Queers for Palestine protest the Jewish National Fund (Photo and more here Indybay.org)
Groundbreaking Op-Ed in today’s Times from CUNY professor Sarah Schulman on Brand Israel and the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation. Everyone is talking about this today. Wow. A piece aimed at the Brand Israel campaign, a piece aimed at the hateful occupation. The mainstreaming of a term that only Palestinian solidarity activists have used for the last few years. The neocons have got their knickers in a twist today. Go New York Times! Put our website out of business!
From the article “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’“:
In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.
Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The government isn’t alone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)
This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”
The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”
Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”
What makes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies so susceptible to pinkwashing — and its corollary, the tendency among some white gay people to privilege their racial and religious identity, a phenomenon the theorist Jasbir K. Puar has called “homonationalism” — is the emotional legacy of homophobia.
There was a great video a while back about Toronto GLBT activists against the occupation .
Israeli pinkwashing is a fraud.
Eli Yishai is a cabinet minister . Women are currently being targeted. The gay community will be next.
Here another one that indicates PC on Israel and the zios is dying.
Holocaustology 101
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/22/the_boys_who_cry_holocaust/singleton/
RE: “the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as ‘an international gay vacation destination.’ ~ Schulman
MY COMMENT: Perhaps they should use a little of that $90 million to apprehend the gunman who attacked the Tel Aviv gay centre in 2009.
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
SOURCE – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Tel_Aviv_gay_centre_shooting
So, to be clear: a gay person in the occupied West Bank says:
– “Please keep occupying, you are the most modest dictator I could have”
– “I wish I could go to Tel Aviv”
– “I wish I could go back home”
– “I support the x state solution”
– “Leave me alone, Ill manage. Go home, where you came from”
Interesting post, Phil and Adam,
But don’t get too excited about the NYT obviating the need MW any time soon…ain’t goin’ to happen!