Anything good Israel does is just an insidious way to distract the world from the “occupation” of Palestine.
Planting trees to make the desert bloom? That’s what critics call greenwashing the occupation. Israeli humanitarian to disaster zones abroad is bluewashing. Israeli ties with indigenous North American peoples is redwashing while ties with African-Americans is blackwashing.
When it comes to Israel, things like trees, a helping hand and friendship — and the world needs more of these — are purely perfidious plots against the Palestinians. Period.
Which brings us to one more example of Palestinian activists wrecking the color wheel. The Independent gave an op-ed soapbox to Haneen Maikey and Hilary Aked to take Israel to task for “pinkwashing” — which is exploiting the Jewish state’s LGBTQ+ rights to distract everyone from “its systematic denial of Palestinian rights.” Aked’s a third-rate academic writing a book on the Israeli lobby for a company that publishes anything disgusting about Israel.
They myopically argue:
It could not be clearer that nothing is apolitical where Israel is concerned. That’s why the idea that holding Eurovision in Israel is “just a bit of fun”, is so misguided.
Translation: Israel’s acceptance of gays means absolutely nothing as long as the Mideast conflict — which is not a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT+) issue — remains unresolved.
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Palestinians have a reputation for homophobia in the West Bank and in Gaza, but rather than have an honest conversation about it, Maikey and Aked blame Israel.
They then go on to argue that Israel’s respect for LGBT+ rights is harmful for the Palestinian LGBT+ community(!?)
In fact, we can say from personal experience that pinkwashing has deeply harmful impacts, not least on Palestinian queers. The narrative that Israel welcomes LGBT+ self-expression while in the rest of the Middle East queers face relentless persecution, constructs a false opposition.
It is not merely propaganda which makes Zionism more appealing to queer groups, sometimes even eliciting direct support for Israel’s apartheid regime. It is also a form of violence against Palestinian queers, rendering all of the progressive forces inside Palestine invisible, including erasing the queer Palestinian movement’s achievements.
This narrative encourages LGBT+ Palestinians to believe that their families, society and friends will always reject them and there is no hope of challenging homophobia – something which also exists in Israel, despite efforts to hide it.
Above all, Israel’s pinkwashing is a cynical attempt to normalise its entrenched apartheid regime which discriminates against, dispossesses and subordinates all Palestinians, queers and non-queers alike.
Maikey, Aked and The Independent demonize Israel, but they do a bigger disservice to the Palestinian LGBT+ community with all their talk of pinkwashing.
But there’s a word for blaming Israel for their society’s intolerance which doesn’t appear in their piece: Brainwashing.
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