People Against Prisons Aotearoa

Pride reaction to Queers Against Israeli Apartheid 2014 Protest

*This is the first part of a two-part series of speeches delivered at No Pride in Prisons FUCK PRIDE rally on February 20, 2016.

At Auckland Pride 2014, the Embassy of Israel announced 3 days before the Pride Parade that they would be marching in the Auckland Pride Parade. They said in their press release: “Whilst BDS campaigners have fled in their minivan to Wellington to protest against the performance of the world renowned Dance Company Batsheva… the Embassy of Israel will be participating in Auckland’s annual Gay Parade.” It was clear to both the Embassy of Israel and BDS campaigners that their presence in the march was inherently political and contested. Many of us were enraged by this news and decided to do something about it. A group of us queers who recognised this as an attempt at pinkwashing quickly got together to organise as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, which is a global movement of queer-powered resistance against Israeli apartheid and pinkwashing.

Israeli pinkwashing is a cynical strategy to mask the colonial settler violence, genocide and apartheid against Palestinians by showcasing an image of the State of Israel as gay-friendly, progressive and caring about LGBT human rights. By allowing the Embassy of Israel to march in the Pride Parade, Auckland Pride Festival organisers were complicit in this violence.

As queers we could not allow this to happen without demonstrating our dissent. We decided to directly draw attention to their pinkwashing by jumping the barriers and marching in front of them with a banner saying “No rainbow big enough to cover the shame of Israeli apartheid” and a “Pinkwasher” performed satirical street theatre telling people to “Just think pink” to distract people from the 50 + laws that discriminate against Arabs and the illegal occupation of Palestine. We explained our intentions in a flyer that we distributed to the crowd. We had a mixture of cheers and boos from the people on the sidelines. One person jumped the barrier to join us and gave us hugs.

Security guards were on the scene quickly and herded us to leave. But as far as we were concerned, as queers we had every right to be there and challenge this shit. Pride security guards assaulted and carried people out. They tried to ram some of us through the barriers and were threatening to break people’s arms. Legally security guards are not allowed to touch you, it’s assault. So last year wasn’t the first time Auckland Pride security guards assaulted queer protestors at the pride parade.

Members of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid were eventually physically removed from the parade, but the disappointing thing was the reaction afterwards where members of the “rainbow community” thought pride should just be a celebration and not to mix it with global politics. But you know what, fuck that, we shouldn’t let our oppression get used to prop up other forms of injustice and it is never going to be apolitical.

We made a statement to GayNZ after the protest to explain our motivations:

It’s out of a desire to support Palestinian queers, and in the tradition of intersectional queer politics, that we decided to take a public stand against the Israeli Embassy’s float at Auckland Pride. We know that some of our fellow queers think that Pride is not the appropriate time or place to make a political statement about Middle East politics. The argument that we shouldn’t mix pride parades with global politics sounds an awful lot like the 1980s argument that anti-apartheid protesters shouldn’t mix rugby with politics. We were not the ones who chose to use Pride as a platform for discussing Israel. The Israeli Embassy are the ones who decided to hijack a gay pride event and exploit to uphold a progressive image of a state that subjects its Indigenous inhabitants to apartheid.

Our queer politics are rooted in the principle of ‘no one left behind’. We do not accept the advancement of gay men at the expense of lesbians, or of cis queers at the expense of trans people. We also cannot accept the advancement of any queers at the expense of Palestinians.

Since we took this action in 2014, the Israeli Embassy has not marched in another Auckland Pride Parade. Let’s keep it that way! Instead of giving the Israeli a platform for pinkwashing, the queer community should be answering Palestinian (including queer Palestinian organisations’) calls for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel until it recognises the right of return for Palestinian refugees, until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine lands and until Israel grants full equality to Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel.

As queer people, we should give a fuck about global and local politics because governments, and oppressive arms of the state are using our struggles and oppression to become more effective agents of social control and violence. The Israeli state, the Police, the military and Corrections officers can now “pink out” the violence they perpetrate and represent. These people as representatives of oppressive institutions have no fucking place in a Pride Parade.

Written by members of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Aotearoa

Further Links:

Anne Russell’s article about the protest: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1402/S00124/mixing-politics-with-art-queer-pride-and-israeli-apartheid.htm