#PositiveMentions: Israeli “Country Branding” and/as Pinkwashing Failures

• In Event: Homonationalism, Imperial “Harm-Reduction,” and Pinkwashing Zionism

Abstract

Israel has a host of so-called “country branding” initiatives that seek to position the settler state as a misunderstood subject; their logic holds that youth misunderstand Israel as either too imbricated in war or religion and need to instead be shown its cultural and artistic breadth. These initiatives have historically organized all-expenses-paid trips to Israel for social media influencers to rebrand the country as a progressive tourist destination for millennials. Organizations committed to this work, like Vibe Israel, boast of having “brought over 250 influencers” to Israel and “generated almost a billion positive mentions of Israel.” Reframing Israel’s settler colonial origins as evidence of its position as a “Start-Up Nation,” Vibe Israel provides media training workshops, tours, and hashtag campaigns that celebrate Israel’s diversity as an alibi for its racialized violence.

Initiatives like these have largely gone silent over the past 15 months of Israel’s genocide, but have posted hasbara talking points to “get young liberals to lean in;” these talking points desperately focus on women in leadership positions and LGBTQ pride parades. Meanwhile, settler boat tours of North Gaza have mushroomed, where Israelis act as spectators of land that they imagine will soon be theirs. In my contribution to this panel, I will remark on how these two types of tours are not a thing apart. While one works to underemphasize Israel’s relationship to war and religion in order to boost its progressive global image and the other welcomes the genocide of Gaza in order to secure more land for Israelis, both do the same work: they not only sanction Israel’s settler colonial displacement but also launder it, producing and promoting a vision of Israel not cleansed of the violence it reproduces everyday but indebted to it

Author

• Jennifer L Kelly, University of California-Santa Cruz