Israel has spent hundreds of millions of shekels marketing Tel Aviv as the gay capital of the Middle East, yet same-sex marriage remains illegal within its borders. Several white South African queer people are lured by this event. As the next Tel Aviv Pride parade approaches, Herman Lategan takes a closer look at who and what the campaign is really for.
I’ll never forget it. It was in 2023 when my friend, we’ll call him Sam, told me he was going to join two other friends in Tel Aviv for the gay pride, which was then on Thursday, 8 June and would continue for a few days. I was a bit stunned. At that stage I had been reading about the history of Israel and the Nakba.
For those who are new to this, because many are, the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. But Sam told me how one friend was doing business in Tel Aviv, another would be on holiday, and how wonderful it would be to get away and join them.
“Oh,” I remember gushing, “don’t forget the White City. I would like to see a bit of the architecture. Take photos.”
The White City refers to a historic area of Tel Aviv famous for its thousands of white or light-coloured Bauhaus and International Style buildings, many designed in the 1930s by Jewish architects who had fled Europe. UNESCO later declared it a World Heritage Site, one of the world’s largest collections of Bauhaus architecture.
What I did not know at the time was that the White City had risen over land that, before Tel Aviv’s rapid expansion in the early twentieth century, included sand dunes, citrus groves, olive trees, and agricultural land belonging largely to Palestinian Arab villages. Some plots had been legally purchased by Zionist organisations during the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods; much had not.
My friend left and sent me updates via WhatsApp. He told me about the jolly bars, hip restaurants, beautiful people, the pride events, and how freely you could walk the streets after midnight. He visited Christian sites in Jerusalem, walked the Via Dolorosa, and later toured the Holocaust Museum. The sheer emotional weight of it moved him to tears.
Another tour took him to the Dead Sea. He was mesmerised by the sight of Masada, the ancient fortress plateau overlooking the water, famous for the Roman siege of 73–74 CE, nearly two thousand years ago.
One of his friends introduced him to an acquaintance living in the YOO Towers, a luxury block in northern Tel Aviv designed by Philippe Starck. Their website promises “lavish living” and panoramic views over the city and the Mediterranean.
Gaza City lies roughly seventy to eighty kilometres south-west of Tel Aviv as the crow flies. On my friend’s return, I heard all the stories in detail. He never got to see Gaza. Tourists are generally not allowed to visit Gaza for leisure. While it was not technically illegal, the necessary permits were seldom granted for tourism, making visits difficult and requiring specific, strict authorised reasons.
Four months later, the attacks of 7 October 2023 were carried out in southern Israel, close to the Gaza Strip border. Rightly, the world was shocked. What transpired over the following years was that West Asia had turned into a dystopian nightmare.
Israel, through its own relentless and ongoing aggression in the region, was placed under the global spotlight. The (Barbra) Streisand Effect emerged: that phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or suppress information backfires and instead makes that information far more public than it would have been otherwise. And so, with the next Tel Aviv Pride approaching on 12 June, it seems apt to examine the term “pinkwashing”.
An $88 Million Campaign, for a Country Where Same-Sex Marriage Is Illegal
Tel Aviv will host what its promoters describe as one of the biggest pride celebrations on earth. Marketing material promises a city that “lights up in colour and energy”, cementing its reputation as “the gay capital of the Middle East, and perhaps even one of the gay capitals of the world.”
Nearly 300,000 people are expected to march and dance along the Herbert Samuel Boardwalk. Tour packages combine the parade with excursions to Masada, the Dead Sea, and Jordan.
What the promotional material does not mention is that same-sex marriage is illegal in Israel. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset rejected a bill that would have legalised same-sex marriage. Israel does recognise same-sex unions contracted abroad and allows same-sex couples to adopt, but it has never passed legislation permitting gay marriage on its own soil. The “gay capital of the Middle East”, indeed.
Dalal Iriqat and Mahdi Owda, researchers at the Arab American University in Palestine, document the phenomenon in a 2025 paper published in the Journal of Ecohumanism. The strategy, they write, “reflects the image of sexual and gender diversity within a policy aimed at washing Israel’s hands of blood.”
The campaign began in 2005 under the slogan “Oasis of Middle Eastern Democracy”, the same year Israel launched its government-backed “Brand Israel” initiative. The investment that followed was substantial. According to Iriqat and Owda, an international marketing campaign was launched with an investment of 340 million New Israeli Shekels, roughly $88 million at the time, to market Tel Aviv as a cosmopolitan and sophisticated tourist destination for gay travellers, particularly from Europe and North America.
The campaign ran targeted advertising in England and Germany, created dedicated social media pages, established direct flight routes, and built a dedicated website. Writing in The New York Times in 2011, author and activist Sarah Schulman named the tactic directly. Pinkwashing was, she wrote, “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”
What “Hasbara” Means, and How It Works
To understand pinkwashing, it helps to know the broader framework in which it operates. In Hebrew, hasbara means “explaining”. Developed as a concept in the early twentieth century by Nahum Sokolow, a Polish Zionist journalist, it has come to describe Israel’s co-ordinated approach to public diplomacy: the shaping of its debonair image abroad through media, marketing, and messaging.
The “Brand Israel” campaign was the commercial expression of this strategy. After three years of consultation among the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Finance Ministry, alongside American marketing executives, the campaign launched with the explicit goal of making Israel appear more liberal that their surrounding “backward” Arabic neighbours. Critics argue that LGBTQIA+ rights became one of its most potent symbols. The message is clear: all Arabs are primitive homophobes, we are not.
The Rainbow Flag Over the Ruins
In November 2023, Israeli airstrikes had already killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including, according to figures reported by The Observer, more than 4,000 children. It was at this moment that the Israeli government posted two photographs to its social media accounts.
The first showed an Israeli soldier, Yoav Atzmoni, standing in battle fatigues in front of buildings that Israeli airstrikes had reduced to rubble. He was holding a rainbow flag. Across it, in handwriting, were the words: “In the name of love.” The government’s caption read: “The first ever Pride flag raised in Gaza.” The second showed the same soldier beside a tank, holding an Israeli flag with rainbow-coloured borders. Both images were posted by the official @stateofisrael account.
The implication was familiar: Israel had come, the imagery suggested, to free Palestinians from the “vicious Arabs”. Sa’ed Atshan, chair of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College and author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, said the images were not accidental. The messaging was “driven not by genuine enthusiasm for LGBTQIA+ rights, but deployed strategically for political ends.”
On 11 December 2023, during the same period, Israeli accounts posted another image to Twitter: two men, one in military uniform, one on one knee in proposal. The caption celebrated a same-sex engagement near the Gaza border. The allusion, that same-sex marriage was available and celebrated in Israel, was false. There is no law permitting same-sex marriage in Israel to this day.
“I Was Welcome as a Lesbian, But Not as a Palestinian”
Rauda Morcos, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and human rights lawyer, described her reaction when she heard Tel Aviv planned to hold Pride in 2024 as bombs continued to fall on Gaza.
“Is there no sense of humanity to realise that there are people being bombed every day in Gaza by your own country? And you’re calling for Pride and equal rights for queer people? I honestly don’t care, because if we don’t have equal rights as humans, it doesn’t matter,” she told The Observer.
Homosexuality had been decriminalised in the West Bank since the 1950s, after anti-sodomy laws inherited from the British colonial period were removed. Palestinian queer organisations including Aswat, Al Qaws, and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions have operated for years despite severe political and social pressures. Israel, however, has long used the threat of Palestinian homophobia to psychologically draw LGBTQIA+ Palestinians towards identification with their occupier.
One of the most striking accounts of this dynamic comes from Ghadir Shafie, co-founder of Aswat – Palestinian Gay Women. Writing in Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research in 2015, Shafie described how, as a teenager questioning her sexuality in a Palestinian community, she called an Israeli support line, then the only resource available to her. The voice on the other end urged her to move to Tel Aviv, where she could “live her life freely as a lesbian.”
She went, and was welcomed as a lesbian, but not as a Palestinian. “They affirmed that I did not look and sound Arab,” she later wrote, “so there was no need for me to embarrass them by bringing up my Palestinian-ness in conversations with others.”
They proposed changing her name. “I went home, feeling disgusted at the thought of being renamed by colonial oppressors to better fit their definition of the lesbian category of identity.”
She left Tel Aviv at the end of her first year at university without saying her farewells, “determined never to look back.”
The Backlash, and Whether Pinkwashing Still Works
Jasbir Puar, professor at the Institute of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and author of Terrorist Assemblages and The Right to Maim, argued that pinkwashing as an external messaging strategy had already been significantly undermined by Palestinian activist organisations and the international solidarity movement.
Stephanie Westbrook, coordinator of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, declared that “No Pride in Genocide” had become the global queer slogan. Thousands of queer artists had pledged not to perform in Israel; pride organisations across Europe and North America were excluding sponsors complicit in Israel’s actions in Gaza; and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association had rejected Israel’s candidacy for its World Congress and suspended Israeli pinkwashing organisations from membership.
The Parade Goes On
The 2026 Tel Aviv Pride, scheduled for 12 June, is already being sold. Brochures are printed, tour packages are ready, parties have been named. The clichéd hasbara promotional copy is as smooth as ever: “Tel Aviv Pride has become one of the biggest events of the year in Tel Aviv.”
Somewhere in the fine print, if you look for it, is the fact that gay marriage is still not legal in Israel. And beyond the parties and the rainbow banners, Gaza burns, Iran has been attacked, and southern Lebanon is bombarded.
One wonders what a suitable Pride song would be, perhaps the German Neue Deutsche Welle band Trio’s: “Da da da / Ich lieb’ dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht/ da da da.”
Herman Lategan is a journalist and author based in Cape Town, South Africa. He writes creative nonfiction and essays, with a focus on observational, personal and often ironic storytelling. His work has appeared in numerous local and international publications. He is the author of four books.
