Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli-Hamas war has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the center of the world's attention.
In the LGBTQ community, it's focused renewed attention on the accusation that Israel engages in pinkwashing. Pride parades in New York, Boston, and Toronto last month were disrupted by protesters alleging Israel uses LGBTQ rights to deflect from its policies toward Palestinians.
Pinkwashing is the promotion of the pro-LGBTQ aspects of a corporation, political group, or government in order to downplay other things that might be considered negative. Corporations that participate in Pride but donate to anti-LGBTQ politicians are often accused of it, as is Israel.
In San Francisco, pro-Palestinian groups boycotted the June 30 Pride parade, drawing between 1,000 to 1,500 people to a countermarch through the city's Mission and Castro neighborhoods.
Rauda Morcos, a lesbian Palestinian citizen of Israel who's a human rights lawyer, told the Bay Area Reporter in a Signal interview that she thinks Israel uses the issue so Westerners will look the other way from the occupation of Palestinian land. She was one of the founders of Aswat, a group for Palestinian lesbians.
"Israel has no right to use their notion of being LGBT-friendly, or their idea of being LGBT-friendly, that would allow them to be supremacists in the region. It would never give them an extra benefit to make them a democratic country," she said. "You can't call apartheid and occupation democratic, or LGBT-friendly."
In turn, Israeli LGBTQs with whom the B.A.R. spoke on a recent press trip to the region were surprised at the level of anti-Israel sentiment in the global queer community since October 7 — and asked American activists to compare Israel's record against that of their opponents.
"If you're talking about Hamas, you're talking about a jihadi organization," longtime Israeli gay activist Rommey Hassman said in an interview. "Jihadi organizations are against homosexuality. They define us as something not even illegal but demonic. They think all gay men should be executed. That is not something new. They are not progressive and [are] anti-anything LGBTQ. It's like saying 'Black people for the KKK.'"
The June 23-27 trip in which the B.A.R. participated was paid for by the American Middle East Press Association, a nonprofit that states it seeks to serve as "a trusted resource for journalists looking for experts and spokespeople on the current conflict and beyond." AMEPA brought two American reporters on the press trip, "Wartime in Israel," with its counterpart, the Europe Israel Press Association, which itself brought 22 journalists from the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Neither organization is funded by the Israeli government, nor was there any pre-approval of interview questions, article topics, or requests to view articles before publication. (See related story.)
Background on conflict
Since the Six Day War in 1967, the former British Mandate for Palestine has been divided between Israel proper and the Occupied Territories, which include the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, the U.S. State Department reports.
Predominantly Arab East Jerusalem — home of the Old City and its important religious sites such as the Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher — was annexed by Israel in 1980, in a move not recognized by the U.S. or the rest of the international community.
Civil administration in the West Bank is run by the Palestinian National Authority, which is recognized by the United Nations and 145 countries as the government of an independent state of Palestine within the Occupied Territories. In Gaza, the civil government has been de facto run by Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist organization, and which pushed out the Palestinian National Authority two years after Israeli ground troops unilaterally left Gaza in 2005.
Israel, with support from Egypt, blockaded Gaza since the Hamas takeover, which human rights groups stated was an illegal collective punishment, but which the Israeli government claimed was necessary for its security. The blockade led to the building of tunnels smuggling fuel, food, weapons, and more under the Egyptian border.
(The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory held in 2022 that Gaza was still occupied, despite the lack of ground troops due to "control exercised over, inter alia, [Gaza's] airspace and territorial waters, land crossings at the borders, supply of civilian infrastructure, including water and electricity, and key governmental functions such as the management of the Palestinian population registry" by Israel.)
In the West Bank, Israelis have been building settlements that the U.S. and the international community consider illegal. Israel also built walls throughout the West Bank in response to terror attacks in its territory. While suicide bombings have decreased, Palestinian and international organizations, as well as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, have likened the wall, the settlements, and the military presence in the West Bank to apartheid.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas brigades broke out of Gaza and killed 1,139 people in Israel in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Hamas has been holding Israelis who were abducted as hostages in Gaza. (The number of hostages still being held is 116 as of press time. Others have been released.)
Israel responded to the Hamas attack with an extensive bombing campaign in Gaza, and a ground invasion with the stated goal of destroying Hamas. That has led to the deaths of over 38,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry.
The U.S. provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel annually. The Biden administration has faced pressure from some Democrats and protesters to cut off that aid, or make it conditional on a ceasefire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized the Gaza conflict as winding down in a recent interview on Israeli TV, saying, "We will have the possibility of transferring some of our forces north" to fight Hezbollah, whose rocket attacks have led to the displacement of tens of thousands of Israeli civilians in the country's north since October 8.
Meanwhile, the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry determined both the Israeli government and Hamas have committed war crimes, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the leaders of both Israel and Hamas. President Joe Biden denounced the ICC warrant for Netanyahu as "outrageous." (This is separate from South Africa's case in the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.) Months of ceasefire talks and negotiations have so far gone nowhere.
LGBTQ rights in Palestine and Israel
The divide between the West Bank and Gaza means different laws and social mores around homosexuality. The Palestinian National Authority has not legislated on the subject. Homosexuality has been legal in the West Bank since the adoption of the Jordanian Penal Code of 1951 (the West Bank was part of Jordan from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War until the 1967 Six Day War).
The history of Ottoman, British, Egyptian, Israeli, Palestinian, and Hamas rule in Gaza makes a legal consensus difficult. However, according to Amnesty International, the 1936 British penal code that criminalizes homosexuality is still in effect there.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a 2019 article based on interviews with four gay men and one woman, recounted fear of arrest, torture, and forced marriage.
Social media allows the LGBTQ community in Gaza to connect, though they fear Hamas catfishers, according to the article, which also reported others have connected online and formed friendships.
"There is a guy I met online who became a very close friend. With him I can be myself, I feel good," an interviewee who went by Ahmed said in the Haaretz piece. "We go to the beach together to look at guys. If I hadn't spoken with him online before meeting in real life, we would never have been brave enough to admit to each other that we were gay."
In 2016, the New York Times reported a leading Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, was tortured and executed on charges of homosexuality and theft.
Same-sex sexual activity became legal in Israel by a vote of the country's parliament, the Knesset, in 1988, and discrimination against gays and lesbians became illegal four years later. However, laws against homosexuality hadn't been enforced since a 1953 directive from the Israeli attorney general.
Though Israel became the first country in Asia to recognize same-sex marriages in 2006, same-sex marriages cannot be performed in Israel proper. This is because Israeli marriage law only recognizes the marriages of Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and 10 Christian faith communities, in a system dating back to Ottoman rule. None of the recognized religious courts recognize same-sex marriages, and even heterosexual Israelis who want a civil, nonreligious marriage can't get one.
"We're trying to get rid of the rabbinical system," Hassman said.
People who don't want to participate get married in other countries then return to have their marriages recognized at home.
"There are reform rabbis, conservative rabbis from the U.S. who will marry us, but it's not part of the rabbinical system," Hassman said. "I think when young people get married without the religious system, they're saying, 'Fuck the government. We don't care what you decide.'"
Hassman has been on the front lines of LGBTQ rights in Israel since the AIDS epidemic. He said, as chair of the Israel AIDS Taskforce in the 1990s, he helped advocate for the government to approve, and thus pay for, antiretroviral drugs.
"In the beginning, AIDS was a non-issue," he said. "No one talked about it, no one cared about it." Now, he said, with government benefits, "it's an even better situation than in the U.S., where people had to pay for the medicine."
Hassman was also involved in promoting Tel Aviv, Israel's most populous city, as an LGBTQ-friendly destination, according to a 2019 research paper, "The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities."
The first Tel Aviv Pride parade was in 1993, and it now claims to be the largest Pride parade in Asia.
"Of course, it was a struggle," Hassman said. "The first festivities were private. Little by little, the city municipality got involved. It took time and today, gay Pride is a city event — funded by the city."
There are usually Pride parades in other Israeli cities too, now, including in the northern port city of Haifa, and in Jerusalem, where it has faced pushback from conservative religious groups. But it's Tel Aviv, as Hassman joked, that "is a straight-friendly city, but totally gay."
"Being gay and living in Tel Aviv is wonderful," he said.
Chen Arieli, a lesbian, has been Tel Aviv's deputy mayor since 2019 in charge of welfare and public health administration.
"Growing up as a teenage girl in Haifa during the 1980s, I found myself seeking refuge in Tel Aviv-Yafo due to the lack of opportunities," she stated in a WhatsApp message, referring to the city's formal name. "Back then, there was no internet to access information, leaving me feeling isolated and distressed in a remote city."
Arieli stated that Tel Aviv "played a significant and groundbreaking role in positioning the LGBTQ community within Israeli society," starting in 1975 when The Aguda — The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel was founded there.
But the community feels threatened by a coalition of far-right parties that are allied with Netanyahu in the Knesset, she stated. Before the war, Israelis took to the streets protesting proposed changes to the judicial system that would limit the power of the Israeli Supreme Court to exercise judicial review.
"Our struggle and lives here are in danger because democracy is the only way for us to live here," she stated.
Pinkwashing allegations
During some free time on the recent trip, the B.A.R. went to East Jerusalem to find the office of alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, a Palestinian LGBTQ organization. The exact address isn't provided on its website (though it's listed as being on Al-Zahra Street), but the website does state an address will be provided upon phone request. Multiple phone calls to make contact went unreturned, but the Palestinian LGBTQ center responded to an email stating that though "unfortunately right now we don't have the capacity for interviews or meetings ... if you're willing to get an idea about our point of view you can check our articles and materials on social media and website."
AlQaws' website contains a number of pieces, including one from 2020 on pinkwashing.
"Pinkwashing pushes the racist idea that sexual and gender diversity are unnatural and foreign to Palestinian society," alQaws states. "When this idea is internalized within Palestinian communities, it alienates queer and gender-nonconforming Palestinians and isolates them as a social group."
Many queer Palestinians consider the characterization of Tel Aviv an oasis of queer acceptance on the sunny Mediterranean abhorrent.
"Israeli travel guides and promotional videos advertise Tel Aviv beaches as a gay-friendly getaway destination — and hide the reality that tourist partygoers are dancing atop the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages," alQaws states.
Indeed, much of the predominantly Arab population of the old port city of Jaffa — which later became part of Tel Aviv to form a single municipality — fled amid the 1948 fighting, according to a first-hand account in the New York Times.
Morcos said that "Israel was founded over the bodies of Palestinians, over our villages," and reiterated her point that comparing different countries is a way to disempower countries that aren't Western.
"The LGBTQ, whatever letter you can add to it, as a way to criticize other countries — it doesn't matter which — is Western and colonialist and I'm sick of this, honestly," she said. "I'm tired of this thinking that being a country that is so-called LGBT-friendly is better than a country that is not. Who said so? And honestly, Israel is not an LGBT-friendly country in this Western world language."
One issue Morcos expressed with Western LGBTQ movements is the goal of conformity.
"Queer people are not the same as straight people and actually it's a weak point in the LGBT community because the whole idea was to actually struggle for differences and liberation," she said. "We want to widen the society to include all kinds of difference."
One way in which LGBTQs did conform, she said, was by attending WorldPride in Israel in 2006 — even though there were restrictions on freedom of movement for Palestinians from the West Bank.
"They [Israel] were trying to hold an international event while they were in two wars and a blockade over the West Bank," she said. "Not all people could move around and come to work because of the LGBT people coming from all over the world to celebrate their gay life. I don't find in that any kind of pride."
Morcos asked people to be more thoughtful, saying some Western LGBTQs "don't find any similarity toward other marginalized groups around the world."
Aram Ronaldo of the Queer Palestinian Empowerment Network is a queer Palestinian American born in the U.S. and splits time between the Bay Area and New York City. He charges that Tel Aviv as a queer sanctuary is a mirage.
"A lot of drag performers have gone to Tel Aviv Pride and see it's not straightforward," Ronaldo said in a phone interview, referring to conversations with drag artists at LGBTQ production company World of Wonder Productions.
Ronaldo added that it may be an accepting environment "as a white person or as an Ashkenazi Jewish person."
"But anyone else of color, LGBTQ, nonbinary, non-white male and it falls apart," Ronaldo said. "The illusion is gone."
AlQaws argues that Israel promotes LGBTQ rights and acceptance to help bolster its reputation as a liberal, democratic state in the U.S. and Western Europe.
"By promoting cities like Tel Aviv as gay tourism destinations, Israel's foreign ministry seeks to win the support of queer communities across the world and prevent international connections with the Palestinian struggle," alQaws states.
In 2016, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism was criticized for spending 10 times more on an advertising campaign for LGBTQ journalists and bloggers to come to the country than on local LGBTQ organizations. After pressure, the ministry suspended its tourism budget and increased funding to organizations such as The Aguda.
AlQaws argues that pinkwashing is "ultimately an expression of Israel's deeper gender and sexual politics and the ideological foundations of Zionism" and threatens the rights of LGBTQ Palestinians because it frames the issue as a binary choice. It's a "disempowering framework," alQaws states.
"Israeli settler-colonialism works by breaking apart and eliminating Palestinian communities, whether through the military violence of occupation and siege, the legal regimes of apartheid, or the denial of refugees' right of return," the group continues. "If gender and sexual oppression are an essential part of what it means to be Palestinian, then there is no way to challenge or change it. At no point can queer Palestinians be regarded as radical agents of transformation within our own society."
AlQaws argues Israel's defenders are not interested in alleviating LGBTQ Palestinians' suffering.
"When queer Palestinians are spoken about by Israel's defenders, it is only to paint a portrait of individual victimization that reinforces a binary between Palestinian backwardness and Israeli progressiveness," alQaws states. "These portrayals suggest that Palestinian society suffers from pathological homophobia, and that no dissenting voices could ever survive for long within it."
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American straight ally who grew up in Gaza City and lives in the Bay Area, told the B.A.R. in a phone interview that Israel boasting of LGBTQ rights is "an unfair weaponization."
"You can't go to an occupied people, who have been so completely diminished of some of their most basic rights, and expect them to be enlightened when it comes to this particular issue," he said.
Alkhatib said he prefers to stay away from the terminology and "talk about the details."
"I agree there are aspects of LGBT rights Israel has that are not found in Palestinian society, but the use of this particular angle has come across as an unfair weaponization and advantage, to say Israel is this exceptionally capable place," he said. "It is a fact that Israeli intelligence has blackmailed LGBT people in the West Bank into collaborating with the Israeli army to provide intelligence, or act as informants, or potentially out them in their own communities, knowing that is an incredibly dangerous, awful thing."
Haaretz and VICE News have reported on the practice. In response to similar media reports, alQaws states that "singling out sexuality ignores the stranglehold that Israel's militarized colonial regime has on the lives and privacy of Palestinians more generally throughout Palestine."
"Blackmailing and extorting an individual on the basis of their sexuality is, of course, a naked act of oppression," alQaws continues. "But it is no more or less oppressive that blackmailing and extorting an individual on the basis of their lack of access to healthcare, disrupted freedom of movement, exposure of marital infidelities, finances, drug use, or anything else."
Response
Hilla Peer is a lesbian who is the chairwoman of The Aguda. She said in a WhatsApp audio interview the pinkwashing matter isn't so simple. It's "a very big, general term," she said, and "we have to be able to look at things in perspective in every single case."
"When it comes to pinkwashing, I can't find a single government that hasn't sinned," she said. "Some things are complicated and not black-and-white issues. Israel is a complex country and situation. It won't be solved because of the gay community in Israel or pinkwashed due to the gay community In Israel."
Peer brought up Israeli soldier Yoav Atzmoni raising a rainbow flag in Gaza after the invasion late last year — posted to Israel's Instagram page with the caption, "The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza."
"Do you remember that picture of the soldier who went to Gaza and opened a Pride flag?" she asked. "I know that guy personally, and it's a matter of perspective. When the State of Israel shares that as the State of Israel, that's pinkwashing to the world, but when my friend lost five friends on October 7, and he opens the gay flag there, for me, that is not pinkwashing. That is victory over the homophobic terrorists who killed his friends. ... As much as we all crave a single reality of black-and-white, that's not what's actually happening."
The Aguda works as an umbrella group coordinating 19 LGBTQ organizations in Israel. Peer has been chairwoman "for the better part of the last five years," she said, and it runs houses throughout Israel for LGBTQ youth, including youth from ultra-Orthodox, Arab, and Palestinian backgrounds.
"We started by operating a hotline and in a few months we started growing a department," she said. "In three years we are talking about a physical house, as a community. More than 200 people. That might sound like a low number, but it's astronomical. Most of them are here [in Israeli territory proper] but some are not, and we, to be honest, don't care. We provide aid to everyone."
Arieli stated to the B.A.R., considering the rise of Israel's far-right, that "Netanyahu exemplifies pinkwashing, boasting of LGBTQ successes mainly on international stages and in English, while in Israel, he does not promote our rights, especially our personal security."
But the label shouldn't apply to LGBTQs in Israel, Arieli held.
"Accusing activists who defend their rights in their own country of pinkwashing is misguided," she stated. "This claim should be directed against the government."
The traditional Tel Aviv Pride didn't take place this year — it was replaced by an event calling for the return of the hostages being held in Gaza. Among the speakers was Maayan Gross, a transgender woman who has fought as a reservist in the strip with the Israel Defense Forces. Gross was in the IDF in Gaza before the 2005 withdrawal but had not come out as trans yet.
"It felt like I was going back in time," Gross told the B.A.R. in a phone interview. "I felt I'd imagined the last 18 years."
Gross said she felt LGBTQ acceptance in Israel and the IDF have come a long way during that time.
"Most people in Israel accept and recognize the LGBT community," she said, and framed the conflict as one of national survival.
"In their [Hamas] charter, their set of beliefs is to destroy Israel," Gross said. "Hamas kidnapped Israelis, but also citizens of Gaza." Gross agreed with Hassman in criticizing Western protests in support of Palestinians and Gaza that have been widespread in the U.S. and elsewhere, saying Hamas would "destroy every one of us. I hope it doesn't do so."
Like Arieli, Peer expressed fears for the future of LGBTQ acceptance in Israel.
"I would say I am probably one of the first people to criticize my own government and my own country," Peer said. "We spent much of the last year combatting a judicial overhaul and are dealing with an LGBTQ-phobic government. We are fighting for our democracy — the only reason to be able to live here."
Phillip Ayoub, a professor of international relations at University College London; Amy Lind, a professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati; and gay, nonbinary Lebanese American singer Hamed Sinno, all of whom have spoken or written publicly about the pinkwashing allegations, declined to comment for this report.
Sinno stated in response to the B.A.R.'s request to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "Thanks for reaching out, but unfortunately your framing of the Zionist entity's occupation of Palestine and the genocide of the Palestinian people as the 'Israeli-Palestinian conflict' leaves little to be interested in."
The Institute for Palestine Studies also declined to comment. A representative stated he didn't "feel qualified to speak to these points."
The Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance agreed to an interview but did not respond to a request for scheduling it by press time.
[Editor's note: This is the first of three articles stemming from reporter John Ferrannini's recent trip to Israel.]
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