November 29 is the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people — a day that has been observed since 1977. This year, it will be observed during a nominal ceasefire — I say nominal because the Israeli occupation regularly breaks the terms of this ceasefire, with 500 incidents of a breach by Israel, 340 Palestinians killed and more than 900 injured since the October 10 ceasefire was announced. Similarly, Israel continues to break the terms of the ceasefire in Lebanon, and Israeli media report that its military is gearing up for offensives in both Lebanon and Gaza.

I want to take this opportunity to look at some of the main myths spread by the apologists for this brutal regime and its genocidal violence. While there are many, I wish to focus on the myth that Israel is a democracy, as well as on its pinkwashing and homonationalism.

One often hears that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, as if that is supposed to shield it from critics of its genocidal violence and apartheid regime. I fail to see how one can even remotely call Israel a democracy. It may be a democracy for its Jewish citizens, but that is like calling apartheid South Africa a democracy because the Afrikaners had a vote in how brutal their regime was.

Israel was founded by acts of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. That is Israel’s founding reality. And the means of ethnic cleansing in its creation have led to an end of continual ethnic cleansing since. Palestinians fled for safety in the face of the Zionist terror on their towns and villages, many escaping to the relative safety of what we know today as Gaza and the West Bank. Those Palestinians who, for whatever reason, were unable to flee, or whose communities were not ethnically cleansed in that terror found themselves renamed as Israeli Arabs, citizens in the new Israeli state. They found themselves ghettoised and under military law until 1966 — the same military law was then applied, to this day, to the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank. That is, they were denied rights, subjected to arbitrary whims of military overlords, restricted from building homes or tending to their fields.

Even after the formal relaxation of the military law within Israel itself, this minority has continued to face persecution. They live in a form of segregation, denied the right to purchase property outside of designated areas, denied the right to purchase property from Jewish citizens, and denied access to work in 70 per cent of Israel’s economy. Planning applications are routinely denied and the distribution of state funds to their municipalities limited. The richest Palestinian municipalities are poorer than the poorest Jewish municipalities as a result, and they are reduced in the main to menial labour and as a reserve army of labour.

This is not to deny that there are exceptions to the rule. There are rich Palestinian citizens of Israel. There are professionals. They even get the vote, with their numerical minority such that they pose zero risk to the domination of Zionism.

While Palestinian citizens of Israel are prevented from expanding their settlements, Jewish settlements are funded around them. The right of return, of those refugees who fled in the face of ethnic cleansing, is denied while any person in the world who can claim to be Jewish is granted Israeli citizenship — and these emigrants are used to change the demographics on the ground in ongoing ethnic cleansing.

And since 1967, with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has continued to deny the Palestinians living there their rights. Unwilling to end the occupation and allow an independent Palestine, they are also unwilling to grant the Palestinians rights as citizens of Israel. Instead, we see the same pattern repeat itself — genocidal violence to eradicate the population. The only question is that of tempo — more intense in Gaza, and more of a slow strangulation in the West Bank. Palestinians find themselves subjected to military law, with one in five Palestinians — that’s about 800,000 people — having been subjected to detention without charge, frequently subjected to torture. Zionist terrorists regularly engage in pogroms, with the full backing of the Israel Defence Forces, terrorising Palestinian communities and stealing resources such as water and agricultural land. The West Bank is fragmented by Jewish settlements and military checkpoints, destroying community cohesion, reminiscent of how the United States used highways to destroy Black communities — just more intense.

This is not a democracy. I hesitate to even use the term apartheid for the simple reason that what we see in Israel and its occupation is even more brutal than South Africa at its worst. What Israel is is an ethnocracy engaged in a process of ethnic cleansing and genocide from even before its birth. Apartheid is too polite a term.

And what of pinkwashing and homonationalism?

By pinkwashing, one means how the superficial promoting of LGBTQ+ rights is used for the cynical purposes of distracting from actions that have little to do with equality or inclusion. It was actually coined to describe the cynical deployment of LGBTQ+ narratives by Israel to distract from the reality of their genocidal regime towards Palestinians and the wider Arab world. By homonationalism one means how superficial promotion of LGBTQ+ rights is used to promote nationalist, racist, anti-poor or Islamophobic positions. That is, it generally provides a cover for other prejudices. We see this clearly in the US and Britain in some currents who seek to camouflage their prejudices on the basis of their superficial support for LGTBQ+ rights. We also see it in countries where race and class are strongly correlated by a history of slavery and segregation as cover for racial and class prejudices.

What does it matter to the queer Palestinian if their oppressor is queer, too? Does it matter to the Queer Palestinian if the bombs being dropped on their heads are from Queer Israeli pilots? The single greatest threat to LGBTQ+ Palestinians is not other Palestinians, it is the occupation and genocidal violence of the Israeli regime. It is well documented also how Israel weaponises sexuality, threatening to out Queer Palestinians for intelligence purposes.

It is important to note that there are LGBTQ+ activist organisations in Palestine, the most prominent being Al-Qaws (the rainbow) and Aswat (voices) that are both advocates of LGBTQ+ rights and are part of the resistance against the occupation. As they have made clear, there can be no pride in genocide.

Israel uses pinkwashing to help justify its brutality, especially to garner sympathetic support from the West for its occupation. This narrative is little different from the argument of past empires — that they are an enlightened occupation, bringing civilisation to the natives. It is a narrative that is fundamentally racist, and to the extent it is picked up by apologists in the West, it demonstrates how the lack of an intersectional approach to oppression allows for one language of liberation to be co-opted for the purposes of wider oppression.

I will close by quoting the Lebanese LGBTQ+ group Helem (dream), also active in the resistance movement:

“Sexual liberation cannot be achieved through imperialism or detached from the wider struggle for democracy.”

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University