Racism Wrapped in Rainbow Flags

Sunday's annual LGBT pride march in NYC featured many of the typical opportunists leeching off the festivities, corporations and politicians seizing the chance to hawk their wares or pander for votes during what used to be the commemoration of a radical anti-police riot at the Stonewall Inn. Fitting in well with these shameless self-promoters was the state of Israel, represented via their New York Consulate and the Tel Aviv municipality. They marched waving an equal number of Israeli and rainbow flags, suggesting somehow an equivalence between a racially-based state and a symbol of diversity.

Participating in the delegation was gay porn actor-cum-mogul (no pun intended) Michael Lucas, producer of films such as "Men of Israel", "Shameless Holes", "Piss Sluts", and "FARTS!". Recently, the Zoolander lookalike has found a second calling in politics, acting as an apologist for Israel and basher of Muslims in mainstream gay publications such as The Advocate, formulating ingenious strings of buzz words such as: "The world should understand that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not a conflict between two political entities. It’s a conflict between two worlds — one that is stuck in the Middle Ages and one that belongs to the 21st century. It’s a conflict between civilization and barbarism; between freedom and oppression; between democracy and dictatorship; between human rights and violations of human rights." This past year, he started a sort of Birthright Israel for horny gay dudes, getting tourists exclusive access to "sexy soldiers" on IDF bases.

Elsewhere, Israel's state-sponsored attempts at pride march co-option were met with resistance. Toronto's Queers Against Israeli Apartheid dissident bloc was at first banned (and then unbanned) from this year's march following a campaign by B'nai Brith, supposedly under the justification that the term 'apartheid' was offensive (nevermind that the comparision has been made by former Israeli Prime Ministers Barak,Olmert and allegedly even Ben-Gurion). In Madrid, Israel's official delegation was banned from participating as organizers expressed dismay over the flotilla massacre, much to the chagrin of Russian-born Michael Lucus, who quipped, "Europeans are not very smart."


The goal of Israel's LGBT-targeted marketing campaign is to brand their state as a queer oasis in the middle of an otherwise hostile Middle East. Take for instance the workshop planned for last week's US Social Forum by the organization StandWithUs, titled 'LGBTQI Liberation in the Middle East'. From the description alone, it doesn't seem so bad; certainly, homophobic injustice occurs everywhere, and activists should stand in solidarity with others fighting for their liberation. However, when one takes into account that StandWithUs is not an LGBT rights organization but one described in their mission statement as being dedicated to "ensuring that Israel's side of the story is told", a duplicitous political agenda becomes apparent.

Thankfully, a number of actual Middle Eastern LGBT organizations took notice, and penned a strongly written letter to the USSF demanding the cancellation of this workshop, which the USSF respected. Unlike StandWithUs, I'll now allow these organizations to make their case in their own words:

Stand with Us has no connection with the LGBT movement in the Middle East apart from ties to Zionist Israeli LGBT organizations, yet it claims to speak for and about our movements. It has no credibility in our region, and as organizations working in and from the Middle East, we condemn its attempt to use us, our struggles, our lives, and our experiences as a platform for pro-Israeli propaganda.

Since Israel’s brutal wars on Gaza and Lebanon in 2006 and particularly after the recent unprovoked attack on the flotilla of activists going to Gaza, the Israeli government has found itself increasingly marginalized by international condemnations and weakened through the growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. To remedy this, it has launched a massive PR campaign using organizations such as Stand with Us to convince the world that Israel is not a brutal settler-colony state, but rather a free democracy where human rights in general, and LGBT rights in particular, are respected and upheld. Stand With Us deceptively uses the language of LGBT and women’s rights to obscure the fact that institutionalized discrimination is enshrined within the state of Israel.

Our struggle is deeply intertwined with the struggle of all oppressed people, and we cannot accept that we are being used as a tool to discredit the Palestinian cause. Stand with Us would have everyone believe that the Palestinian cause is an unworthy one because of the homophobia that exists within Palestinian society, as if homophobia does not exist elsewhere, and as if struggles for justice are predicated on some sort of inherent “goodness” of the oppressed, rather than on the principles of freedom, justice, and equality for everyone, everywhere. Stand with Us would have us all compartmentalize our beliefs, lives, and identities so that solidarity with the queer struggle would preclude solidarity with others.

While Stand With Us is quick to point out the oppression of queer Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, it conveniently forgets that those same queers are not immune to the bombs, blockades, apartheid and destruction wrought upon them daily by the Israeli government, and that Israel’s multi-tiered oppression hardly makes a distinction between straight and gay Palestinians.

We refuse to be instrumentalized by anyone, be it our own oppressive governments or the Zionist lobby hijacking our struggle to legitimize the state of Israel and its policies, thus providing even more fodder for our own governments to use against us. If you want to learn about our movements and struggles, engage with us, rather than with those who will use us as pawns in Israel’s campaign to pinkwash its crimes.

As a Jew, I find myself disturbed by Israel carrying out it's crimes in my name, and can only imagine how it must feel for queer Palestinians to have their existence co-opted by a state who would just as soon blockade, fence off, and bomb them.

In response to their workshop's cancellation, StandWithUs lashed out in a particularly nonsensical manner, claiming that the USSF, by listening to the voices of reputed Middle Eastern LGBT organizations, had effectively "shamefully silenced the suffering of Middle East gays because of their own hateful intolerance." It also became clear that while their workshop description taken alone might suggest a discussion of homophobia throughout the entire region, including Israel, they had always planned on using it as a platform for promoting Israel's "outstanding record on LGBT issues" and status as a "refuge for persecuted gays in the Middle East." Are either of these claims even remotely true?

Like most societies, Israel struggles with institutionalized homophobia, and it helps neither Palestinian nor Israeli queers to pretend otherwise. A Haaretz poll showed that nearly half of Israelis view homosexuality as a perversion, and hate crimes are common, such as the highly publicized 2009 incident where a gunman murdered 2 and injured 11 in a gay youth meeting. Israel's own LGBT pride celebrations have come under attack, both from non-state agents in the form of stabbings, stonings, and posters in Haredi neighborhoods offering money for any pride participant killed, and from official government sources, such as the Interior Minister, who last year signed a letter calling it an 'abomonation', and from the police, who this year rejected the pride parade's proposed route since it passed by a yeshiva. Although much fuss is made over queer Israeli's 'right' to serve in the IDF (and shoot at queer Palestinians), same-sex marriage will remain non-existent as all marriage is required to be under the auspices of the religious authority, a policy leftover from the Ottomans. How progressive.

As for the claim that Israel is a safe haven where persecuted queers from across the Middle East can seek refuge, in actuality, queer Palestinians who flee to Israel risk deportation, jail, and house arrest. Israel refuses to grant asylum to them even in cases where it's known they could be murdered if deported back to their original communities. Much of the Israeli LGBT establishment also struggles with anti-Palestinian racism, and in the tolerant gay 'bubble' of Tel Aviv, many queer Palestinians end up "living and working on the streets." Arab queers were even prevented from speaking at the memorial for those killed in last years shooting, the justification given that "we can't go so far." Tolerance, it seems, has it's limits.

However, there are members of Israel's queer community who are willing to speak out, and this year they've organized 2 alternatives to Tel Aviv's mainstream pride parade, the Community Pride Parade: Parading for Change and Just Before Pride: Alternative Radical March. The organizers recognize the necessity of understanding oppression intersectionally, and that struggling against homophobia also means tackling racism in all it's forms. As the organizers of Just Before Pride wrote on their website,

"We decided to march this year in view of the growing hate crimes against gender-political-social-class minorities in Israel and in the occupied territories, and in the face of the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv municipality, which neither represent us nor our values...We recognize the vital and imperative connection between the LGBTQI struggle and political struggles of other minorities that suffer systematic oppression in the state [of Israel] and the occupied territories."

Participants in pride celebrations everywhere can learn from what these dissident Israelis are trying to accomplish in creating an inclusive space that challenges attempts at co-option like what happened here on Sunday. Next year, in New York!