What does this orientation do? How is the orientation a cover for the acts of violence both the US and Israel do? What can we learn about the tactics of imperialism- I say “genocide”- from the standpoint of obfuscation? We can now adequately turn towards Jasbir K. Puar's The Right to Maim to understand how Israel- aided by the US- became a nation of military-information circulation.
We can start by directing our attention to the quote here (this is in the “Disability Strikes” section. “Disability due to war injury also functions as a permanently looming specter: the disability to come from the bombing that might but mostly do not happen functions to continually justify the occupation. … Another manifestation of the instrumentalization of disability as a part of the occupation machines is the discourse of trauma, in particular the post-Holocaust trauma that takes hold from 1967 onward and disavows trauma for the Palestines through the centering of Jewish suffering (Puar 107, emphasis mine). Here, we have an interesting agency in the self-bringing up of one’s history. For Fanon, we see history’s-now in the racism directed towards him, that is then an internalized mechanism of restriction; Here, we see history’s-now in the self-proclaimed victimhood, as a justification for movement by any means. This making history-now in regards to the Israel state is how Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut can justify the funding of the Iron Dome through the rhetoric of “innocence,” and for Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida to disallow the attribution of Israel as a state engaged in apartheid. In other words, the making the history of victimhood of the Israel people history-now defends the actions of the Israel state towards Palestine. We can also say that Israel extends itself through this history-now.
From this standpoint of history-now, we can attend to the topic of “pinkwashing” as a site of oscillation between the history-now of Israeli victimhood to now-history of redefining and reproducing the Israeli. Let us first start with defining pinkwashing: “”Pinkwashing,” a piece of propaganda highlighting the LGBT rights record of Israel as a function of obscuring or legitimating its occupation of Palestine… pinkwashing has been redefined as the Israeli state’s use of its admittedly stellar LGBT rights record to deflect attention from, and in some instances to justify or legitimate, its occupation of Palestine” (Puar 96). As we are made aware of, pinkwashing is deployed to obscure the acts of violence, in general. Puar attends to this term to discuss how Israel recognizes certain queer bodies and the twofold purpose this recognition serves: to bring more bodies into the national project of Israeli reproduction and to engender Israeli saviorism.
Let us attend to the former before we attend to the later of the statement. Israeli saviorism engendered under pinkwashing is presented by Puar as an adaptation of the women question: “As elaborated by Partha Chatterjee, this question arose with some force in the decolonization movements in South Asia, whereby the capacity for an emerging postcolonial government to protect native women from oppressive patriarchal cultural practices, marked as tradition, became the barometer by which colonizers arbitrated political concessions made to the colonized” (98). For Puar, the woman question biomes the homosexual question. In which “[w]hite queers (queer men?) saving brown homosexuals from brown heterosexuals” I call this the homosexual question: How well do you treat your homosexuals?” (99). It is from this “homosexual question” that we can began to understand how the circulation of information and images come to orient both the Israeli populace and international nations towards an innocent, in-need-of-defense, state.
The inclusion of specific queer bodies serves as a source of international funding. “The United States and Israel are the greatest beneficiaries of homonationalism in the current global geopolitical order, as homonationalism operates to manage difference on the scalar registers of the internal, territorial, and global. Moreover, pinkwashing is an ideological and economic solicitation directed to the United States- Israel’s greatest financial supporter internationally- and to Euro-American gays who have the political capital and financial resources to invest in Israel. Thus, pinkwashing’s unconscious appeal to U.S. gays is produced through the erasure of U.S. settler Colonialism enacted in the Tactic endorsement of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” (97). This appeasement is to the “morals,” to use the word of Rosa DeLauro, of the United States. “Morales” an obfuscation of the “erasure” of history that would rather not be attended to; a departure from history-now to now-history by means of not attending to that which has been relegated as history; as counterproductive to the advancement of the national project. The relegation of counterproductive history as now-history is a lens of understanding pinkwashing as a money-generating economy. From “touristisrael.com” “Tel Aviv Gay Pride has become one of the biggest events of the year in Tel Aviv. Visitors from all over Israel and the world come out in full force to celebrate. The city lights up in color and energy, proving its reputation as the Gay Capital of the Middle East, and perhaps even one of the Gay Capitals of the World” (emphasis mine). Here we start treading shaky waters. Our exploration of pinkwashing is not to underwrite the value and importance on LGBT+ acceptance and advancement in national recognitions. Rather, it is important that we attend to what “[Tel Aviv’s] reputation as the Gay Capital of the Middle East,” obscures; how the reputation is deployed as a justification to the occupation. I end here, this interrogation of engendering Israeli saviorism through the deployment of pinkwashing with, with words from Puar:
“What becomes clear is that the purported concern for the status of homosexuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is being used to shield the occupation from direct culpability in suppressing, indeed endangering those very homosexuals. Further, the LGBT rights project itself relies on the impossibility/absence/nonrecognition of a proper Palestinian queer subject except within the purview of the Israeli state itself, as a rescued subject” (Puar 120).
Having interrogated the process and benefits of engendering Israeli savorism we can now turn our attention to pinkwashing as a tool of reproduction for extending the reach of the Israeli state. Let us start with this quote: “Thus, [Puar] would argue that the most pernicious thing that the discourse of pinkwashing accomplishes, along with the keeping activated a discourse about Palestianian homophobia, is effacing the fact that the state’s interest in homosexuality is superseded by its interest in reproductive capacities of bodies engages in Israeli pronationalism” (Puar 117). Pinkwashing becomes behind that which is the main mission of the Israeli state: to reproduce Israelis. Putting pinkwashing behind the mission of reproduction Tel Aviv- and by extension, Israel- becomes the “Gay Capital of the Middle East;” the Gay (Recognizing) Nation of the Middle East. We can understand how things become given by becoming behind- in the background, as that which is “behind the action” (Ahmed 131), by attending to Ahmed’s meditation on the habitual body in regards to race; how race is taken up by the body, as that is which is behind the body. “[R]ace becomes given insofar as it does not have our attention. If race is behind what we do, then it is what we do” (Ahmed 131). If Gay is behind what Tel Aviv does- is behind what Israel does- then “Gay” is what Tel Aviv/Israel does. This is to say that LGBT+ recognition recedes into the background and becomes a perceived inherent doing that Tel Aviv and Israel does.
But why? Why has the gay-rights project become behind Israel’s reproduction project? Doesn’t it seems quite contradictory to include those who don’t or may not contribute to reproduction through heterosexual coupling? What does the recognition of the homosexual body do for the mission of Israel? Especially considering how “This new Jewish body and the new state were also gendered masculine and became “the necessary site for healthy, heterosexual transformation,” as the degenerate diaspore was understood as feminine and effeminate: a rehabilitation then from homosexuality” (Puar 102). Without the attention that recognition of the homosexual body there is an inability to rehabilitate. If Israel was already gendered masculine, there would be no need for rehabilitation. So, here, again. we see the oscillation between history-now to now-history. I argue that the crucial factor to situating gay to behind the Israel reproduction project is a testament to the historical perpetuation of a meek-Jew; one that is now-history as a result of the transcending masculine-Jew- one who engaged in war, sex, and extraction. And the now-history of the masculine-Jew, the agent of transcendence through the conquering of biology- is that which is behind “Israel [being] known as the world capital of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and is “often represented as having the highest number of fertility clinics per capita in the world”” (Puar 112). If access to IVF and fertility clinics is what is behind Israel, the access to IVF and fertility clinics is what Israel does. And this doing is extended beyond the heterosexual body, as a tool of pinkwashing, by applying the US ideology of “don’t ask-don’t tell” for recruitees of the military to those non-heterosexual couples that become families through the accessibility of IVF and fertility clinics (Puar 113).