Protesters encamped at the University of Toronto say anybody who points out gay rights issues in Palestinian territories is working on behalf of Zionist colonizers.
The protesters shared a post by the group Jewish Voice for Peace on Instagram, which called any Israel supporter who brings attention to human rights violations against gays in Palestine “pink-washers.”
Examples of “pinkwashing” include pointing to the beheading of asylum seekers because of their sexual orientation or the criminalization of “sexual and gender diversity” instead of only focusing on Israel’s actions in its war with Hamas.
The protesters at the “People’s Circle for Palestine,” illegally encamped on U of T property, think so anyway.
The group shared images from an “educational” piece by one of their allies called “How is pinkwashing a form of colonial violence.”
The groups posit that Israel uses the gay refugees it takes in from Gaza and the West Bank to make itself look better than the countries that those “gender and sexually diverse” people are fleeing from.
According to the protesters, It’s all part of Israel’s plan to avert international gaze from its “oppression of Palestinians.”
“This strategy erases, alienates, and isolates queer and trans-Palestinians, driving a wedge between them and their communities and perpetuating the dangerous myth that they should “run into their colonizer’s arms,” the post said.
“The pinkwashing narrative, which portrays civilized colonizers triumphing over ‘backwards natives,’ is rooted in racist, anti-Palestinian rhetoric and draws on old colonial tropes.”
The post argued that it is Israel and its supporters who, by focusing their attention on human rights abuses and anti-gay culture in Gaza and the West Bank, are dividing gays from their Palestinian community.
“Pinkwashing isolates queer Palestinians from their own communities by using colonial divide-and-conquer strategies that exacerbate internal divisions and existing forms of patriarchal and capitalist violence,” the group said.
True North contacted the group to learn what it meant by these forms of violence that they say exist in Palestinian culture but did not receive a response.
“Pinkwashing warps the reality of queer youth by telling them that their families hate them and that their communities are unsafe,” the post continued.
According to an article about Israel granting LGBT Palestinians asylum, the country was home to 90 LGBT Palestinian asylum seekers in June 2022.
One of those asylum seekers testified at Israel’s legislative building, the Knesset, describing how his family had tried to kill him for the crime of being gay.
However, the anti-Israel protesters believed that Israel was incapable of helping anyone from Gaza or the West Bank due to its “colonial” relationship with the region.
“By promoting the myth of queer refuge in Israel, pinkwashing reframes the dynamic from colonized and colonizer to victim and saviour,” the post said. “As if a colonial state could also provide salvation to the very people it’s colonizing and displacing.”
The group used a report from Al-Qaws, a “queer” Palestinian group, as its source for their Instagram infographic slide. However, it went slightly off script when referencing “capitalist violence” in the region and some other points.
“Pinkwashing silences the presence and power of the Palestinian queer movement. This systematic erasure of progressive and politicized queer voices serves the colonizer’s narrative that queer Palestinians are alone, rejected and have no collective agency,” the protesters said in the post.
“Yet the Palestinian queer movement is an integral part of Palestinian society and the anti-colonial struggle, making it the most formidable challenger to pinkwashing.”
In the report, Al-Qaws only claimed that it “viewed” itself as an integral part of Palestinian society.
In 2019, the Palestinian Authority, which rules over the West Bank, banned Al-Qaws from operating in its territory.
It said the gay rights group’s actions “infringe upon the higher principles and values of Palestinian society.”
The group said that this statement triggered a wave of hate messages, including death threats.
Al-Qaws, which is based out of Haifa, Israel, works in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Ramallah, among others, and has said they’ve received similar threats and hate mail for other events they advertised.
According to the Times of Israel, homosexuality is considered taboo but not illegal in the West Bank. But in Hamas-ruled Gaza, it is a crime that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.