Out of a desire to continue to align Queer|Art’s organizational values with those of our community, and following the lead of artists who boycotted apartheid in South Africa, we share the following statement of endorsement of the thoughtful, hopeful, and principled Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to end Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid.
Amnesty International’s recently released report finds Israel guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid, and calls on businesses to cease activities that “contribute to or benefit from the systems of apartheid.”
Queer|Art hereby refuses to collaborate with or receive funding from any institutions that continue to contribute to this cruel system of apartheid that steals both life and land from Palestinian families.
In keeping with the cultural boycott called for by Palestinian artists and cultural institutions, and modeled for artists in NYC by Adalah-NY, Queer|Art will not participate in events sponsored by the Israeli government or complicit Israeli institutions in New York, Israel, or anywhere else.
Queer|Art rejects antisemitism in all forms and recognizes it as a co-constitutive part of the metastasizing white supremacy which has led to so many horrifying acts of violence in the past two years alone.
Queer|Art affirms our dedication to refusing discrimination against individuals based on their identity (including citizenship, race, gender, or religion) or opinion. The affiliation of an artist or individual with Israeli cultural institutions or organizations that are benefiting from and otherwise complicit in Israeli apartheid will continue to have no impact on how they are considered for Queer|Art’s programs, grants, and awards. Instead, we follow the lead of the Palestinian-led BDS movement in focusing on complicit institutions and organizations and their official representatives.
Queer|Art hereby calls on other organizations to support the work of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to end Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid NOW.
WHY BDS? WHY US? WHY NOW?
Over the past two years, through a global pandemic, rising white supremacist violence, and the uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, Queer|Art has attempted to be direct and vocal in our response and the positions we take—seeing them as a reflection of our intergenerational community of artists, many of whom are lifelong activists and organizers. These same artists have continued to challenge and expand our understanding of these many struggles and highlighted the intertwined nature of movements for liberation across borders, and the need for transnational solidarity.
The present issue was brought to the fore by a group of artists in our community, who recently rejected an unsolicited offer to participate in a Pride campaign for the sportswear company PUMA. These artists felt that Puma was seeking to use images of queer and trans people, in part, to pinkwash its continued support for and profiting from Israeli apartheid (as made more publicly visible by the work of the Palestinian-led Boycott Puma campaign). We were frustrated that our community and our website seemed to be serving as a casting pool for PUMA’s campaign, and so in addition to supporting the work of the group of artists rejecting Puma’s offer, we also felt it necessary to spell out our values more clearly in this area.
As an incredibly diverse, multidisciplinary, and intergenerational community of queer and trans artists, we find it vital to clearly refuse any efforts that seek to cynically use our community as a ploy to distract from or justify systems of injustice. It is plainly wrong to use the hard-fought gains that the global LGBTQ+ community has made over the past 50+ years as a marketing tactic in service of legitimating the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians. Despite the extensive pinkwashing propaganda campaigns by companies such as Puma, we will continue to stand with our Palestinian queer and trans siblings and affirm that we belong everywhere but apartheid belongs nowhere.
As an arts organization, we believe that we possess an enormous responsibility in what has become a deeply narrative-based struggle. Artists, including those in our own community, have long been on the frontlines of pushing this campaign forward, often at tremendous professional and even personal risk. It is long past time that arts organizations take a stand, and join in helping to shoulder the burden of that risk. It is our hope that by doing so publicly, we might open up space for similarly situated arts organizations to do the same.
Our organization has always been home to many Jewish queer and trans artists, and our community would be incomplete without them in it. We reject antisemitism in all forms and believe this position is in alignment with our endorsement of BDS against Israeli apartheid and with the principles of many progressive Jewish organizations that reject any conflation between advocacy of, one the one hand, Palestinian rights and opposition to the apartheid policies of the state of Israel, and on the other, racism, hatred, and discrimination against Jewish people.
We are grateful to the decades of work by groups such as the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), Adalah-NY, and Jewish Voice for Peace NYC. They have laid the groundwork and made endorsements like ours possible.