Pride and politics
The Jerusalem Gay Pride parade, rescheduled for Thursday after this summer’s war, has been marred by discord in the LGBTQ community
Debra writes for the JTA, and is a former features writer for The Times of Israel.
It’s been a tough summer for gay activists in Jerusalem.
In the midst of war with Hamas, rockets whizzed over Israel’s capital city and riots broke out in its eastern Arab neighborhoods. A 16-year-old Muslim boy, Muhammed Abu Khdeir, was allegedly murdered by Jewish extremists in a revenge attack for the deaths of three Jewish teens. Before his body was found, malicious rumors circulated to the effect that Abu Khdeir was murdered by his kin over his supposed homosexuality.
The Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, which has always been more of a serious political march than a festival-like celebration, was postponed twice in light of the ongoing violence. The event is now finally scheduled to take place on Thursday, but its numbers, organizers admit, will likely linger near the 2,000 mark – much lower than in previous years.
It’s not just the war that cast the past few months in a gloomy haze, one which the rainbow flags and colorful slogans of the march will likely do little to lift. Indeed, this summer saw so much infighting, social media bickering and political haranguing between different factions of Jerusalem’s LGBTQ community that the city’s gay leadership is heading into the event looking nearly as divided as the capital itself.
“The overwhelming reason that there is going to be less turnout this year is because of the fact that there was a major controversy,” says Sarah Weil, a philosophy student at Hebrew University who is a longtime LGBTQ activist and head of the Women’s Gathering in Jerusalem. “The people who were already alienated are gone, and the people who were on the seams, trying to be involved, are alienated.”
Tensions between other activists and the Jerusalem Open House, the most prominent grassroots LGBTQ activist organization in Jerusalem, began on July 20, when JOH executive director Elinor Sidi published a post on her personal Facebook page against the war. Her language, which included calls to burn down both the Knesset and Israel’s military headquarters, as well for soldiers to disobey orders, outraged some members of the community, who in turn used Facebook to call for her to resign.
Citizens outside of the gay community were also disturbed by the post; Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meir Turgeman filed a police complaint against Sidi, accusing her of inciting violence against the state.
Sidi apologized shortly after, and the board members of JOH released their own statement in which they threw their support behind their director. Nevertheless, the incident spiraled into a comments war on social media, with posters on both sides of the argument hurtling insults at each other and spiraling deeper and deeper into hostility.
“I took some of the criticism to heart,” Sidi admits now. “When you’re a public figure it might be a little blurred where the line between your personal agenda and your public persona begins. It was a good idea to make that border a little clearer.”
Sidi said that as a result of the incident, she no longer posts anything related to JOH on her personal page, so as to better separate her own opinions from those of the organization, and she also has all of her posts for the JOH Facebook page reviewed by another staff member before they are uploaded. Nevertheless, she said, she was taken aback by the amount of criticism she faced.
“My personal beliefs are not relevant to the entire JOH agenda. JOH has never taken a stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not our mandate or mission. What was done in this case was to take things posted on my personal Facebook page and blow them out of proportion.”
Critics of Sidi and the JOH board said that the incident with Sidi’s Facebook statements was part of a bigger issue, and they accused the group of having a far-left agenda that has alienated members of the Jerusalem gay community. Weil pointed not just to Sidi’s own politics but also to that of JOH’s first director, Hagai El-Ad, who was recently appointed director of the human rights organization B’Tselem.
Weil said that by publicly aligning with the far left, the JOH had given fodder to right-wing lawmakers and communities – the ultra-Orthodox, for example – who were already hostile to gays.
“It makes it more difficult to pass laws, to work with the Israeli government, and it fans the flames of hostility with the radical right and the homophobic elements of the community,” she said. “Jerusalem is a very complex city. A large part of the population is conservative, religiously and politically, and LGBTQ people need to navigate around that and work with it in order to create a community that is pluralistic and tolerant.”
Sidi said that the incident has had a surprising silver lining – it led to increased dialogue between JOH and Zionist groups in Israel, and this year, for the first time, several Zionist activists will be joining the march and waving Israeli flags alongside their rainbow ones.
“I’m really happy they’re joining us,” Sidi said. “They’re doing it to feel like they are reclaiming a place in an organization that they perceive as having no place for them.”
The march will begin at 5 p.m. on Thursday evening in Jerusalem’s Liberty Bell Park, and end in Independence Park. Like past years, organizers expect a counter-protest of anti-gay demonstrators, and have coordinated their route and their security with police.
Despite the ugliness of this summer’s incident, Sidi said she felt that the end result would be that more people would be joining the march to show where they stand. The declining numbers, she insisted, were because of the war and the last-minute rescheduling. Anyone who chose to boycott the march because of her statement, she added, was only hurting the community in the long run.
“If there are specific individuals who are punishing the JOH because of my personal and political views, I think that they’re wrong,” she said.
Weil said that she wavered on whether or not to attend, but had decided to join the parade – which she referred to as a Jerusalem rights march – after all.
“I’m going because even though JOH is responsible for planning the Jerusalem rights march, it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the entire LGBTQ community,” she said.
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