[This article is part of a roundtable that is a product of a public forum that Academics for Justice in Palestine (AJP) at UCSB held on 8 December 2023. To see all other entries in this roundtable, click here.]
I came to Palestine and to anti-Zionism from a commitment to collective liberation and from my involvement in queer and trans organizing. One of the centerpieces of Israel’s public relations campaign is to characterize Palestinians as savages who are hyper homophobic and misogynistic, and to characterize itself, the state of Israel, as a gay-friendly land of freedom and safety. This strategy, often called pinkwashing, isn’t just a distraction technique (like, look at us holding a pride flag so you don’t see us killing thousands of children), it’s also an effort to weaponize queer rights as a justification for genocide, and an effort to erase the existence of queer Palestinians (to suggest that queer life in Palestine is impossible). Recently, I saw photos of an IDF soldier holding a gay pride flag over the rubble of Gaza and said, “look, it’s Gaza’s first pride flag.” The video relies on the heinous idea that queer people value the existence of a pride flag more than the Palestinian families whose homes, and perhaps bodies, are buried underneath it. And last month, an Israeli sketch comedy show aired a skit, watched by millions of viewers, that makes fun of queer pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S., portraying us as self-sabotaging morons who adore Hamas. These are just two examples of the ways that Israeli propaganda so fundamentally misrecognizes queer and trans movements for liberation, which have long been about joint struggle and the self-determination of all oppressed people. And because of this misrecognition, there is now a beautiful, global chorus of us who now say “I am not gay as in let’s wave a pride flag; I am queer as in free Palestine.” We join our anti-Zionist Jewish comrades in saying, “Not in our name.”