Pinkwashing: A Proud Gay Man’s Exposé |
As an open and proud gay man who has heavily donated to gay causes and been deeply involved in the fight for gay rights, I speak from personal experience. For me, being gay is an immutable characteristic, just like having brown hair or brown eyes—it’s simply part of who I am, not a choice or something to be hidden or differentiated as “other.”[1]
Pinkwashing refers to the accusation that Israel promotes its progressive stance on LGBTQ rights as a deliberate strategy to distract from its policies toward Palestinians. The term was popularized by Sarah Schulman through her influential November 22, 2011, op-ed in The New York Times titled “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’.”[2] Though some incorrectly attribute its coining to her, the term originated earlier in activist circles and was stolen from its prior use in breast cancer awareness critiques. I find it appalling that anti-Israel activists steal terms from cancer awareness—where it originally criticized companies exploiting pink ribbons for profit—to weaponize anything against Israel. This is a hate movement searching for reasons to spew hate. These are not valid arguments; they seek to accuse, invalidate, and invert anything as a tool to spew hate. They do not care if the arguments are legitimate; they just want a launching point to find accusations, with no value for their own credibility.
The hate movement against Israel systematically weaponizes every historical victimhood suffered by Jews, deliberately inverting Jewish trauma into accusations against the Jewish state. A primary example is the promotion of “Double Genocide” theory—a revisionist effort to equalize or prioritize other narratives to dilute the uniqueness of the Holocaust and cast Jews as the new oppressors.[3] This is a movement built on lies, where those who propagate them attempt to invalidate, negate, and invert the Jewish experience by stealing the language of liberation and survival.
Schulman’s accusation frames Israel’s LGBTQ protections—such as recognizing foreign same-sex marriages, allowing adoption, and providing asylum—as mere propaganda.[4] Yet, as an open and proud gay man, this ignores the reality that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where LGBTQ individuals can live openly without fear of state-sanctioned execution or torture.[5] Gay Palestinians often escape the West Bank or Gaza, where homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by death under Islamist rule, seeking refuge in Tel Aviv.[6] Israel’s milestones include legalizing same-sex activity in 1988, prohibiting employment discrimination in 1992, and equalizing citizenship applications in 2016.[7] In December 2023, Israel’s High Court unanimously ruled that same-sex couples may adopt children, marking a........