Dismantling the Pink Door in the Apartheid Wall: Towards a Decolonized Palestinian Queer Politics

This essay engages with over a decade of Palestinian queer organizing and addresses how a politics around gender and sexuality takes shape within a context of occupation and Zionist settler colonialism. In conjunction, it identifies and analyses the way in which Israel’s pinkwashing project is rooted in a single-issue identity politics akin to the universalization of hegemonic western LGBT politics as the emancipatory model par excellence. Within pinkwashing Palestinian queers can only become recognizable as victims of their society and through a language of gay rights. Visibility, pride, coming- out, and gay rights circulate as dominant frameworks imposed on Palestinian queers to understand their struggle. However, Palestinian queer groups emphasize the necessity to understand the complexity of the Palestinian queer struggle as inherently anti-colonial. This essay argues for a queer politics around gender and sexuality that does not operate in isolation, but is rather responsive to and part of a larger political context of Palestinian liberation.