British Imperialism Didn’t Cause Palestinian Homophobia
Currents
When left-wing pro-Palestine protestors recently went viral with signs reading “Queers for Palestine”, their feeble attempt at creating an “intersectional” political coalition was broadly mocked for ignoring (or demonstrating a lack of awareness) of how dismal it is to be LGBT in Palestine. In an effort to downplay the virulent homophobia and anti-LGBT laws in Gaza, British leftist Owen Jones tweeted the following:
Echoing talking points from academics like Sa’ed Atshan, pro-Hamas organizations such as the Institute for Palestinian Studies, and publications including the British outlet Gay Times, Jones’s tweet was part of a thread attempting to shift the moral responsibility for systemic homophobia in Gaza. Stating that “There isn’t the death penalty for homosexuality in Gaza” because it’s “a prison sentence of up to 10 years”, Jones then claims that this is “bad enough without exaggeration.” In the interest of fighting back against hyperbole, that’s fair enough. But for Owen Jones — himself a gay man — to downplay such a retrograde system in defense of Hamas’s record on LGBT issues reveals the game many self-described “anti-imperialist” leftists are playing. The tweet blaming the British Empire for creating anti-same-sex legislation in the Palestinian Mandate back in 1936 was quickly annotated by Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, “Community Notes”:
“While it is true that the British Empire introduced anti-LGBT laws in its colonies, those laws are not valid anymore as the Mandate ended in 1948. Israel was also part of it, and no such laws exist [there] anymore. Today, most countries with those laws are under Sharia, like Gaza.”
Indeed, Palestine’s rankings on LGBT acceptance from institutions like UCLA and Georgetown are dismal, and Hamas’s Islamic fundamentalist ideology predates the British Empire’s 40-year presence in the region by over one thousand years. As Armin Navabi recently wrote, this ideology “harbors a brutal dogma that is antithetical to the liberties and rights championed by LGBT activists.” Hamas’s attitude toward homosexuality comes not from the British, but from their fundamentalist Islamism (just as Britain’s formerly homophobic laws were inspired by conservative Christianity). As Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar told Reuters in 2010, “You [in the West] do not live like human beings. You do not even live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?”
The eruption of war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas following the most deadly attack on Jews in generations has disrupted the lives of millions in needlessly tragic ways. The war has also disrupted several of our assumptions about just how much brutality and bigotry the Western left is willing to excuse in service of Critical Social Justice and “decolonization.” The massive suffering caused by imperialism is beyond dispute; however, it is also possible to overstate its role in shaping the social attitudes of people who were once the subjects of imperial whim. It is true that the effects of colonialism can long outlive any empire, but there comes a point at which invoking the legacy of past imperialism to excuse modern problems denies the agency of colonized people.
Islamic homophobia is an issue that goes beyond terrorist groups like Hamas. While the Quran’s language regarding homosexual and bisexual behavior is somewhat ambiguous, the hadith, the canonical sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, contain many straightforward prohibitions. In practice, this results in the persecution of LGBT people in both official and extrajudicial ways throughout the Muslim world. LGBT Palestinians face extreme ostracism, sometimes fleeing as refugees or even being kidnapped and beheaded. The authorities also ban the activities of LGBT rights groups. And it isn’t just LGBT Palestinians being oppressed by Hamas in Gaza. Institutional sexism is also part and parcel of Sharia Law. Human rights researchers rank the Palestinian territories among the worst places in the world to be a woman. For Western activists ostensibly concerned about the oppression of marginalized groups to effectively support the continued rule of Hamas over Gaza (to the point that they would even deny Israel the right to self-defense against the terrorist organization) is hypocritical in the extreme.
Regarding the leftist claim that it is past British imperialism to blame for present Islamic homophobia, it is also worth looking at how LGBT people are treated in Gaza versus how they were treated in England. True, same-sex behavior was once criminal in Britain, but it hasn’t been since 1967. While there were past instances of persecuted LGBT individuals in the United Kingdom — such as Alan Turing’s chemical castration and subsequent suicide — there are no stories of gay or bi Brits being strung up on cranes or having their heads sawn off. Contrary to what Hamas apologists might be tempted to argue, the oppression LGBT people face in Gaza is not the product of extremist outliers acting out of turn with Hamas or of Hamas helplessly following the century-old statutes of the defunct British Empire.
It’s worth going through a bit of history. The land that today encompasses Israel and the Palestinian territories was, from 1918 until 1948, controlled by the British Empire. The British attempted to create two states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, which the latter rejected. As a result, the British turned the keys of one of the states over to the Israelis, who promptly faced a war from seven different Arab countries or territories — a war which they won. After Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950, it decriminalized homosexual behavior in 1951. In Egypt-controlled Gaza, however, LGBT Palestinians received no such reprieve.
Israel was attacked by its neighbors again in 1967 — resulting in another war that the Israelis won — and the Gaza Strip was under Israel’s full control until 2005. Hamas subsequently received a majority of votes in Gaza, kicked out the more moderate Fatah party that was part of the Palestinian unity government and broke away from the West Bank in order to rule Gaza without democratic dissent.
Not only had the British been gone for more than 50 years by then, Hamas chose to go above and beyond any existing anti-LGBT legislation. They opted to have different laws from the West Bank — specifically Sharia law. In the tradition of the Taliban and Islamic State, Hamas launched a campaign of imposing strict rules on women, persecuting non-Muslims, rooting out anything they perceive as vestiges of Western culture (including queer people), and deploying religious police to enforce those laws. They went above and beyond anything even the notoriously brutal British colonial authorities did and carried out abductions and torture against gay and bi residents. The simple fact is Hamas is a jihadist group, and LGBT rights are virtually nonexistent throughout Muslim-majority countries, including many the British never colonized. Does anyone really think that in the absence of an old British legal framework, Hamas wouldn’t have made life hell for LGBT people in Gaza?
What animates many Western leftists like Owen Jones, who see themselves as fighting for “decolonization,” is a Critical Social Justice-inspired vision of the world that sees everything through a simplistic binary that divides everyone (often fallaciously) into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” In this worldview, anything associated with white people or the West is invariably categorized under “oppressor.” In the realm of foreign policy or international affairs, this translates into activists based in the West reflexively regarding their own nation or government as the oppressor. This distorted view of the world is what Swedish sociologist Goran Adamson calls “masochistic nationalism,” where, like the chauvinistic nationalist, the masochistic nationalist tends to see their nation as the center of the world. The main difference is that instead of seeing their nation as the world’s unique hero, they see it as its singular villain. This can provide an avenue for shallow self-criticism that serves to make one feel morally superior to others who aren’t self-critical in this way.
This masochistic nationalism commits an error that historians have warned against for generations: categorizing people as oppressed can rob them of their complex humanity and deny them the agency to make moral or immoral choices just like anyone else. Doing so not only disempowers people, but also patronizingly holds them to lower ethical standards. This is not the way to treat others as equals. Say what you will about the shortcomings of liberal democracies, but they recognize and defend human rights, LGBT rights, and women’s rights to a greater degree than any other system in history — that should be the standard we hold everyone to.
It is possible to recognize the injustices imposed on Gazans by the Israeli government while also recognizing that Hamas is a fascist, theocratic regime hell-bent on genocide and global jihad — a regime that criminalizes being LGBT and executes even its own commanders at the mere accusation of gay sex. There is an inescapable truth that Western leftists must face: there can be no “free Palestine” or “Queers for Palestine” without freeing Gazans from Hamas.
George Orwell once wrote that “however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back." Hamas’s brutal rule over Gaza is incompatible with LGBT and women’s rights and has done nothing but oppress the Palestinian people. By launching acts of terror upon Israel from civilian areas in Gaza, Hamas puts millions of lives in danger — further demonstrating its disregard for the welfare of the Palestinians under its rule. Instead of facing this reality, too many on the Western left twist themselves into pretzels to find ways to blame Hamas’s failings on others (including their own Western nations). Instead of advocating for the removal of Hamas, which would actually improve the lives of Palestinians, they place their own masochistic nationalism at the center of the issue.
Oftentimes, they go even further by claiming that LGBT activists who “pinkwash” Israel’s misdeeds by referencing Israel’s LGBT rights are engaging in a form of colonialism by expecting Palestinians to live up to our “Western” standards. The irony is that, in imposing their own uniquely Western framing onto the Middle East, in appropriating a foreign conflict to further their own self-centered Western worldview, these arch “decolonialists” are, to use their own hyperbolic jargon, colonizing the complex issue of Palestine. The only difference is they are doing so as a consequence of their tortured “logic,” in service of the cause of the Islamist, religious far-right.
Published Oct 31, 2023
