There are two issues of our time really that I think amount to a litmus test for morality, as far as I am concerned: one is, what you’re prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people, and the other is, and what are you prepared to do on behalf of gay and lesbian people? I really feel that those two things are co-equal fundamentals in my worldview at this time
– June Jordan in A Place of Rage (1991, dir. Pratibha Parmar)

On Saturday, 25th April, over 200 people attended the first Queers for Palestine Symposium. The day provided a space of reflection, discussion and strategy on queer organising for Palestine in Britain. Discussions throughout the day focused on political mobilisation, strategy, imperial violence and queer life in Britain. 

These discussions recognised the radical potentials of queer and trans organising, whilst also being aware of how LGBTQ+ rights can be exploited to produce liberal, assimilationist politics that exist to protect capitalist, imperialist interests. A key focus for this was Queers for Palestine’s campaign against Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ charity, for hiding its links with arms manufacturers such as BAE Systems, RTX, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris. Speakers and attendees also discussed how to move away from the small, yet committed queer and trans groups across Britain (and elsewhere) towards broader organising that can begin to develop mass political organising and coalitional solidarity across various struggles, refusing to let queer and trans politics become isolated.

Left organisers in Britain and elsewhere should consider this interview with Queers for Palestine as a demonstration of the tenacity of queer and trans organisers attending the symposium. This interview argues that crucial interventions can be found when understanding queerness not solely as an identity, but as a methodology and form of organising that engages in structure, discipline, sustainability and bringing this together through a shared political hope.

1) Why are Queers for Palestine holding this symposium now? What have been the big changes in queer/trans organising and Palestinian solidarity since October 7th 2023?

First, the shifts and transformations we are talking about are not specific to queer and trans communities alone. They are part of a much broader global shift around Palestine over the last two and a half years. Queer and trans people are part of this wider world, which spans very different political formations, from liberal and neoliberal identity-based politics to radical left currents including communists, anarchists, and others. Across these positions, we have all witnessed the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the global political rupture it has produced.

Second, after these two and a half years of sustained urgency, and following the recent period since the ceasefire, there has finally been some space for reflection. This is not unique to us. Many Palestine groups and queer organisations have expressed the same need to pause and think strategically about longer-term work. We heard this from comrades in No Pride in Genocide in Glasgow; there is a wider shift from emergency-mode organising toward questions of sustainability, consolidation, and long-term strategy.

Third, there is a more immediate and situated reason for this moment. Queers for Palestine is not only responding to global conditions, but also building on concrete connections and exchanges that have taken place recently, including Omar Khatib¹’s temporary presence in London, conversations around queer organising in Palestine, and experiences of imprisonment and political struggle. This has allowed new forms of connection between Queers for Palestine and comrades in Palestine and beyond, including figures such as Nadine Abu-Arafa, a lawyer and queer feminist who has worked with hundreds of detainees during the genocide, and Haneen Maikey, co-founder of al-Qaws.

2) A key aim of Queers for Palestine is to facilitate the growth of a mass queer politics against settler colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, what do you think that looks like?

It means understanding queerness not as an identity, but as a political tool. Queerness should not be reduced to representation, visibility, or inclusion within existing systems. It should be about disrupting the structures that produce violence in the first place: colonialism, borders, prisons, patriarchy, and racial capitalism.

In that sense, queerness is not only about who we are, but about how we struggle and what kinds of worlds we are trying to build. It means moving beyond small, self-contained queer collectives and toward mass political organisation.

If queer politics remains limited to small circles speaking mainly to each other, it cannot confront power at the level required. The task is to organise with and through the masses, not outside them, to build relationships with workers, migrants, students, anti-racist movements, housing struggles, and Palestine solidarity organising. This means accepting contradiction, because mass work is never politically pure. But queerness becomes meaningful precisely when it enters these contradictions and helps disrupt the dominant logic, rather than staying as a separate subcultural space.

These two points were really the main threads running through the whole day, especially from the contributions of Omar and comrades from Palestine. They gave us tangible and living examples of what queer organising in Palestine looks like in practice, how queerness becomes part of anti-colonial struggle, not as a separate issue, but as something embedded within the broader fight for liberation.

3) When discussing imperial violence and queer life in Britain, a comrade said that they saw a radical potential in queerness, but we are not taking it for granted. How can we develop those radical potentials in our own queer and trans communities?

We should answer this question with a clear understanding of the answers to the previous question, the important directions taken from the symposium and how we live out our queerness as a political tool for mass politics in our communities.

We can ask ourselves, what are we trying to do together in these community spaces? Are we only trying to survive? Are we living as if the joy and expression of small, relatively closed groups of our friends and community is in itself a political goal? When we struggle against political power, are we only demanding rights for those who fit certain identities? Or are we organising with an eye to victory against the systems that cause harm in the first place?

As we engage in this reflection and discuss our community projects and activities with others, we can begin to understand the sources of our suffering and the violence we face. As one panellist pointed out, LGBT charities and NGOs work as part of an international institutional order, backed and maintained by the US. Stonewall, which is Europe’s largest LGBT charity and is based in Britain, is a part of this fabric. They have received funding from USAID and have had board members who are directors at the Tony Blair Institute, a think tank central to the reoccupation plans for Gaza, developed by the US and its Western allies, including the UK. These institutions, their senior staff and directors, form part of an imperial-capitalist institutional infrastructure that benefits from and maintains capitalism and imperial violence across the world. They are the ones who constantly push and propagate liberal understandings of “queerness” both here in Britain and across the world. 

They, and the wider class they belong to, are, through their power and wealth, the actors who are causing the harm done to people here and everywhere else. It is their class who build and drops the bombs on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and profits from it. We may view ourselves as different from them, and we are, but if we do not address the power, the organisation, the social system that allows them to maintain their power and propagate the harm, we will never achieve liberation.

As we build a more concrete understanding of who our enemies are, those who prevent us from building the kinds of worlds that we want to live in, we can then turn with a new eye to our existing ways of being together in community. We emphasised that history shows that the only source of sufficient power to combat such enemies is the masses of exploited and oppressed people. What this means for us as queer and trans people looking to activate the radical potential of our communities is that we need to turn to the conception of queerness as a politics and not an identity, and learn to utilise the tools and methods of this queerness to build mass politics.

It means looking at our practices of community, care, mutual support, enjoyment, healing, and so on, and asking ourselves the question our Palestinian comrade Nadine asked: How can these practices of care become part of a movement that can actually win? We all need to work this out together, but in part, it must look something like more and more of us becoming engaged in explicitly political organising; Having structures, strategies, goals, and long-term plans. 

It looks like us building our spaces to rejuvenate and care for one another, so that we may reenter the struggle afresh, and with greater strength and spirit. It means meeting the masses, going outside of our spaces of comfort, having our home spaces be places of rest and recuperation, not of solace, survival, or escape only. It means building powerful mass movements, starting with our immediate communities but building systematically outwards. All of this requires entering and not escaping contradictions and tensions, and working with people who hold views we may disagree with or that make us uncomfortable. This is not an abandonment of queer politics, but rather it is how we make sure our politics has real force. 

4) An ongoing campaign for Queers for Palestine is mobilising against Stonewall and their refusal to acknowledge if they still work with arms manufacturers who they previously celebrated as inclusive employers, are there any possible avenues for queer and trans people working in the LGBT+ charity sector to challenge this?

Yes. If there are queer and trans people working in companies that are accredited as Diversity Champions, or the new title, Proud Employers, and they know that there are arms companies among other Proud Employers, then they could reach out to Queers for Palestine and let us know. Stonewall has hidden the names of most of the companies accredited under their new scheme.  There used to be 200 names listed on the Top Employers list; now, they only show the Top 21. 

If any workers in the sector know any of this information or have any other connections with Stonewall, they could reach out to us. If anyone has previously worked for Stonewall, they could also reach out to us; that would be very helpful.

5) This symposium included an exhibition curated by A Healthy Level of Dissent and Tarunisms on Queers for Palestine’s propaganda and movement photography. How important has propaganda and culture been for Queers for Palestine in helping to develop mobilisation and strategy in queer and trans communities?

Propaganda and photography have both been very important, and neither of them in a simple way. The symposium posed a lot of questions to all of us. It suggested answers and directions as well, but it posed a lot of questions because we all have, collectively, a lot to learn. We see this swell of activity, we see a turn to organisation, to study and the need for structure, discipline, and sustainability. We also see an approach to queerness as a method for entering, rather than avoiding contradictions, that can move us from small committed queer groups to broader mass politics. But many questions remain about how to do this, and the symposium is also a space for carefully posing questions that have come out of our work.

The exhibition fit into this overall pattern. It exhibited some of the propaganda and photography that have been important to our work over the last two and a half years. It provided a quieter space for participants to reflect, talk, remember and recall what we have all been doing. But it also provided a space and prompts for reflection.

The exhibition insisted on the centrality of design and propaganda to movement building, and this insistence is clearly born out by examination of any revolutionary tradition, past or present. But as we are building a movement, we need to go further, and the questions posed help prompt us to think about where we are and where we can go next. If you think of a successful liberatory movement, in what ways did design and propaganda help with the success of the movement? Or, to what extent does a cohesive visual language serve a movement? Does it establish a strong mental image that can be associated with it? Does it limit it? 

Similarly, the exhibition posed critical questions about the role of the photograph in movements today. Photography, maybe especially in the era of social media, plays a role in reflecting to us the movement we are building, but in an age of surveillance and politics as a trend, the role of photography should be critically investigated by our movements and organisations. An example of the kind of questions on photography posed is: to what extent are/can protest photographers be extractive or generative for the communities they photograph? 

Finally, the exhibition posed a question to attendees about the image overall: think of an iconic piece of visual propaganda, design or photography – what is the first thing that comes to mind? Why does it resonate with you? What is it trying to say, or make you feel? Does it stand on its own, or is its context inherent to its value? What is the world like without it?

We know that our communities are full of creative people, and we are committed to the centrality of revolutionary culture in mass movement building. We hope that the exhibition has helped to foreground this and engage attendees in thinking about where we can go next in contributing to the development of such a culture. This culture is important in many ways, but at a very key initial level, we think that our strong and clear visual language from the beginning has contributed directly to the visibility and welcome of the queer blocs, which was then a space where lots of queer people had their first entry into protest and then into organisation.

6) In summarising the symposium, we were given two questions to take away with us, ‘what is queerness?’ and ‘what is to be done?’ – what does QfP take away from those questions and the first symposium overall?

In summarising the day we returned to questions to reflect on, provocations to act on, and observations from history to consider.

Some of these questions we need to collectively reflect on are: How do we move from small, committed queer groups into broader mass politics? Are we building a movement that is structured, disciplined and sustainable? What are we bringing to the Palestine solidarity movement beyond queer visibility? What is the result of our organising? 

Some of the provocations for us to act on are: 

• To dismantle queerness as identity and understand what political queerness is.
• To build local alliances and organise with others outside the queer world on local issues. 
• To do the difficult work of struggling through contradictions, not fleeing them.
• To practice care through the creation of material infrastructures and challenges to structures of power, not just as affect. 
• To find time to reflect, critique, and learn from our local and global histories. 
• To design campaigns targeting the material infrastructure of empire and capitalism around strategy and not moralism. 
• To learn, through queerness, about class, race, the family, healthcare, and other intertwined structures of power.

 Some of the observations from history to consider are:  

• Change is inevitable, and the inevitability of change is the ground of the hope that we choose to begin from in our work. 
• The masses, when organised, are powerful vehicles of change. 
• Direct action and mass organising are not mutually exclusive but complementary and necessary parts of a movement. 
• The movement requires sacrifice and risking comfort and certainty, but there is also greater safety in numbers. 
• A good organisation can find us as newcomers with imposter syndrome and help us grow and become more confident. 
• A good organisation is where individuals become collective political subjects.

We can say that queerness is a method for reading structures of power. Beginning from personal and intimate experience as a legitimate site of knowledge, that experience is then theorised as part of a collective effort to understand the systems that oppress people. This approach to our struggle does not shy away from contradiction, but enters into it and learns to move and build political power through contradiction. 

What we must do is utilise these queer methodologies to organise ourselves and our communities so that we can move past care and joy as survival and move into practices of care that enable successful political struggle against the conditions and enemies that hurt us. This means moving away from small committed groups and into broader mass politics; it means less emphasis on queer visibility and more emphasis on building power, which is slow, messy, uncomfortable, and the only way we can actually liberate ourselves from Zionism, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

1.  Omar is a queer Palestinian organiser. She was detained under zionist military administrative detention for 16 months during the genocide and previously worked as the spokesperson for al-Qaws for six years and has over a decade of experience organising around queer, trans, and feminist issues in Palestine.
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