This Pride Month my heart and my thoughts are with Queer Palestinians, whose existence, too inconvenient for Zionist propaganda and western liberal imperialism, has often been minimized, hidden and denied. And yet they exist, and like queer people everywhere, they struggle, they overcome, they love, and they dream.
The state of Israel has gone to great lengths to paint itself as a haven for gay rights in the Middle-east; a bastion of civilized, liberal values in a region filled with barbaric, murderous fanatics. And like most of its propaganda, this argument is based on a complete distortion of reality, if not flat out lies.
Homosexuality has been legal in the West Bank since 1951. Efforts to re-criminalize it or to ban LGBTQ advocacy groups have been successfully opposed by civil society. In Gaza homosexuality is illegal (from a law dating back to the British Mandate, I may add), but it is punishable by imprisonment, not death, and this is rarely enforced. By contrast, homosexuality is legal in Israel, but same-sex marriage is not. The rise of the far-right in recent years has coincided with a spike in homophobic hate crimes. Israel has also a notorious record of blackmailing queer Palestinians into becoming informants, threatening to out them to their relatives if they don't cooperate with the occupation.
All this to say: whatever taboos remain to be overcome by Palestinian society, neither them nor their governments make it a habit or a priority to go block by block, house by house, looking for queer people to round up and kill. And however gay-friendly Israel may seem in comparison to its Arab neighbors, it is far, far from what western liberals have come to expect from a "gay paradise", to say nothing of their treatment of Palestinians, queer or straight. In fact, if anyone seems to be the one going out of their way to target queer people, to use them for their own ends, to threaten them with punishment, it is Israel. They use their own LGBTQ community to pinkwash their crimes, and they weaponize the identities of queer Palestinians to turn them against their own people.
Indeed, queer Palestinians face far, far greater danger and oppression from Israel than from whatever Palestinian government nominally rules over them. I imagine things like Pride flags and Pride parades, same-sex marriage, coming out even, are not the first priorities on ones mind when one has the entire apparatus of a colonial nation-state suffocating them; when there are bombs raining down from the sky, and you don't know if you're going to live, or have a home, or a future. It's frankly absurd to be expected to see the absence of rainbow flags as a greater evil than the bombing of cities, the murdering of families, and the destruction of an entire society...or worse, to use it as justification for such crimes.
Because ultimately, it doesn't matter if the fantasy concocted by Zionist propaganda were true or not. It doesn't matter if Palestine really were a hub for murderous homophobic fanatics, and Israel a wonderful gay utopia: occupation is still wrong, apartheid is still wrong, genocide is still wrong. Period. The cheerleaders of this genocide even undertand this on some level. They use the lack of gay rights in Palestine as justification for the killing, but you never see them apply the same reasoning for homophobia in the West, of which many of its proponents are far more vitriolic and draconian than Palestinians actually are. Yet as always, white western people are given leniency for their crimes, no matter how monstrous, while Palestinians and other racialized societies are savagely punished for their flaws, real or imagined.
My hope for the people of Palestine, queer or otherwise, is for them to be free of the crushing weight of Zionist oppression, and to not let anyone else dictate the terms of their own freedom and their own dreams.
Happy Pride 🏳️🌈 and Free Palestine 🇵🇸
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