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“Love Without Borders” of “Pride Families” in the Holy Land

Antonia Levy

Streets lined with rainbow flags, filled with shirtless muscle-boys with side-locks—in the Middle East? As I read the invitation to the seventh annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv this past summer, I realized just how limited my knowledge was of the situation of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people in the Holy Land. More focused on the ever-newsworthy Israeli-Arab conflict, I had assumed that LGBT rights was a minor issue on Israel’s busy political agenda, only to discover that equality for gays and lesbians sits at the heart of several of the country’s political, cultural, and ethnic fissures.

The Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv, organized by Israel’s Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgenders (AGUDAH), displayed the happy and tolerant side of the Shekel. United under this year’s motto, “Pride Families,” tens of thousands of homosexuals, transsexuals, bisexuals and heterosexual supporters—estimates range from 70,000 to over 100,000—turned out for a peaceful, exhilarating march in the Middle East summer heat. The colorful floats, provocatively dressed dancers and pounding music recalled happenings on New York’s Fifth Avenue or in Berlin’s Tiergarten, rather than the heavily protected event actually taking place. With open support from state and municipal officials such as deputy mayor Yael Dayan and Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, the parade radiated an atmosphere of acceptance and confirmation, provoking Israel’s major leftist newspaper, Ha’aretz, to announce, “today, gay is in … and many gays feel their war is won.”

Relatively speaking, and especially considering its geographic location, Israel has made great strides toward establishing meaningful gay and lesbian rights. A short historical outline: In 1975, AGUDAH was founded as Israel’s first gay organization, mainly by immigrants from Western countries influenced by the gay liberation movements of the 1960s. During its first decade, it served as a support and social group rather than a political organization. This was mainly due to Israel’s pressing security problems and the ongoing Zionist revolution—which sought to create a “New Jew”, emphasizing family life and reproduction—barred for many years the discussion of a variety of other social problems, including gay and lesbian rights.

Public discourse on these issues finally took off in the late 1980s, with remarkable success: after decriminalizing homosexuality in 1988, the Knesset made several important decisions concerning gay rights. In 1992, anti-gay discrimination in the workplace was banned; one year later gays and lesbians were accepted for military service in Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). When the popular Israeli transgendered singer Dana International won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 and was subsequently made honorary ambassador by the Knesset, issues regarding transgendered people entered the Israeli gay agenda. The same year, Michal Eden won a seat in the Tel Aviv City Council, becoming Israel’s first openly homosexual elected official.
Furthermore, both the Supreme Court and the military have recognized same-sex domestic partners as eligible for spousal benefits.

With the achievement of rights and recognition, the Israeli gay community has begun to address concerns about the rights of other minorities in the country, especially gay Arabs. If the situation for gay people in Israel is at times hostile, it can be downright deadly for those living in the occupied territories, where the punishment for homosexual acts within the Arab communities is death. This situation has prompted Jerusalem Open House (JOH), a gay community center, to work with the Israeli government to secure visas for persecuted gay Arabs, and to extend its outreach and support to the Arab community with a specially assigned Open House Palestinian outreach coordinator. Other gay activists link their complaints to Israeli oppression of Palestinians, like the group “Kvisa Sh’chora” (Dirty Laundry) that protested during the Tel Aviv parade with signs reading “There is no pride in occupation”. It seems that the only real opposition to gay rights stems from religious political parties and Orthodox religious authorities, which refuse to yield on issues of same-sex marriage or the ordination of gay rabbis.

Is this a sign of Western openness and tolerance? Maybe not. Alternative explanations of this phenomenon, even from within the LGBT community, point to the fundamental conflicts in the Holy Land. “The ultimate sexual taboo in Israel is sex between Jews and Arabs, not sex between those of the same sex,” concludes one academic study cited by Hagai El-Ad, director of Jerusalem Open House. Similarly, the atmosphere in Tel Aviv appears to be gay-friendly, but many activists still see Israeli society as homophobic, “a super-racist society that refuses to accept the Other in any way,” according to Rami Hasman, former chairman of the Committee to Fight AIDS.

This analysis seems to hold when comparing the seemingly undisturbed gayness of the Pride Parade in Tel Aviv to the events accompanying the same event in the country’s conservative capital. The LGBT community in Jerusalem celebrated its third annual Pride Parade at the beginning of June and encountered very different reactions from the event in Tel Aviv.

Already at the first Pride Parade two years ago, the High Court of Justice had to force the predominantly Orthodox Jewish city to provide services to organizers, including police protection. This year, the city’s first ultra-Orthodox mayor Uri Lupolianski permitted the parade at the beginning of the month—and had to be assigned two bodyguards by the Secret Service because of death threats from ultra-religious groups, which were particularly upset that a homosexual event had been allowed in the Holy City. But the mayor’s support was not as all-embracing as his decision might imply. Members of JOH, which organized the parade, complained about a decrease in municipal support, and tried in vain to have the city hang the usual rainbow flags along the streets of the parade. A group of ultra-Orthodox Jews held counterdemonstrations, signs condemning the march were placed throughout Jerusalem and several politicians who participated in the parade also received threats.
Nevertheless, about 3,000 people, some in full drag, marched through Jerusalem’s city center on the day of the parade. Some wore large rabbit ears, as reaction to a well-known Kabalistic rabbi’s remark that gays are “subhumans” who will be reincarnated as “rabbits and bunnies.” Under the banner “Love without Borders,” the march was less a parade than a protest against intolerance and oppression. Despite heavy police protection and many supporters lining the streets, marchers were heckled by mainly Orthodox Jews, called abominations, and blamed for inciting the wrath of God. These reactions show how controversial the issue of gay rights remains for certain segments of Israeli society. Those who saw Sandi Dubowski’s sensitive film “Trembling Before G-d” know how seemingly impossible a resolution of this discrepancy of opinions can be in view of an Orthodox reading of Torah and Talmud.
Despite these events—or perhaps because of them—the Holy City will be the setting for another and even bigger staging of Gay Pride, this time international in scope. At their annual conference in 2003, the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Coordinators (InterPride) selected Jerusalem to host WorldPride in 2005. According to InterPride, WorldPride is “a unique event that is decided upon … when needs are present and is used to bring change where it’s most needed, to carry a special message and/or to have a global impact.” The first WorldPride event was held in 2000 in Rome, where it drew approximately 400,000 people from around the world and became the largest gay event ever held in the Eternal City. The organizers hope that the ten day festival in Jerusalem, which will be held under JOH’s slogan “Love without Borders,” will have a similar effect. Suzanne Girard, co-president of InterPride, said: “We want to send a message to the world that our struggle transcends borders and encompasses all faiths. Through this celebration, we wish to embrace all world communities in the search for recognition and acceptance”.

WorldPride will present an enormous challenge to a city that has seen 4,000 years of cultural, ethnic and religious division, and is governed today by a mayor who heads an almost exclusively religious coalition and has pledged to maintain the delicate secular-religious status quo. But this same city, home to the holy sites of three world religions, has ever again proven its ability to promote tolerance and inclusion.

Antonia Levy is a student in the PhD program in Sociology.