The Anti-Apartheid Struggle Will Not be Pinkwashed: History Shows That Suspension of Israeli Organisation from ILGA World Was Correct

On 29 October 2024, the largest global network of organisations advocating for LGBTQI rights, ILGA World, removed Tel Aviv from consideration as one of four possible host cities for its next World Conference. Moreover, they suspended the membership of the Israeli organisation that had made the proposal.

This represented the culmination of weeks of debate and protest action in response to the proposal of Tel Aviv as a possible host city by “Israel’s pioneer LGBTQ organisation”, the Aguda—and a welcome reversal of ILGA’s initial doubling down.

In the wake of the Aguda’s bid, a vote had been scheduled, in the usual fashion, during the 2024 ILGA World conference, taking place next week in Cape Town. Understandably, however, the inclusion of Tel Aviv on the ballot, along with three other potential host cities, faced considerable backlash.

South African activists and organisations have raised serious concerns about Israel’s human rights record and the severe violations of international humanitarian law that continue to be committed by the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank, including their ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

They have pointed to the well-established parallels with South Africa’s own history of apartheid and South Africans’ longstanding solidarity with the Palestinian people. Significantly, among those who have voiced this criticism are the two South African hosts and partners for the upcoming Cape Town conference: Gender DynamiX and Iranti.

After some back and forth, including the withdrawal of leading South African LGBTQI activist and former ILGA Co-Secretary General, Phumi Mtetwa, as the closing keynote speaker, local activists—organising under the banner of the Pavement Special Collective—put forward a set of demands.

In their subsequent statement, the ILGA World Board expressed their “unanimous[…] deci[sion] to remove the bid from the Aguda from consideration” to “ensure we fully uphold universal respect for human rights, equal representation, and the elimination of barriers to participation for all members—including in our conferences.”

The decision also followed an “emergency motion” presented by over 70 ILGA member organisations from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. The motion raised significant concerns about the Aguda’s endorsement of the Israeli police and the police’s proposed role in protecting conference participants, as well as the organisation’s claim that Israel ranks higher in “quality of life indexes” than cities like Cape Town and Los Angeles.

The motion stated: “To put to vote the possibility of holding the ILGA World conference in the capital of an apartheid state […] without acknowledging the larger politics of pinkwashing—a term that refers to the use of LGBTQI rights to distract from or justify human rights violations—is both shameful and unacceptable.”

History Repeating Itself

This is not the first time that ILGA World, an umbrella organisation with over 2,000 member NGOs globally, has been confronted with issues relating to member organisations advocating for LGBTQI rights in apartheid states—though, initially, it was a South African organisation that faced suspension on this count.

In May 1987, the anti-apartheid activist Simon Nkoli, remembered as a founding figure of South Africa’s LGBTQI movement, raised concerns in the US-based periodical Gay Community News about representation at the upcoming ILGA conference in Cologne. Since 1984, Nkoli’s trial for treason had garnered significant media attention internationally—attention that served as a catalyst for ILGA’s eventual suspension of the predominantly white Gay and Lesbian Association of South Africa (GASA).

After being celebrated in 1983 as the first African organisation to apply for ILGA membership, GASA faced scrutiny over its predominantly white leadership and its relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa, then under a UN-sanctioned boycott.

When GASA’s, and by extension South Africa’s, membership was approved in 1984, ILGA issued a statement opposing apartheid and supporting the boycott, though their efforts to form an anti-apartheid working group appear to have been short-lived. Confirming GASA’s expulsion in July 1987, ILGA cited the organisation’s lack of support for Nkoli amid ongoing concerns about its collaboration with the apartheid regime.

When asked why they had not supported him during his time in prison, GASA maintained that Nkoli’s arrest was not on gay-related charges and therefore not a “gay issue.” Supporting Nkoli would, they argued, fall beyond their mandate.

Conversely, Nkoli’s own activism and his public linkage of apartheid to homophobia has helped cement our current understanding of homophobia as a legacy of apartheid, and as an issue that demands attention in the pursuit of equality envisioned by post-apartheid South Africans. It was for failing to recognise the critical link between the struggle for gay equality with the struggle against apartheid that GASA was eventually expelled.

It now seems particularly revealing that, in 1983, GASA’s membership bid was supported by representatives from Israel, who drew parallels to their own situation, asserting that “gay groups by definition are always working against the state.” Tellingly, the Israeli representatives did not specify whether they understood “working against [an apartheid] state” to entail actually working against apartheid.

The Legacy of Global Solidarity

Allowing Israel to bid to host the 2026/2027 ILGA World Conference would not only have legitimised Israel’s use of (limited) LGBTQI rights as a tool of pinkwashing but also undermined ILGA’s credibility as a body committed to human rights in their entirety.

And yet, at a time when transgender people are confronting unprecedented levels of discrimination, stigma, violence, and health disparities—both across the African continent and globally—it is those who stand to lose the most who have insisted, once again, that we cannot isolate our struggles.

The Pavement Special Collective, a grassroots advocacy group established in response to the high fees and inaccessibility of the ILGA conference, along with its two Cape Town hosts, works with some of the region’s most marginalized communities. Gender DynamiX is Africa’s oldest surviving and first registered transgender organization, while Iranti is a media advocacy organization dedicated to defending the human rights of transgender, intersex, and lesbian individuals across Africa.

ILGA’s most recent statement acknowledges that for organisations like Gender Dynamix and Iranti, “even the possibility of voting on such a bid in their home country would have been at odds with the unequivocal solidarity for the Palestinian people.”

The success of South African activists and organisations in compelling ILGA’s eventual decision to remove the Aguda’s bid from the ballot and suspend the organisation’s membership is a powerful reminder of the importance of insisting on that LGBTQI struggles are waged in solidarity with anti-apartheid struggles and all collective attempts to make more lives more liveable.

As a political tactic, pinkwashing seeks to sever the connection between movements for equality, disguising them as isolated battles in order to bely the necessarily collaborative nature of the fight against systemic oppression. In the face of attempted pinkwashing, Nkoli’s reminder of the futility of single-issue struggles is more relevant than ever:

What will we say when people ask, “What did you do to bring about change in this country, where were you during the battle?” We’d have to come back to them and say, “We were with you but we didn’t want you to know we were there.” That would be a foolish answer. […] When South Africa is liberated, there will be no question of anyone saying, “those people were not part of us.”