"Pinkwashing" - Wash Delicately!

The process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is stuck. Direct negotiations seem far off. The Palestinian leadership is split between Fateh and Hamas, and President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is trusted less and less to have the political capital to be able to enter into a historic compromise with Israel. The Israeli government is assumed to be uninterested in compromise as well as satisfied with the "status quo" - which, of course, does not exist because the developments on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are detrimental to the Palestinians - and a two-state solution appears to be less and less possible.

In this intractable situation, Palestinians are searching for alternative strategies. New attempts to bring movement into the blocked negotiating process include seeking international recognition through the United Nations, nonviolent resistance, boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) and anti-normalization. Anti-normalization requires the halting of governmental as well as civil cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis because such projects are considered to serve a fig-leaf function as long as the occupation-oriented Israeli government is in power. BDS and antinormalization are receiving international attention and find allies mostly among the global left.

The campaign against so-called "pinkwashing" is along similar lines. The Israeli government is accused of advertising to the world a gay-friendly Tel Aviv as a hallmark of Israel, portraying itself as the only true democracy in the Middle East while diverting attention from the occupation and emphasizing homophobia in Palestinian and other Arab societies.

Self- Whitewashing and Excessive Criticism

The accusation of "pinkwashing" needs to be treated delicately, washed in the gentle cycle. Nothing in the Middle East is black and white, nor is anything simple. The truth is, as Sarah Shulman writes in her muchacclaimed New York Times article ("Israel and 'Pinkwashing,'" Nov. 22, 2011), that for several years now the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has conducted an international advertising campaign of gay-friendliness in Tel Aviv and identifies such with all of Israel. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke about it at the UN and also Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, praised Israel's tolerance toward Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people at a conference, while contrasting it with the terrorism during the second intifada. Israel hosts and participates in...