Pride month and the rainbow flag of colonialism
An anti-pinkwashing protest at Madrid’s alternative pride march on 28 June 2017
Ghadir Shafie writes in Mondoweiss on 10 June 2026:
Every June, Pride Month arrives carrying the weight of Stonewall — a rebellion begun by Black and brown trans women who understood that survival and resistance were inseparable. It arrives as a declaration that queer lives are worth celebrating, that our loves are worth protecting, that we are owed the full dignity of existence. For many around the world, Pride Month is still precisely that: an act of defiance dressed as joy, a reminder that the right to be visible was never given, only taken.
For Palestinian queers, Pride Month arrives with a question the rest of the world is never asked: whose freedom are we celebrating, and at whose expense? We watch the rainbow flags rise over a city built on the ruins of our people, and we are told this is progress. We are offered liberation — but it comes with a condition. Forget who you are, or be unwelcome. We are handed a pride that was never meant to carry us.
This is pinkwashing: the art of waving a rainbow flag to hide a fist — using queer visibility as a shield against accountability, dressing conquest in the colors of liberation. I learned what looks like from the inside — the warm offer, the hidden condition, the erasure dressed as rescue. What I could not have imagined is that it would be performed at the scale and audacity it is today, in the middle of a genocide. I am speaking about Pride Land, planned for this June 2026 at the Dead Sea — billed by its organizers as the largest LGBTQ+ festival ever held in the Middle East: four days, fifteen hotels, a temporary “Pride City” of performance stages, beach venues and round-the-clock entertainment, promoted directly by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The private production group behind it describes it as something “crafted from within the community.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promoting it makes the architecture of Brand Israel visible once again: a cultural spectacle that launders an international image while the bombs continue to fall.