by Tara Kazemi
On 13 November 2023, the Israeli government’s official Twitter account shared a post featuring Yoav Atzmoni, an Israeli soldier who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, holding a rainbow flag in Gaza. The caption described it as: “The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza,” intending it as a message of hope, peace, and freedom to those living under what they called “Hamas brutality.” Yet when I look at these images, I see something entirely different. Behind Atzmoni, the backdrop filled with military tanks and the ruins of destroyed houses, structures reduced to rubble, remnants of what were once homes, is a stark representation of lives lost. Rather than a symbol of liberation, this tweet reads as Israeli war propaganda using LGBTQ+ rights to obscure the reality of Palestinian dispossession (Stedler 2018).
This tweet exemplifies pinkwashing in action, creating a representation that serves both visibility and erasure. Pinkwashing describes how LGBTQ+ rights are used to obscure state violence, occupation, and human rights abuses. This is how Israel reinforces the notion that Hamas is the sole source of brutality, and that Palestinians are inherently oppressive, while Israel is portrayed as their savior (Puar 2013; Stedler 2018). The power of this tweet lies in its ability to manipulate global perceptions of Palestinian resistance as anti-LGBTQ and backward. When Israel waves a rainbow flag, Western audiences are already primed to accept the idea that it is a beacon of peace and freedom in a hostile region.
The tweet is persuasive not because it tells the truth, but because it reinforces a Western assumption that Eastern countries are inherently violent and backward. This reflects the power of Orientalist narratives that rely on a binary of “civilized” West (i.e. Israel) and the East (i.e. Palestine) as an inferior, regressive, and inherently oppressive space in need of Western intervention (Said 1978). This narrative not only perpetuates Orientalist stereotypes but also erases decades of LGBTQ+ Palestinian resistance and activism that exist independently of Israeli intervention. Organizations such as alQaws and Aswat actively work to advance LGBTQ+ rights within Palestinian society without relying on an occupying force to define their liberation (Stedler 2018).
Therefore, this framing depoliticizes the struggles of LGBTQ+ Palestinians, making them appear as passive victims rather than as active agents in their fight for both queer and national liberation (Schulman 2012). LGBTQ+ Palestinians are hyper-visible when their rights and identities can be weaponized to vilify Palestinian society and Hamas, yet invisible when their activism challenges settler colonialism (Puar 2013). So, is Queer Palestine really an oxymoron, or is that just what we are told to believe in order to justify silence about Israeli apartheid? Their existence is not simply erased but strategically manipulated to justify military control rather than being recognized as part of a broader struggle for liberation (Stedler 2018).
The weaponization of LGBTQ+ rights is an aggressive strategy that actively mobilizes queer identities and struggles to justify military aggression, occupation, and nationalist agendas (Puar 2013; Stedler 2018). In this case, this tweet is not merely using LGBTQ+ rights to improve Israel’s reputation but is leveraging them to construct a moral justification for its military actions. This selective deployment of LGBTQ+ discourse creates a false binary in which queer liberation is contingent upon military intervention, ignoring the reality that true justice for LGBTQ+ Palestinians is inseparable from Palestinian resistance, self-determination and decolonization (Mbembe 2003).
The framing of Israel as a protector of LGBTQ+ people against Hamas serves as a pretext for ongoing violence, which exemplifies homonationalism. Homonationalism is not simply about a state’s embracing LGBTQ+ rights but also its conditional and selective use of queer identities to reinforce geopolitical hierarchies. Notably, homonationalism is a historical phenomenon, emerging in the post-9/11 era as part of broader Western discourses that weaponize LGBTQ+ rights to distinguish liberal democracies from Muslim-majority countries, often reinforcing Islamophobic narratives (Puar 2013).
This analysis makes it clear that raising a rainbow flag becomes manipulative when it is wielded by the very forces that impose violence on the people it claims to represent. LGBTQ+ Palestinians are not looking for military forces to grant them rights while subjecting them to colonial rule; they are struggling for their own liberation on their own terms (Stedler 2018). If resistance is to mean anything, it must come from those directly affected by oppression, not from those who enforce it. Palestinian queer activists are already speaking; the real question is whether the world is ready to listen (Schulman 2012). Palestinians are always expected to resist, to prove their humanity through struggle, to constantly assert their right to exist. Yet this expectation locks them into an endless cycle in which resistance is necessary but never sufficient (Stedler 2018).
Tara Kazemi is completing a double major in Women and Gender Studies and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Toronto, with research interests in feminist resistance, revolutionary memory, war archives, health politics and policy, female reproductive health, and human bio-cultural evolution.
WGS340 WOMEN & REVOLUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST 