Homo Zion
How pinkwashing erases colonial history
Hussein Omar 
The extermination of the people of Palestine, accelerated once again after October 7, 2023, has produced some of the twenty-first century’s most chilling images. Amid this photographic embarrassment of obscenities, however, one stands out: an Israeli soldier, Yoav Atzmoni, holding a rainbow flag inscribed with “In the Name of Love” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, amid the debris of bombed out homes. The image was captioned:
“The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza. Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.”
Atzmoni later confirmed that he was inspired to scrawl the lyrics of a favorite U2 song on the flag, which his partner had sent him to take into the battlefield, when he found himself surrounded by the Muslim bismillah (“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate”) in Gaza.[1] The Arabic word Allah sounded to Atzmoni (an Arabic speaker) like the Hebrew Ahav. He replaced that particularly forbidding name that Muslims give their God with a putatively universal (and ironically, Pauline) signifier: love. Atzmoni claimed his message was one of peace and hope to the people he and his fellow combatants claimed to be freeing from the evil, theocratic rule of Hamas.
In the hundreds and thousands of comments that followed the image posted by @Israel, an official social media account of the state, critics derided the photo as the latest example of pinkwashing—the name now given to the cynical PR campaign adopted by the Israeli state since 2005 to represent the country as a queer haven. Initially launched to promote Tel Aviv Pride, pinkwashing—which cost the state ninety million dollars in PR costs in 2010 alone—has become a central arm of Israeli hasbara. Many of the photo’s critics correctly pointed out that gay marriage isn’t permitted in Israel. Others recalled how Avi Maoz—Knesset representative of the far-right Noam party as well as deputy minister in charge of “Jewish Identity”—has repeatedly sought to ban Jerusalem Pride and impose legal regulations that would reassert the status of the conjugal, heteronormative family. Some pointed out that Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (a self, if sarcastically, identified “fascist homophobe”) has promoted the stoning of gay, trans, and gender non-conforming people. Additionally, some recalled how Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, used to organize anti-Pride “beast parades.” They allege that Israel’s leadership is profoundly homophobic at home even as it pretends to be homophilic abroad. For liberal Zionists, Atzmoni’s photo was proof of Israeli society’s inherent tolerance, which had been endangered by Netanyahu’s right-wing, populist, and fanatical rule.
And yet, while it is undoubtedly true that the photo appears hypocritical given the views of Israel’s political leadership, understanding the image’s function requires us to move beyond such descriptively accurate, if politically toothless, accusations. Hypocrisy might help us understand how the photo was meant to appeal to metropolitan White Gays in places like New York and Berlin, but it does not address who else it was intended to convince: an Israeli, Jewish fundamentalist political elite that has become an increasingly embarrassing liability to those who have invested, both figuratively and literally, in “pinkwashing Israel.” Atzmoni’s insistence on appearing as a gay man in combat speaks to fissures within Israeli society that date back to its foundation. As Daniel Boyarin has convincingly argued, Zionism was a colonialist project intended not to uplift the Arab populations it would come to rule over and displace, but instead to uplift the putatively backward “Eastern Jews” (Ostjuden). In this regard the “Herzlian Zionism,” of which Atzmoni was an embodiment, had a “civilizing mission, first and foremost directed by Jews at other Jews.” The only natives to whom Herzl imagined directing his civilizing mission were those “Hottentot Ostjuden, whom . . . were read by him as constituting another race.” As such, we might understand “pinkwashing” as a project that seeks to uplift the backward Jewish homophobes to the level of their cosmopolitan “Westernized” elites, who sustain their material and affective links to the metropolitan cores of the United States. Atzmoni’s triumphant photo-op likewise signals to the backward fundamentalists in government that he imagined himself to be uplifting the state to a universal, progressive standard for himself and his secular allies.
“We might understand “pinkwashing” as a project that seeks to uplift the backward Jewish homophobes to the level of their cosmopolitan “Westernized” elites, who sustain their material and affective links to the metropolitan cores of the United States.”
Indeed, regardless of Atzmoni’s actual intention—whether naive or dishonest—toward the people he was ostensibly liberating, it is worth taking him at his word, not least because the photo communicates developments that are historically novel and therefore significant. The accusations of hypocrisy seem to miss something else that is important: the inopportune photo reflects, and in fact inscribes, a newly emergent sense of Israel’s world historical mission. This mission was no longer about the salvation of a particular tribe or set of tribes, the Jews, but about salvaging the universal project of civilization itself. As Israel’s president Isaac Herzog reiterated a few weeks later, “[t]his war . . . is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization.” But how did “gay rights” become the avatar of such universality? How did sexual freedom come to appear as the animating force and desired object of violently birthing the universal? Saving brown women from brown men has long animated such imperial misadventures, but when did the brown homosexual become central to such a project? If, as Uday Mehta argued long ago, universality defined, and was at the core of, every imperial liberal mission from the British colonization of Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the War on Terror at the beginning of the twenty-first, the fixation on “gay rights” as the animating force behind such a project was itself something relatively new.[2]
Atzmoni suggests—by substituting the word particularist term Allah for a universal love—that Palestinians, and especially Palestinian Muslims, harbor the same hatred for homosexuals that he sees within his own society, in an all too predictable instantiation of projective fantasy. He imagines the deplorable and undesirable homophobic “backwardness” of Israeli religious society to also dwell within that society’s perceived enemies, the Palestinians. In a sleight of hand that both acknowledges and mirrors the ethno-religious foundations of the Jewish state, Palestinian “backwardness” is displaced onto “Islam” and “Muslims.” And yet, anti-sodomy laws in Palestine did not originate within Islam or from the efforts of Muslim legislators; instead, they were imposed by prudish British colonial officials who imported Victorian anti-sodomy ideas wholesale from the Raj in India. Ironically, those British officials imagined they were overriding a “national institution” and forcefully yanking Palestine backward into the purview of a universally liberal civilization. Thus, by tethering homophobia to Islam, Atzmoni, like many other pinkwashers, obscures the British origins of anti-sodomy regulations, perhaps even unknowingly. Instead, they imagine homophobic laws as wholesale products of the religious character of Muslims, against whom Israelis increasingly define themselves—even though these very laws were repealed in much of Palestine in 1951, over thirty-five years before they were repealed in Israel proper in 1988.
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How then did sodomy go from being the symbol of backwardness nearly a hundred years ago to becoming a symbol of progress? How did sodomy get reinscribed as a symbol of freedom when it had originally been held up as a symbol of repression? How can we make sense of this reversal—from imperialist crusaders against sodomy to genocidal crusaders for it—of roles?
Roughly a century ago, British imperial officials, installed to govern the newly established League of Nations mandate of Palestine, sought not to liberate the native sodomites but instead to stamp out their backward practices. They debated the necessity of imposing such measures from the start of the mandate even if it would take them a full decade and a half to impose anti-sodomy laws in 1936, largely imported from the Indian Penal Code of 1861. In a detailed memorandum written in May of 1925, Sir Gerald Leslie Makins Clauson, a civil servant at the Colonial Office and a Turkish philologist, expressed concerns about amending the Ottoman Penal Code regarding matters of sexual (mis)conduct. He wrote:
“It is more for the High commissioner than for us to say whether sodomy is such a national institution that it must be permitted to continue but personally I should have thought that the proper course was to make it illegal & gradually to wean the population to less unnatural practices. If this step is considered too drastic then clearly what for the want of a better word may be described as ‘male brothels’ must be subject to the same disabilities as the ordinary variety, or the disgruntled brothel keepers will go into a still more unsavoury line of business.
Incidentally bestiality is not even touched upon, though in certain classes of Moslem society (particularly the nomadic tribes) it is almost as much a national institution as sodomy. It may have been left out, because it would be practically impossible to suppress it. This is probably the case.”
In British Mandatory Palestine, it was sodomy (and not its suppression) that was seen as the national prerogative of Palestinians. By contrast, the imperial officials that sought to stamp it out saw their mission as being driven by the desire to reform Muslim sexual mores toward what they called “ordinary copulation.” Bringing Palestine into the purview of world civilization would require the transcendence of the particular practices of locals and the adoption of the universally acceptable ones of “ordinary copulation.”
But such reforms were tentative. It took a decade and a half to enforce such legislation, which reflects the extreme caution with which British officials approached tampering with institutions perceived to be sanctioned by religious law or custom. Convictions about the religious intransigency of Muslim subjects had developed over several decades of occupation in Egypt, where Lord Cromer had reasoned that the longevity of British rule could be guaranteed so long as the occupation didn’t interfere with local religious legislation, authority, and institutions. Avoiding such interference, it was hoped, would permit imperial officials to stamp out any resistance to their rule, as they believed the natives were primarily concerned with religion, not politics.
And yet, ironically enough, it was against the stirrings of Palestinian disquiet in 1936, which by the summer of the year would turn into a full-blown mass uprising, that anti-sodomy laws were instituted after a decade and a half of hesitation. That it would take the new forms of sociability instituted by a brewing anti-colonial revolution to bring in such regulations evinces Foucault’s counterintuitive insight: “what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex acts themselves... It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate.” Amid the threat of an anti-colonial revolution, British officials couldn’t tolerate sodomy—an avatar of a world of sociability that was as alien as it was disgusting and, thus, banned.
“Amid the threat of an anti-colonial revolution, British officials couldn’t tolerate sodomy—an avatar of a world of sociability that was as alien as it was disgusting and, thus, banned.”
The 1936 Arab revolt would prompt the design, testing, and implementation of some of the most violent measures hitherto used in colonial territories. Human shields, collective punishment, and the use of concentration camps were imported as counterinsurgency techniques from elsewhere in the British Empire and perfected during the three years of the Arab revolt. This period set the blueprint for Palestinian resistance—a combination of boycott and armed struggle—for decades to come. These counterinsurgency techniques would be inherited by the Zionist state that would come to the replace the British Mandate, and both the use of human shields and collective punishment would be liberally deployed in moments of Palestinian mass mobilization. Although Israeli military courts would rule against the use of such measures, they came to be widely used during the Second Intifada. By contrast, neither Human Rights Watch nor Amnesty International found evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Palestinians in Gaza or elsewhere have made use of such methods. Like the homophobia imagined to be native to the Palestinian enemy, the use of “human shields” is taken to be evidence of the low value the barbaric insurgents place on their “women and children.” As the vernacular Freudian wisdom of present-day activists holds, every accusation is a confession.[3]
In 1936, as in 2024, the desire to reshape Palestinians’ sexual practices and proclivities seems tethered to moments of spectacular violence—unprecedented in their own contexts. One is struck by the abundance of masochistic and, in some cases, necrophiliac fantasies and practices related to genitals and genitality: from the attested practice of extracting sperm from the testicular tissue of Zionist militants killed in combat to be cryogenically stored in hospitals, to the demand made by the Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi that the foreskins of Hamas fighters be removed (despite the fact that all adult Muslims are circumcised) as revenge—just as David was said to have done to the Philistines.
It appears that far from being an animating force, the reform of natives’ sexual proclivities—whether through anti-sodomy regulations or forcing them to raise rainbow flags above their demolished homes—is actually just a deceptive object. It doesn’t set violence into motion but acts as a fantasy for the possibility of its satisfaction. As the genocidal violence prompted by October 7 makes clear, this imperialist violence—even that which sets out to reform natives’ sexual practices—cannot be understood through the usual rational models of strategy or even political economy alone. It has a libidinal impetus that is unquenchable and insatiable. It can never be satisfied. Like the mirage, a metaphor beloved by Palestine’s many generations of colonizers, it fades from view the closer we approach it.
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Despite the fact that such histories belie a very different narrative from the one Israel and its supporters like to tell, this corrective to the overwhelming queer identification with Israel seems to change very little. To understand why that should be, one needs to turn to the era of the AIDS crisis when a special model of securitization was developed by bourgeois, cis, white metropolitan in the United States at least two decades prior to the adoption of pinkwashing as official state policy by Israel. In the decades of the AIDS crisis, both a proprietary relationship to the history of gay liberation was established by the United States, as was a model of militarized self-protection against the underclasses. This was despite the abundantly clear fact that it was state violence, not “gay bashing,” that was the primary culprit for the destruction of queer lives.
The establishment of a canonical narrative about the story of gay liberation in that country—with an attendant fetishization of ‘gay havens’ like post-Stonewall New York and San Francisco—cemented in the global imaginary an essential association between gay liberatory politics and American history as exceptional. With time “gay rights” would come to be seen as a uniquely American civilizational attainment—reiterated by the fact that Pride is celebrated in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, for example—and by the 2000s, adopted into American imperial politics. A particular story of American (white and bourgeois) gay liberation would be exported as a universal yardstick by which all other histories, and particularly Third World histories, were to be compared and mostly found deficient, and therefore judged “backward.” No longer would the Muslim woman be the only subject worth saving; now, too, the Muslim homosexual would emerge as a new imaginary subject upon which imperial fantasies of transformation would be inscribed.
This explains why the United States would come to instrumentalize its particular history of gay liberation and uphold it as a measure against which the rest of the world ought to be compared. However, it does not explain why Israel would also come to fall within the purview of that global civilizational attainment. To understand how the claim to Israel’s unique status would find plausibility in the American and Western European metropolitan imaginary, one must turn to the writings of one of ACT-UP’s infamous founding members, Larry Kramer, who insisted that Zionism could, and should, be a model for queer liberation. For Kramer, as for many that follow in his intellectual wake—including transphobes, for whom Zionism represents a bastion against fluidity and ambiguity—Israel was a model of permanent security. It represented a fantasy that borders, real and metaphorical, could be secured and that a people on the verge of annihilation—whether Jews fleeing European antisemitism or people with AIDS embattled by the American state—must and could not just take arms but create states for themselves alone.
The fantasy of Israel as a homosexual haven drew on earlier intellectual queer engagement with Zionism dating back to the height of the AIDS crisis, when many argued that the state’s neglect of gay men diagnosed with HIV resembled the Nazi Holocaust. Most poignantly, ACT-UP activists chose as their symbol the pink triangle (albeit inverted) to recall the badge that gay men were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. To Larry Kramer—the righteously rageful activist, novelist, and playwright—the state’s decision to let gay men die on an unprecedented scale was reminiscent of, and best captured by the metaphor of, the Shoah. Both, he would argue, stemmed from deeply felt and more or less equivalent hatreds: antisemitism and homophobia. The latter, however, was a hatred of an unusual kind and was characterized by a “horrible singularity”— the hatred of parents for their homosexual children. “Can Jews,” he writes, “imagine being hated by their parents for their Jewishness?” In his 1989, Reports from the Holocaust, Kramer used the language of “genocide” and “gas chambers” to describe the American state’s concerted effort “to completely eliminate and destroy us.”
From Kramer’s perspective, antisemitism wasn’t just a metaphor for homophobia but had, in fact, inadvertently produced the latter. He argued that it was antisemitism’s victims who formally instituted homophobia in the United States. Jewish-European psychoanalysts (whom he called “Freud’s children”), fleeing their homelands from 1930 onward, were responsible for perverting Freud’s doctrine in America by developing a medicalized, institutionalized, and scientistic homophobia. These refugees needed “scapegoats of their own,” and as a result of their “insecurities forged a great need to prove to the New World that they would fit completely.” They did so by articulating, and subsequently instituting, the notion of “homosexuality-as-illness.” “How truly perverse,” Kramer writes of that generation of psychoanalysts, that “[t]he persecuted turned into persecutors.” Although the logic of Kramer’s critique— of the persecuted turning into persecutors—appears to presage many present-day critiques of Zionism, such as that developed by Daniel Boyarin, it led Kramer to, instead, defend the Jewish ethnonationalist project.
For Kramer, Zionism wasn’t a failure to be rejected, but rather one that queer activists ought to emulate. Kramer’s advocacy of a gay Zionism emerged out of three observations: First, the adoption of macho dress and behaviors had failed to inure gay men to their homophobic, heterosexual critics. Second, gay men were to be blamed for their own suffering because they had failed to organize politically, just as Hannah Arendt had laid blame, in his reading, on Jews for their political quietism across two thousand years of persecution. Lastly, because the “Gays’ Israel,” which is what he called San Francisco, was no longer a place where homosexual men had any political power, having attained it for a brief window in the 1970s,[4] Kramer thus concluded that nothing short of “an AIDS terrorist army, like the Irgun which led to Israel” would save American gays from the designs to destroy them. The solution to a gay Holocaust could only be a gay Zionism.
As Christina Hanhardt argues, Kramer’s fantasies of making a gay Zion were indeed realized on American soil as upper middle-class gay publics in the 1980s began to identify “gay bashing” as the primary source of their suffering. “Gay bashing” would replace police violence, poverty, incarceration, and homelessness as an object of activism as propertied, white, and cisgendered queers began to demand state protection, and to direct state violence against those who did not hold the very same privileges. As Patrick Dedauw argues, particular ways of “framing the vulnerability and protection of queer and trans people has a profound symmetry with Zionist ideology.” And it is no coincidence that the two organizations that queer people turned to in order to pass hate crime legislation were the Anti-Defamation League and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Anti-Violence Project. The former in particular, as Emmaia Gelman has argued, is a Zionist advocacy organization that masquerades as one protecting Jews from antisemitism. Right at the moment when it was being marshaled to reify “gay bashing” as the primary danger to queer Americans, the ADL made efforts to quash opposition to the first Gulf War on college campuses, maintaining that the latter amounted to antisemitism. Those charges were primarily directed at students of color—at “political correctness,” “ethnic studies,” and “diversity”—which was fully in line with ADL’s earlier history: it had organized a campaign against the National Education Association’s claim that the KKK wasn’t an aberration from America’s structural racism problem but a manifestation of it. In striking a Faustian pact with the ADL to institutionalize “gay bashing” as a hate crime, Queer Americans also codified a particular (racist) vision of American exceptionalism which would be marshaled into the promotion of American imperial interests.
Bourgeois gay and lesbian Americans imagined themselves as a minority population whose only hope of being kept safe from external violence was to be found in putatively sovereign territories on land cleansed of its original inhabitants—now cast as a dangerous menace—by militarized, state-backed force. But the notion of a national “safe space”, one of permanent security, then as now, is an illusion, and is even more so when it is predicated on the destruction and the dispossession of others—occupation and settlement in the case of Israel, gentrification and the making of “gayborhoods” in metropolitan capitals. Spaces, for queer people or anyone else, can never be safe without justice, nor is their dream of “security” possible to realize without restitution.
“By regarding pinkwashing as cynical PR stunt, these efforts persistently ignore the psychic identification that queers both in and out of Israel feel with its model of securitization.”
As such, efforts to refute Zionism’s claims about itself as a queer haven have only been very marginally successful. By regarding pinkwashing as cynical PR stunt, these efforts persistently ignore the psychic identification that queers both in and out of Israel feel with its model of securitization. To be clear, such failures to overturn pinkwashing’s claims persist regardless of whether they undertake the proctological task of disputing the basic historical “truths” of Israeli attitudes to homosexuality or whether they engage in logical disputation. This latter mode, typically articulated in the subjunctive mood, holds that even if Palestinians don’t have the same gay rights we do, we still shouldn’t endorse their genocide. This approach is especially troubling. It keeps Palestine shrouded in mystery, appearing to conceal some secret of which anti-Zionists are ashamed: that it is indeed a brutish place, but we shouldn’t bomb it regardless.
Without taking seriously the fact that bourgeois, white, cis metropolitan queer people find in Israel a compelling model for their own fantasies of security, we are in no position to make sense of why queer people have been quick to embrace Israeli propaganda, despite the abundance of evidence, and repeated insistence of anti-Zionist activists, that the propaganda is just that. Concurrently, we must come to terms with how this process of identification made possible the formulation of queer freedom in a program of rights (legally articulated, encoded, and protected) as an archetype to which all “civilized” societies should conform, and the yardstick against which their civilizational attainments must be measured.
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It is precisely this fantasy that Atzmoni perpetuated with his photographic palimpsest of Zionism’s unrealized dreams, inscribed atop the rubble of destroyed Palestinian lives, homes, schools, and hospitals. This document of barbarism, disguised as civilization, reminds us that the violence that Atzmoni’s seemingly innocent act appeared to authorize cannot be understood using conventional political scientistic models of strategy or of political economy. The violence committed “in the name of love”—whether it claims to seek the destruction of Hamas or the genuine reform of the natives’ sexual proclivities—is animated by an impossible desire to destroy something that cannot be destroyed. How else can we explain, crucially without explaining away, this seemingly quixotic violence which seems to exceed interest or utility?
Perhaps sexuality is indeed central to its functioning, but not in the ways that Atzmoni or those who cheered him on could understand. If, as Paolo Freire famously stated, ‘[t]he oppressed find in the oppressors their model of manhood,’ then the particular pattern of Zionist violence might find legibility in that of Nazi Germany. In the same way that the specter of German defeat in the First World War haunted the Second, so, too, does the Nakba enact a vindication of the near extermination of Europe’s Jewish populations. The victims of each sought to overcome a prior moment of defeat by identifying with their vanquishers.
As Zionist incursions on Gaza intensified from October 9, 2023, onward, I couldn’t stop thinking about the work of Klaus Theweleit, the German sociologist and cultural critic with ideological affinities to the post-1968 “New German Left.” In his magisterial Male Fantasies, Theweleit sought to understand proto-Nazi and Nazi violence through an enormous, vernacular corpus of dreams, diaries, and other fragmentary forms of writing by the Freikorps generation, out of which the Nazi project grew. Dissatisfied with histories that treated Nazism as a purely ideological phenomenon—with a focus on where ideas came from, but not necessarily on how they become plausible and why they became believable to vast numbers of “ordinary Germans”—Theweleit sought to excavate the deep psychic formations that led people (mostly men) to target others whom they suspected or believed to be “less than male”: women, homosexuals, Jews, and communists predominantly.
Drawing on the work of Austrian pediatrician and psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler, Theweleit concluded that the Freikorps generation were pathologically undeveloped people with unordered and unbordered bodies, who had failed, in childhood, to develop the erotic defenses necessary to keep external dangers at bay. The result of this development, or lack thereof, is a kind of projective fantasy or hallucination, in which one’s own perception of one’s body as an undifferentiated mass and mess is projected onto outsiders who might, for whatever reason, effect its final dissolution. For such disturbed beings (whom Theweleit terms the “devivified” and “undifferentiated”) violence is enacted preemptively on those perceived as threats. This violence feels liberating to the perpetrators, who expel their own fear of dissolution by causing it to happen in others—thereby presumably asserting a measure of control.
But why do some people develop such pathologies in the first place? And why did this pathology come to affect an entire generation of German men? Theweleit argues that these defective subjects become this way as a result of severe punishment in childhood. The process of toilet training, in particular, compels the child to renounce pleasure in its own periphery. Toilet training forces them to denounce liquid subjects and instills guilty feelings when they fail to do so. In this way, these little boys are “not yet fully born.” They never enter into certain stages of object relations or the Oedipus complex. They fail to develop a bodily ego, nor do they develop a sense of boundaries. They are only able to gain a sense of self— autonomous, boundaried, and whole—by preemptively killing the enemy that threatens to dissolve them. Their enemies are often associated with liquids—mud, water, semen, urine, spit, blood, sweat. Their own perceived leakiness threatens to dissolve the boundaries of the not-yet-born men, who begin to see parallels between their unbordered bodies and the unbordered nation itself; control of the latter serves as a fantasy for depathologizing the former. Fascism, Theweleit concludes, isn’t best understood as an ideology but instead as the collective acts of violence through which the-not-yet men attempt to stop up their leaking bodies.
Running through Theweleit’s work is an unresolved tension: on the one hand, his belief that his subjects weren’t essentially exceptional (or “psychotic” as he calls it) and, on the other, the opposite impulse to reject any universalizing claims to the aggressive nature of the men he wrote about. He was cautious to argue that reducing the origins of Nazi violence to some universal aggressivity was merely an exculpatory exercise that sought to normalize and render unexceptional their violence. To that end, he noted how Hermann Göring had sought to do exactly that when, from his prison cell at Nüremberg in 1946, he told the American psychologist G. M. Gilbert that “there is a curse on humanity. It is dominated by the hunger for power and the pleasure of aggression.”
Theweleit’s resolved his conflicting political impulses—between wanting to render the Freikorps’ aggressions exceptional and wanting to render them universal—by locating the pathologies of German genocidal culture in the troubled and troubling forms of childrearing he described. Despite the precautions he took to emphasize that his subjects weren’t, in fact, psychotic, Male Fantasies ultimately leans toward exceptionalizing the German cultural milieu out of which the book, as well as its subjects, emerged.
While this argument may have appeared convincing in the 1970s, especially among supposedly repentant children of Nazis when the book first appeared, after October 7, it is significantly less so. The exceptionalizing impulse to which Theweleit yields now appears not just inaccurate but dangerous. The German state deploys its putative expertise, with respect to its enactment of the paradigmatic genocide, to prohibit those that seek to prevent another. In this regard, Theweleit’s magnum opus now appears as yet another of the many texts that render the Holocaust exceptional, portraying it as the worst of all possible crimes. As Dirk Moses has forcefully argued, this perspective ensures that the Holocaust overshadows both prior and subsequent instances of genocidal violence. By focusing on the Holocaust’s most particular features, a yardstick was established that makes it increasingly difficult not just to identify but to take seriously repetitive patterns of exterminatory violence. And yet, both the response to October 7th and the longer history of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, both prior to and subsequent to the Holocaust, reveal that genocidal projects are far from exceptional but instead a constitutive part of the nationstate system in modernity.
Leo Bersani took pains to emphasize that the imbrication between sexuality and violence is at the heart of the constitution of every subject, regardless of where they were reared or how. It is simply a feature of the alienation any individual experiences as they enter culture or society. For Bersani, violence is constitutional, normative, and “normal” to all humans. The impulse to imperial violence isn’t an aberration, but instead an endemic and usual feature of socialization. It is inherent in all subjects. If, for Theweleit, violence allows men to feel “whole,” for Bersani, the attraction of violence is determined precisely by the opposite potentiality—it allows men to experience the egoic shattering that they all (unconsciously) desire. For Theweleit, violence allowed men to preemptively gain control over the borders of the self that they felt were under constant threat of dissolution, whereas for Bersani enacting violence was the primary means by which men could experience shattering relief from the stranglehold that the ego held over the psyche. For Theweleit, the sadism of fascistic violence is thrilling precisely because it allows the agents of it to experience the illusion of being sovereign, whereas for Bersani the sadistic desire to destroy others is attractive precisely because it promises to dethrone the sovereignty of the ego. If, for Theweleit, violence is the tool through which the pathologically ‘not-yet-fully-born’ experience a sense of feeling whole for the first time, for Bersani, violence is a tool of liberation from the illusions of wholeness that constrict us.
Bersani maintained, therefore, that the impulses toward genocidal violence aren’t to be located in a particular generation of German men, but instead could be activated within any human subject. Through an implied critique of thinkers like Theweleit, Bersani argues that the Freudian discovery of the death drive transforms our understanding of human violence from one that is exclusively directed at destroying others, to one that is instead directed primarily at destroying ourselves. Sadism is thus always masochism—and it’s in the destruction of self that the subject experiences some form of liberation. Perhaps I am attracted to Bersani’s universalist version because it seems to offer a sense of solace: Zionism will destroy itself at precisely the moments when it appears most powerful.
“It is incumbent upon queer people who dream of Palestine’s liberation to excavate not just their own histories and the choices they made but have now forgotten, and thereby critique their own psychic investments in that project.”
Even as Zionism may contain within it the kernel of an unconscious desire for its own dismantling, it is incumbent upon queer people who dream of Palestine’s liberation to excavate not just their own histories and the choices they made but have now forgotten, and thereby critique their own psychic investments in that project. We must redirect our efforts from attempting to counter pinkwashing at the level of fielding alternative facts, and instead ask: what are the questions to which “pinkwashing” seems to provide an answer? It is also incumbent upon us to remember the many who stood against the pact that we made in exchange for militarized state protection.
Although they have been drowned out by Larry Kramer’s often loud and overbearing voice, many queer people of Kramer’s era didn’t identify with the muscular forms of power, machismo, and sovereignty that seemed to underpin Zionist violence. Instead, they were inspired by those whom Zionism rejected, left out, and rendered dispensable—the Palestinian “victims of victims,” in Said’s memorable phrase. Julius Eastman, the Black composer, pianist, and performance artist, also hinted at the necessity of armed struggle as a path to gay liberation but took inspiration from decidedly anti-Zionist forces. In his famous “Gay Guerilla,” he declaimed, “I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match with ‘Afghani’ Guerrillas or ‘PLO’ Guerrillas, but let us hope in the future that they might.” Jean Genet, who spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating on behalf of the Black Panthers and Palestinian Fedayeen in Jordanian refugee camps, was similarly clearsighted about the affinities he saw between the heroically queer and the heroically dispossessed Palestinians. For Genet, the transsexual was heroic for they are “ready to brave scandal and see it through till’ they die. If they don’t die however these heroic transsexuals carry ‘a lighted candle around on his head for the rest of his life, night and day. . . . A lot of fedayeen are heroes.” A year after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, the Cuban visual artist Félix González-Torres insisted on drawing parallels between People With AIDS (PWAs) and the Palestinian people, whose flag was banned in Israel after the 1967 war. Responding to the 1980 ban on artwork that used the colors of the Palestinian flag in Israel, which had led to the arrest of a number of Palestinian artists, González-Torres created an artwork composed of four monochrome panels— green, red, black, and white— to emphasize affinities between the PWAs (to whom the work was dedicated) who “are discriminated against for being HIV positive” and those whose flag was forbidden “by the Israeli army in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
In this way, when Zionist leadership mocks Palestinians as “human animals” and mocks queer people via the staging of “beast parades” they remind us of a time, not so long ago, when we too were deemed dispensable by the very states that we now imagine offer us protection. This is something that Eastman, Genet, and Gonzáles-Torres understood, even if they ultimately “lost” that debate. These metaphors of beastliness should remind us of the very fragile political compromises that we made when we redirected our animus away from the state and onto our own kind, from whom we now imagined ourselves as in need of protection. Even as the identification between Zionism and queerness remains strongly cemented in the popular imagination, the global antiwar movement, which has accelerated with such astonishing speed since October 7, has sought to reclaim the paraphernalia of queer liberation (from ACT-UP’s Silence=Death to its pink triangle now imagined as the Palestinian watermelon to the occupation of Grand Central Station in New York) for the purposes of Palestinian liberation. They are a reminder that the affinities between Palestine and queerness aren’t coincidental or contingent but signify something quite profound. As Palestine’s preeminent poet Mahmoud Darwish put: “My Freedom is to be what they don’t want me to be,” eloquently capturing the powerful potential for subversion that Palestine and queerness both hold—if only we let them.
[1] The song was perhaps even more fitting than Atzmon or his intended audiences could have ever known since U2 are notorious for espousing an anti-anti-colonial politics in Ireland.
[2] Although gender, sexuality, and the regulation of both have played a foundational role in the history of imperialism, they were typically directed at native women. As Gayatri Spivak famously quipped, the entire history of British imperialism in India might be usefully summarized as the story of “white men rescuing brown women from brown men.” Unlike the women that were to be saved in times past, Atzmoni’s stated wish to rescue the gays of Gaza came with an added advantage: they have no reproductive capacities and thereby didn’t threaten the project of demographic engineering upon which “Israel” (and indeed any imperial project) is predicated. Yet, understanding Atzmoni’s stated objective merely as a variation on an old theme misses something important.
[3]As the Queers in Palestine manifesto clearly states: “International feminist and queer activists, in solidarity with Palestine, are facing attacks and harassment by Zionists under the premise that those who support Palestine will be ‘raped’ and ‘beheaded’ by Palestinians for merely being women and queers. Yet more often than not, rape and death are what Zionists wish upon queers and women who stand in solidarity with Palestine. Zionist fantasies of brutalized bodies do not surprise us, for we have experienced the reality of their manifestation on our skin and spirit.”
[4] Kramer went so far to advocate for the creation of a gay separatist state. For a while, San Francisco “was the gays’ Israel”, he argued. Homosexual men attained “great power in the political structure of that city” and no political figure there could “consider not consulting with gay leaders.” Before the devastation of AIDS, “gay power was sufficient to keep most local heterosexual opposition in check”. But tragically this was no longer the case.