From the closet into the Knesset*: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity

Abstract

This article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself.