Why We Fight: Refusing NYC Arab-baiting, refusing Israel's pinkwashing

The LGBT Center's ban on “groups meeting about the Israel-Palestine conflict” is racist – and it makes the queer community an instrument of racism. It extends the practice of pinkwashing beyond facilitating Israeli apartheid, and into a facilitation of New York's anti-Arab/anti-Muslim hate.

Let's be clear about what the Center's ban does: it brands any queer who stands up against the racism and violence of Israeli apartheid as a terrorist sympathizer, and a threat to the safety of “good” and “normal” queers. It brands as “dangerous” Palestinian queers' call for support for their human rights, and any talk of Palestinian human rights in general. It shuts out Palestinian queers themselves. It tells Arab and Muslim queers that they're only welcome if they promise not to mention an issue deeply affecting their communities. By stark contrast, we're allowed talk about Israel at the Center all day long, as long as we ignore its six decades of occupation and the existence of the Palestinians, queer and straight, under its military control.

That deeply unequal impact is not an accident.
The only reason some queer meetings at the Center are deemed controversial is that New York's anti-Arab/anti-Muslim, pro-Israel lobby groups whipped up complaints, and they created controversy only about meetings on Palestine – not Israel. They are not queer, although they found a few bigoted queers to voice their arguments at community meetings. The reasoning of these not-queer organizations, reported in the Israeli press, was that anyone supporting Palestinian queers is providing a “fig leaf for Arab homophobia.” (Jerusalem Post 6/1/11 -  http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=223236) They asserted that queer supporters of Palestinians are “self-hating.” They were not concerned about the integrity of safe space, nor community space, for queers.

By adopting their complaints that the meetings are “too controversial,” the Center signed off on the completely racist idea that Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians make us unsafe by existing, and especially by talking about their own human rights. The Center vilified and punished queers who prefer to fight for space within Palestine rather than promote Israel – where neither straight nor queer Palestinians are safe – as a refuge. And the Center handed over a major, historical queer institution to straight, racist bigots rather than holding out for queers to have our own ideas.

In a queer community with limited resources, we have to choose where to fight. It's critical, obviously, that Palestinian queers and others directly marginalized by the ban not derail their ongoing work in order to fight the Center. It's also critical to fight the Center. That's the task of queer human rights supporters and allies, and sometimes needs the direct participation of Palestinian queers as well.

The fight here is against pinkwashing: not just pinkwashing of Israeli apartheid, but also pinkwashing of New York's virulent anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism. We fight against the idea that queers are protected by quashing discussion of Palestinian human rights. We fight against the conversion of a major New York institution – one that represents queers to the mainstream, whether accountably or not – into an enforcer of that bigotry. And in part, we also fight to insist that mainstream queer institutions still rightfully belong to the queer community, even though people of color, trans people and others have built other, frankly more relevant organizations to carry out their work. The Center now represents the much bigger anti-Arab, anti-Muslim forces at work in our city who have latched on to us as the vehicle for their bigotry. As police, politicians, universities and the rest of our infrastructure explodes with anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigotry, we can't sit out the resistance.