Normally this week is an off-week, in which I post something more private and only to paid subscribers. This week is a bit different.
I wasn’t sure I was going to write this week until I saw IDF soldiers standing in the ruins they have made of Gaza holding rainbow flags. One reads, in English, “In the name of love.”
I wasn’t sure what I was going to write this week until I saw that the state of Israel itself was paying for that photo to appear in people’s timelines on Twitter under reportage by Palestinian journalists who are documenting the genocide of their people.
The reason I wasn’t sure what I was going to write this week is that it’s hard to think about anything else but the genocide in Gaza, and it was hard for me to figure out what I have to say besides the basics: “never again” is for everyone; you cannot draw moral equivalence between an occupation force and those they occupy; listen to Palestinian, Arab, and Jewish voices who are fighting for a free Palestine.
It wasn’t hard for me to know what to write this week, though, staring at that photo of that man grinning atop rubble.
What I want to write this week is simple:
In the name of love, of actual love, for the sacred right of humans to live in this world un-murdered, keep queer rights out of your fucking mouth, you genocidal trash.
All of the fussy details are less important. All of the complicated but necessary things to understand about the conflict matter, but they don’t matter as much as simple condemnation of a rainbow-washed genocide.
The state of Israel is attempting to make every queer person in the world complicit in the bombing of hospitals, the murder of children, the generations-long occupation, the blatant land grab. The state of Israel is attempting to make us complicit in their settler-colonial project, in genocide.
Every queer person who wanted to remain on the sidelines is no longer on the sidelines, because they have invoked us. They have looked at us and said “this is for you. We did this for you. We have written your name on this mountain of skulls, this hill of bones. Do you not love us for it?”
This would still be unforgivable if Israel were the most LGBT-accepting nation in the world, but it isn’t. Gay couples cannot be married in Israel–nor can interfaith heterosexual couples. Gay couples and interfaith couples have to get married outside the country, and only then is their marriage partially recognized by the state. Why? Because Israel is a theocratic ethnostate. Only 36% of Israelis believe that same sex marriage should be legal as of 2023… 16% strongly favor same-sex marriage rights while 43% strongly oppose it. Their rainbow-washing is blatant, hypocritical, and unforgivable propaganda.
I don’t track my follower count too closely on social media. I probably should, since my income relies on it–publishers look at your follower count as well as your sales record when they decide whether or not to publish your books–but I don’t. I think I lost about a thousand, maybe two thousand followers off of Instagram when I started posting about Palestine. About 4-5% of my following. I pay even less attention to Twitter and frankly have no idea how it impacted me there.
I have other friends, creative professionals, who’ve had it much worse. One friend of mine lost her management team for her unabashed support of “maybe genocide is bad no matter whom it happens to.”
I’m very rarely the kind of girl to say “everyone needs to post about this particular topic.” I don’t find it useful to condemn people for not doing social media activism, which often feels very performative and indirect anyway. This time feels different.
It feels different because the majority of the American people want our government to call for a ceasefire and the overwhelming majority of the US government has told us to eat shit, the bombs will keep dropping. Snipers with rifles bought by our tax dollars will stay posted up outside hospitals, ready to shoot paraplegics.
It feels different because right now we are seeing a grassroots movement that is challenging the stranglehold Zionist propaganda has had on the American people. Thanks to the Jewish voices at the forefront of the protests, people are learning that anti-zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism. People are coming to terms with the fact that this is not a conflict between religions, between Judaism and Islam, but between an apartheid state and the people it oppresses. People are unlearning, en masse, one of the greatest lies of the 20th century–that the state of Israel has a right to displace and oppress the Palestinian people.
The way that this unlearning is happening is that people are posting about it and talking about it. People are doing more than talking about it, too, which is even better.
We’ve seen some of the largest protest marches in history, and we’re starting to see more and more direct action against the war machine. We may or may not succeed at forcing a ceasefire, but if we keep at it, we can succeed in breaking the media and governmental narratives.
While we do it, we have to stay alert for people coming in with other convenient and hateful narratives. Critiquing the nation of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, but the antisemites are coming out in force to try to get their agenda on the table. Both Muslim and Jewish people are facing an uptick of racist and/or antisemitic attacks across the world–we can’t let Nazis infiltrate the movement with their message of hate and their nonsensical conspiracy theories, and we must confront both antisemitism and islamophobia wherever we see it.
As long as our tax money goes to buy weapons for the IDF, every American taxpayer is implicated in the carnage. Now, thanks to that man with that rainbow flag, every queer in the world has been too.
When some piece of shit mass-murderer stands over the conquered ruins of a city with our flag in his hands, he has invoked us.
It’s up to us to stop him.
In the name of love.