By now Israellycool readers have heard much about the violent anti-Israel protest at the LGBTQ Creating Change Conference earlier this year. One conference attendee wrote of the experience, “I was reminded of the stories I’ve heard and read about the European ghettos being stormed by torch-wielding anti-Semites, blaming our ancestors for countless horrors.”
The pseudo-academic theory of “pinkwashing” seems to have played a large role in what happened there. Indeed, photos from the event showed protesters carrying placards demanding an end to it. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to take an in-depth look at this theory and its origin.
The theory was popularized by Sarah Schulman. Schulman is a professor at The College of Staten Island, a school with a 2014 applicant acceptance rate of 100% and a six-year graduation rate of 47%. Her biography on CSI’s website indicates that she holds only a Bachelor’s degree from Empire State College. Despite Schulman’s lack of academic credentials, she was afforded a platform in the New York Times to disseminate the idea that pinkwashing is “a deliberate strategy [by Israel] to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”
It wasn’t Schulman, however, who first dreamed up this bizarre charge. According to James Kirchick, writing in Tablet, the “pinkwashing” theory was invented by none other than Jasbir Puar, who has now come under fire for propagating a modern blood libel at Vassar College.
In 2010, Puar attempted to connect Israel’s positive attitude towards LGBTQ people with its conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, writing in (where else?) The Guardian:
Israeli pinkwashing is a potent method through which the terms of Israeli occupation of Palestine are reiterated – Israel is civilised, Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic, uncivilised, suicide-bombing fanatics. It produces Israel as the only gay-friendly country in an otherwise hostile region. This has manifold effects: it denies Israeli homophobic oppression of its own gays and lesbians, of which there is plenty, and it recruits, often unwittingly, gays and lesbians of other countries into a collusion with Israeli violence towards Palestine.
In reproducing orientalist tropes of Palestinian sexual backwardness, it also denies the impact of colonial occupation on the degradation and containment of Palestinian cultural norms and values. Pinkwashing harnesses global gays as a new source of affiliation, recruiting liberal gays into a dirty bargaining of their own safety against the continued oppression of Palestinians, now perforce rebranded as “gay unfriendly”.
Puar offers no support for her premise that that Israel’s treatment of Israeli LGBTQ people, and its campaign to invite foreign LGBTQ’s to spend their tourism dollars there, have anything to do with the conflict with Palestinian Arabs and the broader Arab world. Nor is there any support for her implication that Israel is either responsible for, or making up, the mistreatment of Arab LGBTQ people in the West Bank, Gaza, and beyond.
What is really underlying Puar’s “pinkwashing” charge is the assumption that Jews, and specifically a subset of Jews known as Israelis, cannot do anything that might seem virtuous unless it is for nefarious reasons. As the invaluable Alan Dershowitz wrote in 2013, this is just a new twist on classic anti-Semitic tropes.
Last month at Vassar, Puar showed the true depths of her depravity when she made the baseless charge that Israel is stealing Palestinian organs for scientific research. She also claimed that Israel maims Palestinians, rather than killing them, because “the Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population.”
The claims that Puar advanced in her Vassar speech reveal nothing about Israel, and everything about Puar. She is ready to believe, and to ask others to believe, any claim that shows Israeli Jews to be despicable creatures, evidence be damned. Now that Puar has revealed herself as an unrepentant anti-Semite, her repugnant, unfounded, and bizarre “pinkwashing” theories should be discarded as well.
