Corporations decked in rainbows- It is that cringe time of the year courtesy of rainbow capitalism

+ Israel's wokewashing tactics to cover-up its colonial occupation of & apartheid in Palestine

Honestly, the real gift of pride month is all these corporations fighting over who can do the most cringe marketing. In the words of Chipotle, Hola fam “Hómo estás?”

Chipotle @ChipotleTweets

Homo Estas? Very well, thank you. #LoveWins

Products that are pink, green, decked in rainbows, with labels like ‘eco-friendly’ & ‘sustainable’ or progressive-sounding catch phrases, the Ukraine flag or any trending social cause, marketed with black & brown faces or ‘diverse’ bodies— all tactics deployed by corporations to get you to increase their profits so their rich CEOs & execs can bathe in more luxury. Today- we dive into the funny & yet very informative depths of cringe capitalism by observing how these assholes tell on themselves.

Before when the struggle for Queer & Trans liberation was not as mainstream, rainbow capitalism was absent & didn’t spike until the 1990s when economically privileged (mostly white) LGBTQ+ folks in western (colonial) countries became an increasingly “bankable” consumer base with more disposable income (this privilege is not extended to the poorest, most marginalized Queer or Trans folks). This is predictably how all capitalism works- it makes any injustice profitable. Corporations & the state exploit us & will superficially SAY anything to gain our support while never DOING anything to support us. We cannot commodify & consume our way to Queer liberation.

Corporations use the optics, lingo & jargon of political movements to depoliticize & sterilize them. Diversity is an illusion of progress that is used to pacify people & distract them from using tactics that weaken the empire. With the rising popularity of rainbow capitalism, oppressive nation states (like the U.S. & Israel) began to use queer marketing strategies to improve their public image. The global hegemonic alliance of the wealthy & elite running nation-states share resources & tactics of oppression to maintain their power. If they’re aligned, we should probably get out shit together and build solidarity.

I saw this on the official U.S. Marines IG & couldn’t help myself

- How Israel brands itself as a ‘gay haven’ to hide its violent military occupation of & apartheid in Palestine

Israel launched a successful 2005 woke-washing campaign after years of guidance from U.S. corporations. It re-branded the country’s image as a ‘beacon of freedom & democracy’ which garnered public support to use U.S. taxpayer dollars to send military aid for Israel’s occupation of & apartheid in Palestine.

What is Pinkwashing? It’s a branding tactic deployed by the Israeli government and its allies to use a seemingly progressive stance on Queer & Trans rights in Israel to detract and deflect attention from its ongoing settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing in historic Palestine. It is a form of identity politics that relies on anti-Arab racism and islamophobia to paint the SWANA region (also known as Middle East) as ‘savage, backward, primitive’ in contrast to white, colonial countries which are deemed ‘superior, modern, free’ while being the world’s most brutal, oppressive, imperial empires. It paints Arabs and Muslims as “terrorists” in order to dehumanize them and build a case for imperialist invasions and destruction of their communities. In addition, it erases Queer Palestinians from the picture completely or attempts to separate their liberation from the fight for a free Palestine.

For example, the US has positioned itself as a global defender of LGBTQ rights & a savior of Muslim women who it positions as weak, oppressed objects that need saving with no agency of their own— all to advance its imperial/ economic/ geopolitical interests like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq to monopolize oil.

I want to take a moment to share resources incredible, eye-opening, informative resources in case you want to learn more about the struggle for Palestinian liberation in addition to pinkwashing & understand your critical role in pushing for a free Palestine because whether all of us are complicit in its occupation. I’ll list a few below and more at the very end of the newsletter.

• Palestine 101: Something to get you started

• Here is a resource that breaks down different forms of wokewashing:

  • Redwashing: Co-optation of socialist, leftist movements to position the zionist state of Israel as a "progressive” cause. As the resource states:

  “Zionists who consider themselves leftist or at least progressive (deemed by Palestinians as  “Progressive Except for Palestine”, or PEPs) have failed to reckon with how their professed ideology and the state they support lies in complete contradiction to any liberatory ideals. The purpose of this article then is to critique the ways in which redwashing, or the painting of the State of Israel and Zionism in practice, past or present, as leftist or progressive obscures the disastrous effects of Zionism on the indigenous Palestinian population. Zionist settler-colonialism, as with all forms of settler-colonialism, is and always will be incompatible with socialism.”

  • Greenwashing: Israel’s deceptive portrayal as a leader in the environmental justice movement

  • Bluewashing: Israel using humanitarianism to cover up its trail

  “He kills the victim and then walks in his funeral”

  This is an Arabic proverb that conveys how those who cause the most harm will still try to save face afterwards. It’s a fitting one to describe Israel’s behavior; despite the death and destruction it has caused throughout Palestine and most recently in Lebanon and Syria, its propaganda efforts depicting itself as an altruistic savior through humanitarian aid are nothing short of relentless. The use of humanitarian aid campaigns to cover for crimes against humanity that themselves necessitate humanitarian aid is what has become known as bluewashing, and it is a publicity strategy that Israel has become increasingly fond of.

  • Purplewashing: Israel’s depiction as a “feminist” beacon

  These strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity.  The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.

• Faithwashing: This quote from the resource sums it up really well-

  Conflict in the Middle East is consistently treated as routine, even banal, and ultimately rooted in religious disagreement; political actors and their causes are deemed to be hashing out a cultural and religious “clash of civilizations”  with the West, completely obfuscating any economic or political grievances. Perhaps nowhere else is this as clear as in the discourse surrounding the barely 100 year old Zionist colonization of Palestine, which is depicted as a fight between Muslims and Jews that is as old as time and thus, intractable and hopelessly complicated. Zionism and Judaism are erroneously and dangerously conflated, Christian and other non-Muslim Palestinians are either ignored or their issues cynically exploited, especially by Christian Zionists whose blind dedication to Israel has only deepened its oppressive hold over all Palestinians. Most recently, there has been a growing trend suggesting that Muslims everywhere in the world are deemed to have a stake equal to any Palestinian. Religion was and is used as a pretext for the oppression of Palestinians, and so interfaith dialogue is presented as the long lost “key to the conflict”. All this does is obscure the real issues at hand that this justification helps perpetuate: settler-colonialism, imperialism, land rights, sovereignty over natural resources, and Palestinians’ self-determination; this obscuration is what has become known as faithwashing.

• Article: Pinkwashing: Israel’s International Strategy and Internal Agenda by Ghadir Shafie, a Queer Palestinian activist

• Angela Davis video on the intersections of Black & Palestinian liberation. Also, if you haven’t read her book “Freedom is a constant struggle”, definitely do.

• Article: How Israel uses pinkwashing to position itself as a “gay paradise”

• Article: “Why Palestine is a Queer and Feminist issue” by Ashley Bohrer, the founder of Jews for Justice in Palestine

• A guide & documented history of all pinkwashing tactics deployed by Israel

• Lecture "Homonationalism Gone Viral: Discipline, Control, and the Affective Politics of Sensation" by Jasbir Puar author of “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”

• Article: “Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents” on how efforts to counter pinkwashing from the Global North often only focus on Queer rights in a vacuum separate from colonialism and capitalism

• The Jewish Voice for Peace pinkwashing resource collection

Stay weird, friends. In solidarity,

Ayesha.