thank you to all who helped collect thecontents of this zine <3

reprinted without permission:i hope it's clear why sharing these words wasurgent and necessary.
anti-copyright: please distribute widely.
pdf at hlanticap.noblogs.org (search for “zine”)
november 2023
cover design and additional contents added bypleasure pie
january 2024

What do any of you know of myPalestine? Of the late night queer parties
in Ramallah? Of raves held in biblicallyaged buildings? Of lesbians in hijabs, ofgay men in hoop earrings, of trans
Palestinians dancing with joyful
abandon?

We fear Israel first, before our families,
always. We're 100 times more likely todie at the hands of an Israeli gun orbomb than by western propagandized
ideas of honor killings.

I've seen White Christian Americans wish
their child be dead rather than gay.

Israel is the one that weaponizes thehomophobia that Queer people all over
the world of all religions experience tojustify murdering Palestinians of all
kinds, young and old, Christian andMuslim, Queer and Straight.

Zaheer Suboh“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representativesof the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginningbecause I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten intoa tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room
where the men of my family between the ages of six andsixty-five are notmarched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud for myloved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.

Moving towards HomeA Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine

June Jordan

November 9, 2023

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”- The New York Times, 9/20/82

We write this as workers, students, farmers, parents – as Palestinians, as queer
Palestinians. We write this not because our queerness exceptionalizes ourpositions but because, in the same way, we have been othered as queers, weare now facing patriarchal colonial tactics that seek to further alienate us asqueer Palestinians. To gather our words and energies requires an enormous
effort. We are sickened that amidst these moments of spectacular brutality andcarnage projected onto Palestinian bodies, including rape, torture, mutilation,and maiming, we are diverted from grieving and organizing to make a demand.

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and thered dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyesof his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies andthe stenchthat will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again andagain raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors andthe breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the deadI do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and thered dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare“to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”“to tighten the noose”“to step up the military pressure”

Since October 7th, we have been witnessing an accelerated genocide unfoldingin the Gaza Strip and in all parts of Palestine, blatantly and publicly declared on
numerous occasions by Israeli governmental and military figures. The brutality
and lethal magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and its
supporters produce increasingly harrowing conditions for those who remain
alive in Palestine, every day, everywhere. This brutality has been sustained
through the continued economic, military, diplomatic, and political support ofworld leaders historically and presently. We note, document, and narrate thehundreds of catastrophic massacres for the past 75 years at the hands of theannihilatory wrath of the Zionist regime; from Deir Yassin to the Tantura
Massacre (1948) upon which Israel’s foundation is based, to the Kafr Qassem
Massacre (1956) to Sabra and Shatila (1982), and this is just to name a few.
There is no possibility of any liberatory political and social movement toachieve life and dignity if it is aligned with the genocidal death machine of
Israel. Israel is founded on blood and is sustained through blood.
During these times, and in line with its long-standing exploitation of liberal
identity politics, Israel has been weaponizing queer bodies to counter any
support for Palestine and any critique of its settler-colonial project. Israelis(politicians, organizations, and “civilians”) have been mobilizing colonial
dichotomies such as “civilized” and “barbaric,” “human” and “animal,” andother dehumanizing binaries as a discourse that legitimizes the attacks on
Palestinians. Within this settler-colonial rhetoric, Israel seeks to garner andmobilize support from Western governments and liberal societies by portraying
itself as a nation that respects freedom, diversity, and human rights, that isfighting a “monstrous” and oppressive society, illuminated clearly through thedeclaration of the Prime Minister of Israel “There is a struggle between thechildren of light and children of darkness, between humanity and law of thejungle.”While these blatantly racist genocidal declarations take the stage, activists in
Palestine and internationally are being silenced, harassed, detained,
criminalized, workers fired from their jobs, and students suspended fromuniversities. International feminist and queer activists, in solidarity with
Palestine, are facing attacks and harassment by Zionists under the premisethat those who support Palestine will be “raped” and “beheaded” byPalestinians for merely being women and queers. Yet more often than not, rapeand death are what Zionists wish upon queers and women who stand insolidarity with Palestine. Zionist fantasies of brutalized bodies do not surpriseus, for we have experienced the reality of their manifestation on our skin andspirit. Yet they never seize to accelerate in their explicit vehemence. It
becomes evermore absurd when such framings are constructed against
Palestinian society, in light of countless testimonies, reports, anddocumentations of sexual violence Palestinians have been facing throughout
Israel’s 75 years of military occupation. From the thousands of Palestinian
prisoners, men and women, who are subject to sexual torture and rape since
Israel’s inception to this very day, to daily and escalating settler violenceagainst Palestinians in the West Bank, to Israeli “civilians” filming themselves
torturing kidnapped Palestinians as a TikTok trend, and the most recent
harrowing footage published on social media platforms by Israeli soldiers whichdocument the lengths of torture and sexual abuse soldiers and settlers inflicton our bodies regardless of their sexual orientation and gender – all forms ofviolence, including sexual violence are systematically and structurally part ofZionist domination over Palestinian life. And yet Israeli society continues toweaponize queerness for the purposes of justifying war and colonial repression,as if their bombs, apartheid walls, guns, knives, and bulldozers are selective of
who they harm based on sexuality and gender.
We refuse the instrumentalization of our queerness, our bodies, and theviolence we face as queer people to demonize and dehumanize ourcommunities, especially in service of imperial and genocidal acts. We refuse
that Palestinian sexuality and Palestinian attitudes towards diverse sexualities
become parameters for assigning humanity to any colonized society. We
deserve life because we are human, with the multitude of our imperfections,and not because of our proximity to colonial modes of liberal humanity. We
refuse colonial and imperialist tactics that seek to alienate us from our society
and alienate our society from us, on the basis of our queerness. We are fighting
interconnected systems of oppression, including patriarchy and capitalism, andour dreams of autonomy, community, and liberation are inherently tied to ourdesire for self-determination. No queer liberation can be achieved with settlercolonization, and no queer solidarity can be fostered if it stands blind to the
racialized, capitalist, fascist, and imperial structures that dominate us.
We call on queer and feminist activists and groups around the world to stand insolidarity with the Palestinian people in their resistance to displacement, land
theft, and ethnic cleansing and their struggle for the liberation of their lands
and futures from Zionist settler-colonialism. This call cannot be answered onlyby sharing statements and signing letters but by an active engagement withdecolonial and liberatory struggles in Palestine and around the globe. Our
unequivocal demands are as follows:• Reject Israeli funding, refuse collaborations with all Israeli institutions,and join the BDS movement.
• Strike: Silently or publicly, refuse that your exploited labor be used for thesilencing of Palestine activism or the funding, support, and endorsementof military settler colonization and genocide.
• Do what anti-colonial queers have done for decades, reclaim thenarrative, and set the terms of the conversation, this time about
Palestine. What is happening in Palestine is Genocide. Israel is a
Settler-Colony. Palestinians are a Militarily Occupied and ColonizedSociety. Under international law, Israel Does Not have the right to“defend” itself against the population it occupies, while Palestinians
Have the right to Resist their occupation. Demanding Ceasefire is thefirst step in holding Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity. We
must also demand to break the siege on Gaza and the dismantlement of
the Zionist settler-colony.
• Contact your local representatives to pressure them into defunding the
genocide, ending their military, diplomatic, and political support with
Israel. Speak up against the ongoing and complicit criminalization ofsolidarity with Palestine and the colonial and Islamophobic projection ofEuropean Antisemitism on Palestinian and racialized voices, as we arewitnessing particularly in France, the UK, the US, and Germany.
• Shut down main streets. Organize a sit-in in your local central station.
Interrupt the flow of commerce. Complacency is a choice.
We, queer Palestinians, are an integral part of our society, and we are informing
you: from the heavily militarized alleys of Jerusalem to Huwara’s scorchedlands, to Jaffa’s surveilled streets and cutting across Gaza’s besieging walls,from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Visit queersinpalestine.noblogs.org for the full list of signatories andtranslations.

Gay Travel(or Music Makes the People Come Together)
Kyle Carrero Lopez
The gays want to know how B’s trip
to the settler colony went.
He says: What can I say?
It was a lot like the settler colony
where I live, but with a great desert flair.
Street life was fabulous over there.
The city’s rainbow flags were a schoolof fish—plentiful, spry,slick in their sidewinds,a shield of gills turned one large gill.
B slid through security checkpoint
after security checkpoint,
each playing a different era of Madonna.
All over town, men held each other’s hands
and not-hands and smiled, sun-lickedon high-rises, far from thoughtsof where they were or how or who
was below. Parties every night.
At the club, B met a twunkin a harness who would shout things likeWe’re so lucky to be alive—as in: underthe molly under the red lights
under the ceilingunder the missile defense system
and not Over There, where, like smog,
gay hate hugs the air.
But this one queer kept trying to interject.
There’s queers on the fringes too, he’d start,
queers teargassed, queers shotin self-proclaimed self-defense
while club queers choose which tank,which cross-body bag to wear.

The location-tagged stories featured here are anonymous submissions toQueering the Map (queeringthemap.com), a collaborative project of "digitallyarchiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space."further reading
Palestine as a Queer Struggle
uscpr.org/activist-resource/grassroots-advocacy-toolkit/palestine-as-a-queerstruggle/
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: Say No to Pinkwashingbdsmovement.net/pinkwashing
What is pinkwashing?
shado-mag.com/know/what-is-pinkwashing/Decolonize Palestine
decolonizepalestine.com
Palestinian Feminist Collective's action toolkit
palestinianfeministcollective.org/all-out-for-palestine/
Solidarity with Palestine - A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List
www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/black-feminist-perspectives-onpalestine-a-reading-list
A Palestinian trans woman's story peels away Israel's pinkwashing veil
www.972mag.com/trans-lgbtq-palestinian-israel-pinkwashing/
All Out for Palestine: Against Queer Silence and Complicity
www.midnightsunmag.ca/all-out-for-palestine-against-queer-silence-andcomplicity/
The queer Israeli youth taking a stand against pinkwashingwww.972mag.com/queer-israeli-youth-pinkwashing-palestinians/
Queers speak out: Why do I support Palestine?
en.velvele.net/2023/11/02/queers-speak-out-why-i-support-palestine/#NoPrideInApartheid Toolkit
uscpr.org/NoPrideInApartheid

And each time he’d begin to speak,the EDM would just keep playing
louder and louder,almost like the DJ was doing it on purpose.

Source: jewishcurrents.org/gay-travel-or-music-makes-the-people-cometogether

Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial
Violence
alQaws: for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society
October 18, 2020
Over a decade ago, Palestinian activists adopted the term “pinkwashing” todescribe how the Israeli state and its supporters use the language of
gay and trans rights to direct international attention away from theoppression of Palestinians. Israeli travel guides and promotional videos
advertise Tel Aviv beaches as a gay-friendly getaway destination—and hide thereality that tourist partygoers are dancing atop the ruins of ethnically cleansed
Palestinian villages. The open inclusion of gay officers in the Israeli occupation
army is used as proof of liberal forward-mindedness, but for Palestinians thesexuality of the soldier at a checkpoint makes little difference. They all wield
the same guns, wear the same boots, and maintain the same colonial regime.
Pinkwashing emerged as part of an ongoing international propaganda effort,
which aims to rebrand Israel as a liberal and “modern” state in the face of thegrowing Palestine solidarity movement. By promoting cities like Tel Aviv as gay
tourism destinations, Israel’s foreign ministry seeks to win the support of queer
communities across the world and prevent international connections with thePalestinian struggle. Crucially, the promotion of “gay-friendly Israel” depends
on presenting Palestinians (and Arabs more generally) as the exact opposite:sexually regressive and therefore undeserving of solidarity. These stereotypes
draw on the long history of efforts to demonize Palestinian narratives andresistance using political strategies anchored in anti-Arab racism andIslamophobia.
The early years of anti-pinkwashing activism focused on identifying andcombating efforts to hide the reality of Israeli colonialism and apartheid behinda smokescreen of queer-friendliness. However, as anti-pinkwashing campaigns
and theories progressed, activists in alQaws realized that the term
“propaganda” could not capture the true scope of pinkwashing. While
pinkwashing often appears to the world as a global marketing strategy, it isultimately an expression of Israel’s deeper gender and sexual politics and theideological foundations of Zionism.
Pinkwashing is the symptom, settler-colonialism is the root sickness.
Recognizing pinkwashing as colonial violence can help us understandhow Israel divides, oppresses, and erases Palestinians on the basis ofgender and sexuality.
Israeli settler-colonialism works by breaking apart and eliminating Palestinian
communities, whether through the military violence of occupation and siege,
the legal regimes of apartheid, or the denial of refugees’ right of return. Yet it
also divides Palestinians internally and psychologically, in the personal realmsof self-perception and collective identification. In order to understand theLGBTQ narratives to invade Gaza and Afghanistan. I am not “proud” when
progress is quantified by Zionist militarization.
Uzi Even is an overlooked example of how homonationalism is foundational to
Israel. Even has been a nuclear researcher integral to Israeli national security
for decades. Hailed as a gay icon, his “successful” fight for “gay rights” inIsrael was to secure the inclusion of LGBTQ personnel in the military, which waslegitimized by his indispensable role in national intelligence.
Likewise, Kristin Beck, is portrayed as a trans role model. A longtime SEAL withextensive intel, whether it is “progress” or her militaristic patriotism that makes
her legitimate is still unclear. For example, Beck has condemned the actions oftrans whistleblower Chelsea Manning for being unpatriotic, revealing that transacceptance is conditional.
Pride month falls on the heels of Nakba — a climax of depraved massacres anddestruction of hundreds of villages, displacing approximately 800,000
Palestinians from Palestine in 1948. It also coincides with the commemorationof Naksa — the annual day of commemoration for the Palestinian people of thedisplacement that accompanied Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967
when Arab forces and the Palestinian resistance challenged Zionist
militarization of Palestine, and 600,000 additional Palestinian refugees werecreated. The 1967 war paved the way for Israel to become a global power,
influencing the world’s political and economic agenda. Israel leads the weapons
market with a history of collaborations from the South African government at
the height of apartheid as well as Pinochet in Chile.
This year, the 73rd commemoration of Nakba landed the same week as Eid, theholiday that closes the holy month of Ramadan. While Ramadan is supposed to
be a time to rekindle spiritual connectivity, this year Eid’s festivity was
undercut by the solemn intensity of ongoing repression in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan,
the Al Aqsa Mosque and Gaza.
Israel is falsely known as a beacon in a region void of rights. From its supposed
feminism to its “LGBTQ friendly” tourism, Israel’s reliance on militarization,
repression and racism receives sparse attention.
As a queer Arab, I drown between ads beckoning me to purchase gay sodas
while swallowing domestic Zionist repression masked as progress. This
correlation is not a contradiction: Their “Pride” is built upon the repression andexploitation of others. And so I find place in the placelessness, the movements
we have paved to liberate our lands and ourselves.

originally published in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2021-06-28/
opinion-trans-palestinian-pride-month-isolation

Pride month is isolating for me as silence about
violence in Palestine continues
Yazan Zahzah
June 28, 2021
Pep radiates from the screen. I feel twinges of fatigue and annoyance when
first seeing the surge of rainbow advertisements. It is Pride month again. As atrans Palestinian whose family was violently displaced from Palestine andLebanon due to Zionist militarization, Pride is isolating, especially with thesilence surrounding ongoing violence in Palestine. It is within the margins I am
displaced to that I find home: Palestine is the epitome of placelessness and thebeating heart of worldwide struggle. It is the most queer.
Pride is celebrated every June and originated in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots.
It commemorates the legacy of people like Sylvia Riveria and Marsha P.
Johnson: Latinx and Black leaders who synthesized radical queer politics,
addressing intersections of race, immigration, gender, class and national
struggle. Rampant transphobia, racism, xenophobia and classism guided by
White, cisgender, middle-class gay men whitewashed this rhetoric of its
potential and shaped the movement into what many see today: shallow
aspirations for structural assimilation.
In United States popular culture, feminism and LGBT rhetoric promote figureslike Gloria Steinem and Harvey Milk. While they are influential figures, twoflaws exist with this glorification.
One, it presumes that U.S. “democratic” infrastructures are the only ones that
could allow oppressed communities to fight for justice, often co-opting
centuries of Indigenous, Black and Global South ideologies predating U.S.
political frameworks.
Secondly, it exceptionalizes and absolves the structures culpable in the very
violence that many of us are responding to.
While the U.S. claims to affirm women and LGBTQ people, it is selective whichpeople it affirms. Following the 2016 Pulse shooting, rainbow police cars
flooded parades, stoking transgender anxiety around police. A Palestinian
woman, Noor Salman, was imprisoned for years despite her repeated testimonythat she was a survivor of domestic violence. Pulse also catalyzed Countering
Violent Extremism, a counterterrorism program utilizing social services tosurveil and obstruct Muslim political dissidence.

nature of this struggle, we also have to understand ourselves, and how
colonization impacts our inner lives.
Pinkwashing pushes the racist idea that sexual and gender diversity are
unnatural and foreign to Palestinian society. When this idea is internalized
within Palestinian communities, it alienates queer and gender non-conforming
Palestinians and isolates them as a social group. These compounding socialpressures tell queer Palestinians that they must give up on some part of theiridentity or experience: we can either be queer and not accepted as a
Palestinian, or we can be Palestinian and not accepted as queer. The
destructive effects of internalized pinkwashing reverberate throughout
Palestinian communities, strengthening myths that associate queer Palestinians
with Israeli collaborators or Westernized native informants and propagating
feelings of hopelessness that narrow our political imaginaries.
Pinkwashing is also a disempowering framework: if gender and sexual
oppression are an essential part of what it means to be Palestinian, then there
is no way to challenge or change it. At no point can queer Palestinians be
regarded as radical agents of transformation within our own society. Instead,pinkwashing compels queer Palestinians to interpret their experiences and pain
through the lens of victimhood and powerlessness, which contributes to thebroader disempowerment and suppression of all Palestinians under colonial
domination.
When queer Palestinians are spoken about by Israel’s defenders, it is only topaint a portrait of individual victimization that reinforces a binary between
Palestinian backwardness and Israeli progressiveness. These portrayals suggestthat Palestinian society suffers from pathological homophobia, and that nodissenting voices could ever survive for long within it. Pinkwashing tells queer
Palestinians that personal (and never collective) liberation can only be found by
escaping from their communities and running into their colonizer’s arms. The
pervasive myth of Palestinians finding “queer refuge” in Israeli cities flies in theface of the actual policies of the colonial state, which are premised on the
exclusion and destruction of Palestinians—queer, trans, or otherwise. The
fantasy of Israeli humanitarianism falls apart as soon as the colonial situation istaken into account. There is no “pink door” in the apartheid wall.

Thus, while George W. Bush launched the war on terror, it was “post-racist”
icon Barack Obama who expanded it. Though Joe Biden was elected by Muslims
to dismantle the program’s successor, he pumped it full of funding andsupported its third rebranding.

Yet “Israeli savior” myths persist, in spite of their obvious contradictions,because pinkwashing works tirelessly to erase the presence of its mostformidable opponent: a Palestinian queer movement that uncompromisingly
merges the fight against colonialism with the fight against patriarchal andcapitalist oppression, and which views itself as an integral part of Palestiniansociety and the anti-colonial struggle. The systematic erasure of progressive
and politicized queer voices serves the interests of the colonial power and its
narrative.

Similarly, in Israel and the U.S., progressive ideologies are imbued with
deceptive layers, often called “pinkwashing.” They have used feminist and

AlQaws places emphasis on pinkwashing as colonial violence in order to
uncover Israel’s deeper sexual and gender politics. By rejecting colonialfragmentation and refusing to allow a wedge to be driven between the self andsociety, we are able to combat our exclusion and claim a place for ourselves inour communities and in our struggle. In alQaws’ work, Palestinian
queerness is not simply an identity, but a radical approach to politicalmobilization and decolonization.
What does this mean for international solidarity activists and for Palestinians
organizing in the diaspora? This document was conceived in the hopes ofreorienting anti-pinkwashing work to center queer Palestinian voices
and incorporate approaches that have developed throughout two
decades of grassroots organizing in Palestine. In activist circles based in
the Global North, pinkwashing has largely been regarded as a propaganda
strategy and fought through campaign-based anti-pinkwashing initiatives.
Drawing on the analysis of pinkwashing as colonial violence will not only allow
activists to better combat instances of Israeli propaganda, but will situate
pinkwashing within its broader settler-colonial context and allow us to makeconnections to other forms of colonialism and gendered/sexual oppression.
Anti-pinkwashing work is conducted in the spirit of internationalism and antiimperialism, but we also hope for this resource to live in dynamic localorganizing, and evolve according to the context it is read and used in.

Source: www.alqaws.org/articles/Beyond-Propaganda-Pinkwashing-as-ColonialViolence