Queer Palestine – Pinko Collective

[Pinko; 2024]

By collating cultural ephemera about queer life in Palestine and the diaspora amid ongoing genocide, Queer Palestine creates a small but vital counter-archive to challenge established Zionist narratives that impute presumptive sexual backwardness to Palestinians in order to justify their total annihilation. The editors of this nearly 100-page zine—a trio of Palestinian scholars, organizers, and cultural workers—collaborated with Pinko Magazine, a US-based collective that publishes seasonal print volumes and online writings that explore the liberatory horizon of “gay communism.” Moving across a diverse set of materials that include a manifesto, interviews, creative nonfiction, photography, and multimedia art, Queer Palestine performs the double objective of fomenting urgent collective action against the Zionist destruction of Gaza and historic Palestine while also documenting the everyday practices of living that shape contemporary queer Palestinian selfhood.

In their introduction, the editors recognize the imperative to gather fragments about queer Palestinian life in the wake of October 7. They also caution against reducing these lives to the spectacle of violence. “In the context of accelerated genocide,” they write, “the impulse to collect, to save elements of the worlds under siege and bombardment can also serve to exceptionalize the assault and increase its stature as the determining factor of our existence.” With this in mind, this counter-archival volume navigates between the sphere of anticolonial praxis and the domain of cultural, symbolic, and imaginative meaning-making. The very publication and circulation of the zine itself is inseparable from political praxis: All the proceeds earned from sales go directly to funding relief efforts for two Gazans (known by their pseudonyms “ES” and “QFG”) featured in an interview conducted by Afeef Nassouli, an independent Palestinian journalist and producer. In this counter-archive, queer Palestinians do not appear as passive or “perfect victims.” Rather, they link politics to culture to challenge the instrumentalization of queer identity by Zionism. “Pinkwashing” is the process by which “a state or organization appeals to LGBT+ rights in order to deflect from its harmful practices.” Many have identified the rise of Israeli pinkwashing in the 2005 Brand Israel campaign, in which the Israeli government created multilateral corporate partnerships with public relations companies in North America and beyond to market Israel as a modernized haven for gay and queer people. This campaign popularized narratives of surrounding Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian societies as essentially homophobic, more evidence of their intrinsic barbarity. By mobilizing this media apparatus, the state of Israel frames the ongoing destruction of Gaza as a crusade to liberate queer Palestinians from homophobia.

Anti-pinkwashing efforts (known as pink-watching) have largely operated through international nongovernmental organizations and principally relied upon the tactic of the boycott. Queer Palestine enlarges the terrain of pink-watching by linking it to a grassroots philosophy of anticolonial resistance in Palestine known as “the popular cradle.” “The popular cradle” (“Al-Hadena Al-Shabiya” in Arabic) refers to “a state of cohesion between the resistance and the masses, leading the resistance to become a general state of being” among Palestinians. It names an organic relation of support that Palestinian communities lend to the resistance groups that exercise their legally protected right to armed struggle and self-determination as enshrined in the 1982 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 37/43. Some of those forms of support include “deterring the enemy, harbouring fugitives, warning the resistance of potential danger, production of literature and media that supports the resistance, and much more.” Liberal Zionism strategically isolates issues of gender and sexual oppression from the question of settler colonial domination in order to sow divisions in the popular cradle and to rationalize the genocide of Palestinians “in the aggregate.” Palestinian anticolonial queer politics are faced with the task of reconnecting the specific dimensions of gender, sexual, and national liberation in order to bolster the requisite solidarities that sustain the mass character of resistance to Israeli military occupation. Queer Palestine does the critical work of identifying such a task and offers glimpses into the possibilities of actualizing it.

In the collectively authored manifesto that opens the zine, “A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine,” an anticolonial approach towards Palestinian queer liberation diverges from an imperial politics of liberalism anchored in the vocabulary of gay and trans “rights.” The liberal “human rights” framework tends to define gender and sexual freedom as the capacity to assimilate into and reproduce a society stratified by class and racial hierarchies. Declaring that “we refuse that Palestinian sexuality and Palestinian attitudes towards diverse sexualities become parameters for assigning humanity to any colonized society” and that “no queer solidarity can be fostered if it stands blind to the racialized, capitalist, fascist, and imperial structures that dominate us,” the manifesto seeks to internationalize the ethos of the popular cradle among queer and feminist movements abroad. Against the pseudo-freedoms offered by liberalism, the writers further urge “an active engagement with decolonial and liberatory struggles in Palestine and around the globe” and enjoin their readers to “reject Israeli funding, refuse collaborations with all Israeli institutions, and join the BDS [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] movement;” to strike, “silently or publicly, refuse that your exploited labor be used for the silencing of Palestinian activism or funding, support, and endorsement of military settler colonization and genocide,” and to “Shut down main streets. Organize a sit-in in your local central station. Interrupt the flow of commerce.” While the manifesto is concerned with transmitting a plan of action to its readers, its placement as the opening piece also performs a kind of conceptual space-clearing function for Queer Palestine by implying that this political vision generates an imaginative energy that nourishes the production of queer creative, artistic, and cultural work featured in the rest of the volume.

The zine also provides a visual portrait of queer Palestine. The contemporary mediascape is oversaturated with images of brutalized Palestinian bodies and extreme scenes of violence. Queer Palestine eschews replicating the spectacle of violence and supplies an alternative visual vocabulary. Maria Zreiq’s photographic series, “Exile and the Colonizer,” does not feature Palestinian bodies at all but captures the diverse architectures and landscapes of displaced villages. Qais Assali’s photographs feature Arabic inscriptions on bathroom walls as evidence of “queer times and dialogues” and “meeting spaces between bodies and temporalities.” A section on “Organizations, Parties, Zines, and Films in Palestine” displays a vivid set of images that include protests led by alQaws, a Palestine-based organization advocating for queer and gender diversity, posters advertising a queer party called Aziza (which still takes place to this day in Haifa), and excerpts of art and Arabic poetry from a Palestinian zine called “Banzine” (“Gasoline”). Alexandra Harcha-Montes’s “Palestina Peruana,” in an avant-garde mixed media format, commemorates the intersections of her Palestinian-Peruvian heritage. The interplay between anticolonial politics and language plays out at the psychosomatic plane in Fadl Fakhouri’s short, semi-autobiographical creative nonfiction work, “Spinning the Moon.” Locating himself as a diasporic queer Palestinian who experiences an increasing sense of alienation in “ultra zionist New York,” the narrative voice confesses that he had not been writing much “prior to Oct 7,” and that he “had been carrying many words in my mind, but none were spilling out.” Fakhouri experiences alienation at the level of language—as the inability to externalize thought through words—and at the level of the particularized Palestinian body among differently marked bodies, such that “our presence [as Palestinians] can make the air harsh with the embodiment of traumatic memory.” October 7 and the ensuing acceleration of genocide, even as it “instilled a new fear in me, a shaking new fear,” simultaneously emboldened Fakhouri’s desire for collective emancipation from colonial oppression that, in turn, catalyzed a newly invigorated process of writing (perhaps of the very piece we now read). In a stylized metaphorical language, the narrative voice expresses these desires for Palestinian liberation, and gradually moves from the individual “I” to the collective “us.” Fakhouri appropriates the imagery of the Jewish practice of crushing glass at weddings and shouting “mazel tov,” offering entirely new meanings:

I do not want to walk on glass anymore, unless I am crushing it beneath my boots in a celebratory manner. Like a wedding, like a festivity, like the exclamation “mazel tov.” That’s what I am waiting for. My mazel tov moment. I want equality and I want my right of return, my stage to dance. Give me my glasses, my cloth, my red stage curtain and let me turn this aggression into a positive outlet. Let us turn shards into poetry. Let us spin the moon.

“Spinning the Moon” reads as a queer diasporic Palestinian twist on what the Afro-Caribbean anticolonial psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon has called the “zone of nonbeing” in his 1952 book, Black Skins, White Masks. Fakhouri’s narrative voice itself compellingly if cryptically alludes to Fanon, indicating that “Fanon has much to say about this” after describing their own “hypervigilance” and “mild paranoia” as a “Palestinian and queer individual” living in liberal urbanity. In his book, Fanon describes the “zone of non-being” as a psychic space of “hell” that the colonized confronts in a world inhospitable to their very existence; it is an “extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.” The very confrontation with this “hell” need not produce political despair nor lock the colonized in a state of ceaseless mimicry of the colonizer; it instead, Fanon claims, constitutes the grounds for a revolutionary transformation of one’s sense of self that may be experienced as an assertive “yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” The desire to “spin the moon”—to imagine a liberated Palestine so intensely that this vision can reconfigure the relation between earthly and celestial realms and can even transmute a Jewish mazel tov into a Palestinian right of return—vibrates like a cosmically Fanonian “yes,” as an affirmation of embodied Palestinian life.

If creative nonfiction like Fakhouri’s highlights a diasporic dimension of queer Palestinian selfhood in the US after October 7, then Afeef Nassouli’s interviews bring our attention to queer people’s immediate experiences surviving the genocide in Gaza. These interviews were conducted in English over email with two queer Gazan men in their early and late 20s, anonymously known as ES and QFG, during April 2024.

ES eloquently discusses some of the challenges growing up as a gay cis man living near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. He narrates the differential treatment he received from his family on the basis of his sexuality, his journey towards self-discovery during travels to the US and Turkey as a student, and some of the complications he faced after contracting HIV abroad, which, due to various stigmas and the delayed availability of treatment in Gaza, resulted in the loss of his ability to walk. The ongoing genocide has made it impossible for him to access critical antiretroviral medications, and his health remains at risk without them. ES describes how his travels contributed to his change in perspective on what it means to be a gay man in Palestine: “I needed to go back to Gaza as a grown up young adult to understand that liberation must be fearlessly obtained and processed internally on the inside so that it can be expressed on the outside,” he says. “I have loved Gaza because it taught me that freedom of the shackles of homophobia and Israeli besiegement can be a state of mind even if not a tangible one.”

ES’s measured mode of expression, which may be related to his training as an “online English language tutor,” is different from QFG’s diction. QFG’s interview retains rich linguistic irregularities, including abbreviations like “bf” for boyfriend, typographical errors (“previouse” instead of “previous”), unpunctuated sentences, semicolons in lieu of apostrophes, the inconsistent capitalization of words and letters, and the casual insertion of “haha”s when fondly recounting romantic exploits with men and women. QFG’s friendly informality evinces a meaningful degree of trust with Nassouli as his interlocutor, though it also imparts the sense that he writes under crisis conditions of rapidly dwindling and unavailable time.

QFG considers himself a bisexual cis man. His interview, which he gave while living in a tent in Rafah during a period of heavy bombardment, touches on the triangulated relationship he maintained with his boyfriend and girlfriend, their tender moments watching Netflix together, and how they “dreamed of traveling the world and hang out and kiss and flirt and eat together.” QFG’s biological family disowned him after learning of his sexuality, but his boyfriend’s family ended up taking him in: “They didn;t like me in the house but with time i became like a son to them. They loved me and accepted me and would tell me to eat and not go out late and i knew they accepted me.” QFG’s boyfriend and his adoptive family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. His girlfriend died in a “previouse” assault on Gaza. He does not deny that “it is hard to be queer in Gaza,” but his story painfully demonstrates that it is the indiscriminate killing conducted by the Israeli occupation that negates the possibility for any life to flourish at all.

Nassouli’s interviews with ES and QFG remind us that any effort to advance queer freedom in Palestine—which include access to reliable healthcare, safe housing, sex education, and community—may only be realized when the Israeli occupation is put to an end. These interviews crystallize ES and QFG’s stories in a particular moment in time, but their lives continue to unfold in the present outside of the page. Queer Palestine locates itself in solidarity with their unfolding realities by promising to direct all proceeds earned from the sale of this volume to their relief funds as ES and QFG reestablish themselves outside of Gaza post-evacuation. Small but immensely valuable, Queer Palestine dispenses with dangerous narratives about sexuality in Palestine while shining a light on the everyday forms of queer life and anticolonial politics that persist against all odds.  

Nico Millman is a writer and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in postcolonial studies, modern South Asian and Latin American literature, and comparative studies of race and caste. He was awarded an Editorial Fellowship and guest edited a special issue of Full Stop Quarterly titled “The Cultural Politics of Land” in 2023.