Israel Respects Gay Rights; the Palestinians Do Not
By Aidan Segal, 2020–2021 CAMERA on Campus Fellow
The University of Pittsburgh’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a meeting in October on the topic of “pinkwashing” — the accusation that Israel exploits the LGBTQ+ community to propagandize a progressive image of the country, and to obscure the reality that Israel is allegedly an apartheid state.
Pinkwashing is one of many false narratives manufactured by anti-Israel organizations. Like any country, Israel is not perfect and not without prejudice; but it strives to be a beacon of freedom for all its inhabitants. In a region hardly brimming with liberal democracies, Israel “adamantly protects the rights of its gay citizens, and the LGBT community is represented in the highest echelons and in all facets of Israeli society.”
Israel celebrates the community not to appear progressive, but because it truly respects gay rights, and has an uncanny level of support for the LGBT+ community.
The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote that a Jewish state would be a positive force not only for Jews, but “for the good of humanity.” Nothing could be more true for the prosperous LGBTQ+ community in Israel, though anti-Zionist activists such as adherents to the BDS movement insist that an ulterior motive is at play.
The BDS movement claims that “Israel’s pinkwashing agenda seeks to portray itself as a fun-loving gay haven while using racist stereotypes to depict Palestinians as backward.”
In reality, there are no civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which has prompted hundreds of gay Palestinians to flee to Israel for fear of persecution.
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