For two decades, Israel has marketed itself as a rainbow-filled sanctuary in a hostile region.
Tel Aviv Pride draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Israeli embassies and tourism boards lean on images of gay soldiers and drag queens to sell a picture of liberal modernity.
Activists have a name for this — pinkwashing, the act of using LGBTIQ rights as a public relations shield for occupation, apartheid and now genocide.
A new report shows just how violent the reality behind that marketing is.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective, with support from Progressive International, has released A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualised and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians. It documents how Israeli military intelligence has deliberately targeted queer Palestinians for years.
The blackmail machine
The report names a military intelligence practice researchers call esqat, an Arabic word meaning “to take down”. Israeli intelligence units gather, or sometimes fabricate, sexual and gendered information about Palestinians. If exposed, this information could shame or endanger them. Agents then use it as leverage. They collect this material through mass surveillance of phones and online activity, and through "honeytrap" operations, where agents pose as romantic or sexual partners on dating apps to lure targets into compromising situations.
Queer Palestinians face particular danger from this tactic. An agent posing as a potential partner might approach a closeted man on a gay dating app. The agent then threatens to reveal his sexuality to his family and community, unless he agrees to inform on relatives, neighbours or resistance fighters. Drop Site News documented one such case in 2024: a young Palestinian student was blackmailed after connecting with an Israeli operative on Grindr, who threatened to expose his sexuality unless he handed over information about cousins already imprisoned by Israel.
This is standard practice, not the work of a few rogue agents. Testimony cited in the report goes back to 2014, when a former soldier from Unit 8200, the Israel Defence Forces' (IDF) cyberwarfare and intelligence division, described how any personal vulnerability, including sexual orientation, becomes "a target for blackmail". Whistleblowers from the same unit have confirmed that intelligence-gathering on Palestinians' intimate lives is standard practice, not an exception.
This traps people between two life-threatening outcomes: exposure and punishment from their own communities, or violent retaliation as suspected collaborators with the Israeli army.
Loubna Qutami of the Palestinian Feminist Collective says this is no accident of war, it is a method of war designed to fracture Palestinian solidarity and manufacture informants. The report places this sexualised blackmail alongside other forms of gendered and sexual violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, including forced nudity, genital torture and sexual humiliation in detention facilities.
Propaganda and violence: the same system
Pinkwashing is more than hypocrisy. Israel does not simply claim to champion queer rights while abusing queer people elsewhere, the two are mechanically linked. The same state that decorates its image with rainbow flags over the rubble of Gaza is, through its intelligence services, actively hunting queer Palestinians and turning their sexuality into a weapon against their own communities.
Palestinian queer organisers have long argued that pinkwashing runs deeper than a public relations trick to be debunked. Groups like alQaws, one of the only LGBTIQ Palestinian organisations, say pinkwashing tells queer Palestinians their only path to safety runs through their occupier. This encourages some to see the soldiers bombing their families as saviours rather than perpetrators. Scholars who study this dynamic call it one of the cruellest forms of violence, because it tries to sever queer Palestinians from solidarity with their own people at the exact moment that they need that solidarity most.
In no way is Israel a safe haven for queer Palestinians. The same surveillance apparatus that enables blackmail also monitors, and when it serves Israeli intelligence, endangers the people it claims to protect. Meanwhile Gaza's queer community, like everyone else in the strip, has spent 1000 days under bombardment, siege and starvation without protection from Israeli bombs.
What solidarity demands
This report should sharpen the case for solidarity with Palestine inside LGBTIQ movements, not soften it. Queer liberation and Palestinian liberation are not competing causes. The same colonial logic that criminalises, surveils and blackmails queer Palestinians is inseparable from the logic that starves and bombs their families.
International queer organisations have begun to act on this: the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association has rejected Israeli pinkwashing bodies from its ranks, and Pride organisations in several countries have adopted policies excluding sponsors complicit in Israel's crimes.
That same logic should guide organising here in Australia. Queer solidarity with Palestine means refusing corporate and government pinkwashing at home. It means supporting BDS campaigns that target complicit companies, and insisting Pride marches stay spaces of liberation, not sanitised backdrops for states committing atrocities. It means believing queer Palestinians when they describe pinkwashing not as an abstract talking point, but as a mechanism that has, in documented cases, ended in blackmail, betrayal and death.
There is no pride in genocide. No rainbow flag is bright enough to wash the blood from a system that hunts queer people as intelligence assets while it obliterates their homeland.