There’s No Pride in Apartheid — Stop Pink-Washing Israel’s Crimes
TRT Editor | Jun 07, 2014
By: Keegan O’Brien/Special to TRT—
Every year in June, the LGBTQ community comes together to celebrate Pride month; and every year you’re guaranteed to see advertisements marketing Israel as a hot, must visit gay tourist destination. From Tel Aviv’s supposed cultural acceptance of LGBTQ people to Israel’s ability to offer endless partying and hot, chiseled men, it’s a gaycation not to be missed.
But, this PR blitz neglects to mention a fundamental truth: Israel is an apartheid state.
For starters, Israel, like all societies in the world, is rife with homophobia and transphobia. It has a highly organized, well financed and politically influential Jewish right wing that advocates for socially reactionary, anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic policies. It is far from a queer paradise.
From Tel Aviv’s supposed cultural acceptance of LGBTQ people to Israel’s ability to offer endless partying and hot, chiseled men, it’s a gaycation not to be missed. But, this PR blitz neglects to mention a fundamental truth: Israel is an apartheid state.
More importantly, Israel is a colonial settler society based on racial apartheid. It’s a country whose establishment in 1948 was based upon the violent expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population to clear the way for the creation of an exclusively Jewish state. It’s a society where Palestinians live as second class citizens systematically subjected to racist discrimination, and as prisoners subjected to utterly inhumane and brutal conditions in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza—commonly referred to as the world’s “largest open air prison” because of the current blockade being imposed by Israel.
Israel’s boosters seem to have realized that building an apartheid wall and bulldozing homes in the West Bank, or enacting a blockade that collectively punishes and starves the entire population of Gaza from accessing its most basic necessities, aren’t the best marketing schemes when it comes to promoting itself as a bastion of progress. Insteadof focusing on its shameful abuse of human rights and violation of international law, Israel has made a concerted effort to market its image as an LGBTQ-accepting, tolerant society in a sea of Arab reaction. While it’s true that some LGBTQ people have been able to create cultural enclaves in select urban centers in Israel, these marketing efforts serve another purpose: to detract attention away from other, not so pretty facts about Israeli society, while demonizing those it colonizes in order to justify its crimes against them.
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http://www.therainbowtimesmass.com/2014/06/07/theres-pride-apartheid-stop-pink-washing-israels-crimes/
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