A fractured rainbow: How the Middle East war split the global LGBTQ community

RU

The Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza split the global LGBTQ community. For the past year, Jewish queer activists in the West have faced hostility from their peers. In New York, Toronto, and several European cities, pro-Palestinian activists have disrupted gay pride parades by showing up with Palestinian flags and anti-Israel slogans, throwing red paint on participants, and blocking their movement.

Traditional lesbian parades (Dyke Marches) in New York and Washington, D.C., were held this year under the slogan “Lesbians Against Genocide,” where “genocide” meant not the Oct. 7 massacre, but Israel's operation against Hamas. Moreover, the organizers of the march in Washington banned Israeli flags — along with rainbow flags featuring Israeli symbols — while Palestinian flags were allowed. This happened despite the fact that members of the Palestinian LGBTQ community often seek refuge in Israel, fearful of reprisals in their homeland. Even after escaping, they are not completely safe: in October 2022, a queer man who had fled to Israel was kidnapped and taken to the Palestinian Authority — he was beheaded).

The global feminist movement responded to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its sexualized violence against Israeli women rather passively. A debate is developing about the reasons for anti-Israeli sentiment in the Western human rights movement: why haven't feminist organizations condemned the terrorists? Why was it only in February 2024 that UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten visited Israel, and only on Mar. 4 — five months after the Hamas attack and well after testimony from freed hostages had become public — that the UN mission finally stated it had “clear and convincing” information that the terrorist attack on Israel was accompanied by rape and sexualized torture? And why is it that prominent feminist theorists like Judith Butler, who, given her Jewish roots, can hardly be accused of anti-Semitism, call for the “contextualization” of a terrorist attack that involved mass murder and atrocities?

“If the horrors of the last days assume a greater moral importance for the media than the horrors of the last seventy years, then the moral response of the moment threatens to eclipse an understanding of the radical injustices endured by occupied Palestine and forcibly displaced Palestinians — as well as the humanitarian disaster and loss of life happening at this moment in Gaza,” Butler wrote just a few days after the Oct. 7 massacre, in which terrorists killed approximately 1,200 people, many with particular cruelty: parents had their eyes gouged out in the presence of small children, children were killed in front of their parents, pregnant women were shot in the stomach, entire families were burned alive, women had their breasts cut off, teenage girls were stabbed in the genitals, and corpses were sexually abused.

The Jewish question in the LGBTQ community

In late October, ILGA suspended the membership of the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, without waiting for the results of its compliance review. Before the war, Aguda applied to host the ILGA World Conference in Tel Aviv in 2028. Before Aguda's application could be discussed, several Palestinian LGBTQ organizations published an open letter accusing it of “supporting genocide.” Other organizations later joined the calls to reject Aguda's application. As a result, ILGA decided to suspend Israel's membership altogether.

Even a few Jewish activists supported the decision. Aguda “does not condemn human rights violations and war crimes committed by Israel,” but instead “identifies with nationalism and militarist culture that are so prevalent in Israel,” according to Dr. Inna Michaeli, sociologist, activist, and former board member of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Germany).

Dr. Michaeli dismisses as hypocrisy any question about feminist organizations silencing sexualized violence against Israeli women:

“Why is it that a government that is completely uninterested in women's rights and, specifically, the issue of sexual violence, took such a sudden interest in rape? Because of political gain. I have personally witnessed Israeli representatives cynically use the topic of the Oct. 7 rapes to gain political support in international forums. And that's where the idea of 'silence' originated. No one is silent; the international community condemned murder and violence even before Oct. 7, when it wasn't just about Israeli victims.”

By contrast, prominent Israeli gay activist Guy Frankovich, a journalist and author of the Queerzion Telegram channel, calls the ILGA decision another example of “progressivist madness and schizophrenic anti-colonial rhetoric.” According to Frankovich, the text of the decision denies Israel's right to exist and features the usual libel about “colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, suffering inflicted by Israeli colonialism — not only on Palestinians, but also Lebanese, Syrians, and most importantly, Iranians.”

“The queer community still appears to believe in the [fictitious] 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion',” Frankovich says with indignation.

Israel between two fires

Israel, the only LGBTQ-friendly country in the Middle East, is also one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in the world. LGBTQ couples in Israel have the same rights as opposite-sex spouses. Same-sex couples can adopt children and use surrogate mothers.

Discrimination against LGBTQ people is illegal. They can hold high positions in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the government, and the Knesset. The legislative body’s current speaker, Amir Ohana, is openly gay and attends formal events with his husband — a reality that became possible only after years of struggle by Aguda and other human rights groups, and as a result of rulings by the country’s High Court of Justice (Bagatz).

In the 1970s, when the young Jewish state was still far from being a safe haven for queers, Aguda was a pacifist, extremely leftist organization. Over time, Aguda successfully introduced the LGBTQ agenda into Israeli society and helped de-marginalize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Meanwhile, mainstream activists also joined Aguda, gradually becoming part of the LGBTQ community. As The Insider learned from Anna Talisman, an Israeli LGBTQ rights activist, feminist, social worker, and psychotherapist, the IDF itself played an important role in this transformation.

“As you know, military service is the most effective way to integrate into Israeli society. Aguda never protested for the sake of protest: the group fought for equal rights for LGBTQ people, and one important milestone in that struggle was the introduction of open gays into the IDF. As a result, Aguda, once a protest, pacifist organization, has come to be seen in the West as an integral part of Israeli society — and therefore, Israeli politics,” Talisman explains.

Talisman even expresses a sense of understanding for the Western human rights activists who have taken the Palestinian side despite the Hamas terrorist attack:

“Their perspective of the situation spans beyond Oct. 7. They look at the discrimination against the Arab population inside Israel, the occupation of the territories, and the thousands of people that are dying in Gaza right now. We expected that after this terrible massacre, after this catastrophe, everyone would stop and support us unconditionally, but many of those who condemn Hamas do not have it in their hearts to say that nothing happened before or after Oct. 7.

To an outside observer, our hostages are now among millions of people whose lives, judging from newspaper headlines and our politicians' speeches, are worthless to us. And that is what the West is paying attention to.”

Still, she is adamant that many Western human rights activists and opinion leaders, especially fellow feminists, have set their sights somewhat off the mark. While the reasons are understandable, she does not see them as an excuse:

“The women who were affected by the Oct. 7 violence, whether they were Jewish, Ukrainian, Bedouin, or Thai, should have been supported first. In addition, Israeli feminists, myself included, found themselves caught between two fires: we already faced enormous difficulties, having to work in a hostile atmosphere, and now we are under constant attack from the outside. We have lost the crucial support of our Western colleagues.”

Like many other Israeli human rights activists, Talisman considers ILGA's decision to suspend Aguda's membership to be legitimate. As she points out, the Israeli state does very little to help its most vulnerable minority groups: Arab and Palestinian LGBTQ people.

Formally, all citizens of the country enjoy the same rights, but in reality, the Arab sector receives fewer resources, including resources to help LGBTQ people. As uprisings and wars continue, suspicion of the Arab population is growing, and its weakest representatives, including LGBTQ people, find themselves in isolation.

Suffice it to say that the crime rate in Israel's Arab sector is increasing every year. The police have been failing to deal with the problem, and so-called 'honor killings' are by no means a thing of the past. Very few social workers handle Arab LGBTQ people, and even fewer have the means and tools to effectively help them.

While LGBTQ tolerance in the army is perceived positively in normal times, Israeli soldiers taking photographs with rainbow flags in a ravaged Gaza and boasting to have raised the LGBTQ symbol in the Strip for the first time spark controversy. “Who cares at the moment if you have equal rights [as queers]? I honestly don’t care, because if we don’t have equal rights as humans, it doesn’t matter,” Palestinian citizen of Israel, human rights lawyer, and award-winning activist Rauda Morcos told The Guardian in June.

Talisman largely concurs: “Everything this government is doing is not being done in my name. It's as though my car has been hijacked by a crazy driver. He is hurtling forward, knocking down everything in his path, and I'm trying to stop him, but I can't do it alone. This country has a huge trauma. Judith Butler and others can afford to overlook it. It is a privilege they have — but we do not.”

The European perspective

Fani G. from France (the interviewee asked not to disclose her full name) has headed a human rights group working with lesbian refugees for many years. In a conversation with The Insider, Fani emphasizes that she is “openly Jewish.” As she explained, in the last year it has become unsafe to be an “open Jew” in France.

Fani tells us that Oct. 7 triggered a deep rift in the French feminist movement. Activists focusing on practical human rights advocacy were horrified by the tragedy. Meanwhile, those promoting the feminist agenda on the national and local level have refrained from making public statements about the abundance of sexualized violence in the Hamas attack on Israel.

An investigation by The Times confirmed that “attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.” According to Fani, the feminist community prefers not to talk about it, fearful of endangering the idea of the struggle for a free Palestine.

“The fact that a fascistoid movement like Hamas has been made into Palestinian liberators in the European leftist consciousness is now determining the outline of the discourse. How can we admit that people whom we have always seen as freedom fighters are capable of such violence? It is tremendously difficult to change decades-old attitudes,” Fani says.

“I was terrified to realize that we had to wait until March for the UN commission to finally officially acknowledge the facts of sexualized violence on Oct. 7. I think it was a big mistake to verify this for so long, and I find this approach fundamentally anti-feminist. All feminists, regardless of their positions on Israel and the Palestinians, had an obligation to immediately state that sexualized violence by an aggressor is unacceptable,” Fani stresses.

According to the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the country in the final months of 2023 was nearly four times as high as the year before, with two-thirds of the events in question occurring in the first months after the Hamas attack. Roughly 60% of these incidents were acts of physical violence or verbal abuse. This past July, the Jewish Agency for Israel reported a 400-percent increase in the number of repatriation applications submitted by French Jews since the Oct. 7 attack.

According to Fani, Jewish human rights defenders are in a dire situation in France — and not only because of the rise in anti-Semitism. “I have seen many cases when Jewish women working for human rights organizations were forced to publicly take a certain stance under the threat of losing their position,” Fani says. “On one occasion, I made a conscious choice not to travel to Israel with my family. What is happening to left-wing Jewish female activists here is extremely important to me. They should be able to continue working in left-wing political and human rights organizations and should feel protected from persecution if their position does not coincide with that of the majority.”

Israelis saving LGBTQ Gazans

As in any country, some Israeli subgroups are more conservative than others. Social workers cite ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities as being the most conservative in their attitude towards LGBTQ people. Nevertheless, LGBTQ individuals from ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities receive far more support from Israeli society than queer Arabs do.

The situation for Palestinian gays in the West Bank and Gaza is incomparably worse. They are tortured and imprisoned, and Palestinian society's attitude towards them is predictably negative. According to a recent UN Watch report, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip harass Palestinian LGBT people and, in doing so, violate the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture. Additionally, as human rights activists say, the killing and torture of gays in Palestine are largely ignored by the UN representatives charged with monitoring human rights in the region.

Many Palestinian queers are doing everything they can to leave. While Gazans were rarely able to get into Israel even before the war, it was generally easier for West Bankers to do so. They had three options: to cross the border illegally, to obtain an Israeli work permit, or to become an informant for the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet).

Israeli authorities try not to publicize the latter option, but as numerous journalistic investigations show, both Palestinian terrorists and Israeli intelligence services routinely attempt to recruit Palestinian gays. The war has exacerbated their plight: those living in Israel under a work permit lost this privilege following the outbreak of the hostilities.

Aguda is one of the few organizations helping Palestinian gays. The group even features an asylum seeker department. Its head, social worker Titi Katan, emphasizes that Aguda does not help Palestinians move to Israel but provides assistance on the spot, helping them to gain access to residency permits, temporary status in Israel, jobs, housing, and mental healthcare. The organization also helps Palestinian queers move to third countries. According to Katan, most prefer to stay in Israel — closer to their families.

However, over the past year, the war has made it increasingly difficult for them to remain in Israel legally, and so increasing numbers of queer Palestinians have opted to seek asylum abroad. Sadly, Western countries have also been increasingly less willing to accept them. Since the beginning of the war, Aguda has managed to transfer fewer than 20 Palestinians to the West — only a fraction of applicants.

In Israel, queer Palestinians can only stay under a designation of temporary status: the Jewish state hardly ever grants political asylum, but it respects international law, which prohibits expelling people who may be in danger in their homeland. For example, tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea have been living in Israel under such a temporary status for years.

This does not mean that the system is functioning well. In the past year, many Palestinian LGBTQ people have had their legitimate rights violated by Israeli authorities. Dozens have been taken to the Palestinian territories by police, who increasingly ignore their documents, Katan said. Only Aguda's appeals to the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) help such people return to Israel. Recently, Aguda volunteers have begun meeting detained Palestinians at checkpoints — otherwise, they could be expelled almost immediately.

In the past year, Aguda has helped 160 Palestinians obtain temporary status. About half of them were already inside Israel when the war began, with work permits that were revoked after Oct. 7, when Israeli authorities closed the borders to Palestinian laborers. Another 80 or so people made their way into Israel from the West Bank during the war.

COGAT has not released any official statement on assisting Palestinian gays in crossing the Israeli border.

After the war began, Titi Katan's work with Palestinians became much more difficult because of the growing public suspicion. According to Katan, some social workers even try to take on law enforcement functions:

“I sometimes have to remind my colleagues, and even myself, that we are social workers, not Shin Bet agents, and that our function is not to investigate but to help. Overall, it can be said that the war has dramatically changed attitudes towards Palestinian LGBTQ in Israeli society. Before the war, Israelis saw gay Palestinians as gays, first and foremost, and only then Palestinians. Now they are Palestinians first and foremost, and then gays.”

The feelings of Palestinian asylum seekers are even more complicated. “The fact of having to beg for protection from an enemy state in a time of war — which is how Israel is perceived in the West Bank right now — results in a huge psychological crisis, an identity crisis,” Katan says. “Everyone has their way of coping, but many do feel gratitude toward Israel.”

At the outset of the war, dozens of Aguda's clients collected parcels for Israeli soldiers and did other types of volunteer work. Some even asked if they could enlist in the IDF as volunteers, Katan says.

But even those Palestinian refugees who have managed to leave Israel for third countries have identity difficulties. They find themselves outsiders both in predominantly pro-Palestinian Western LGBTQ communities, and also among their fellow queers, explains Titi Katan. “They are no longer perceived as Palestinians, but as Israelis. They don't fit the pro-Palestinian LGBTQ narrative. Not to mention that their fleeing to Israel during the war is perceived as treason. It's very hard for them, and many dream of returning to Israel, but no one needs them here either,” the human rights activist sums it all up.