AT THE JANUARY 2016 Creating Change conference, held in Chicago, hundreds of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli activists shut down a reception for Israeli LGBT activists and their American supporters. Apparently the reception followed a Shabbat service. The group sponsoring the reception was A Wider Bridge, a U.S.-based organization that “builds bridges between Israelis and lgbtq North Americans and allies.” Also participating were leaders from Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, a cross-community organization that serves LGBT Israeli Jews and Arabs, as well as Palestinians who travel from the West Bank to Jerusalem for HIV testing and care and other kinds of LGBT health care.
The activists who shut down the reception included critics of so-called “pinkwashing,” which claims that Israel is a racist, apartheid state that deflects attention from a poor human rights record toward Palestinians by highlighting its progressive LGBT policies. The “pinkwashing” charge has been advanced for years by groups like the New York-based Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, which has tried to get broad-based LGBT organizations to denounce Israel and declare their support for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The protesters in Chicago could have learned about this situation by talking with, rather than shouting down, Israeli activists who live with it every day. Jerusalem Open House is part of the solution, serving closeted ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians who can’t get an HIV test, let alone anti-retroviral treatment, in the West Bank. Israelis and their American supporters should have the right to convene at a U.S. LGBT activist conference. Respect for diversity includes respect for differences of opinion regarding a complicated geopolitical and historical conflict.
A more important, foundational point is that Israel is not a racist, apartheid, or colonial country. In fact, it is actually an island of tolerance in a region where homosexuality is repressed, criminalized, and even punishable by death. Israel decriminalized same-sex relations in 1988 and lifted the ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military in 1993, the same year that the U.S. adopted “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” While Israel hasn’t legalized same-sex marriage or civil unions, it does recognize such marriages conducted in other countries and offers same-sex spouses many of the benefits of marriage.
The Israeli-Arab conflict is an extremely complex regional matter. Israel has very real security concerns, as witness the half dozen wars it has fought since its founding. But Jews have lived in Jerusalem, Hebron, and other parts of Israel/Palestine for millennia. Israel emerged as a refuge for people fleeing intense persecution. “Zion” means refuge, and Zionism emerged in the late 1800s in Europe as Jewish leaders sought a national homeland in which they could be free from the persecution in Europe and Russia.
It was in the early 1900s that hundreds of thousands of Jews traveled to Palestine, and many purchased land there, to escape persecution in Europe. After World War II and the Holocaust, survivors were stuck for years in European “displaced person camps” many of which were former concentration camps and military bases. Many Jews who tried to return home to decimated communities in Poland and elsewhere were killed in pogroms. Britain blocked their entry into Palestine, while the U.S. and other countries took in relatively few Jewish Holocaust survivors in the mid-1940s. Most of the quarter million Holocaust survivors languishing in displaced person camps wanted to go to Eretz Israel—the land of Israel. Many eventually made it, against all odds.
In 1947-48, the United Nations tried to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Arabs rejected this approach and attacked the small Jewish settlements there (totaling under a million inhabitants). Israel fought back and won, founding the Jewish state in 1948, and it has been defending its right to exist ever since. From the 1940s to 1960s, nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries; most ended up as refugees in Israel. Almost half of Jewish Israelis today are descendants of these exiles.
Gaza and the West Bank were occupied in 1967 after Israel defeated several of its Arab neighbors in a war that they started, hoping to “annihilate” the Jewish state. Years later, in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, only to have Hamas launch thousands of rockets and mortars aimed at Israeli civilians. Hamas, the ruling party of Gaza, refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist and teaches Palestinian children hatred toward Jews. Not to be overlooked, within its own boundaries the Gaza authority persecutes gay people intensely.
What’s currently happening in the Middle East is tragic. Israel’s settlement policy is an obstacle to peace, and much land currently occupied by settlements will have to be handed over in a peace deal. Only when the Palestinian leadership accepts Israel’s right to exist can there be peace and, after good-faith negotiations, a Palestinian state. But boycotting Israeli leaders, or not allowing them to speak in a forum like Creating Change, solves nothing, and it fails to acknowledge the very real difference—which is far from a public relations ploy—between Israel’s acceptance of LGBT people and its Arab neighbors’ uniformly anti-gay policies.
Sean Cahill is a gay activist who lives in Massachusetts.
