Mick Hartley

Israel, in an attempt to improve its image in the West, is apparently marketing itself as a gay-friendly nation. Jasbir Puar, associate professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, is anxious to point out the orientalist tropes involved in this outrageous piece of Zionist propaganda:

Israeli pinkwashing is a potent method through which the terms of Israeli occupation of Palestine are reiterated – Israel is civilised, Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic, uncivilised, suicide-bombing fanatics. It produces Israel as the only gay-friendly country in an otherwise hostile region. This has manifold effects: it denies Israeli homophobic oppression of its own gays and lesbians, of which there is plenty, and it recruits, often unwittingly, gays and lesbians of other countries into a collusion with Israeli violence towards Palestine.

In reproducing orientalist tropes of Palestinian sexual backwardness, it also denies the impact of colonial occupation on the degradation and containment of Palestinian cultural norms and values. Pinkwashing harnesses global gays as a new source of affiliation, recruiting liberal gays into a dirty bargaining of their own safety against the continued oppression of Palestinians, now perforce rebranded as "gay unfriendly".

No doubt those gays strung up in Iran, executed in Saudi Arabia, and generally keeping as quiet as possible in the rest of the Middle East, will be reflecting ruefully on how they've been unwittingly recruited into "a collusion with Israeli violence towards Palestine".

CiF commentors are, I'm happy to see, giving this nonsense the good kicking it deserves.

[If you can face it you can read some of the preface to Jasbir Puar's book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, here]