Atshan’s exploration of the queer Palestinian movement is critical for human rights academics and practitioners alike, whether their work focuses on Israel and Palestine or elsewhere. In providing an insight into the complexities of existence at the intersection of Israeli occupation and homophobia, Atshan challenges readers to reflect on a number of issues. Particularly pertinent are: the weaponisation of LGBTQ+ rights to obscure human rights atrocities; the relationship between academia and social movements; and the harm posed by the hierarchy of oppressions. Through these issues Atshan demonstrates the existence of an “empire of critique,” which has restricted the growth of the Palestinian LGBTQ+ social movement.
PINKWASHING, PINKWATCHING, AND THE WEAPONISATION OF LGBTQ+ RIGHTS
The book traces the development of “pinkwatching” in response to Israeli “pinkwashing”. Atshan describes the latter term as follows:
Rather than improve its global standing by providing Palestinians with basic human rights, the Israeli state and its supporters, increasingly moving to the right, seek to market Israel as a state that supports LGBTQ individuals and communities.” [1]
This weaponisation of LGBTQ+ rights in order to obscure other human rights violations is a well-trodden path with particularly devastating effects on queer Palestinians. Israel establishes its “superiority” over Palestine by claiming to be a safe haven for LGBTQ+ individuals, thus justifying its occupation of Palestine. Queer Palestinian activists and allies have countered this with pinkwatching— the careful observation of pinkwashing to deconstruct the notions it attempts to propagate.
The pinkwashing agenda is one that has been replicated in other human rights contexts. Queer scholar Judith Butler identifies an alternative form of it in European countries’ migration policies, which use the narrative of LGBTQ+ to justify hostile policies toward migrants, particularly those from the Middle East and North Africa. She queries:
Is the test a liberal defense of freedom with which I should be pleased, or is my freedom being used as an instrument of coercion – one that seeks to keep Europe white, pure and “secular” in ways that do not interrogate the violence that underwrites the very project? [2]
In a similar vein, Atshan reminds the reader that the pinkwashing agenda adopted by Israel serves to undermine LGBTQ+ rights globally, while underpinning a narrative of violence and occupation of the Palestinian people.
ACADEMIA AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
In this exploration of the condition of queer Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and Israel, Atshan divulges the harm of maintaining a binary relationship between academia and social movements. He evidences this with the theory of the “Gay International,” coined by Joseph Massad in 2002. [3] Massad broadly argues that queer rights movements in the Middle East and its use of the Western-originating identity of “LGBT,” use the language of colonialism and are therefore complicit in neo-imperialism. This dismissal of the lived experience of many queer Palestinians, who have found empowerment in adopting this identity, exemplifies a broader pattern in which:
…academics will publish abstruse theoretical critiques of social movements, and when activists from those movements push back on those critiques, they are dismissed as too unsophisticated to grasp the academics’ original insights. [4]
Atshan therefore reminds those of us interested in the scholarship of human rights issues of the imperative of grounding academic work in the lived reality of those under analysis. Academics in the West in particular must be meticulously considerate of the consequences of their work for social movements which they claim to support. This is not to silence critique, but to ensure that it serves the purpose of strengthening the movement rather than suppressing it.
On the same note, Atshan reminds those on the political left to be cautious about adopting a stance of perpetual critique. He writes that “…critique has become the primary lens through which much left-leaning activism around Queer Palestine is conceived and enacted,” demonstrating the futility of this position in its inability to envision alternatives. The result of this is that potential allies to the movement are reluctant to voice their opinions—they risk critique on the right from pinkwatchers in Israel and critique from some on the left who view any diversion from their specific approach to Palestinian activism as complicity in Israeli occupation. Atshan contextualises this within a “…larger phenomenon on the left of critique… focused on dismantling with limited attempts to offer alternatives”. He argues that this tradition has resulted in an “empire of critique,” which restricts the growth of the movement, providing a crucial reminder that the foundation of critique must envision action.
HIERARCHY OF OPPRESSIONS
Finally, by leading the reader through analyses of political avenues such as representation, boycotts, and academia, Atshan challenges the notion of a “hierarchy of oppressions,” which forces queer Palestinians to select which form of tyranny is more oppressive. In this case, queer Palestinians should not have to choose between their queer and Palestinian identities in order to challenge either homophobia or military occupation. The “hierarchy of oppressions” pressures queer Palestinians to reserve critique of homophobic structures within their societies in order to further the national cause, simultaneously silencing accounts of the violence of Israeli occupation in order to gain access into the “gay haven” of Israeli society. As Atshan asserts, both angles constitute a method of coercion to silence the lived experience of queer Palestinians in order to continue to enact violence upon them. Therefore, this key text demonstrates that social movements must be able to balance multiple liberation struggles along more than one axis.
Atshan’s work, in describing the empire of critique surrounding the queer Palestinian experience, demonstrates the highly politicised nature of certain rights and their potential to be weaponised in order to subvert the gaze from other issues. Furthermore, through his analysis of the heterogeneity of narratives surrounding this liberation movement, he reminds us that the voices of those that exist at these intersections of oppressions should and must be the loudest.
[1] Atshan, Sa’ed (2020) “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique” (CA: Stanford University Press) p3
[2] Butler, Judith (2016) “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?” (London: Verso Books), p107
[3] Massad, Joseph (2007) “Desiring Arabs” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
[4] Atshan, Sa’ed (2020) “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique” p199
[5] Id. p. 180
[6] Id. p. 186
Iona works for a social justice organisation aimed at improving social mobility by teaching key employability skills in schools across London. Iona is an MSc graduate in Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she focused her studies on postcolonial critiques of human rights, and the contention between citizenship law and human rights law.