There Is No Pride in Genocide: Rome Pride Rejects Pinkwashing as Israel’s Slaughter Continues

Photograph by Matteo Nardone

In late May 2026, Rome Pride organizers delivered a clear and courageous message: there will be no platform for complicity with genocide. Italy’s only Jewish LGBTQ organization, Keshet Italia, was barred from marching with its own float in the upcoming June 20 parade. The reason was straightforward and principled—Keshet refused to endorse Rome Pride’s political manifesto, which explicitly condemns Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and demands a clear break from the Zionist state’s policies of occupation, apartheid, and extermination.

This decision has triggered predictable outrage from Zionist quarters, who immediately cried antisemitism. But the real issue here is not prejudice—it is accountability. Pride was born as a radical act of resistance against oppression, not as a rainbow-washed corporate parade where war criminals get to fly rainbow flags while bombing children.

The Abomination of Pinkwashing

Israel has spent decades perfecting the art of pinkwashing—cynically parading Tel Aviv’s vibrant (and heavily subsidized) Pride scene as proof of its “liberal democracy” while maintaining the most brutal settler-colonial regime on earth. Queer Israelis may serve openly in the occupation forces, but Palestinian queers live under a double nightmare: the daily violence of military occupation and the conservative social pressures exacerbated by decades of dispossession and siege.

In Gaza and the........

© CounterPunch