The Pinko collective affirms the right of the Palestinian people to liberate themselves from Israeli colonial domination. The Israeli state is engaging in a genocidal aerial assault on millions of people in Gaza, menacing a ground invasion, and cutting off access to electricity, food, medicines and water. We call on people worldwide to use all means available to them to prevent this catastrophe, and to defend the people of Gaza.
As a collective of gay people, we also feel a special obligation to reject the enlisting of gay rights in service of genocide and colonial domination. Supporting Palestinian liberation is part of the struggle for freedom for all queer people. We reject the slander that to support Palestinian liberation somehow means to endorse homophobia. Israeli society’s limited and superficial claims to gay inclusion rests on the systematic exclusion of Palestinian queers. The Israeli government features a self-described “fascist homophobe” leader of a Kahanist settler party. The people in the West making these accusations openly covet and work for the same license to hate queers themselves. The IDF manipulates this homophobia to blackmail, torture, and compel Palestinian queers to betray their people in exchange for their conditional safety — revealing the underside of sexual freedom to be nothing but a protection racket.
If the supposed homophobia of specific Palestinian forces is your primary concern, while entire family lines are buried in rubble, while neighborhoods dig out babies from bombed buildings with their bare hands, while white phosphorus rains down on children trapped behind the prison walls in which they’ve lived their entire lives, we are politically opposed. The only route to a sexually free Palestine can be through a Palestine freed from Israeli domination. A free Palestine requires the mass resistance of the Palestinian people, joined with international solidarity in dismantling the basis of the Israeli state.