Palestinians are dying in the name of LGBTQ+ people. This is not what we stand for.

Voting “uncommitted,” “uninstructed,” “no preference,” or leaving the ballot blank in the primary 2024 elections has brought hundreds of thousands of voters to protest President Joe Biden’s handling of the US-financed massacre of more than 40,000 Palestinian lives by Israel. The President and his administration have failed to bring an immediate and permanent ceasefire to Palestine.

Contrarily, the president sends aid by the billions (our tax dollars) to Israel. 

Related:

330 LGBTQ+ artists pledge not to perform in Israel until a Gaza ceasefire occurs

“Palestinians remind us that none of us are free until we are all free.”

Each day, Palestinian youth die through starvation (on purpose) in the name of LGBTQ+ people. 

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It’s called pinkwashing when Israeli Occupation Forces hold a Pride flag over the mass graves of Palestinians. 

When we think of pinkwashing, we often think of corporations during Pride Month, but pinkwashing is a propaganda strategy used by both the US and Israel’s elite decision-makers. 

“Pinkwashing is an integral part of Israel’s ‘Brand Israel’ public relations strategy, which appeals to racist and colonial notions of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as backwards and intolerant in contrast to the supposedly enlightened Western liberalism of Israel,” writes Jimmy Pasch, Jewish Voices for Peace West Regional Organizer.

Israel uses LGBTQ+ propaganda to assert an image of Israel while villainizing penalties for being LGBTQ+ in other Middle Eastern countries. Oftentimes, the US does the same. However, these countries still have LGBTQ+ discrimination and inadequate legal protections as well as racism and segregation. And there is still a genocide of Palestinian life taking place that doesn’t care if you’re LGBTQ+ or not. 

For instance, Israel doesn’t recognize nonbinary people, and about half the country has poor public perception of LGBTQ+ people and even more so a negative attitude towards marriage equality. The country also only recognizes same-sex marriages legally performed abroad.

So much of what the US and Israel embolden is the erasure of global queer histories in real-time. Tools like Queering the Map help mitigate this violent erasure of Palestinian queerness into immortalized histories.

“I’ve always imagined you and me sitting out in the sun, hand in hand, free at last,” one Queering the Map message reads in northern Gaza. “We spoke of all the places we would go if we could. Yet, you are gone now. If I had known the bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”

This message is universal, and it shatters my heart. Many should relate to the way intergenerational cultural erasure is at the center of another’s white supremacy cultured ignorance. Consequently, anti-LGBTQ+ laws and pinkwashing are both a part of imperial and colonial powers’ dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ cultures that are cosplaying equality – so much so that Gaza’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws were established by them. 

The British ruled that same-sex sexual activity was prohibited in Gaza under the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936, according to the Human Dignity Trust. 

Not only that but as Gaza continues to get brutally bombed with impunity, hospitals have no ability to ensure health equity. Any Palestinians in Gaza who were on HIV medication before Oct. 7 can no longer maintain access to it or to testing and screening. 

Risks associated with stopping HIV medication look like rising viral load and a risk of opportunistic infections and illness; possibly increased risk of other serious illnesses such as heart, liver and kidney disease; passing on HIV to sexual partners; and inability to regain T cell count upon retaking medication.

This is one reason American playwright Victor I. Cazares is striking his HIV medication in solidarity with Palestine. “HIV has always been a part of my presence. So it became inevitable it would then become a protest,” Cazares said in Vulture Magazine.

We need access to life-saving medication, policies, and a chance at true liberation from here to Palestine with a thriving earth free from radiation poisoning. We will never get there by saying a free Palestine is not an LGBTQ+ issue, to think that is to be lied to.

Queer Palestinian groups like Aswat and alQaws are working to fight against the genocide of all Palestinians at a grassroots level. They must be uplifted.

“The struggle for liberation in Palestine is intersectional; it is transformative and effective and needs the full support of the global queer community,” Ghadir Al Shafie, the co-founder of Aswat – Palestinian Feminist Center for Sexual and Gender Freedom said in an Instagram statement. 

The truth is that every American who pays taxes is connected to the Middle East. 

From the language cleansed from your tongue – the lands so many Americans were stolen from; the land stolen from Indigenous communities, the history distorted, and censored; to flatten lands by the hands of the more powerful colonizers who said they came back in “peace” – you know what it means to live in a present erased from the past.

LGBTQ+ culture is a limb of liberation when the “movement for equality”  works to rebuild from genocide without genocide. No one is “safe” in Israel’s illegal nuclear radiation-emitting bloodbath funded by the US and Europe’s neo-liberal, neo-fascist agendas.