Apartheid Israel by Sean Jacobs

Author:Sean Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Ed. Note: This piece was originally written for a 2006 conference organized by the American Association of University Professors that was canceled due to pro-Israel action by influential donors. The full discussion can be found at www.aaup.org/file/Papers-From-A-Planned-Conference-on-Boycotts.pdf.

Chapter 11

Toward a Queer Palestine

Kelly Gillespie

I’m fighting for the abolition of apartheid, and I fight for the right of freedom of sexual orientation. These are inextricably linked with each other. I cannot be free as a black man if I am not free as a gay man.

— Simon Nkoli, speech at the first Gay Pride in Johannesburg, 1990

One of the most ambiguous maneuvers in the politics of Palestine/ Israel has been Israel’s deployment of gay rights as a way of proving its credentials as a democracy. In the darkest days of South African apartheid, it was unimaginable that homosexuals could be used in this way: steered into frame as the happy face of the regime, the sign of democracy. In South Africa, the nationalisms of apartheid and the antiapartheid movement were coterminous with homophobic and transphobic violence. Sexuality that wasn’t resolutely heterosexual was persecuted, forcing non-normative sexualities into silence and underground. In contrast, we are today faced with a regime that hoists the rainbow flag up next to the Israeli flag, a conflation that has bewildered and angered queers around the world.

Friendly young women from Israel’s public affairs departments are sent to speak at global universities about how well Israel treats its LGBT citizens. Pink tourism is courted to showcase Tel Aviv as one of the world’s best gay destinations. Campaigns are run to show how open-minded the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is on matters of sexual orientation. “Where in the Middle East Can Gay Officers Serve Their Country? Only in Israel!” reads one poster. On another, “The Best Army in the Middle East Does Not Discriminate Against Gay Men and Women. Real Liberals Love Israel.”

Pinkwashing, as it has come to be known, is the strategic use of “gay rights” to create the veneer of democracy over a conservative political project. It is the deployment of the progressive history of “gay rights” as a resource in the maintenance of other systems of coercion and inequality. This strategy has only been able to take hold as, over the past twenty-odd years, the legislation of LGBT rights has come to be a crucial liberal democratic marker of a good society. Israel has been using this historical fact as a way to insert itself into the international community as a “good state,” effecting the appearance of being a progressive country even as the occupation of Palestine sustains ongoing violations of Palestinian life. Jasbir Puar has named this political assemblage “homonationalism,” a peculiar equation that extends the privileges of citizenship to homosexuals as it withdraws them from others. It is not an equation that has “gay rights” as a threshold to other progressive inclusions but rather employs LGBT inclusion as a deliberate means of sustaining other forms of discrimination and exclusion, usually racist and imperialist.

This relegation of “gay

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