Exposing the Genocide-Enabling Sponsors of Cincinnati Pride: Top Sponsors Have Deep Ties to Israel
Queer bloc protests against rainbow capitalism during Dublin Pride 2016.
Photo: Aloyisius via Wikimedia
As a reaction to the persistent raids on queer spaces, the LGBTQ community fought for their rights by throwing objects at cops, freeing people detained by cops and protesting by the thousands despite widespread police brutality and mass arrests. Led by trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the queer community showed up and protected each other from state violence and oppression. Today, Pride has become a rainbow-coated commercial for corporations to lure potential consumers while drawing attention away from their profitable arrangements with the settler-colonial state of Israel and its ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Rainbow capitalism allows corporations to cosplay as progressive by sponsoring Pride events and manufacturing Pride products while simultaneously betraying progressive ideals. These so-called “woke” corporations pay lip service to progressive causes while implicitly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the oppression of many more populations across the Global South. This is the reality of capitalist exploitation, which depends on the subjugation of increasing numbers of the proletariat in order to feed its insatiable appetite for profit at all costs. Make no mistake, corporate America’s support for Pride is just another cynical attempt to draw in more queer and progressive consumers while actively benefiting from the genocide of LGBTQ people in Palestine.
Many of the companies in the long list of sponsors for this year's Cincinnati Pride have less than stellar track records when it comes to Palestinian liberation. Starbucks, US Bank, Nestlé and L’Oreal have been subjected to consumer boycotts due to their connections with Israel. In the last few months, there have been calls for divestment from Israeli universities and companies all over college campuses. Top Pride sponsors such as Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, Gilead Sciences and Thermo-Fisher Scientific closely collaborate with these very same universities and companies, directly benefiting from and contributing to apartheid Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Consumer goods behemoth Procter & Gamble is one of Cincy Pride’s Diamond tier sponsors this year. P&G has operated a local office in Israel since 2001 and established the P&G Israel House of Innovation (IHI) in 2007. They proudly boast of their monopoly over the Israeli market, claiming that their products have made their way into 98% of Israeli homes. P&G’s involvement also extends to “the transformation of military technology for civilian application,” such as the real-time image processing technology from Rafael’s Missile Division being used to develop “PillCam,” an ingestible camera for the detection of GI disorders. P&G profits from the same military technology being used to surveil and target Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In 2011, P&G partnered with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through the Yissum Research Development Company. The Hebrew University conducts more than one-third of all academic scientific research and 43% of the biotech research in Israel. Founded in 1964 “to protect and commercialize the Hebrew University’s intellectual property,” Yissum has registered over 7,000 patents and licensed out 530 technologies, generating $2 billion in annual sales. Yissum’s business partners include agriculture giant Monsanto, pharmaceutical companies Teva, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, and Google, which provides the Israeli military with cloud storage and AI capabilities through Project Nimbus. P&G is proud of its partnerships in Israel and is more than happy to reap the benefits of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
Gold sponsor Thermo-Fisher Scientific operates in multiple locations across Israel and works closely with the Israeli Ministry of Health. Its Applied Biosciences brand offers a product called the RapidHIT ID System which “generates forensic DNA profiles in virtually any setting in as little as 90 minutes” according to their website. RapidHit was approved by the FBI in 2020 for use by forensic DNA labs to process DNA samples and search them against the U.S. National DNA Index System (NDIS) CODIS database without manual interpretation or review. This technology is currently being used at the US/Mexico border on migrant families and is more than likely being used on Palestinians to uphold Israel’s apartheid state and ethnic cleansing campaign.
Platinum sponsor Gilead Sciences also collaborates extensively with universities and organizations in Israel, including Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Ministry of Health. On their website, Gilead claims to be “the partner of choice for every organization or person in Israel’s health ecosystem who identifies with our vision.” They have developed more than 25 medications including Remdesivir, one of the drugs included in the COVID treatment Paxlovid.
In February of 2019, Hebrew University professor and acclaimed Palestinian feminist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian gave a lecture at Columbia University where she claimed that Israeli authorities were allowing large pharmaceutical companies to experiment on Palestinian prisoners. She stated that “Palestinian spaces are laboratories.” Shaloub-Kevorkian was detained and interrogated by Israel in April, marking the first time Israel had targeted an academic for speech related to their work. Mohammad Baraka, head of the extra-parliamentary High Follow-up Committee for Arabs in Israel, made a similar accusation in April OF 2019, claiming that the Israeli Ministry of Health had issued licenses to international pharmaceutical companies to carry out medical tests on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
These are not the only injustices Israel has been accused of. In 2017, the Palestine and Arab Occupied Territories Sector at the Arab League published a report that accused Israel of not only performing medical experiments on Palestinian prisoners but also of stealing the organs of Palestinian martyrs. The report claimed that Israel holds the bodies of Palestinians as punishment and keeps them in morgue refrigerators for long term storage. They cited a Palestinian human rights report that found Israel had been holding 249 Palestinian bodies since the 60’s. In November 2015, Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour sent a letter to the UN Secretary General in which he wrote that “[a] medical examination conducted on bodies of Palestinians returned after they were killed by the occupying power found that they were missing organs.” In 2014, an analysis of major organ trafficking cases since 2000 conducted by the New York Times reported that Israelis have played a “disproportionate role” in organ trafficking. Most recently multiple Palestinian martyrs were found in mass graves at Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals with organs and skin missing. Unethical organ harvesting is a practice not wholly unfamiliar to Thermo-Fisher. In 2023 the family of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cervical cells were harvested without her consent and used in medical advancements around the world, sued Thermo-Fisher Scientific for compensation and won. These extensive allegations of organ harvesting from Palestinian bodies and the alleged unethical experimentation on Palestinian prisoners by Israel makes clear that companies like P&G, Gilead and Thermo-Fisher are continuing to benefit from the exploitation of black and brown bodies.
These sponsors claim to advocate for the LGBTQ community. Gilead Israel claims that they have supported the activities of the LGBTQ Center to advance social rights for the LGBTQ community since the founding of Gilead Israel in 2016. Pinkwashing or Rainbow-washing has been used by LGBTQ “advocates” to not only legitimize the State of Israel, but also to demonize Palestinians. They argue that Israel supports queer people and should be defended, while Palestine does not support queer people and even punishes them so they are not worth protecting. Whether the government supports LGBTQ people or not does not change the fact that queer and trans people still exist in Palestine, and the genocide is killing them too. If we learn anything from the Stonewall Riots, it is that we — the queer community and its allies — keep us safe; using LGBTQ issues to justify an ethnic cleansing campaign embodies everything wrong with neoliberalism’s individualistic and disempowering ideals.
Claiming to support progressive causes while maintaining ties with an oppressive regime does not concern the bourgeoisie; if it raises profits, then it’s all the same to the ruling class, even when it's clear to us that they hold inherently contradictory positions. Their support for causes such as LGBTQ Pride are not — and can never be — grounded in genuine allyship because their profits ultimately depend on exploiting workers and indigenous peoples across the globe, irrespective of its impact on queer or human rights. It is up to all people of conscience to call out these swindlers and their thinly veiled PR campaigns as antithetical to the ideals of acceptance and justice embodied by the celebration of Pride. Cincinnati Socialists joins with Divest Cincy Pride in demanding that Cincinnati Pride divest from these companies and bar them from using LGBTQ issues to further enable genocide and exploitation.