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A teach-in by Queer Crescent in collaboration with Palestinian Feminist Collective – Palestine is a Queer Issue: Resisting Pinkwashing Now and Until Liberation. Featuring guest speakers Rabab Abdulhadi from Palestinian Feminist Collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, Shivani Chanillo from Lavender Phoenix, poetry by Mx Yaffa from Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD). Moderator by Shenaaz Janmohamed of Queer Crescent.
Important Links and Resources:
- Sign on to Queer Crescent’s Ceasefire Campaign for LGBTQI+ organizations and leaders
- Queer Crescent’s Pinkwashing Resources
- Queer Crescent Website
- Palestinian Feminist Collective Website
- ASWAT Instagram (@aswatfreedoms)
- Lavender Phoenix Website
- Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) Website
- Purchase Blood Orange by Mx. Yaffa
Transcript
Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you all so much for being here today. Welcome to the “Resisting Pinkwashing Now Until Liberation” teach-in. Queer Crescent is honored to host this teach in in partnership with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Lavender Phoenix, The Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity or MASGD, Teaching Palestine, and Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies
Thank you all so much for joining us and for tuning in. My name is Shenaaz Janmohamed. I use she and they pronouns. I’m the executive director of Queer Crescent.
Queer Crescent is really thrilled to offer this Teach-in and to be in learning with you all for the next hour and a half on Pinkwashing in particular, as we hold grief and rage and mourn towards healing, towards resistance, towards a free Palestine. Joining the resounding people all across the world who have been calling for a permanent ceasefire. To not let the violence and the destruction of Gaza go without our clear and determined voice to say that this is not okay, that we, our tax dollars should not be paying for this, that we do not consent to genocide. And as queer people, as trans people, it is very much a queer issue to be in solidarity with Palestine. For the next hour and a half we will take time to learn from Palestinian organizers.
in Palestine, in the U. S., around the ways in which this moment can be used to understand our relationship to pinkwashing in particular and to Palestinian solidarity in general. And so thank you again for being with us today.
We’re going to start our Teach in with poetry, because we deeply believe as a queer Muslim organization in the power of cultural work, cultural change, and imparting our shine as queer people into the culture. That is the way that our people have survived. That is the way that people share their histories their survivalship is through culture.
And so, before I bring up Yaffa, who’s a dear friend and comrade, and also the executive director of MASGD, the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, let me introduce Yaffa. Yaffa is a trans Muslim and displaced indigenous Palestinian. She is sharing poetry from her new book, Blood Orange, shout it out, please get a copy if you haven’t already, which is an emotional, important, and timely poetry collection.
Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of Indigenous people. Join me in giving some shine, energetic shine to Yaffa, and I’ll pass to you.
Mx Yaffa: Hi everyone. It’s so nice to be here with you all. So excited to share space with all of you, with all the incredible panelists, with the entire Queer Crescent team, y’all are just incredible. Right before this, me and one of the other panelists realized we could potentially be related. So that’s the beauty of having spaces like this, where you connect with people that you’ve kind of been missing your entire life, but you didn’t even know that they were missing. I’m excited to recite some poetry for you all from my new collection. Just a little bit about the collection before I recite some poetry.
This collection was written for the most part, on the weekend of October 13th to the 15th. Some of y’all might remember that there was an eclipse during that weekend. And I really wanted to find something that would really center queer and trans Palestinian experience in particular, and also would just support me in navigating my own processing of everything that’s going on.
I have family both in Gaza and the West Bank still. I’m originally from Jaffa and Jenin, but I’ve kind of lived in nine different countries. So when I say I’m displaced, it’s displacement from various different wars, various genocides, various everything. And the result of that was Blood Orange.
I tried to get it out as quickly as possible and here we are. The first poem that I’ll read is called “Healthy”. And I’ll talk a little bit about each of these poems after I read them. It’s called “Healthy”. We are not meant to be okay, when genocide is our neighbor that is funded by our labor.
We are meant to be a mess, our sleep tearing into reality, anxiety brewing, wondering what is hope. We are meant to tear at the seams of reality, realizing a reality built on oppression is bullshit. We are meant to realize and demand all we are worth. Self actualization, wholeness. Things systems built off of genocide can never.
Our response labeled by western capitalism as wrong is healthy. We move to wholeness always, they move to pain attempting to drag us with them. So this was actually the very first poem that I wrote for this collection and it was in that first week of the genocide immediately following October 7th when so many people were really struggling with what do we do with all of this, right? We’re witnessing an entire genocide right before our eyes. And what do we do? There was a lot of hopelessness going around and a lot of narratives, at least in what’s known as the United States and the global north that’s always told us that all of that is wrong. That we’re not supposed to be overwhelmed by things. But for me, with all the practices that I have, it’s actually healthy to be overwhelmed right now. We’re not supposed to know how to let genocide live in our bodies with ease. We still show up, we still do the things, and yet at the same time, we honor it.
That it is a large experience. This is not normal. This is not something that should be happening all the time or ever. And so really wanted to honor that of the world that we live in is not what we deserve. For us to be overwhelmed right now is actually healthy, is where we should be. So the second poem I will read kind of goes into the conversation of today around pinkwashing.
This one’s called “At Odds”.
My transness and a colonized perception of Palestine are at odds. They think it’s because of lack of modernity. I say I have only received death threats targeting my transness from white people, Zionists, and other various political affiliations. I say only white people around me have ever disowned their own.
Yet I do not talk to sisters who choose to buy into imperialist transphobia, claiming it as their own. My parents do not understand how some of their children could hate anything any of their children could be, why anyone would hate what they do not know. I won’t talk much about pinkwashing because I know we’ll get to that today. But in particular, most queer and trans Palestinians over these last eight weeks have been receiving such immense violence from the broader LGBTQ community telling us that our people are the ones who are going to kill us. I’ve been receiving death threats my entire life in particular as an organizer since I was 19, and I have literally never received a death threat from anyone from our region from any Muslim person. It has always been white people who have sent me death threats specifically for my queerness and my transness.
Let alone everything else. And so that, that poem just kind of honors that experience.
I’ll read one more, and I’ll say just a few words before I read this last one. For me, the arts are so important. Not just as a tool for resistance, but also as a tool for world building. Often we think of the world is what creates art, rather than art is what creates the world. If you look at literature, even with Zionism, Zionism was in literature 100 years before it was ever named. I think about that of what is the world that we are building, what is the world of tomorrow that we get to write about and paint about and do all different kinds of art forms about today.
And so this last poem kind of brings a little bit of that into it. The collection goes into the topic of utopia as we’re exploring all of these other things. and as we’re experiencing this genocide. So this last poem is called “Land Back”. I do not know names wiped from time in Gaza Like I do not remember the names Of great uncles and aunts Who have been reclaimed by our land To say they were murdered Is to claim loss that our land will never feel For we are made of her And regardless of how many layers of phosphor fill the air We return to her in our deaths They may exacerbate the process of our return, but return we shall.
Standing thousands of miles away, I know even here she will take me back for distance is a creation that is buried with bodies that were never ours. We are not the ones who take land back, it is land that takes us. There will come a day when the sun sets on a world and rises in another, when indigenous sovereignty is honored.
Where queerness no longer exists, where transness is no longer an identity, where humanity means something genuine.
So I wanted to end with that, on a note of everything that we’re doing right now, all of the resistance is world building. We’re building the world that we have always deserved. So I’ll leave you all with just one final thing about the book, like I mentioned, the reason I wrote this book in the first place and published it is to raise awareness about queer and trans Palestinians in particular and our experiences, and also to fundraise for queer and trans Palestinians both on the grounds in Gaza and in the diaspora. So 100 percent of all the proceeds from Blood Orange go directly towards that.
As we’re getting deeper and deeper into this, the needs of the queer and trans Palestinian community is getting so immense, both on the ground in the region and in the diaspora.
Over just the last few days, I’ve received over $20,000 worth of requests from individuals because people are being doxed, people are receiving death threats, people are losing their jobs. In one case, people are losing their children. There’s a lot happening. And so just wanted to leave with that. I want to invite you all to pay attention to those needs and honor them, especially as we go into next year and into the elections.
Thank you again for having me. It was such a pleasure to be here. And I’m so excited for the rest of this.
Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Yaffa. It’s so wonderful to have you here. And it feels so important to start our teaching with the ways in which poetry, culture, moves and inspires us. It opens our hearts in ways that feel both healing and necessary as part and parcel to our organizing and our deep learning. As my comrade and partner Saba says, to growing our empathy to be able to show up with more depth, more commitment, and more resolve towards these issues because we are deeply interconnected. So thank you again, Yaffa..
Before I turn to introduce our other panelists, I wanted to just ground us for a moment in why Queer Crescent, along with the many partners that I named at the beginning felt it was important to host this teach in.
Back on November 3rd, Queer Crescent in collaboration with the Palestinian Feminist Collective drafted and released a letter calling upon LGBTQI organizations, leaders, and influencers to join Queer Crescent and Palestinians in calling for an immediate ceasefire. And in particularly to take up understanding and resisting pinkwashing as a queer issue.
The frame ” Palestine is a queer issue” is very much an homage of Palestinian Feminist Collective who tirelessly make the links around gender justice, bodily autonomy, self determination, sovereignty to the project of Palestinian liberation. Seeing them as part and parcel of the same project of liberation, and we very much are inspired and in deep gratitude to PFC and all the tireless folks who make those links so clear and apparent to us.
We are also in deep gratitude to organizations like Al-Qaws, based in Palestine, who have been telling us about pink- washing for a long, long time, and we are finally doing our part to answer the call as an organization as Queer Crescent. Since we shared this letter, over 350 individuals have signed on, over 65 organizations have joined us in a commitment to calling for permanent ceasefire.
This teach in is part of our commitment to moving those who have signed, ourselves included, and the many others who have joined us today. To deepen our shared resolve to a free Palestine through learning about pink watching as a propaganda tool of Israel and settler colonial state violence, and to allow this moment to transform us so that the grief is not in vain, towards a more fierce committed and clear stance of solidarity with Palestinian liberation movement. As queer and trans people and within LGBTQI organizations, we have a distinct role to play to organize to undermine pinkwashing. Because pinkwashing works and functions on the backs of racist tropes of Palestinians, Arabs, SWANA, and Muslims more broadly.
We cannot let our vulnerabilities as trans and queer people be exploited in the pursuit of colonial violence and the genocide against Palestinians and all indigenous people. It was not surprising that some of the first folks who signed on to our letter were trans led organizations like the Transgender Law Center, like El/La, and indigenous organizations.
It’s not surprising because I think for folks who are leading trans led organizations, Trans and indigenous organizations, the relationship of self determination of bodily autonomy and to state violence and colonization is clear, right? Because ultimately colonization uses gender injustice and creating these wedges within our communities as a way to dampen our resistance and to keep us apart.
So, I don’t want to say more because our amazing speakers will speak and illuminate so much more of these issues. But I wanted to just state why it was important for Queer Crescent to support advancing these conversations. So, our first speaker today is Ghadir Shafie ( she and her). She is a Palestinian queer activist and the co founder of ASWAT, Palestinian Feminist Queer Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms.
A passionate advocate for the intersectionality of the struggle of Palestinian queer women, fighting multiple forms of oppression as Palestinians in the context of Israel’s system of apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism, as women in a militaristic and imperialistic male dominated society, and as queers in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia.
Ghadir promotes active solidarity for Palestine through global feminism and with queers. Thank you, Ghadir. Pass it to you.
Ghadir Shafie: Thank you so much. Hello from Palestine. Thank you so much for organizing this teach-in on pinkwashing. I am grateful for your presence here with me, witnessing in this horrible, horrible time.
I will speak today for about 15 minutes, and I want you to bear in mind that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 18, 000 Palestinians. That is one Palestinian every 15 minutes. Imagine how many queer people are being killed daily by Israel. The scenes from Gaza are beyond description. They defy comparison, even for Palestinians, jaded by decades of occupation and settler colonial violence.
Devastated landscape filled with craters and the blackened ruins of what were once people’s homes, dead bodies or pieces of them. Orphaned children screaming in terror and incomprehension. Desperate survivors crying for food and water. Doctors despairing at the ever growing influx of wounded people they know they cannot treat.
As a queer Palestinian watching these images of horror, one stood out as particularly revolting in a rather different way. It shows an Israeli soldier in the middle of the rubble of one of the many residential neighborhoods in Gaza, flattened by the Israeli indiscriminate military strikes. In the distance, smoke from Israel’s carpet bombings hang in the air. The soldier is surrounded by Israeli tanks and demolish everything in their way. It is a scene of death and destruction The soldier stands holding a bright new rainbow flag. and Described it as a message of hope.
What hope can there be for 2.3 million Palestinians trapped over 16 years in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Gaza has become a graveyard for Palestinians. They have no water. No food and no electricity as Israel has cut off what little it allowed in through its already suffocating siege.
They seek shelter from Israeli bombings in hospital, UN schools, mosques, and churches, only to find these sites targeted by Israeli strikes. Those who can flee their homes along Israeli designated safe corridors only to have their vehicles shelved by the Israeli IDF soldiers. It seems incomprehensible that an Israeli soldier would pose a photo with a rainbow flag while participating in his army’s mass slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of half of Gaza’s homes. The truth is more sinister yet. This stunt, which was shared online by the Israeli state official social media accounts, is a textbook. example of obscene colonial pinkwashing. More than that, it is a pinkwashing on steroids. For years, Palestinian queers have denounced Israel’s pinkwashing, a cynical strategy designed to use self proclaimed support for LGBTQIA plus rights as a pink smokescreen to conceal its 75 years regime of apartheid, which oppresses all Palestinians, no matter of our gender.
or sexual orientation. All the while singling out queer Palestinians for persecution and blackmail. It is an attempt to falsely depict Israel as modern and a liberal country while diverting attention from its alignment with far right homophobic regimes and groups around the world and its current fundamentalist, racist, and homophobic government. In addition, Israel’s pinkwashing agenda is a colonial tool that has the racist aim to misrepresent Palestinians as backwards, homophobic, and thus not deserving of human rights. It also tries to convince us, as queer and trans people, that we are somehow foreign in our society, and tries to turn us against our Palestinians brothers and sisters.
I think there couldn’t be any better example of Israeli pink washing than the photo that the Israeli soldier with the rainbow flag in the rubble. Israeli pink washing has always been dishonest and dangerous. It has always been racist and colonial. It has allowed Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing, besiege, imprisonment, and murder of Palestinians, queer and non queer alike, for decades.
Now it’s being used to cover up for genocide.
In these dark times, Palestinians in besieged Gaza are bearing the brunt of Israel’s full blown genocidal war and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank, meanwhile, are also facing escalating waves of killing, torture by both Israeli military and illegal sectors.
Apartheid, for Palestinians like myself inside Israel, is reaching new peaks as Israeli forces are targeting and suppressing any expression of sympathy with the oppressed. As hard as it is, we still maintain hope. We have no other choice. That hope comes from the grassroots mobilization that are forcing complicit governments and institutions to finally call for the bare minimum that is nevertheless the absolute priority: a ceasefire that will put a stop to Israel’s carpet bombing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Queer groups have been extremely instrumental in our struggle for liberation. Queer groups have been an important part of the mobilizations. Nearly 40 LGBT, QA plus groups across Southwest Asia and North Africa called for the immediate ceasefire stating ” we stand with justice, equality, progress, and liberty.”
Throughout my life as a queer activist, I have proudly held the rainbow flag high as a symbol of queer inclusion, queer struggle, queer liberation, queer equality, and queer joy. The Israeli soldier participating in Israel’s genocidal war on my people in Gaza has desecrated the flag, has disgraced the flag, and made it a mockery for all it stands for.
Queer and trans people and groups are increasingly seeing through the pink smokescreen and rejecting Israel’s pinkwashing and its war crimes and crimes against humanity. We will not stand by as our flag and our identities are co opted and used to justify a genocide. I call upon queer allies around the globe to remember none of us is free until we are all free.
What can we do right now in these terrible times? Since 2005, Palestinians have proposed to you, our friends around the world, an entirely nonviolent method of ending Israel’s power over our lives. An academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This strategy is known as BDS, Boycott, Digestment and Sanctions.
BDS means boycotting all Israeli state sponsored institutions. This is not aimed at individuals, but at institutions financed by the state and that serve as extensions of the government that occupies us and keeps us under siege. We ask academics, staff and students not to speak at Israeli state funding organizations, including universities.
We ask artists and cultural workers not to perform in apartheid Israel. Make sure that your universities are divested from Israeli money. Do not take israeli money for your conferences or film festivals. Do not accept deceptively free propaganda trips to Israel. End complicity with the government of Israel by among other things, cancelling all joint projects activities that are complicit with Israeli universities.
Right now, the main demand is to stop the genocide. Stop the genocide and ask for ceasefire now.
So how can queer groups and queer people support queer liberation in Palestine?. One effort that is happening right now around the world is Queer Cinema for Palestine. Queer cinema for Palestine is a vibrant event that happens globally, established in 2021 to support queer art and queer cinema around the world.
Today, there are more than 270 filmmakers and artists who signed our pledge to boycott Israeli film festival, to boycott Israeli institutions, and support queer liberation in Palestine. Queer Cinema for Palestine is happening online in more than 15 locations around the world from the 2nd until the 10th of December.
Under the title, There’s No Pride in Genocide, we gather together as artists to support, Queer Cinema for Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There’s not much to say. I think you’ve seen the image from Gaza. You’ve seen what is happening right now. This is not a regular panel on pinkwashing. It’s happening during a genocide, where pinkwashing is also used to promote genocide. So, may I ask you as a Palestinian and as a queer Palestinian, please keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is a queer issue. Gaza is a queer issue, and there’s no queer justice until we are all free. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you so much for your work and activism on Palestine. You are saving lives right now. Thank you.
Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Ghadir. Thank you so much for your passion, your commitment, reminding us that hope is an active choice that you’re engaging in every day, despite all the odds, because that is the story of survival. Thank you for reminding and being so clear in the link to BDS boycott, divestment and sanction movement as tangible ways that we could be in solidarity with Palestine and to chip at the far reaching power of the Israeli state and settler colonial project.
Thank you for showing the ways in which queer folks and queer organizations. use culture and art to tell different stories of survival with the Queer Cinema for Palestine. And thank you for showing up and being here with us. Thank you for all the ways that you hold communities, your fullness, and time to share and to lead us today.
Wishing so much protection and safety to you and yours. Next we have Rabab Abdulhadi. Rabab Abdulhadi (she/her) is an internationally known scholar and distinguished professor and researcher. Her scholarship, pedagogy, and public activism focus on Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities and their diasporas, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, and a Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies at the Historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. She is also a treasure, a beloved teacher, organizer here in the Bay.
I feel really grateful that you’re here with us today for all the work, all the times that you’ve taught me. It’s really such an honor to be able to host you and invite you in, Rabab.
Rabab Abdulhadi: Thank you so much Shenaaz, and I begin by acknowledging that my own university, San Francisco State University, sits on stolen indigenous Ohlone people’s land, and I’m now on the east coast of the United States, where I am also present on the Lenape people’s land that has been stolen and people have been displaced, just like it is in Palestine.
I also want to thank Queer Crescent for organizing this with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and actually joining with Palestinian Voices. I’m very happy that my colleague, my sister, my sibling, Ghadir, was able to join us and has actually taken a lot of the things that I was going to focus on, and thank you, Yaffa, for especially naming even the poetry, Blood Oranges, because we know what oranges mean and how they have been used.
And many Palestinians can’t even eat oranges because it reminds them of the orchards that they’ve lost back home. So I start, if you don’t mind, just Putting the first slide on. Yeah. And this is a slide if people can see it.
This is actually was done in 2013 and it was organized by a group of underground artists, called themselves cultural jammers, to remake all the campaign that was at the time by Pamela Geller and other Zionist groups doing all this smearing and buying sides on the buses and so on.
And the reason I mentioned because there is a connection between the cultural jammers and also the whole naming of pink washing because pink washing, some people say, emerged in Palestine. Some people say it emerged in the U. S. Some people talk about the whole question of washing and then the question of pink and so on.
And I think for me as a researcher, a scholar, it’s very, very interesting because there are so many origins of every single way that we are having the struggles. And so the colonial boundaries and borders that the colonialists and settler colonists try to impose upon us don’t really work because we cross these borders at least maybe imaginary, maybe in our networks and so on.
But why is it that pinkwashing persists? Ghadir spoke a lot about it. I’m just going to just emphasize a couple of things. It is necessary, very important for Israel public relations. Public relations is a very important project for it. This is why Israel consistently demands of the Palestinians and the Arab countries and the world, not only to recognize Israel’s right to exist, but to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which in itself a very racist notion.
And this is very much connected with the genocide that we’re seeing now in Gaza, that also we have seen for 75 years of Nakba and for over 100 years of colonization of Palestine, because , the slogan by the Zionist movement was “a land without people, for a people without the land.” We can talk about “for people without the land” a little bit later, but let’s talk about “a land without people”.
In order to accomplish that and legitimize it, you have to arrest the people. You have to erase them. You have to erase their presence. You have to also discredit their discourse, their work, their culture, their interaction, their social relations, in order for you to present yourself as Israel does. And as Ghadir mentioned, as a modern state that is making the desert blue, which we know is not true, and by contrast, is the best friend of women and queer people, as a gay haven, as opposed to quote unquote the backward, savage. excessively homophobic, excessively misogynist, Arab world, Arab and Muslim world, and in which Arab men and Arab and Muslim and Palestinian men are presented as irrational, bloodthirsty, misogynist, haters of women and Queer people, and as women as being docile, as being only oppressed constantly, and need to be rescued by the colonists who will come in and basically realize what Gayatri Spivak spoke about I don’t know, 30 years ago, the colonist project of trying to save brown people from brown communities and queer people from their own queer communities. And so in order for this to work, it has to be presented in all of these things that it is necessary.
And it’s very important for Israel to focus on its public relations. And this is something that has been actually very part and parcel of since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, a task that was assigned to the military, to the security of interior affairs to the Mossad, which is the CIA, outside intelligence, Shambit, the internal intelligence to everybody.
And now we see more and more the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other is, and the whole question of quote unquote branding, which I put it in parentheses because branding also refers to the ways in which people engage in slavery actually used to quote brand people whose lives they owned.
So I put it in parentheses. I question it. But Israel is very big on that to brand Israel as a gay haven. Israel as a best liberator of women and so on.
This is also what we see today in the sense of Israel actually making a very public relation campaign and a very, very intensive campaign to claim that Palestinians have chopped off the head of children, which was even reiterated by the president of the United States without even thinking about it because he was quoting Israeli Officials who we know are not really known for telling the truth and then they had to retract it the second day but yesterday he repeated the same thing again and said there is the rape of women and so on which we do not have any evidence until now.
We know that a lot of Israeli groups and Zionist groups like this group Bonat Alternativa and others are alleging, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that. If there is any evidence of that, we will not stand for it. We condemn any kind of violations of gender and sexual, justice because we believe that gender and sexual justice is part and parcel with indivisibility of justice.
So this is not something we are trying to cover, but this is very much part and parcel of the Israeli propaganda and it’s churning machine, the Hasbara machine is everywhere and they keep changing their stories. And if we have time we can actually go over how each story has developed and moved from one place to the other.
I’m also talking about the ways in which colonial feminisms or colonial quote unquote feminism, because feminism is supposed to be about the liberation of women as part of liberation of everybody, have been very much engaged in. But within that, there is also notion of blaming the victim.
It is a very important aspect of it. So in order for the Israeli and the Zionist narrative to work, you have to blame people. And one of the very well known cases, for example, was the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the young Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped from in front of his house on July 2nd, 2014, right around the big, big 2014 war on Gaza we talked about, and kidnapped by Israeli settlers who took him to a forest in Jerusalem that was built on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where the massacre on April 8th, 1948 happened in order to facilitate the creation of the Israeli state. And they made him drink kerosene and set him on fire and burned him alive, which was a clear case of lynching.
Now, what Israeli police tried to do was to actually say that Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family to quote unquote salvage family honor. And they killed him because he was queer. And now if it wasn’t for his father who had videotapes of the security cameras outside of the house and showed it– the Israeli police tried to confiscate it and basically destroy it– showed that these people came and kidnapped him.
The relative would still be among colonists, among racists, among white supremacists, Zionists, that Palestinians are killing Palestinians and they are doing this all the time. So it’s not only blaming the victim, but it also instilling and reinforcing the narrative of people, not only Palestinians, this happens with all indigenous and all colonized communities and all communities of color from time immemorial.
You look at the history of the United States, this is something, this is a trope that keeps getting repeated again and again and again. And it’s not an easy trope because It is not something that’s only being said. It’s not only a discursive issue. It’s not a discursive issue that we need to deconstruct in the classroom because we know the history, including that.
But recently, many people started learning more about the case of Emmett Till, the young Boy who was killed and the woman who actually accused him came out and said that she lied, but he was killed and he was lynched. And then his mom insisted on having open casket so everybody could see the crime.
And there’s so many more examples that we don’t have time to get into all of them now, but this is part of the colonial narrative, the colonial strategy in order to discredit the people who are colonized and discredit their struggle.
And this is definitely a part in Gaza and it is, but the other thing is that it depends on the narrative of saying that our communities in particular as exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally traditional. And this is something that we saw in Abu Ghraib for example.
When they were talking about, we’re not going to show the images of iraqi men are particularly insensitive. But we were raising the question, which men are okay with it, which women, which anybody, which non gender binary person, who would be okay with being subjected to sexual and gender violence; to being displaced like this and so on.
Nobody will be. But the imaginary that it is trying to instill that’s built on Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti Arab, anti Palestinian, anti Muslim racism as part and parcel of all kinds of racism basically makes it possible to do a little dog whistle in order for you to enforce all of this.
We saw this also at the US Social Forum when Zionist groups stand with us, which now everybody knows what it is, tried to do a workshop around queer communities in the Middle East, and many of us objected to it. And the reason that it got through because the organizers thought that this would be something that would be actually really wonderful, bringing everybody together. They did not really investigate who this group was and what it was doing and did not coordinate with the many organizations that were at the U. S. Social Forum in 2010 in Detroit from our own community to see what is happening, what’s going on, are you part of this unparceled hat? Even though the Palestinian queer organizations have existed for a very long time, and I think it was by then, if I’m not mistaken, Ghadir you can correct me that we organize a national tour and for all calls throughout the U S in order for people to speak and you all came and spoke in my own classroom. This is part of the stuff that keeps going back. And this is also the same thing that we hear around this group that I’ve mentioned now, and this propaganda that’s happening, and also in terms of the ways when we passed the resolution on BDS in the National Women’s Studies Association 2015, many Zionist groups came out and basically came with the whole question is there a place for Zionism and feminism? Many of the feminist groups have been targeted, including the International Women’s Strike and so on. This is a continuous, systemic, persistent thing. This is not something that is out of random or accidental. And so what do we do about this? In addition to what Ghadir said, I think it’s really, really important for us to say, how do we fight back?
We fight back with multiple ways. One of the ways we do for example, organizing this in the classroom. So one of the things that we do in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies program ever since we were founded in 2007 is every single year we were partnering with the Pride Month at San Francisco State to organize sessions on the whole question of queer justice, and this is one of them. Even after San Francisco State stopped funding pride month, we continue doing it again and again. We believe that it’s really important to connect the knowledge within the classroom with the knowledge outside and with the activism and advocacy.
We do not separate what happens in the classroom, what happens in the academy from outside. So the academy is not producing knowledge that is divorced from reality. The people who are organizing are part and parcel of that. And so we’ve been doing this again and again. The other thing that is really, really important to think about is how do we work here, and I’m talking here in the diaspora, with groups on the ground, Palestinian queer groups who are working? So one of the examples that I would like to cite from our own experiences is when Al-Qaws was attacked by Palestinian police in Nablus trying to hold an event. My hometown Nablus. We were going to rush and say something, but we waited and we coordinated with Al Qaws and we asked, what should we do?
And we did not do anything until Al Qaws came out because we were objecting to the whole question of saving queer people from queer communities, saving brown people from brown communities, the whole question of the colonial notion. And we were also taking leadership from the people on the ground who are day in and day out struggling. Once Al-Qaws came out with it, what we did is we published in one of the newspapers in the Bay Area, along with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, which is a group that has been doing a lot of work for a very long time, and whose founder actually was chosen to be the Grand Marshall at Gay Pride Parade at San Francisco.
And she turned down this honor and said, because I am here in Palestine struggling with the International Solidarity Movement at the time to oppose the apartheid world to oppose the repression by Israel and so on. So we organized together. And that’s when we said we endorse. We support. This is really important sometimes to think about how do we take a back road and when is it we go public with things. At this point, we really need to go public and we need to defy all this propaganda that is happening.
This is part of what the solidarity mean. But this is not free. When we do something like this, there is punishment. And these are some of the flyers I’m showing from the Queer Liberation March that took place in 2019. This was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall, Uprising. The Queer Liberation March at that time actually decided to refuse any corporate funding, to refuse to allow the police to go march in their own uniforms and so on, rejected the policing, rejected the state apparatus that represses people, rejected the corporate money and so on. As a result, there was space for us to be there.
So we were organizing, we organized a big contingent under the banner of QAIA, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and also Queers A gainst Islamophobia.
So we participated and I took this banner and I put it on my Facebook page. This led to the another Zionist attack, which is trying to silence Palestine and were trying to criminalize Palestine in the curriculum, and especially targeting us and our program in particular. And they took it and didn’t say what was on the banner. They just said that I’m spreading hate, and thus I should be– they had 86 organizations, some of them fake organizations– sign it, send it to the university, to the chancellor of California State University to the president of San Francisco State, saying that I’m spreading hate. This for them is hate.
Palestine is a queer issue. BDS Zionism is racism. Silence means death. For them, this was something that was very problematic, and it was something that is undermining the Zionist propaganda, and Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and eliminating the Palestinian people like the genocide that we are seeing here, and trying to continue pushing the pink washing without having it exposed.
As a result, our program has been attacked again and again. The Lawfare Project executive director got on the TV, on Fox and friends, and made a lying statement. They sued me. And they sued San Francisco State and they sued California State University. But we defeated them. It was thrown out of court. It was dismissed with prejudice. But she lied about that. And she said that I’m spreading hate; that I’m one of the leading anti Semitic– Horowitz every single year pushes out a formula about the top anti-Semitic scholars, and they always give me number one. And I think they do it in May because this is the fundraising season for them. As a result, I started receiving death threats. However, and including to my own university and the threat voicemails on my office mail that said Muslims will die, which is the same phrase that the guy who killed Wadiah Al-Fayyumi in Chicago, stabbing him 26 times.
He said Muslims will die. The university does not believe that this is actually a viable threat. And so they protect the right wing speech, which is white supremacist and Zionist is a protected speech protected that they can do whatever they want, put up hateful posters, do whatever they want against us, but we are not allowed to say so.
And the university is not investigating death threat letters that actually came to me through the University President’s office to my own office. However we refuse to be silenced. We refuse to lie down. And so we continued organizing. And one of the main events that we organize, and we do it every year, is this panel Queer Open Classroom that everybody can attend and come in. Queer justice against pink washing, exposing it, bringing scholars and activists, Ghadir was one of the people who spoke at that, in order for us to support liberation for Palestine as part of liberation of all, and to support gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice.
Thank you.
Shenaaz Janmohamed: Oh, Rabab. I hope that you can feel all the tremendous. gratitude and love that you’re getting in the chat. I think that there is such a clear longing to be hearing stories from elders, folks who have been in this fight for so long. Thank you for bringing in the long arc of queer Palestinian organizing.
Thank you for bringing the long arc and history of queers being in solidarity for Palestine. It’s so important that we understand that while this moment is so important for us to study, learn and act. It rests upon such a long arc and such a long history of organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Thank you for also speaking to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, thank you for speaking him into the space.
Thank you for both of you reminding us to follow the lead of queer Palestinians. What we’re trying to do with you all today with this teach-in is to really pull us together, circle around and invite us all to be following the lead of queer Palestinians so that we can take on this work as inextricably linked to our own liberation; to advance the work of undermining pinkwashing and Zionism as part and parcel to our queer liberation.
So thank you so much, Rabab. Our last speaker, Shivani Chanillo with Lavender Phoenix. Shivani (they/them) is a trans non- binary second generation Indian American organizer. Shout out to the baddy Indian organizers out here, myself included. Their experience of active solidarity with Palestinian folks came in 2017 through exchanges they facilitated between their high school students in Baltimore, and students at Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank.
These powerful exchanges stoked Shivani’s passion for developing young people as critical thinkers grounded in revolutionary values and politics. As a leadership development coordinator at Lavender Phoenix, an organization that Queer Crescent deeply loves and feels deeply supported by and in deep siblingship with.
Shivani continues this work by facilitating opportunities for trans and queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to practice values based organizing and contribute to intersectional movements. In particular, I just want to really say that we were so excited to invite Shivani and Lavender Phoenix in to our teach in as the final speaker, because Lavender Phoenix is one organization that really models, going back to the initial motivation of this teach in with our letter calling for a permanent ceasefire, calling on LGBTQ organizations and leaders to sign on to understanding pink washing and to support Palestinian liberation.
Lavender Phoenix is one such organization that has really demonstrated such values align solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And so I’m really excited to bring you in Shivani to close us out to talk about how queer people, queer organizations can really double down on our solidarity.
Shivani Chanillo: Thank you so much Shenaaz for that introduction and to Queer Crescent for organizing this event. I just want to take a moment and just, I feel so deeply moved by the sharing from Rabab and Ghadir in this workshop and just sitting with the lineage within all of us as we take up Palestine as a queer issue. We have generations of lessons and decades of work and such powerful leaders here in this space, but all across the world to follow, and I feel so grateful and so excited to be joining in on this work and sharing a little bit about what Lavender Phoenix is doing in this moment.
If you haven’t heard of Lavender Phoenix, we build trans non binary and queer Asian and Pacific Islander power here in the Bay Area. We are a base building organization training grassroots leaders to build intersectional movements. As we witness an escalation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine I can say that our base is firmly grounded in the understanding that Palestinian liberation is part of our struggle and our responsibility as trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people.
And so I want to start by sharing a little bit about what we’re doing in this moment, before sharing about how our members arrived to this point. Since October 7th we have shifted our work accordingly. We have dedicated time to mobilize our members and our broader communities to action. We have educated each other to stay politically grounded.
We have and will continue to support each other to process the grief of this moment and to remember hope, optimism, and commitment. In so many facets of our work, we are stepping into deeper leadership and responsibility to support our Palestinian comrades to win. And more tangibly across our six member led committees, this looks like offering healing support, coordinating our members who are trained in protest and digital security to support our comrades, coordinating contingents at in person and online actions, moving financial resources and funder attention to our Palestinian partners, and uplifting pro Palestinian messaging and calls to actions using our social media reach.
Responding to Palestine and challenging pinkwashing is not a shift in our priorities, but it’s actually a sharpening of our focus as an organization. We’ve organized our base over the years to recognize our interconnected struggles, and across our membership, we so deeply understand that the Palestinian struggle is our struggle.
And Palestinian futures are our futures. All of the actions we are taking right now to support Palestine, to challenge pinkwashing are the result of so many tests, experiments, and trials that have helped us deepen our political purpose and grow our power. Many of these experiments and trials that we’ve conducted over the years really informed our current theory of change. And this is really critical to how we’re organizing in this moment. Our emergent responses to sharpen contradictions in our world like we are witnessing with Palestine, are only possible because we organize within a consistent theory of change.
A key part of our theory of change and a key part of my role as Leadership Development coordinator, is that we are committed to developing leaders who are rooted in our values, in our history, in emotional intelligence, and compassion, because we know that is how our movement will be sustained and will be effective.
So we’re not just developing members and masses who care about single issues, we’re developing holistic, critical thinkers who care about solidarity with all oppressed people so that in moments like this, solidarity with Palestine is a natural choice in our larger fight for liberation. One of the really important ways we do this, and this workshop is a critical example, is we educate our base, our trans and queer API base, on our history.
We dig into how systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy impact all of us across our identities in the past and in the present. Right now, the tools and tactics being wielded by fascist leaders to criminalize and punish trans people here in the U. S. are rooted in the same white supremacist, colonial, and imperialist ideologies used to justify the dehumanization and murder of Palestinians, particularly trans and queer Palestinians. As part of our theory of change, we’ve also spent intentional time educating our base about revolutionary politics like abolition and healing justice, and developing our skills for safety, for healing and resource mobilization that are applicable in moments all across our movement.
We spent so much time since we implemented this theory of change in 2021 to build our base and grow our power so we can show up for our partners who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in this moment. We have spent so much time cultivating our skills and knowledges so we can support our movements beyond just trans liberation.
I want to end just by sharing a little bit of a story. A few weeks ago, our members participated in a direct action that asked many of them to step into higher risk than they had before. Prior to the action, we met to get grounded together. Folks shared their fears, but they also countered those fears with a really rooted sense of purpose.
So many of our members talked about how they wanted to look back on this moment and know that they and we as an organization did everything in our power to support Palestinian liberation. And they spoke about the sacred responsibility and duty we have in this moment to show up in solidarity. I feel so moved, even now, just thinking back to that moment and feel so much gratitude to our members for taking new risks, to the generations of leaders in our organization and our movement who have led us to this point, and I feel immense admiration and gratitude to the long lineage of Palestinian queer and trans resistance, and current day organizers who are guiding us right now.
For Lavender Phoenix, this moment is really helping us clarify our power, and for many of our members, this moment is helping them clarify their political purpose. The things all of our Palestinian siblings are fighting for, self determination, safety, healing, community, decolonization, these are the things that we as trans and queer API people here in the Bay Area so desire for ourselves as well.
We refuse to let our transness and our queerness be co opted for violence and displacement and genocide, and we know that our struggles and our futures are united, and we’re committed to fighting alongside our Palestinian comrades until we are all free. Thank you so much for letting me share. I’ll pass it back to Shenaaz.
Shenaaz Janmohamed: Shivani, thank you so much for bringing all of it. Lavender Phoenix, I just can’t swoon on y’all enough. You model that clarity of purpose and power and grace. There’s also such deep humility and grace to be in constant learning. As an emerging organization, an emerging queer organization, I just have to say Queer Crescent feels so deeply held by y’all and really inspired with the path that you are leading and inviting us all towards.
This piece around letting this moment sharpen the focus. It’s not a pivot. I think I’ve even said, we’re pivoting, we’re in rapid response. Part of our political principles as an organization is understanding anti Zionism as part and parcel of the white supremacist project.
And so this is not a pivot, it’s not a rapid response, but to your point, it’s a sharpening and it’s a double down of our commitments, principles and priorities. So thank you for naming that.
Cheryl Truong: And that’s the end of our show. Tonight’s show was a broadcast of the Resisting Pinkwashing teach-in co-led by Queer Crescent and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. It was moderated by Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent and featured poetry by Mx. Yaffa of MASGD, and guest speakers, Rabab Abdulhadie from the Palestinian feminist collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, and and Shivani Chanillo from AACRE Group Lavender Phoenix. Learn more about the incredible work of these incredible organizations and sign on to Queer Crescent’s cease fire campaign through the links in our show notes.
Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, Paige Chung, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar. Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Kiki Rivera, Swati Rayasam, Nate Tan, Hien Nguyen, Nikki Chan, and Cheryl Truong
Tonight’s show was produced by me, cheryl. Thanks to the team at KPFA for all of their support. And thank you for listening!