Silence is Complicity: How LGBTQ+ Peak Bodies Are Pandering to Israel’s Pinkwashing

By Aisya A. Zaharin, in collaboration with Trans Sister United and Queer Arab Australia 

Anti-LGBTQ laws in Palestine were imposed by British colonial rule, yet Israel weaponises them to pinkwash apartheid — and the silence of LGBTQ+ peak bodies is nothing short of complicity.

As Gaza starves under a UN Level 4 famine and a queer Australian was abducted along with other activists by Israeli forces aboard a humanitarian flotilla, the deafening silence from LGBTQIA+ peak bodies is not just unsettling, but also a betrayal. After a harrowing week in captivity, Tania Safi described how they were being psychologically and physically brutalised. They were stripped, sexually humiliated, choked, and kicked—cut off from the outside world and treated ‘like a criminal’ by Tzahal (צה״ל), the very army that brands itself as the ‘most moral in the world.’

Yet, the same LGBTQIA+ movements that champion intersectionality have gone disturbingly quiet. When organisations refuse to speak out, their silence is not passive but a political stance that aligns with the oppressor. In this case, they perpetuate Israel’s pinkwashing , a strategy that weaponises LGBTQIA+ rights to whitewash its colonial violence against Palestinians. 

Palestine & LGBTQIA+ rights: The Moral Litmus Test of Transitional Liberation

Poet and Black activist June Jordan once named Palestine and queer liberation as the two moral litmus tests for global justice. 

“There are two issues of our time, really, that amount to a litmus test for morality as far as I’m concerned. One is what you’re prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people. And the other is what are you prepared to do on behalf of gay and lesbian people”.                      

—June Jordan (1991)

Fail on either, she argued, and you betray the integrity of the entire human rights project. This principle is rooted in Black liberation and anti-colonial thought: that our struggles are interconnected, and liberation for one is bound to liberation for all.

Still, when Safi was held incommunicado while nearly 900 Palestinians were shot dead at the food distribution site, the ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) and major Australian peak bodies, from Equality Australia to the Australian GLBTIQ+ Multicultural Council remain silent. This is despite a 2024 Pew Research survey showing that 74% of Australians hold negative views of Israel. The gap between public conscience and institutional cowardice widens, revealing an unfathomable moral failure.

Similarly, multicultural and refugee-background queer people are often tokenised by mainstream organisations for diversity optics. Yet, when our communities call for justice in Palestine, those same organisations turn away. Their allyship is merely PR management in rainbow colours, all while serving the interests of the Western capitalist elite. Pride has never been apolitical; Queer and trans justice is meaningless without class solidarity, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism.

Decolonise Palestine: The “Dangerous Alliance” Myth Debunked

Mainstream media loves to spin a dangerous fiction that feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, and anti-racist advocates are somehow “gullible” for standing in solidarity with Muslims—the group that is routinely cast as covert enemies of progress. As a Muslim trans woman from a former British colony, I observe this rhetoric as nothing but a recycled Orientalism talking point that frames Muslims as a monolithic civilisational “threat”.  It is the same humdrum colonial script Edward Said dismantled decades ago, now repackaged to fracture progressive alliances. 

The truth defies this manufactured divide. At their core, progressive movements share far more closely with Islamic traditions of justice than with the West’s pinkwashed militarism. The Qur’an’s call to li-taʿārafū (“acknowledge one another”) celebrates diversity as sacred. Likewise, the Prophet Muhammad’s (P.B.U.H) Farewell Sermon (Arabic: خطبة الوداع‎, Khutbatul-Wadāʿ) insists on equality and equity across gender, race and class; the principles that mirror liberation struggles today. These are not the tenets of an “enemy civilisation”, they are our sacred shared principles of liberation; and no empire, no occupation, can erase what was written in the dust of Arafat that day.

And yet, the mainstream LGBTQIA+ movement seems to suffer from selective amnesia. It was the British colonial project, not Islam, that exported legal homophobia to Palestine. Long before rainbow flags flew, Islamic civilisations celebrated queer love and gender fluidity. As part of the 1858 Tanzimat reforms, the Ottoman Empire officially decriminalised consensual same-sex relations between men. Although this legal change was influenced by the French model, it ultimately served to codify a pre-existing social tolerance for homoeroticism. Only with the 1936 British Criminal Code did Palestine inherit the violent legacy of “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” punishable by a decade in prison, a law that still poisons LGBTQIA+ rights in Gaza and much of the (post-colonial) Global South. 

Weaponising faith to justify oppression, whether through Zionism’s dehumanisation or bigotry disguised as “tradition” is a betrayal to the Islamic legacy of justice. History bears witness that in the pre-colonial time under the Ottoman rule, Palestine had no anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Hamas’ intolerance is not rooted in Islam; it’s a colonial graft, an imported narrative from the imperial power that the organisation claims to fight. Only by dismantling these distortions can we return to the sacred intersection of solidarity where faith and justice meet.  

Pinkwashing as the New ‘White Man’s Burden’: the Oppressed became the Oppressor

Pinkwashing is whataboutism weaponised where Israel frames itself as a safe haven for queer rights while justifying violence. They cast the settler-coloniser as the “defender of Western democracy”,  to “save” queers from the “barbaric” Muslims. This is Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” (1899) updated, reinforced by Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (1996) myth; and swallowed whole by institutions too afraid of being labelled antisemitic to condemn state crimes. Prioritising Israel’s “self-determination” over Palestinian survival is just a settler-colonial logic to justify imperialism. And whether Palestinians are LGBTQIA+ or not, they are all victims of daily state violence.

The bitter irony is that the same Holocaust memory meant to honour Jewish suffering, a history that includes the Nazis’ persecution of LGBTQIA+ people, is now being weaponised to justify Israel’s crimes. While memorials rightly condemn past atrocities, Israel commits the crime against humanity, the collective punishment on Palestinians with the world watching. A number of international legal bodies and human rights organisations, including some prominent within Israel, have pointed to the unfolding atrocity in Gaza as meeting the definition of genocide as outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention. They have asserted that the war is not just a military campaign, but a systematic effort to erase Palestinian life—both in the present and in the future.

Silence as Structural Complicity in the Face of Israel’s Hypocrisy 

We cannot stay silent as the world condemns Palestinian resistance while hypocritically giving Israel unconditional support. Groups like Al-Qaws have exposed how Israel has refined the colonial state-sanctioned queerphobia into a brutal apparatus of coercion. The report reveals how 72% of queer Palestinians have been systemically blackmailed by Israeli security forces, threatening to out them to their families unless they become informants in the occupied territories.

A former officer from Israel’s Intelligence Unit 8200 revealed a wide-ranging campaign to create distrust in the West Bank, which includes the blackmailing of queer Palestinians on Grindr. He declared, “if you can blackmail cooperation, then you want to try to assemble as much filth as possible.” Such human rights violations have fractured the community, resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinians being coerced into becoming informants since 1967—another reminder that the violations in the region did not just begin on October 7, 2023.

The use of such methods endangers LGBTQIA+ individuals who are already subjected to high levels of violence in Palestine. Drawing on Judith Butler’s postcolonial performativity, we observe how queer Palestinian existence is produced under conditions of colonial surveillance where identities are coerced into particular performances that serve the occupying power’s political ends. This dynamic resonates with Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and colonial mimicry: that the colonised subject is invited to perform a resemblance to the coloniser’s ideals, but only in forms that reinforce colonial dominance.

By forcing LGBTQIA+ Palestinians into clandestine collaboration, Israel imposes a regime in which queer bodies become sites of dual inscription: punished through systemic violence, yet simultaneously instrumentalised as tools of repression. As Al-Qaws emphasises, this is not about ‘saving’ queer Palestinians; but to conscript queer identity into the dramaturgy of occupation, where survival demands navigating the violent paradox of being both oppressed and weaponised. 

Rainbow 🌈 Imperialism: the Queer Palestinian Conundrum

Worse still, Israel refuses to recognise homophobic persecution as valid grounds for asylum, effectively trapping queer Palestinians between the violence they escape and the apathy they encounter. Another report shows that only three (3) LGBTQ Palestinians were granted asylum (to be processed to a third country) in Israel between 2008-2022.  Those few who manage to cross into Israel are left in legal limbo—threatened with death back home, while denied safety, stability, or basic rights in their supposed refuge.  Without work permits, social protections, or access to healthcare, many are forced into survival sex or illegal drug-related work. Their lives are suspended in a cruel dichotomy: tolerated but abandoned, visible but erased.  

Zehava’s tragic death, a Palestinian trans woman who fled persecution lays bare this injustice, conforming as a stark indictment of the very system she sought to escape. She desired safety in Haifa, only to be granted a temporary, near-meaningless residency permit, renewable monthly but granting no right to work, open a bank account, or access public healthcare. Isolated and stripped of dignity, she died by suicide.  Her death epitomises the inevitable consequence of a system designed to exclude queer Palestinians, even as Israel markets itself as a beacon of progress.  

And yet, the global LGBTQ movement recoils at the spectre of Hamas, while remaining silent on Israel’s systemic oppression of LGBTQ refugees. And where is the outrage when Netanyahu’s coalition embraces openly homophobic ultra-Orthodox parties that compare gay people to animals that deserve to be exterminated? Where is the anger for over 100 trans people are missing or “presumed dead” after a “preemptive” Israeli bombing flattened the ‘trans ward’ of an Iranian prison? The real threat is not Muslim and Queer solidarity; it’s the Western double standards. 

What explains this silence?? Is it fear of losing funding, fear of political reprisal, or fear of confronting a truth that complicates neat Western narratives? When only grassroots collective like Queers for Palestine and the Pride in Protest risk everything to speak truth, the mainstream LGBTQIA+ sector’s moral failure could not be louder.  

Solidarity is not Selective: The Call to Action for the LGBTQIA+ movement 

“Our liberation is bound together—you cannot claim to support queer rights while funding our oppression”.

—Tareq Baconi, Palestinian Scholar & Queer Collective leader 

Mere recognition of Palestine while bombs continue to fall is not an act of solidarity, but a performative gesture. Judith Butler warns us; symbolic actions that lack structural change ultimately serve to protect the very systems we claim to resist. True recognition requires an immediate end to the genocide and full compliance with the 1948 Genocide Convention—a treaty that Israel and most global North states have themselves ratified. 

It is the time for the LGBTQIA+ movement to demand that Australia and those global North allies; Canada, the UK, Germany and France to sanction and divest from Israel, to hold it accountable for human rights violations and to cease all complicit military exports and cooperation.

There is no ‘rainbow door’ at the apartheid wall—our liberation can never bloom under the boot of occupation; not at the expense of Palestinians’ lives. If we fight for our own freedom while violating the rights of others, we betray the very principles of justice that define us. We cannot bomb people into oblivion by day and wave a pride flag by night. PERIOD!🔥.

Aisya A. Zaharin is a PhD researcher, award-winning trans rights advocate, and member of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Trans and Gender Diverse Expert Advisory Committee. Her work focuses on intersectionality and decoloniality, bridging rigorous academic research with grassroots advocacy to highlight marginalised voices in the quest for transformative justice and equity.