An alliance is forming and driving the right-wing worldwide into a white-hot rage: queer people are showing solidarity with Gazans. “Queers for Palestine” has emblazoned t-shirts across Western cities, where many of the demonstrations against the Israeli attack on Gaza are led by queer people.
Last weekend two large protest marches with tens of thousands of participants took place during Berlin Pride, both of which explicitly stood in solidarity with Palestinians: the Dyke March Demo for Lesbian Visibility and the anti-capitalist, non-commercial Internationalist Queer March. As was to be expected, conservative commentators in German media responded to both with public meltdowns. In the taz, Jan Feddersen wrote that those who believe queer people could be safe in Gaza might well take Nazi concentration camps for “health resorts”. Relativising the Holocaust is supposed to count as antisemitic, but the defenders of the far-right regime in Israel and its human rights violations has long since let all standards slip.
A few days earlier, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu poked fun at gays demanding a ceasefire in a controversial speech in front of the US Congress: Gays for Palestine would be like Chickens for KFC. This slogan has been circulating for some time in right wing discourses. The metaphor is rather lacking. It must firstly be emphasised that far more queer Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombs and the starvation blockade than by homophobic violence from fellow Palestinians. Furthermore, the fact that gay, lesbian and trans people are particularly empathetic with the suffering of the oppressed should not be surprising. Queer people know what it is like to experience exclusion and violence whilst the societal majority decides that their suffering is not worth mourning.
It is no coincidence that Judith Butler, the figurehead of gender theory despised by the right wing, tackled the question of who society mourns in her book Precarious Life following the American war of aggression against Iraq. It is only a generation ago that hundreds of thousands of gay men died of AIDS, a disease first diagnosed in 1981. The US president at the time, Ronald Reagan, took 4 years to even mention the topic. His hesitancy to allow the virus to be researched and fought made him complicit in the deaths of innumerable queer people. Their lives were not worthy of protection or mourning. It took pressure from the streets of the US for gay men to be recognised as “worthy victims”, as Noam Chomsky named those deserving of humanity and empathy in his book Manufacturing Consent. Today Palestinians do not count as “worthy victims” in liberal discourse, in contrast to queer people. This is why the two groups are played off against each other to justify unspeakable violence against Palestinians.
Following the right-wing rulebook
Another point of criticism that fans of war crimes like Feddersen happily reach for goes as follows: if queer people want to stand in defence of sexual minorities, why do they not demonstrate against the Islamist organisation Hamas? Islamic fascists are, with their misogynistic world-view and at times murderous homophobia, clearly not political allies of queer people and leftists. The accusation that there are too few protests against Hamas is nonetheless absurd. Hamas is listed in Germany, the EU and NATO as a terrorist organisation. It is already demonised. To protest against Hamas in Germany makes as much sense as protesting against the USA in Iran. In contrast to Hamas, Israeli military leadership is supported by the German state financially, diplomatically, legally, ideologically, and materially with arms shipments. The federal government is an obvious addressee for people that live and pay taxes in Germany, one that also has the power to institute their demands.
In Gaza and other parts of the Middle East there are doubtless many stereotypes regarding and violence towards queer people. But do people have to fulfil moral standards in order to be worthy of basic human rights? Who is supposed to establish the moral standards that decide who deserves the right to life, dignity and freedom? According to the 1948 UN Human Rights Charter, these are universal rights. They are in force whether we like someone or not.
If homophobia should justify the revocation of human rights, are we going to bomb the Vatican? Will we incarcerate Polish PiS voters in torture camps? Will we exterminate Upper Bavaria? According to this logic, Israel, too, would not escape a humanitarian intervention to benefit queer people. The legal situation for queer people in Israel is indeed better than in many other Middle Eastern countries. Gay marriage is not legal, but gay marriages performed abroad are recognised. Gay couples can adopt children. The Israeli state likes to boast with these socially progressive laws and say “look, Israel is an oasis for queer people and so much better than our surrounding, enemy Arab states – you Westerners therefore have to be on our side.”
Those demanding the closing of ranks in this manner are the useful idiots of the Israeli right wing. Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s finance minister, publicly described himself as a homophobic fascist. The far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, called the 2023 Pride March in Jerusalem a “Beast Parade”. This fits the dehumanising rhetoric of his boss, who called the inhabitants of Gaza “animals”. Are these the allies that Western defenders of queer people want?
The misuse of LGBTQ issues to present a progressive image with which to conceal unethical practices is called pinkwashing, analogous to greenwashing, the use of environmental measures to make a company or product look climate-friendly, even if it is not. Here it must be said that Israeli intelligence agencies repeatedly threaten to out Palestinians publicly – which could in fact be life-threatening – if they do not agree to work for them as informants. Such blackmail is not queer-friendly. Should Israel’s human rights violations be ignored because they are a bit nicer to gay people than Iran?
Critics complain that the charge of pinkwashing is antisemitic. However, pinkwashing was not invented to attack Israel. Corporations often resort to pinkwashing, such as Deutsche Bank, which puts rainbow stickers up at the doors of its branch offices, although the bank does nothing in particular to help queer people. Taiwan similarly likes to emphasise it is the first East Asian country to legalise gay marriage, in order to contrast itself with mainland China and pose as a liberal country deserving of military support.
Pinkwashing is particularly useful to gain geopolitical legitimacy in the West, as it activates a left-liberal reflex to take the side of the marginalised. This reflex has been cited at other historical junctures; the British colonised Nigeria with the stated goal of abolishing slavery. Feminism has also been deployed to justify wars of aggression. One of the Bush administration’s stated reasons for the US invasion & occupation of Afghanistan was a desire to free Afghan women from the yoke of the Taliban. A group of people that cannot speak for themselves in the framing of Western journalists are happily selected as proof that they need the protection of the progressive West. Societies are thus split, for example into queer Palestinians and the surrounding, oppressing patriarchal majority. The interests of queer people in Gaza (including among others, not being bombed and receiving enough food) are currently much more closely aligned with those of their heterosexual neighbours than with the interests of queer journalists in Western cities. Sexual liberation can only be fought for once basic human rights are secured.
Even if Israel scores well regarding queer-friendliness in comparison to Arab states, what is the goal of the comparison? Israel is a Western country, an OECD member, and – perhaps far more importantly – a Eurovision participant. When compared to other OECD countries, Israel looks much worse. To walk through the allegedly queer-friendly centre of Tel Aviv as a visibly queer person quickly demonstrates this. In a 2020 survey by the American Pew Research Center only 47% of Israelis surveyed agreed that homosexuality should be socially accepted. As such, over half of the Israeli population is homophobic and could be bombed into oblivion according to the logic of Netanyahu and Feddersen.
Left-liberals are thus willingly acting as henchmen to the right wing. They help those who have fought the social and cultural progress of the past decades; who despise gender equality, want to ban abortions, banish women back to domestic labour, disenfranchise migrant women, displace people of colour from the public sphere and deprive children of the opportunity to deal with their sexuality and gender in a self-determined manner. Their Kulturkampf is not only successful in and of itself, but also pushes urgent material struggles regarding wages and working conditions out of public discourse.
Those who suddenly designate feminists, postcolonial researchers or gender theorists as public enemy number one because of their tame declarations of solidarity with Palestinians are following the rulebook of the German right wing. Supporters of Israel themselves utilise antisemitic tropes alarmingly often, such as portraying Judith Butler as a puppet master behind queer movements seeking to entice the youth to stray from the straight and narrow and thereby destroy enlightened Western civilisation. This is a typical antisemitic line of argument, which sees said Zionists joining a long line of reactionaries who hold Jews responsible for the social progress they detest. The only difference is that they now claim to be doing so in order to protect queer people.
Change begins with solidarity
Social transformation and mutual respect grow from the experience of shared struggles. The late union activist Jane McAlevey liked to recount the story of a hospital in California where she wanted to organise the care staff. The White American nurses disliked their recently immigrated Filipino colleagues, complained about their pungent foreign food in the canteen, their odd language and so on. McAlevey argues that her fight for better working conditions, pensions and wages would have been lost if she had dismissed the nurses as racists. The results of the labour dispute were not only better conditions for the staff: White and Filipino even linked arms to block their managers from entering the hospital. Through this shared struggle the two groups transcended cultural boundaries to become friends.
A similar event occurred in 80s Britain: gays, lesbians and queers in the cities united in solidarity with striking coal miners who protested Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 closing of state-owned mines. These miners did not hold queer people in high esteem, to say the least. Yet the miners saw how the group “Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners” collected donations for their strike fund, and went on to support the queers themselves by forcing the 1985 Labour Party Conference to pass a resolution on LGBTQ rights. The queer protest marches against Israeli violence towards Palestinians has the potential to become a similar moment of solidarity between very different groups.
At protests like the Dyke March or Internationalist Queer Pride in Neukölln one experiences how women with headscarves walk up to trans men with mesh tees over their visible mastectomy scars and thank them for wearing a keffiyeh and showing their solidarity. Perhaps some young Arabs contradict their friends or family if they disparage gay, lesbian or trans people. After all, they have seen for themselves how queers take to the streets to support Palestinians’ right to live, how they are beaten and detained by the police. They have seen queers’ selfless solidarity. It is a selflessness that the genocide cheerleaders in editorial staff and governments cannot imagine. And therefore they will lose.