For a gay high schooler living in the U.S., it is with extreme difficulty that I watch the American and Israeli governments exploit my sexual identity to excuse ongoing ethnic cleansing.
The Progress Pride Flag was never intended to fly over the corpses of dead Palestinians. Like many queer young people today, I have watched with paralyzing anger as the symbol of our liberation waves atop armed Israeli killing machines and our existence is commodified as justification for Israel’s imperial violence. Israel has no right to wave any flag over the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Yet, for that flag to be colored with a rainbow is illustrative of the settler state’s incorrect, dangerous rationale for carrying out its ongoing genocide.
As Israel and its associated settler colonies market themselves as “gay havens,” they perpetuate the flip side narrative as well—that Palestinians are a barbaric and homophobic population of uncivilized heathens. The narrative itself is anerasure of Palestinian queer life and Israel’s oppression of LGBTQ residents. It ignores that Western colonialism has historically led to worse treatment of LGBTQ minorities in colonized regions. When the British claimed “Mandate Palestine” in 1920, they passed sweeping anti-gay legislation that still governs homosexual relationships in Gaza today. Throughout history, in the name of bringing civilization to Middle Eastern communities, colonialists have criminalized queerness and facilitated queer oppression.
Moreover, Israel itself has punished LGBTQ identities since the state’s birth. The current Netanyahu administration has positionedhomophobicleaders at the peaks of the Israeli government, refuses to legalize gay marriage, and faces rampant rates ofanti-LGBTQ sentiment in the country. Israel cannot be considered a pro-gay force for freedom as it continues the erasure of Palestinian queer life, facilitates an ongoing genocide, and furthers anti-queer lawmaking.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but if queerness was criminalized before colonialism and queerness was criminalized after, that would seem to invalidate the idea that colonialism was responsible.
I’m just reading what you are saying and interpreting it through my own ignorance of queer history save for the last 50 years or so I’ve seen with my own eyes.
It’s also really hard to follow what people are actually saying vs. the words being assigned to them for rhetorical purposes to manufacture the argument another person wants to have. Social media really is the worst form of communication.
That’s only half of the picture, though. The point that the article is making isn’t that colonialism brought anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment to the middle east. It’s that colonialism is generally anti-LGBTQ+ whether or not the area was already and as such, the argument that the colonialists are better because they’re not anti-LGBTQ+ is empty propaganda.
Or put in words already in the very headline of the article: pinkwashing genocide.