arabs with Israeli passports. Come to the West Bank
and talk to people.”
Michael Luongo is the editor of the Routledge book “Gay Travels in the Muslim
World” and was named the 2011 LGBT Journalist of the Year by the National
Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association.