In the midst of the latest 2026 Israeli war on Lebanon, an article on Daraj Media titled “The Queer Left: Caught Between Queerness and the Axis of Resistance” was published. In a nutshell, this article criticizes queer people who stand with anti-colonial armed resistance on the premise that this alignment is a digging of a queer’s own grave. The article's argument is that armed resistance views queerness as an abomination and punishable moral deviance, so supporting this would be a form of self-erasure, making queer people complicit in our own oppression, “postponing” / deprioritizing our liberation. The article basically chastises queers, in a you're either “with us and yourself” stance, or “against us and yourself” stance. It's a bit high school, if you ask us. A similar article was published on the same media outlet after the 2024 escalated war on Lebanon, where you replace the word queer with feminist and then run the same liberal argument. Neither sat well with us. 

As the counterarguments on how to respond to this queer+rage baiting content rushed to our minds, we luckily landed on the comments segment below the article post on Instagram, and reading them, our heads nodded, frowns softened, smirks were drawn, and the counterarguments plaguing our heads … well, they went quiet. The queers are alright wallahi. This article was so rude that even Beirut.com had to pause its mission of letting us know where the hottest new cafes with the most reliable wifi are and published a response in which they let this “gender woke” platform know that “queer people in Lebanon, as elsewhere under occupation, are not a constituency to be managed or a variable in someone else’s political equation. That deserves more than a framework that pits their identity against their political reality.” So while there's no need for us to write a rebuttal, we did feel these sharp and rich comments and counterarguments, in all their glory, needed to be preserved. So here we are, walking you through a fine selection of screenshots that serve anti-colonial, anti-imperial, queer commentary. 

To begin, the article makes no mention of the terror that Israel is committing in our region, but rather emphasizes the harm that “the axis of resistance” perpetuates through its anti-queer stance and through violence committed against queers by militias. This sidelining of the war we live through collapses people and communities into single-faceted identities that can be tokenized: how can a queer person support a group fighting for their land, when their idea of liberation does not include queerness? This “logic” recycles identity-based Western narratives that police how people living under Israeli-American violence should think, live, resist, and dream.

We are no strangers to identity politics in our feminist and queer movements. Liberals have historically been repackaging our struggles into bite-sized presentations for Western donors and white audiences, continuously depoliticizing and diluting our demands for grander liberations. Our region is plagued by strange discourses for queer rights that do not speak to us, to our struggles, or to our livelihood. This strangeness is created by homogenizing queers, whitewashing our struggles, and is preoccupied with visibility, genderbread powerpoints, rainbow-branded consumerism, and knighting places/institutions/professionals as LGBT-friendly. On the other hand, our version of liberation begins with safeguarding and securing the land we inhabit and our people. 

Unable to fathom how queer people could be anything more than just outcast sexual deviants, and can’t possibly feel a belonging to their homes, families, communities, lands, and society, the article laughably claims that the solidarity extended by queer people to armed resistance is a "political identity” of people trying to be "politically correct”. An undermining and belittling on so many levels, which speaks volumes about the value system underpinning the argument. No one is trying to be woke; we’re just literally rooting for our survival. This is especially cruel because there’s no denying that queer and trans antagonism, violence, and discrimination exist in our societies, and attempting to drive an even wider wedge between queers and the communities we come from, whilst struggling to survive multiple forms of violence, is especially low. It ignores the reality of living under (ongoing) war(s), the right to exist in a world free from settler colonial violence, and the histories and dynamic relationships people have had with political parties and armed resistance.

Moreover, the article constructs the “queer body” as separable from the conditions of survival and disregards the Zionist killing machine that determines whether any body survives at all. It alludes to a distinction between queer survival and non-queer survival as if it makes a difference. 

It attempts to sever queer struggle from our lived reality under colonial hell. It demands that queer people position themselves outside collective survival unless every resistance fighter reflects a complete politics of queer liberation. To insist that we must accept our own killing because fighters do not articulate queer liberation as part of their cause is itself a form of dehumanization. It very much mirrors the logic Israel uses against queer Palestinians: your community will kill you, Hamas will stone you, so your only option is assimilation into the “only democracy in the Middle East.” This is the fallacy: return to your people and die, or submit to the colonial state that claims to save you, and you guessed it, it will still bomb, starve, imprison, and kill you and your community. 

Queer liberation can never be abstracted from the cruelties of colonial violence that structure our lives in Lebanon and in Palestine. We reject a queer liberation that is based on treason, on pandering to Western elites, on the same politics that tell us to leave our families behind if they cannot immediately accommodate an “authentic” queer self; that flattens our complexities into a binary of escape or submission; that promises us to be saved by Western individualistic freedom. We reject a queer liberation that refuses to fight for the survival and prosperity of our peoples, our villages in the South of Lebanon, our trees, our sea, our histories, our siblings in Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan. Needless to say, we’ll be including this article in our future reading retreats on the Politics of Sexuality, because it's not every day that someone says it exactly the way you fight against it.