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Israel's first trans officer helps with ethnic cleansing

Barrows-Friedman, Nora
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-first-trans-officer-helps-ethnic-cleansing/20171

Publisher:  The Electronic Intifada
Date Written:  12/04/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Queer and transgender activists protested an event featuring an Israeli soldier in Seattle on 5 April.The event was supported by the LGBTQ Commission, a body that advises city leaders on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.Two commissioners resigned in protest just days earlier, criticizing the group’s participation as an act of pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is a public relations strategy that deploys Israel's supposed enlightenment toward LGBTQ issues to deflect criticism from its human rights abuses and war crimes and as a means to build up support for Israel among Western liberals and progressives.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Lt. Shachar Erez, who has been in the Israeli army for five years, is its first transgender officer, according to The Jewish Daily Forward.

He is on a national speaking tour sponsored by the Israeli army and foreign ministry.

Erez's tour is part of the "Brand Israel" campaign, an Israeli government effort to market a liberal image of the country to advance commerce and tourism and improve Israel's international standing.

The tour is hosted by StandWithUs, an Israeli government-funded lobby group with ties to right-wing anti-LGBTQ activists such as John Hagee of Christians United for Israel.

Along with advising the army's "gender affairs office," The Forward reports that Erez works "on a national project to relocate military bases from the center to the periphery of Israel."

This indicates that Erez, a commander in his unit, is involved in helping coordinate the mass expulsion of Palestinian Bedouin communities from their ancestral lands in the southern Naqab region of present-day Israel, part of the "Negev 2020" plan to "develop" the area exclusively for Jews.

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