Several weeks ago, Palestinian queer activist Haneen Maikey cancelled a speaking engagement in New York because the event organizer, Columbia University professor Katherine Franke, had arranged to meet with a Jewish/Zionist LGBT group. Franke was reportedly dismayed by the hostile, polarized nature of any discussions between mainstream and “Zionist” LGBT communities. She wanted to explore how they might work together more constructively.
To Maikey and many of her peers in the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) movement , that was the ultimate betrayal.
Because you cannot speak to the enemy.
In a 2009 interview with a reporter from the left-wing Israeli daily newspaper, Ha’aretz , Maikey expressed her distaste for being interviewed by journalists who, oddly enough, always want to ask about the treatment of homosexuals in Gaza, the West Bank and the Arab world (in a word, appalling).
Maikey, like her colleagues in QuAIA, would much rather stick to basics: organizing boycotts against any and all things “Zionist” and spreading QuAIA’s interpretation of Middle East history — one in which the state of Israel is diabolical.
It’s Gay Pride time the world over and Toronto’s festivities gear up this week. Tel Aviv recently hosted a Pride parade with more than 100,000 revelers. According to QuAIA, that’s just “pinkwashing” — Israel using its insincere tolerance of homosexuality to distract from the brutal, racist, militarism that is in the country’s DNA.
Such reasoning, of course, vitiates any possibility for Israelis, or anyone who supports the existence of the state, from doing anything good. The doctors in northern Israel who have been saving the lives of wounded Syrians who sneaked across the hostile northern border? That’s all part of the “pinkwashing” conspiracy. Democratic and civil rights? Emancipated women? Acceptance of refugees from around the world? Global disaster relief when a tsunami or earthquake or hurricane strikes? Pinkwashing. Helping an elderly person cross the street? Any act of kindness is to be mistrusted, for it is all a “Zionist” plot to trick the world.
Speaking to the executive committee of Toronto City Council this spring to explain why it is noble and appropriate for QuAIA to be publicly funded and rage against Israel in the Toronto pride parade, local activists Elle Flanders and Niko Block, self-identified Jews, shared their view that their queerness is inextricably bound with their profound struggle for human rights and decency, qualities that Israel lacks. We are supposed to be moved by the fact that they have lived in Israel and the PA. Furthermore as Flanders told council, many Israeli papers refer frequently to the “apartheid” policies of the Israeli government. Her point? She, Block and left-wing Israelis know better than anyone else.
There is no more robust press in the world than in Israel. Ha’aretz may engage in “apartheid” musings, but — so what? Does that make such views more compelling? Are Flanders’ views more credible or morally weightier because she is Jewish and has lived in Ramallah? It seems to be why she mentions it.
By that logic, we should all pay very careful attention to the conspiracy theories involving the United States and promoted by celebrated novelist Alice Walker or Princeton professor emeritus Richard Falk. Are their views more credible because they’re American? I think not.
In his recently published book,
Julius analyses the contemporary secular anti-Zionist to have a set of beliefs that treats the geopolitics of the Middle East “as the outcome of a plan on the part of (Israel), rather than the product of complex, contingent historical circumstances.”
Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
If only it were so simple.
To QuAIA, it is.
Clarification- June 21, 2013: Representatives of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid spoke to Toronto's executive committee in the spring in support of the city continuing to fund Pride but the organization itself does not receive any city funding and nor was it seeking funding.
Vivian Bercovici is a Toronto lawyer and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. Her column appears monthly.