“Pride in Genocide”: No to Israel’s Pinkwashing

For decades, Israel has sold the world a false image of itself. The state that occupies, dispossesses, and today exterminates a people has presented itself as an outpost of civilisation: liberal, tolerant, modern. This is not a recent operation. It began with the state itself. From its foundation in Palestine as a Western settler-colonial project, the dominant narrative was that of pioneers building a country in the desert and turning it into a garden, even though Palestine was already a prosperous nation, politically, economically, and culturally developed. The real history was suppressed, concealed, and rewritten to manufacture a false narrative.

The claim that Zionist settlers “made the desert bloom” is one of Israel’s most recognisable clichés, perhaps second only to the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”. According to this myth, Palestine was a desolate and neglected expanse, redeemed only by the ingenuity of settlers. It is a colonial and Orientalist trope: non-European lands depicted as empty and abandoned, lands that only white “civilisers” could transform into a fertile paradise. The same stereotype fuelled European colonialism for centuries, legitimising the “discovery” of supposedly empty lands and violence against Indigenous peoples and their territories. Yet a glance at geography is enough to refute it: much of Palestine formed part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent.

Pinkwashing is the latest version of this same operation. Among Israel’s most useful strategies in recent decades has been the effort to pass itself off as a modern, quasi-Western country, and gay rights have become the instrument for doing so: Israel as the only refuge for LGBTQ+ rights and open society in the Middle East. That image has never been innocent, neutral, objective, or true. It has always been a weapon, built on the oldest Orientalist stereotypes, portraying Israelis as enlightened Westerners and Arabs and Muslims as backward, violent, and irredeemably intolerant. It has fuelled Islamophobia by political design and manufactured a clash of civilisations that never existed, so that every criticism of Israeli crimes could be turned into an attack on civilisation itself, and every act of solidarity with Palestinians into a betrayal of progress. This is the trap into which the question of Pride and Palestine has been deliberately placed: a manufactured contradiction in which one is supposedly forced to choose between LGBTQ+ rights and a people under occupation. Palestinian queer organisations have rejected this framing for years, arguing that the choice is false at its foundations: queer liberation and Palestinian liberation are inseparable, moving hand in hand. A country cannot present itself as a beacon of progress while violating the rights of a people it occupies, oppresses, and massacres.

Two Palestinian organisations, Aswat and Al-Qaws, have been central to developing and advancing the understanding of the politics of pinkwashing: a carefully conceived and structured critique, developed locally and globally, in the streets and in international forums, until it became a language adopted by queer movements around the world. This critique did not emerge from outside queer politics but from within it, from activists who refused the artificial choice between their identity and their people. And it is a critique that, it must be said clearly, has nothing to do with LGBTQ+ rights as such. What Palestinian queer organisations denounce when they speak of pinkwashing is not the existence of those rights, nor their value, but the way they are instrumentalised: brandished by Israel to appear as what it is not, a free, open, and civil society, while concealing the reality of a people to whom every right is denied. The contradiction is precisely this: a state that proclaims itself the champion of some rights while occupying, oppressing, and massacring an entire people. The critique is therefore not directed against LGBTQ+ rights at all, but against the use of LGBTQ+ rights as a political alibi for state violence: against the use of some rights as a flag to cover the denial of all rights to other people.

As Ghadir Shafie, co-founder of Aswat, the Palestinian Feminist Centre for Sexual and Gender Freedoms, explains: “Queer liberation and Palestinian liberation are not parallel struggles that proceed alongside one another, but the same struggle: inseparable, indivisible, and impossible to place in sequence.”

Shafie describes the concrete condition from which this critique emerged: “Palestinian queer and LGBTQIA+ people are among the most marginalised and discriminated-against minorities in the world, and face multiple layers of oppression: as Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and occupation; as women and trans people living in sexist, violent, militarised and patriarchal societies; and as queer people in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia.”

This distinction is essential. The debate is not about whether sexual and gender minorities deserve rights, recognition, and protection. It concerns, rather, the possibility that such rights may be mobilised and exploited to prevent and obstruct legitimate criticism of a state in other, broader, and far more serious areas. In other words, the controversy concerns the legitimacy, the very foundation, of this image. It is an unsustainable contradiction to represent two opposite things at the same time: LGBTQ+ rights for Israeli Jews and, simultaneously, the annihilation of the Palestinian people through ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The term pinkwashing describes the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion as a source of political legitimacy in discussions that are in fact about occupation, war and violence, exclusion and power. It does not deny the importance of LGBTQ+ rights, but asks what happens when such gains are separated from the wider political context in which they operate. And that context is an occupation that has lasted seventy-eight years and an ongoing genocide.

“The entire pinkwashing narrative is deeply rooted in Israeli colonialism and apartheid,” Shafie observes. “One of the main challenges of our organising work, beyond political, social and geographical fragmentation, is to build a narrative capable of speaking to all Palestinians, of finding what we have in common, and of not separating us further from the struggle for justice and peace.” For Palestinian queer organisations, the problem is not LGBTQ+ visibility in itself, but the way that visibility can be used to separate the rights of one community from the political reality lived by another: the reality of an oppressed people under an apartheid regime, facing a society that commits the most heinous crimes and enjoys the privileges of the state imposed by that racist system. How could the two societies, that of the colonised and that of the coloniser, be separated when the first is deprived of fundamental rights while the second boasts of enjoying them all?

States increasingly seek their legitimacy not only through military or economic power, but also through soft power and moral recognition. Human rights, gender equality, environmental commitments, and LGBTQ+ inclusion have become important sources of international prestige, and a litmus test for judging levels of progress and civilisation.

A state cannot protect the rights of one population while denying fundamental rights to another. It cannot celebrate diversity while maintaining systems of exclusion elsewhere and committing the most atrocious crimes. It cannot be known for tolerance while exercising domination, oppression, and violence against others. How can a state such as Israel be celebrated? It cannot. And it must not be.

Pinkwashing represents a politics of moral substitution. One sphere of progress becomes a shield against critical scrutiny in another. And none of this exists by accident.

This strategy has a well-documented history. In 2005, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Finance Ministry, in consultation with American marketing executives, launched Brand Israel, a government campaign designed to redefine the country’s image, from a militaristic and ethno-religious state occupying a nation and violating international law, into a modern, cosmopolitan, and progressive society. By 2010, the promotion of Tel Aviv as a global gay tourism destination had become a central pillar of that strategy, supported by a dedicated investment of around 88 million dollars. Tel Aviv’s reputation as the queer refuge of the Middle East, in other words, did not arise spontaneously: it was designed, financed, and administered as an instrument of foreign policy and as a propaganda weapon. Hasbara.

The most recent case makes this architecture visible with almost unprecedented frankness. In June 2026, Pride Land is scheduled to take place on the shores of the Dead Sea, presented by its organisers as the largest LGBTQ+ festival ever held in the Middle East: four days, fifteen hotels, a temporary “Pride City” of stages, equipped beaches, and continuous entertainment, promoted directly by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The organisers themselves describe the project as “active Zionism”, intended to strengthen Israel’s status as a liberal centre through the tourism industry. The Dead Sea lies in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied under international law, and the tourist infrastructure offered as the festival venue has been built through decades of settlement and expropriation. A rights festival, promoted by a state, on occupied land, while the genocide in Gaza continues: this is the politics of moral substitution made literal. It is a dystopian world, a cacotopia: the worst possible place, post-apocalyptic. It is difficult to conceive of anything more monstrous: a “city of pride” erected on expropriated land, on Palestinian bodies and villages, a dance floor a few dozen kilometres from a people being starved and exterminated in the world’s largest open-air concentration camp, broadcast live to the world. It is not merely hypocrisy, the greatest hypocrisy. It is the obscenity of a celebration built upon a genocide, an absurdity that no promotional language can normalise.

As Shafie wrote in Mondoweiss: “During Pride month, Palestinian queer people watch Israeli rainbow flags rise over cities built on the ruins of our people, and are told that this is progress. But this pinkwashing serves only to clean up Israel’s image while genocide rages. Do not be deceived.”

The question, then, does not concern the existence of Israeli legislation on LGBTQ+ rights. It concerns why such gains repeatedly appear in discussions that are actually about occupation, settlement expansion, blockade, military violence, the destruction of Gaza, and genocide. Critics of the anti-pinkwashing movement often describe it as hostile to Jewish communities; supporters reply that criticism of Israeli state policies should not be confused with hostility towards Jews. These accusations of antisemitism are used as a weapon to silence those who dissent and those who condemn the crime of crimes, genocide. And they no longer work.

The destruction of Gaza has made these questions unavoidable. The genocide is visible: documented, live-streamed, before everyone’s eyes, undeniable. It cannot be allowed to be masked by pinkwashing, and the world is beginning to reject it categorically. Many European LGBTQ+ organisations that once considered Palestine a peripheral issue have begun to see neutrality itself as a political choice. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association rejected the candidacy of Aguda, the umbrella organisation of Israel’s LGBTQ community, to host its world congress in Tel Aviv, and suspended it from the organisation. Thousands of queer artists have pledged not to perform in Israel, and numerous Pride organisations in Europe and North America have excluded sponsors complicit in crimes committed in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. “No Pride in Genocide”, as the coordinator of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel declared, has become the global queer slogan.

The most visible response to Pride Land bears precisely this name. While the Israeli Foreign Ministry promotes its city of pride on the shores of the Dead Sea, Queer Cinema for Palestine, a global solidarity movement born from the refusal to separate pride from justice, is coordinating nearly three hundred screenings in sixty countries and five continents this year under the slogan No Pride in Genocide. Two geographies of the same month of June: on one side, a state festival on occupied land; on the other, a global queer community choosing to look towards Gaza and not look away. It is the same choice Palestinian queer organisations have made for decades, refusing to allow the freedom of some to be built upon the annihilation of others. No Pride in Genocide is not merely a slogan: it is the refusal to divide justice into separate compartments.