ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses alQaws’s activism, the story of its emergence, and ongoing work in order to show the relevance of decolonial queering politics in unsettling paradigms of hetero-conquest. It starts by focusing on the emergence and evolution of alQaws’s positionality as a queer and Palestinian grassroots movement, which rejects both Israeli LGBT spaces and Western frames of gay organising. It outlines how its anti-pinkwashing work not only questions Israeli narratives of gay progressiveness versus Palestinian homophobia but also reveals the complicit role of international actors in reproducing such colonising hierarchies. Queer Palestinian call for boycott and anti-normalisation work challenges essentialising critiques around the Gay International as well as some strands of homonationalism-centred critiques. Overall, the chapter reveals how Palestinian queer activism offers strategies and analyses of value to the politics of native queer refusal.
