Deep-lomacy #1

Pinkwash diplomacy

In honor of Pride Month, here is another angle of the story. We invite you to take a look into the concept of Pinkwash and to this end we approached none other than Dr. Chen David Misgav Hauftman, an urban politics, gender and sexuality researcher - here are his thoughts:

In November 2011, Sarah Schulman, a professor of Literature, a writer, an activist and a Jewish-American documentary series maker (particularly known is her joint film with director Jim Hubbard, which reviews the history of the ACT-UP movement in which she was a member in the 1980s and 1990s) published a column under the provocative title "Israel and 'Pinkwashing'". In the column, Schulman argued that Israel, as a state, uses the rights of the LGBT community to portray itself as a liberal, progressive and western state - one that maintains and promotes human rights, while in practice it is a system that systematically violates basic human rights due to the regime of occupation and oppression applied to Palestinians in the occupied territories and the discrimination of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Schulman developed this thesis in an equally evocative book called "Israel, Palestine and the Queer International" in which she explained her sources of inspiration - critical intellectuals such as American Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar, Canadian Naomi Klein and Israeli Dalit Baum, as well as her exposure to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) and queer activists involved in this movement.

The concept of "Pinkwashing" has since gained momentum and has become a code name for actions by states and corporations who use LGBT rights to "launder" crimes and violations of human and civil rights, therefore drawing themselves a positive and liberal image. The concept has gained momentum in the academic, intellectual and public discourses and has since gained development, that led to theoretical and political debates, and to an adoption in political contexts in the Middle East.

The theoretical meaning is fascinating, since the concepts used in the academic discourse in fields such as political science or international relations are most often created in Western or Anglo-American political and diplomatic contexts and from there are adopted in the global and academic periphery, while the "Pinkwashing" was developed in the context of the Middle East and the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the public and diplomatic sphere too, the concept of "Pinkwashing" caught on and became a vanishing point expressing the various perspectives on what was recently defined on Israeli channel Kan 11 - the gay revolution in Israel.

On the one hand, Israeli critics all over the world, as well as LGBT and local queer scholars and activists, embraced the concept in its original and critical sense towards Israeli government policy. Contrarily, Israeli speakers and diplomatic representatives (and its unofficial emissaries such as U.S. Attorney Professor Alan Dershowitz) have, in the past decade, been battling an all-out war against this attitude and claim it to be anti-Semitic and even violent.