BDS & The Queer Appropriation of Pinkwashing

Key Findings:

This essay explores the origins of the term “pinkwashing". It also explains why BDS is best understood as part of a wider collection of anti-democratic regimes and civil society organizations that employ the rhetoric of “social justice” in ways that undermine its realization. 

The very intention behind the BDS movement’s appropriation of the term ‘pinkwashing’ (originally used by American breast cancer survivors to name their specific betrayal by corporations selling pink ribbon products known to cause the disease, whilst the color pink was simultaneously reclaimed by American gay men during the HIV crisis to symbolize political liberation) is to cast fabricated, geopolitically-specific concerns over human rights to its audience. These concerns are unlikely to be possessed organically (nor do they naturally connect to other marginalized groups’ narratives, especially those of Western LGBT communities), but without them, the BDS movement could not as effectively reach wider audiences.

Israel has various prohibitions against sexual orientation discrimination, and recognizes same-sex marriages conducted abroad, joint adoption and open military service. The BDS movement uses the term “pinkwashing” as a linguistic tool to characterize Israel’s LGBT rights monitoring and related reforms as illusory, as a strategic means of impeding social justice and solidifying its state aggression against a vulnerable Muslim/Arab other, and as a means to harness the gay community to reposition its global image and conceal the struggles of Palestinians. Evidence of Israel’s cunning is supposedly located in its LGBT cinema output and Tel Aviv’s designation as the “world’s best gay city.” 

BDS campaigners such as Sarah Schulman and Jasbir Puar equate the hard-won rights of LGBT Israelis (all of whom are incorrectly implied as “gay white people”) to a sinister public relations exercise that conceals (i.e., “pinkwashes”) Israel’s alleged misdeeds against Palestinians (all of whom are incorrectly implied as “people of color”). In 2010, Schulman insisted BDS convert its “manifesto culture to soundbite culture” and thus engage celebrities with messaging to avoid “heightened rhetoric” and “ideological language” (Weiss 2012). This effectively fostered the translation of Islamist ideology into a digestible popular movement, all the while managing to avoid the inconvenience of academic intervention. 

Notably, the BDS movement actively refuses to acknowledge the culpability of those states and actors that criminalize and openly oppress LGBT people (especially in the Arab world and including all past and present Palestinian leaderships). Pinkwashing narratives and apologists for homophobia in the Arab World (such as Schulman and Puar) maintain that only white people can be held fully responsible for their actions; non-whites such as the Palestinians cannot (or can but only to a limited extent). Puar insists that homophobia is “irrelevant” to queer Palestinians for whom ending the Occupation comes first. 

BDS and its cooptation of LGBT rights are suggestive of the larger global trends in resurgence of authoritarianism, including: authoritarian targeting of democracy’s crucial institutions (e.g., academia and autonomous non-profit groups); highjacking concepts (e.g., pinkwashing); and undermining social norms (e.g., freedom of speech and association) whilst developing authoritarian-friendly ones (e.g., heterosexism and antisemitism). For BDS supporters, Israel’s vibrant responsiveness to its LGBT communities serves as an inconvenient truth.

Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, has made explicit that his opposition to Israel is not the occupation of 1967 but the very existence of the Jewish state from 1948, and that BDS supports a judenrein Palestine from the river to the sea.