Gay Palestine News & Reports

by Joshua Ronen
In an effort to reach out to the Palestinian homosexual population, a Jerusalem gay community center is advertising its Jerusalem Pride 2001 events in Arabic. As part of its month-long celebration, the Jerusalem Open House is, according to a statement, inviting “all Jerusalemites to celebrate gay pride in Jerusalem: Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis, religious and secular.” Open House, which opens its series of events tonight with MK Yael Dayan (Labor) and Jerusalem city council member Anat Hoffman, is offering opportunities for dialogue with Palestinian gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals.

“At this time of conflict in Jerusalem and the region, we see special importance in bringing out different voices, voices from a different time when Islamic and Jewish traditions had a shared view of male-male affection,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of Open House. “We hope that by expressing these voices from the past in a contemporary context, we will be able to hope for an open life, freedom and happiness in this city which we all love so much.” Although Open House has worked with the Muslim community — its library has a Koran donated by the international Muslim gay and lesbian organization Al Fatiha — this marks the first time in this country that information about homosexuality is being disseminated in Arabic.

“This is the most challenging aspect of Open House’s mission,” El-Ad said, pointing out that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not helped in bringing the homosexual populations of the two communities together. According to Dayan, the homosexuality community, which numbers globally about 10 percent of any population, has faced considerable opposition in this part of the world. She drew a comparison between the Orthodox Jewish community and the Palestinian community, which frequently oppresses those who live a homosexual lifestyle. “Our religious community is as closed and backward as the Palestinians,” said Dayan, who just recently sponsored legislation to allow same-sex marriages. “You [not only] have to open up your own society, but in a city like Jerusalem, you have to give support to members of other religions.”

But despite the similarities, Palestinian society has been a lot less accepting of the homosexual lifestyle. Open House believes it can help change that. “Even with more and more ties between Israelis and Palestinians being slashed, Palestinians still come to the center here,” El-Ad said. “In Palestinian society, there’s no such thing as open homosexuality,” said Daniel Weishut, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Network of Amnesty International, who works closely with Open House. “There are no clubs or bars or meeting places.” Along the same lines as Open House, Amnesty is currently involved in a project to offer educational information about homosexuality in Arabic. “Arabic [speaking] homosexuals suffer from a lot of discrimination and usually live in hiding,” Weishut said.

12 June 2003 – Gay.com U.K.

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Jerusalem pride’03 parade delayed after suicide bomb

Jerusalem’s second gay pride parade, “Love without Borders”, scheduled for tomorrow, Friday 13 July, has been delayed after the city experienced one of its worst suicide bomb attacks yesterday. The bomb, which killed 16 people aboard a packed bus during the city’s rush hour and injured up to 100 others, precipitated an emergency meeting of the parade’s organisers.

The meeting concluded with the announcement: “As a result of yesterday’s suicide bombing in the center of Jerusalem, Jerusalem’s 2nd pride parade Love without Borders (originally scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, June 13th) will be delayed by a week. Yesterday’s bombing was one of the worst in Jerusalem since October 2000, the echo of which felt strongly in the center of Jerusalem as well as at the Open House itself. “The parade will take place a week later than planned, on Friday June 20th.

No changes occur in the route of the parade or the schedule for pride day, excluding the delay by a week.” Hagai Elad, Executive Director of the Jerusalem Open House, told GayMiddleEast.com: “We cannot joyfully parade in the heart of Jerusalem while funerals are taking place – including those of neighbors and friends. Postponing the parade by a week is the only course of action we can take now, an expression of human sensitivity towards the city we live in.”

Last year’s parade, the first in Jerusalem, was considered a huge success, with up to 4,000 estimated participants.

June 9, 2003 – Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem, Israel

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Jerusalem of pink

by Jenny Hazan
A throng of teens and young adults gathered beneath the gigantic rainbow flag at the Jerusalem Open House LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer and Questioning) Community Center on Saturday night to kick off the second annual Love without Borders Jerusalem Pride week. With a line-up that includes a literary presentation by Blue 18 author and former Ha’aretz journalist David Ehrlich tonight, a solidarity meeting with professional activists from the Italian Queer Organization on Thursday, and the grand finale parade on Friday afternoon, Jerusalem’s Open House – the organization behind the event – is putting the holy city on the map of Western capitals that pay tribute to gay pride.

But the event in Jerusalem is distinct from any of its partner festivals, both here and abroad. “Pride in Jerusalem is very different than pride anywhere else on the planet,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Jerusalem Open House. “It’s the only pride event in the world that starts with the Traveler’s Prayer and ends with Shabbat services.” Love without Borders is tailored to Jerusalem’s unique population.

The six-day event –which includes the sponsorship of both the Al-Fatiha Foundation for gay and lesbian Muslims and the Keshet Ga’avah World Congress of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews–takes its name not just from sexual orientation, but also from the political boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians. “We’re a social change organization, and the agenda is to make Jerusalem more open, more pluralistic, and more tolerant,” explained El-Ad. Some of the more than 4,000 participants at last June’s precedent-setting parade used the festival as a pro-Palestinian political platform.

Marchers held signs declaring “Free Condoms, Free Palestine,” “Transgender, not Transfer” and “Dykes and Fags Against the Occupation.” The event also proved controversial to the haredi community, which threatened to stop the march by “all means,” but opted merely to boycott. But, the Jerusalem Open House would not be deterred. “It’s a gradual process of the community growing, maturing, and understanding what its obligation is toward members of our community who don’t yet feel safe enough to come to the center,” said El-Ad. “I think that this mixture between disbelief and fear is beyond us. This opens the door to the possibility of a much bigger audience – even bigger than last year. This is what we’re hoping for.”

June 2003

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Recent film documents LGBT suffering in Palestine and Israel–‘Zero Degrees of Separation’

A Graphic pictures production (zerodegreesfilm@aol.com)

by Richard Ammon, GlobalGayz.com
‘Zero Degrees of Separation’ is a feature length documentary (still in progress as of June 03) examining a unique and complex relationshiip between two lovers and two nations from different worlds often less than 3 kms apart. Selim and Ezra, a gay Palestinian-Israeli couple, are fighting for the right to live together in Jerusalem. Through their lives and those of other gay and lesbian Palestinians and Israelis we gain a unique perspective on the Middle-East conflict. In a world where borders create and destroy lives daily , the people portrayed in Zero Degrees take on the larger questions of nationalism and its flaws. As Israeli-Palestianian couples exisitng on the the margins of their societies, these individuals cross those borders sometimes physically, sometimes metaphorically defying the notion of an external conflict with impermeable borders. Zero Degrees is about what is possible and impossible; a story that finds humanity in a time where little else seems to exist.

To watch this documentary is to feel suffocated and oppressed–which is perhaps a success for the director in her unflinching intention to see inside the pain and grief currently blanketing the murderous Holy Land now made very unholy by the intense hostility in the streets and political hallways. Zero Degrees of Separation feels like a voyeur’s intrusion on a deadly family argument that no one should see.

The Palestinian-Israeli war is ugly, violent, divisive and humiliating. Caught in the black hole of hatred are many LGBT citizens of both cloths. As they speak before an impersonal lens their words are sad, mournful–lost in violence and antagonism. Lesbian feminists and a gay Palestinian-Israeli male couple are caught in the crossfire of bullets, occupation, suicide bombers, rocket attacks, arrest and extremist politics. The passion and freedom and easy sensuality taken for granted by many western queers is here forbidden territory. Ezra and Salim possess a love for each other that transcends their racial and religious heritages but this love is gripped by danger and threats from both camps. Salim is a Muslim Palestinian, now disowned by his family in Ramallah since he came out to them. He cannot return home as he could face death. To be gay in that culture is to be “Lu’ot”, to be cursed. Yet to be in Israel is to be an illegal alien, in and out of various jails for the past several years. “These are the schools for teaching more hatred and violence as victims learn well how to victimize in return,” he says. “The only way to rescue yourself from being a victim is to victimize others. So the teaching goes.”. But Salim refuses to be sucked into that political black hole. His love for Ezra is a small but piercing light in the darkness, a glimmer of what life could be like in the Holy Land.

Ezra is alienated from many of his gay Israeli friends and peers (in Tel Aviv for example) who celebrate Gay Pride festival under rainbow balloons and western-style music and tight bright pants. “Tel Aviv gays are apolitical, they are into assimilation.” Ezra cannot understand this sort of life—assimilation into Euro-American lifestyle. “For what? We are not Europe and we are not America. We need to find our own voice and form. We don’t dress or act like that,” he declares seriously and with fatigue. He refuses any celebration as long as Israel occupies and oppresses Palestinians in their own territory. His world is filled with daily shots of hostility, arrest, search-and-destroy warriors, bullets and senseless slaughter of innocents on both sides. His words are slow and infused with unbearable heaviness and near hopelessness for a peaceful hearth where he and Salim can relax in each other’s arms, invite friends for dinner or walk easily through the streets of Jerusalem. He cannot feel peace in his heart when he knows others—Palestinians and Israelis—are suffering. The right way is to work actively against all oppression— racial, religious, political –toward women, gays, any minority including refugees.

The film also interviews lesbian feminist activists–a very endanged type in Palestine. Feminism too is another curse, says one of the women Ruada sadly. Her heart is obviously hurt as she speaks about the oppressed condition of women in Palestine. As an activist in her culture she laments the loss of personal identity in the struggle against violence. There is no other right choice in Palestine for women outside the rigid role assigned by Islamic fundamentalists, outside of subservient marriage and prolific motherhood, outside the litany of hate for Israel.

In a discussion which followed the screening in New York at the LGBT Film Festival in June 03, additional points were made in referencee to Zero Degrees:

Black Laundry is a politically active LGBT organization in Israel working actively against oppression. They bother the pink party types who want music, style and cell phones on the way to the gym. While they dance, Black Laundry (also translates as ‘black sheep’) does anti-occupation work.

The West Bank is different from Gaza; Gaza is very torn up from attacks. Life is at the level of survival so virtually no LGBT work is possible there. Gay peoplethere try desperately to escape, but to where? They face torture if it’s discovered they’re gay, and Israel refuses entry to Palestinians now. The agony of trapped lesbians and gays in Gaza is horrifying.

In Jerusalem there is Open House, an LGBT organization that has a Palestinian Coordinator offering information—counseling and literature in Arabic– but with no influence or power to help.

The director of Zero Degrees, Ellen Flanders, will continue filming when she raises more funds. Already the Canadian Film Board has been very generous she said. She can be reached at: zerodegreesfilm@aol.com.

September 13, 2002 – Yale Herald, New Haven, Connecticut

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Gay Palestinians suffer under Arafat

by Davi J. Bernstein
Chatting with a 21-year-old Palestinian man in a gay bar in Tel Aviv was the most interesting moment of my summer vacation. There isn’t much social interaction between Arabs and Jews these days because of the ongoing terrorist war against Israel, but the gay scene is a little bit different. Why do Arab and Jewish homosexuals mix in Tel Aviv? Because Israel is the only country in the Middle East where homosexuals can live in freedom.

It is not widely known that, along with its war against Israel, the Palestinian Authority is conducting a vicious campaign against its own homosexual population. The New Republic, in its Aug. 19 issue, exposed hideous human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority, which employs special police squads to capture men who have sex with each other. The lucky ones are forced to stand in sewage water up to their necks or lie in dark cells infested with insects; others are simply starved to death. These horrific crimes have motivated hundreds of Palestinian homosexuals to flee to Israel. To be sure, these people have not become Zionists. But at the end of day, they know that “in Tel Aviv no one cares if you’re gay,” as one Palestinian who fled to Israel said, while in Palestinian Gaza, “the police will kill me, unless my father gets to me first.”

If any gay solidarity exists, it must be to defend the nations that permit us to live and denounce the regimes that do not. When so many around us are deliberately misunderstanding the reality of the Middle East, we must be honest and state clearly that Israel is the only country in the region that tolerates our existence. It is incredible that Palestinian statehood can be a “progressive” cause, when the state they seek is one in which terrorism is tolerated but gay people are not. Such a state is totalitarian, not progressive. It is this same totalitarian impulse, not any Israeli “occupation,” that continues the conflict with Israel, because the Palestinian leadership respects nothing ö not homosexuals, Jews, or inalienable rights ö only its own will.

While those on the Left indulge Palestinian totalitarianism, President George W. Bush, DC (Yale ’68), rejects it. His vision is the only hope for freedom ö and peace ö in the Middle East: defending Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state while supporting a democratic Palestinian state that eschews terrorism. Such a vision gives Palestinian homosexuals a chance at a life in their own land because a Palestinian government accountable to its people will be attuned to their most basic needs, not busy encouraging suicide bombing and rounding up homosexuals as Yasser Arafat’s dictatorship is now doing. Every decent person must take a position.

Do you stand with the Palestinian Authority and its totalitarian ethos that seeks to destroy Jews and homosexuals today and who knows what else tomorrow? Or do you stand with Israel ö whose government you may or may not support ö but whose people share our fundamental values of life and liberty?

I put this question to my new Palestinian friend in that bar. He answered: “Where you sit is where you stand, and I’m sitting in Tel Aviv.” It is inspiring to me ö as a Jew, as an American, and as a gay man ö to know that Palestinians are coming to the Jewish state for the freedom to live as God created them. Let us condemn the barbarism of the Palestinian Authority, and let us pray for the intrepid Israelis and Palestinians who are fighting for the right to live according to Micah’s prophecy: “Every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4).

Davi J. Bernstein is a senior in Ezra Stiles College at Yale.

March 13, 2003 – Daily Trojan, University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA

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Palestine’s oppression of gays should not be ignored

by William Goodwin
As the clouds of war grow ever darker over Iraq and media scrutiny becomes increasingly focused on the possible conflict, violence has continued to foment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A diplomatic Gordian knot, intransigence and distrust have characterized both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Especially since the reignition of the intifada, human rights have suffered at the hands of both governments. Consequently, debate and discussion of the hostilities has been framed with the tacit assumption of moral, and it would seem intellectual, parity. Assigning fault and determining the conflict’s roots is beyond the expertise of a young student such as myself.

A pluralistic superimposition of societal equality, however, grossly distorts the vast gulf separating Israelis from Palestinians. Unfortunately, organizations all too often overlook fundamental injustice to champion one side over the other. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in such groups as QUIT!, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism or Queers for Palestine.

QUIT! is a San Francisco-based organization describing itself as “part of an international movement for human rights that encompasses the movement for Palestinian liberation, and all other liberation movements.” Solidarity stems from the group’s implicit belief that as gays they understand the marginalizing of Palestinians. It would seem to be a simple expression of support for those suffering from Israeli abuses. And so it might be perceived to be by those in the organization. The group’s unqualified support for Palestinians, however, puts it squarely in support of a violently homophobic society and government.

Brutal oppression and abuse of gays characterizes many Arab nations, though it is certainly not unique to them. Saudi Arabia, in the recent past, has beheaded several men known to be gay. Others had their punishment of 2,600 lashes stretched over two years, in biweekly floggings, so that they would be able to survive long enough to receive their full sentence. Egypt actively arrests and, in some cases, tortures gays, purportedly for “offenses against religion.” And the PLA (Palestinian Liberation Authority) is no different. In the August 2002 New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi described the treatment of one gay youth: “He was beaten by his family, then warned by his father that he’d strangle (him) if it ever happened again.” Later, “he was arrested … and forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see.”

This is not by any means the worst. Halevi quoted the friend of another victim. “They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole.”

Gay Palestinians fleeing for their lives, then, is not surprising. But where they seek refuge is. Paul Varnell, writing for the Chicago Free Press, offers a hint: “Which Middle Eastern country has a variety of gay organizations … has members of parliament who speak out on behalf of gays … has a head of state (willing to) meet with gay activists? … Israel.”

These “homosexuals sought refuge in Israel after being persecuted in their own communities,” according to the BBC News service. Not only that, but Israeli civil rights organizations are fighting to let those who illegally entered the country stay. “Campaigners in Israel are trying to stop the deportation of a Palestinian homosexual back to the Gaza Strip, where they say he faces death threats.”

Amazingly, this issue has gone almost completely unreported. Outside of the efforts of a few writers such as Halevi, Varnell and blogger Andrew Sullivan (whose writing prompted this article), little has been done or said about the deplorable state of affairs, even by human rights organizations.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), in its last annual report, comprehensively documented abuses specifically related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but failed to mention such gay abuse even once. Scrutiny of Israelis on the same subject, however, is far more intense, according to Shaul Ganon, a prominent Israeli gay activist. “The international human rights groups say they’ve got a long list of pressing issues, (but) when Israeli police harass Arab Israeli homosexuals, I send out reports, and then – oh, you should see how quickly the human rights organizations get in touch with me to investigate. The hypocrisy is unbelievable,” Halevi quotes him as saying.

The dichotomy in open-mindedness and rational thinking is painfully clear. Israeli activists are willing to fight for Palestinian rights, even as suicide bombers slaughter innocents in malls and discos. Meanwhile, a Palestinian gay fears for his safety because “his own family tracked him down and tried to kill him,” according to the BBC. No one could, or should, claim Israeli conduct in countering terrorist attacks has been blameless, nor that their historical treatment of the refugees is untainted. But any discussion of the conflict that fails to acknowledge the bitter homophobia as symptomatic of an ignorant, retrogressive society cannot hope to offer any effective solution.

Such recognition is not a racist condemnation of Palestinians or Arabs. Indeed, the seeds of this presently backward state might very well have been sown by the aggressiveness of Israel’s security measures during the decades and merely watered by religious extremism and poverty. Whatever the source, the tumultuous upheaval that has become daily life in the West Bank, Gaza and refugee camps must be considered in the context of this gross societal disparity. .

Editorial writer William Goodwin is an undeclared freshman. To comment on this article, call (213) 740-5665 or e-mail dtrojan@usc.edu.

December 2002 – Z Magazine Online, Volume 15 Number 12

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Israeli Queers Revolt-Black Laundry Connects Homophobia and the Occupation

by Sue Katz
When was the last time you heard of a demonstration against a beauty contest? It might seem like a flash from the past, but the Israeli queer group, Black Laundry (Kvisa Sh’hora), took an old-fashioned protest target and turned it into a witty and pointed demonstration against the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands.

“We all dressed as drag-queens —girls, boys, butches, trans, everyone. It was our own alternative beauty show,” said Dalit Baum, one of the Black Laundry founders. Their signs helped spectators make connections between the beauty event and the dominant political crisis. “Glamor Won’t Cover the Crime: End the Occupation,” they said. And with even more bite: “Children in Ramallah (on the West Bank) aren’t Hungry; They’re just on a Diet.” Dalit says the group does not hesitate to salvage from the past. “We found a leaflet from the 1970s women’s movement in Tel Aviv and used their slogan— ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re mad’.”

Black Laundry began life at Gay Pride 2001. A small group of Tel Aviv lesbians and gays felt that they could not support Pride-as-usual in light of the occupation, so they distributed a leaflet in the bars and clubs seeking queers with an interest in protest. To their surprise, over 250 folks joined their contingent, well appointed in black and pink and sporting the wittiest prettiest placards of the day. The press found them even more fascinating than the usual drag queens so they received a great deal of attention. Organizing around the statement “No Pride in Occupation,” their most popular slogan was “Gay & Palestinian: Freedom Twice Denied.” By making connections between homophobia and the occupation, Black Laundry brings Israeli gender politics to a new level. Dalit explains their original motivation. “It felt impossible to celebrate our civil rights in a carnival atmosphere when we knew what was being done in the occupied territories just a short distance away.”

The humor used to highlight their issues makes Black Laundry the darling of the media. They can be quite outrageous. For example, to counter the commercialism of Pride, when every rainbow colored object—from key rings to porch awnings—becomes a saleable “Souvenir of Pride,” Black Laundry asked the contingent of Palestinian gays and lesbians who were arriving from Ramallah (only those with foreign passports) to gather up empty tear gas grenades and bring them along. The West Bank was littered with hundreds of spent canisters left by the Israeli Army. Piled into supermarket trolleys, each grenade was decorated with a pink sticker saying “Souvenir of Ramallah.” Unfortunately, the empty grenades were seized by the police at the march as “dangerous objects.” “Why then,” Black Laundry people asked them, “do you throw them at people?”

Following their smash-hit appearance at Pride, they decided to become a permanent group. They now have over 130 on their list- serve and biweekly meetings attract over 30 activists. The mix presently favors women in their twenties and thirties. There is a minority of Sephardic members (Jews whose families come from Arab, African, and Spanish countries, and who can experience ethnic discrimination in Israel). Some Israeli Palestinians (from villages within Israel’s pre-1967 borders) make it to actions, but the danger of being out is quite high, particularly for women. Palestinians from the occupied territories are prevented from participating by the Army’s extreme restrictions on their movements.

What the members share is a commitment to feminist process (consensus, rotating chair, diversity of ideas) and an aesthetic of outrageous and visual expression underlying a “joined-together” politic. Thea Gold, 27, involved with Black Laundry for 8 months, puts it this way. “If different oppressed groups—women, queers, Palestinians, the poor—realize that the same forces are keeping us down, it could help us all focus and combine our struggles and make them more effective.”

Black Laundry is very active and consistently manages to take the most provocative approach to old institutions. Besides their presence at the beauty contest, they also joined the annual Take Back The Night march.

This June, Jerusalem had its first Pride demonstration in an atmosphere so charged that it attracted world media coverage. “Jerusalem is a heated city,” Thea says, “the religious conflicts are strong and the political battles endless.” The Municipality reluctantly agreed to award them a license for the event, but unlike the local government of Tel Aviv, they provided no financial grant. The group organizing the march welcomed the collaboration with Black Laundry, who turned up dressed in black T-shirts with phosphorescent pink identity signs saying: Dyke, Butt Licker, Masturbating Lesbian, Slut. Their signs were in the six main spoken languages of Israel: Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish, Russian, and Amharic (Ethiopian).

Their messages, again, creatively made the connections. “Transgender and not Transfer,” they said, rejecting the call by right-wing Israelis to expel Palestinians from their own land. “Jerusalem: One City, Two Capitals, All Genders” suggested a solution for the city that both peoples claim. In a brilliant co-optation of the protests of the homophobic right-wing religious people who say that the war on the Palestinian people is impoverishing Israel, they carried “Homosexuals and Lesbians in Solidarity with Ultra-Orthodox Poverty.”

Black Laundry pays attention to the cultural details and finds ways to transgress in a language which speaks to the whole population. For instance, it is a tradition, at the entrance to Jerusalem, to post wedding announcements with the first names of the bride and groom prominently displayed. Using the exact graphic style of these commonplace signs, Black Laundry plastered the city’s entrance with “Ruth and Miriam” and “Zvi Yossel loves Menacham Levy.”
The members to whom I spoke all believe, as the slogan says, “The Occupation is Killing us All.” Hadas Sandler, a professional lifeguard, sees the Israeli Army’s violence in the territories affecting women in Israel. “It impacts on us here. There’s now so much violence towards women and trafficking in women. I know it’s connected to the occupation and what we allow ourselves to do to Palestinians.”

The political roots of Black Laundry can be traced directly to Women in Black, a protest movement begun in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in January 1988, just weeks after the start of the first intifada (Palestinian uprising). The Women in Black model of a unified visual image and a regular weekly demonstration in the same location spread throughout Israel, so that at one point there were 39 simultaneous weekly vigils around the country. The model got picked up in Europe and the States and eventually around the world. Women in Black was nominated for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Last year they mobilized simultaneous actions in 150 cities around the world for the anniversary of the Occupation.

Black Laundry is also set to be fruitful and multiply. There is a New York city branch of Black Laundry preparing to march in their city’s Pride and a group in San Francisco. There is something very contagious about the poetry with which they convey complex connections. As one of their recent banners declared: “Free Condoms, Free Palestine.”

Sue Katz has published on the three continents where she has lived, including 14 years in the Middle East. She has completed her first novel, Above The Belt, which takes place in an Israeli martial arts institute during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. To contact Black Laundry, KvisaMail@yahoo.com.

August 20, 2002 – The New Republic
(E-Mail: online@tnr.com )

Tel Aviv Dispatch

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The Horrors of Being Gay, Palestinian and Refugee

by Yossi Klein
Halevi Tayseer, as we’ll call him, a 21-year-old Gazan whose constant smile tries to conceal watchfulness, learned early on that to be gay in Palestine is to be a criminal. Three years ago his older brother caught him in bed with a boyfriend. He was beaten by his family, then warned by his father that he’d strangle Tayseer if it ever happened again. It happened again a few months later.

Word gets around a refugee camp, and a young man he didn’t know invited Tayseer into an orange grove. The next day he received a police summons. At the station Tayseer was told that his sex partner was in fact a police agent whose job is to ferret out homosexuals. If Tayseer wanted to avoid prison, he too would have to become an undercover sex agent, luring gays into orchards and turning them over to the police. Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn’t know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback.

Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see. (“You slap one part of your body, and then you have to slap another,” he recounts.) During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual.

When he was released a few months later, Tayseer crossed into Israel. He now lives illegally in an Arab Israeli village and works in a restaurant. His dream is to move to Tel Aviv. “No one there cares if you’re gay,” he says. These days, though, he knows that an illegal Gazan in Tel Aviv risks being deported and that he’s safest staying where he is. And if he were sent back to Gaza? “The police will kill me,” he says. “Unless my father gets to me first.”

With bombs once again exploding all over Israel, and the Palestinian territories under seemingly permanent curfew, the woes of Palestinian homosexuals haven’t exactly grabbed international attention. But after spending two days with gay Palestinian refugees in Israel, I began to wonder why the liberal world has never taken interest in their plight.

Perhaps it’s because that might mean acknowledging that the pathology of the nascent Palestinian polity extends well beyond Yasir Arafat and won’t be uprooted by one free election. Indeed, the torment of gays is very nearly official Palestinian policy. “The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn’t just come from the families or the Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself,” says Shaul Ganon of the Tel Aviv-based Agudah-Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender in Israel.

“The P.A.’s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators – though I know of two cases in the last three years where people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals.” Since the intifada, Ganon tells me, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law: “It’s now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A.”

A gardener we’ll call Samir, who has fled the territories for Israel, told me of a gay friend who was a member of the Palestinian police and ran away to Tel Aviv: “After a while he returned to Nablus, where he was arrested by the Palestinian police and accused of being a collaborator. They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole.“

International human rights monitors have all but ignored gay Palestinians’ plight. The U.S. State Department’s recently released human rights report for 2001, for instance, blandly notes, “In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized, and occasionally receive physical threats.” As Ganon explains it, “The Palestinian human rights groups are afraid to deal with the problem. One Palestinian activist told me that Israelis need to raise the issue because they’ll be shut down if they try to. Amnesty Israel is sympathetic but their mandate is limited to Israeli human rights violations. And the international human rights groups say they’ve got a long list of pressing issues.

When Israeli police harass Arab Israeli homosexuals, I send out reports, and then – oh, you should see how quickly the human rights organizations get in touch with me to investigate. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.” Because the world hasn’t forced the P.A. to tolerate gays, Palestinia n homosexuals are increasingly seeking refuge in the only regional territory that does: Israel.

In the last few years hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have slipped into Israel. Most live illegally in Tel Aviv, the center of Israel’s gay community; many are desperately poor and work as prostitutes. But at least they’re beyond the reach of their families and the P.A. Still, for these refugees life in Israel means subsisting on the margins.

Ganon, my guide to the community, heads the Association’s outreach to Palestinian gays. He is a big man with a goatee who spends his nights on the Tel Aviv streets where Palestinian gay prostitutes gather, providing food and clothes and trying to keep them off drugs and out of jail. Over the last four years Ganon has waged essentially a one-man campaign to try to interest human rights groups in Israel and elsewhere in their plight. He’s helped about 300 Palestinian gays in Israel and estimates that probably twice that many currently live here illegally without access to legal employment or health care and under constant threat of deportation.

“No one here cares about us,” says Samir, the gardener, who lives with his Israeli boyfriend. “I’ve written to all the government ministries, to all the newspapers, asking for my status to be recognized. No one even bothers answering.” According to Ganon, during the last year police have generally stopped arresting and deporting Palestinian gays because of his efforts. He has even worked out a quiet arrangement with Tel Aviv police, providing them a list of Palestinian gays under his sponsorship and providing those gays with Association membership cards to show their affiliation. The goal is to reassure local police, who are primarily on the lookout for Palestinian terrorists, that these Palestinians pose no threat. (The exceptions to this arrangement are Palestinian gays with security records and those from Gaza, whom the Israelis see as inherent security risks because of Hamas’s popularity there.) Some Palestinian gays, though, say they see no recent change in police policy and still feel hunted.

An American we’ll call William finds himself in the Palestinian gays’ no-man’s-land. Last year he and his Palestinian boyfriend, whom we’ll call Ahmad, moved into Ahmad’s West Bank village – a move that in retrospect seems mad. “We told the people in the village that we were friends, and for a while it worked,” says William. “But then one day we found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day.” Now they live in hiding – mostly from Ahmad’s brothers, who have searched for the couple in Tel Aviv and threatened to kill Ahmad.

Though William has appealed to human rights groups around the world, and to the U.S. Embassy for an American visa for Ahmad, he’s gotten little response. One American gay-advocacy group offered to help Ahmad get asylum after he arrives in the United States. But getting him there is precisely the problem, and William refuses to leave without Ahmad. And so here they are, an American Christian and a Palestinian Muslim stranded in the Jewish state, with no money and no work, living off the charity of friends, dreading the reappearance of Ahmad’s brothers, and waiting for help they know will almost certainly not come.

On a recent humid Tel Aviv night, in an area of shabby cafes for foreign workers and neon-lit sex shops, a half-dozen Palestinian teenage boys with gelled hair and sleeveless shirts sit on a railing, waiting for pickups. Ganon is here, as he is most nights, checking on “my children.” “Does anyone need condoms?” he asks. “How about clothes? Who hasn’t eaten today, sweethearts?” A police car slows down, and the boys call out, “Identity cards!” and laugh. The police ignore them and drive away. The teenage prostitutes, refugees from the West Bank, live in an abandoned building. They tell me that sometimes a client will offer them a meal and a shower instead of payment; sometimes a client will simply refuse to pay in any form, taunting them to complain to police. And sometimes police will beat them before releasing them back to the streets.

A 17-year-old refugee from Nablus named Salah (a pseudonym), who spent months in a P.A. prison where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds, tells Ganon that he has been stopped by Israeli police no fewer than four times that day. He recites the names of the different police units who stopped him by their acronyms. “Try not to do anything stupid,” Ganon says. “I’ve tried to kill myself six times already,” says Salah. “Each time the ambulance came too quickly. But now I think I know how to do it. Next time, with God’s help, it will work before the ambulance comes.” .

August 16, 2002 – In These Times, Institute for Public Affairs

9
Isn’t That Queer- a Nightclub for All

by Orly Halpern
After almost 2 years of bitter fighting, trust between Israelis and Palestinians has never been lower. But in a packed, smoky nightclub on the edge of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim district, the gay communities from both sides still bridge the growing divide, breaking down racial and political barriers as Jews and Arabs defy traditional stereotypes and threats of suicide bombers. While tensions are high in the rest of the country, Laila’s remains the only nightclub where Israeli Jews clap enthusiastically side by side with Palestinian Arabs. Does the fact that these revelers are gay, lesbian or bisexual have anything to do with their mutual tolerance? Absolutely.

“Here we don’t care where you are from or who you are, Jew or Arab. That’s what characterizes the gay world,” says Johnny, a Christian Palestinian Arab from East Jerusalem wearing a tight white shirt and stylish jeans as a Jewish friend greets him with a kiss. “I have 10 children,” says Simo, an ultra-orthodox Jew wearing a black suit and yarmulke, as he pulls out photos to show Johnny and Amir, the Arabs sitting near the bar with him. “I raise them to believe that all people are the same.”

“No one is prejudiced, you feel very free here,” says Rotem, a 19-year-old Israeli. Simo agrees: “As a religious man … I feel more comfortable to come to this place than to go to a straight place. I love my wife, but I do have a slight attraction to men.” Despite his attraction, Simo admits, “I’m scared to realize my fantasy of being with one.” Simo, Johnny, Amir and Rotem sit together in the hot dark nightclub talking about their belief in God as Kylie Minogue blares in the background. “I used to be religious,” says Amir, who has a goatee and wears a tight red shirt. “I prayed five times a day at the Dome of the Rock mosque. I tried for two years to be religious [and not gay], but it was a waste of time. I’m proud to be gay and have been for the last 10 years. This is the way God made me.”

But the political reality outside Laila’s divides these four. Because of severe Israeli security measures, Palestinians are having increasing difficulty coming to downtown Jerusalem, where Laila’s and the Open House, a gay support center, are located. Even those from East Jerusalem, who are considered “permanent residents” of Israel, have trouble passing the newly erected military checkpoints on their side of the city. Yet despite the checkpoints, many take the trouble to get to Laila’s anyway. “Palestinians feel good to come here because they don’t get harassed,” says club owner Avi Friedlander, a Jew from Germany who immigrated six years ago. Friedlander and his wife, Anne Marie, opened the place because he has “many gay friends in Europe who complained when they visited Israel that there are no gay bars in the city.

It was our idea to make this place for all kinds of people.” The first ever Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade took place last June, attended by more than 4,000 people. Despite threats of attacks by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who opposed having a gay celebration in the holy city, the event highlighted the connection between Jewish and Arab gays and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories – even though very few Arabs showed up. Yasser, 31, a father of three from the Old City, explains why: “The Arabs are scared of being filmed on TV and being seen. Our families don’t know we are gay and that we are here.”

A group of 50 women and men wore black shirts with pink writing in Arabic and Hebrew that said “Black Laundry against the occupation, in favor of social justice.” Founded in Tel Aviv last year, “Black Laundry” members directly connect their sexual tendencies with their fight for Palestinian freedom. “We protest against the festive nature of the pride parade [because they’re] doing it while the occupation is going on. Pride is a political thing. We can’t celebrate our freedom while other groups are oppressed,” explains Gali, 22, a lesbian from Tel Aviv wearing the Black Laundry shirt and fishnet stockings. Anat, a 27-year-old lesbian from Tel Aviv and a founder of Black Laundry, adds: “There is a connection between our oppression as lesbians, homosexuals and the oppression of the Palestinians. Since the intifada, the city of Jerusalem is covered with posters and graffiti saying ‘Expel the Arabs.’ Yesterday the city was covered with graffiti saying ‘Expel the homosexuals.’ I don’t want this [parade] to be a fig leaf for the abuses of human rights. A few kilometers from here there are people under siege, people who are hungry.”

March 13, 2003 – Daily Trojan,University of Southern California USC Student Union 421, Los Angeles, CA

10
Palestine’s oppression of gays should not be ignored

by William Goodwin
As the clouds of war grow ever darker over Iraq and media scrutiny becomes increasingly focused on the possible conflict, violence has continued to foment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A diplomatic Gordian knot, intransigence and distrust have characterized both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Especially since the reignition of the intifada, human rights have suffered at the hands of both governments. Consequently, debate and discussion of the hostilities has been framed with the tacit assumption of moral, and it would seem intellectual, parity.

Assigning fault and determining the conflict’s roots is beyond the expertise of a young student such as myself. A pluralistic superimposition of societal equality, however, grossly distorts the vast gulf separating Israelis from Palestinians. Unfortunately, organizations all too often overlook fundamental injustice to champion one side over the other. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in such groups as QUIT!, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism or Queers for Palestine.

The group’s unqualified support for Palestinians, however, puts it squarely in support of a violently homophobic society and government. Brutal oppression and abuse of gays characterizes many Arab nations, though it is certainly not unique to them. Saudi Arabia, in the recent past, has beheaded several men known to be gay. Others had their punishment of 2,600 lashes stretched over two years, in biweekly floggings, so that they would be able to survive long enough to receive their full sentence. Egypt actively arrests and, in some cases, tortures gays, purportedly for “offenses against religion.”

And the PLA (Palestinian Liberation Authority) is no different. In the August 2002 New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi described the treatment of one gay youth: “He was beaten by his family, then warned by his father that he’d strangle (him) if it ever happened again.” Later, “he was arrested … and forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see.” This is not by any means the worst. Halevi quoted the friend of another victim. “They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole.” Gay Palestinians fleeing for their lives, then, is not surprising. But where they seek refuge is.

Paul Varnell, writing for the Chicago Free Press, offers a hint: “Which Middle Eastern country has a variety of gay organizations … has members of parliament who speak out on behalf of gays … has a head of state (willing to) meet with gay activists? … Israel.”

These “homosexuals sought refuge in Israel after being persecuted in their own communities,” according to the BBC News service. Not only that, but Israeli civil rights organizations are fighting to let those who illegally entered the country stay. “Campaigners in Israel are trying to stop the deportation of a Palestinian homosexual back to the Gaza Strip, where they say he faces death threats.” Amazingly, this issue has gone almost completely unreported. Outside of the efforts of a few writers such as Halevi, Varnell and blogger Andrew Sullivan (whose writing prompted this article), little has been done or said about the deplorable state of affairs, even by human rights organizations.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), in its last annual report, comprehensively documented abuses specifically related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but failed to mention such abuse even once. Scrutiny of Israelis on the same subject, however, is far more intense, according to Shaul Ganon, a prominent Israeli gay activist. “The international human rights groups say they’ve got a long list of pressing issues, (but) when Israeli police harass Arab Israeli homosexuals, I send out reports, and then – oh, you should see how quickly the human rights organizations get in touch with me to investigate. The hypocrisy is unbelievable,” Halevi quotes him as saying. The dichotomy in open-mindedness and rational thinking is painfully clear.

Israeli activists are willing to fight for Palestinian rights, even as suicide bombers slaughter innocents in malls and discos. Meanwhile, a Palestinian gay fears for his safety because “his own family tracked him down and tried to kill him,” according to the BBC. No one could, or should, claim Israeli conduct in countering terrorist attacks has been blameless, nor that their historical treatment of the refugees is untainted. But any discussion of the conflict that fails to acknowledge the bitter homophobia as symptomatic of an ignorant, retrogressive society cannot hope to offer any effective solution. Such recognition is not a racist condemnation of Palestinians or Arabs.

Indeed, the seeds of this presently backward state might very well have been sown by the aggressiveness of Israel’s security measures during the decades and merely watered by religious extremism and poverty. Whatever the source, the tumultuous upheaval that has become daily life in the West Bank, Gaza and refugee camps must be considered in the context of this gross societal disparity. . Editorial writer William Goodwin is an undeclared freshman. To comment on this article, call (213) 740-5665 or e-mail dtrojan@usc.edu.

September 17, 2003 – Reuters

11
Palestinian Gay Runaways Survive on Israeli Streets

by Dan Williams Tel Aviv
At the bath houses of Tel Aviv, “Rani” finds anonymity and sometimes a free buffet. And there is always the chance of meeting an Israeli or a rich tourist who will offer his hotel room for a few nights, no questions asked. For gay Palestinian runaways such as Rani, life on the street in Israel is a daily calculation of how to survive, but it is still easier than the persecution they say they suffered in the more traditional communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Anwar” – who like other Palestinian homosexuals interviewed by Reuters goes by an assumed name – fled the West Bank after his brothers and father suspected he was gay and beat him senseless. Rani said he was tortured by Palestinian police who wanted him to spy on other homosexuals – a charge authorities at his Gaza hometown denied. He escaped on a work visa to Israel before a Palestinian uprising for statehood erupted three years ago. Rights activists estimate that 300 mostly male gay Palestinians are quietly eking out a living in Israel, at risk of being forcibly repatriated because they are illegal immigrants or because police consider them a threat.

“The first danger to them is from family and community, as well as (Palestinian) authorities,” said Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International. “Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there their biggest problem is possibly being sent back.” Palestinian runaways learn Hebrew quickly, playing down their Arab accents. Hospitals are avoided, and cash put aside for private health care. Those who turn to prostitution learn to spot plainclothes police from a distance. Fearing that word of their whereabouts might reach vengeful relatives back home, they avoid contact with one another.

“In my dreams I see my relatives, wearing masks, coming to kidnap and kill me,” said 22-year-old Rani, wearing a goatee, fake military dog-tags and a Star of David medallion – the trappings of Israeli urban youth. According to Shaul Gonen of Aguda, Israel’s main homosexual rights lobby, at least three Palestinian runaways have disappeared this way, punished for violating “family honor.”

Nature Versus Nation

Sodomy carries a three- to 10-year jail term in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian legal experts say enforcement is at the discretion of local authorities and usually requires that the accused be caught in the act. Islam denounces homosexuality as a sin, and many Palestinians deny it exists in their midst. Israel, which decriminalized sodomy in 1987, is considered among the more liberal of societies when it comes to gay rights. “Palestinian society is very conservative and there is a very, very, very small and secretive community of these people,” said Hassan Khreisheh, who heads the human rights monitoring committee in the Palestinian Legislative Council, or parliament. He dismissed the runaways living in Israel as “collaborators guilty of various crimes, including homosexuality.”

Palestinian gays are regularly accused by compatriots of being part of Israel’s vast network of informers. Asked to verify Anwar’s account of his expulsion from home, a Palestinian security source said that not only Anwar, but also his father and brothers were viewed as “prostitutes and spies.” “In the Arab mindset, a person who has committed a moral offense is often assumed to be guilty of others, and it radiates out to the family and community,” said Bassam Eid, director of Palestinian Human Rights Watch.

“As homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature, it is not hard to link it to collaboration – a crime against nation,” Eid added, lamenting what he called a “total lack” of support networks for gays in the West Bank and Gaza. Eid and Gonen said they knew of several Palestinian gays who had worked for Israeli intelligence in exchange for money or administrative favors including the right to live in Israel. One former Israeli handler of collaborators disputed this. “Gays are already treated with suspicion in Palestinian society,” said Menachem Landau, a veteran of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency.

“So what good are they for covert work?” Pressure goes the other way too. “Ali,” a 19-year-old from the West Bank, said he went into hiding in Tel Aviv after Palestinian militants ordered him to carry out a suicide bombing and “purge his guilt” for being gay. Rani said he knew of three similar cases. “But they refused. We don’t want to kill, just to live – in Israel or wherever.”

Anwar, who lives with a Jewish partner under identity papers loaned by an Israeli Arab, said he was content but wanted to move abroad eventually. One Israeli-Palestinian gay couple won residency in Canada, but this is rare. Gonen said Israeli police had expelled several dozen gay runaways at West Bank and Gaza checkpoints in recent years. Most soon sneaked back. But he said four had vanished in the territories and one was later reported to have been killed by relatives.

22 October 2003 – BBC News

12
Palestinian gays flee to Israel

A number of gay Palestinian men are risking their lives to cross the border into Israel, claiming they feel safer among Israelis than their own people. According to some estimates, there are now 300 gay Palestinian men secretly living and working in Israel. Their willingness to live there – despite the risk of being detained and deported as a security threat – is due to Palestinian attitudes towards gay men, they claim. One 22-year-old gay man who fled from Gaza into Israel four years ago told BBC World Service’s Outlook programme he was almost killed when his family found out about his sexuality. He says that when he was 18, he was caught with his boyfriend by his brother. “[My brother] brought a stick and hit us,” he said. “He tied us up with an iron rope and went to call my dad, and tell my partner’s. Then he came back and hit us again.” Illegal status

The man said he escaped after his brother went out and told his mother and sister-in-law to make sure they did not run away. “I started crying to my mum, begging her to let us go. So she untied us, and said if my dad found out, he would kill me on the spot. The man said he ran away and, when he discovered his family were hunting for him, fled to Israel. There, he says, he was placed under virtual house arrest because he was viewed as a potential security risk.

Shaul Gonen, of Israel’s main gay rights lobbying group, Agudah, told Outlook that under international law Israel is obliged to offer asylum to those that seek it. But, he says, it can refuse if the applicants are from an area the state is in conflict with. In practice, Palestinian gays end up being placed under virtual house arrest because of the fear that they may be potential suicide bombers. “They are unable to find proper help,” said Mr Gonen.

“Everybody blames them for being something dangerous. “The Palestinians say if you are gay, you must be a collaborator, while the Israelis treat you as a security threat.” Coercion However, many Palestinian gays say they would still rather live under house arrest in Israel, where homosexuality is not considered a crime, than at home. The 22-year-old who fled his home in Gaza alleged that those who do stay in the occupied territories are often coerced into working for the Palestinian police.

He said that he himself had been stopped by police in Gaza, who had threatened to expose him as a homosexual. He alleged he was told by the police to sleep with another man in order to acquire damaging information about him. The man alleged that after he refused, the Palestinian police had tortured him. “They hit me. They put me in a pool of water with just my head sticking out,” he claimed. However, the Israeli secret service also often exploit gay Palestinians, said Mr Gonen. He says this usually involves coercing them into working undercover, to gather information about other Palestinians.

The precarious status of the gay community means gay men often end up working for the secret service or as targets for exploitation by Israeli men. “They work as prostitutes, selling their bodies unwillingly because they have to survive,” said Mr Gonen. “Sometimes the Israeli secret police try to recruit them, sometimes the Palestinian police try to recruit them. “In the end they find themselves falling between all chairs. Nobody wants to help them, everybody wants to use them.“

‘Against Allah’

Gay Palestinians say they are mainly persecuted at home because of religious attitudes. Many Muslims claim that homosexuality is strictly against the Koran. “From my point of view as a Muslim, this phenomenon is rejected completely,” one Palestinian in Gaza told Outlook. “The Islamic religion is merciful – we should try to help them to eliminate this bad phenomenon. “It has a lot of bad things, a lot of disadvantages, a lot of bad sides – regarding their health, regarding their sociability, regarding their association with people around them.”

January 15, 2004 – Cleveland Jewish News

13
Palestinian gays seek safety in Israel

by Dan Baron, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Belying its name, Electricity Park is shrouded in darkness, an ideal spot for curb-crawlers keen to avoid attention as they prowl for male prostitutes at night. The anonymity these streets offer serves as a refuge for the young men who ply their trade in this dismal corner of Tel Aviv. Many of them have far more to fear than the police or the occasional abusive client. Tricked out in drag or the tight, modish attire of Western urban youth, dozens of gay Palestinian runaways eke out a dangerous living on Israel’s streets.

For these gay men, life in the seedy parts of central Israel is far better than the virtual death sentences they fled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sani – not his real name – grew up outside Gaza City, in a refugee camp whose clan networks and congestion made privacy practically impossible. He said he realized he was homosexual at age 16, in an encounter with another youth. Sani’s secret was safe from his father, a local sheik, but eventually it leaked out to the Palestinian Authority police. “They brought me in, held me for hours,” he told JTA. “During one round of questioning, they made me strip and sit on a Coke bottle. It hurt. And all the time I was more worried my family would learn why.”

Torture by Palestinian Authority security services or vigilante attacks by relatives is a fate suffered by countless gays in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where sodomy carries a jail term of three to 10 years. Islam prescribes capital punishment for homosexual activity. Those who survive torture and attacks either fade into meek self-abnegation or, like Sani, break away. Sani’s freedom came at a price: He had to report other Palestinian gays to the police. But as soon as he got out of the Gaza lock-up, Sani got out of Gaza for good, posing as a day laborer to escape to the safety of Israel proper, where he joined an estimated 300 fellow gay runaways.

Now 22, Sani is always on the move, lodging with friends or rich clients he meets at Tel Aviv’s bath houses. If he is short on cash, he resorts to street-walking in Electricity Park. Sani phones home every few months to assure his mother that he is all right – on condition that she doesn’t tell his father and brothers anything about the conversations. “She says they consider me dead, and it’s better that way,” he said. “I have nightmares about them coming to kill me.”

According to Shaul Gonen of Agudah, Israel’s homosexual rights association, at least three Palestinian runaways have been abducted by vengeful kinsmen, never to be heard from again. “Being gay in the P.A. is, quite simply, deadly,” Gonen said. Israel’s preoccupation with security also means that the runaways, in the country illegally, run the risk of being summarily deported if caught. “The first danger to them is from family and community, as well as authorities” in the P.A.-controlled areas, Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International told Reuters.

“Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there, their biggest problem is possibly being sent back.” Israel signed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees covenant of 1951, guaranteeing asylum for anyone persecuted on the basis of sexual orientation.The country’s Interior Ministry said any gay Palestinian can apply to remain in Israel indefinitely if persecution is proven, but the ministry gave no figures on how many such applications have been filed.

Another option for the Palestinians is to seek haven abroad. One gay Israeli-Palestinian couple found a home in Canada, and Gonen currently is campaigning to persuade European Union nations to be more forthcoming with offers of asylum. Many runaways are apparently unaware of their rights, or worried that through some bureaucratic bungle they could find themselves on the wrong side of an Israeli military checkpoint before their asylum application is processed. One 19-year-old runaway told Israel’s Channel One TV that the Al-Aksa Brigade, the terrorist wing of the Palestinians’ mainstream Fatah movement, tried to pressure him into becoming a suicide bomber to “purge his moral guilt.” He refused and fled to an Arab village in Israel’s Galilee region. Gonen tells of a Palestinian runaway in Tel Aviv who helped catch a terrorist. The gay runaway grew suspicious overhearing an illegal Palestinian laborer speak. The man’s accent was Gazan, but he claimed to be from the West Bank. The runaway reported the laborer to the authorities via an Israeli friend, and police who arrested the laborer discovered he was a terrorist fugitive.

Palestinian homosexuals often elicit more suspicion at home than in their haven of choice, regularly drawing accusations that they collaborate with the Shin Bet (Israeli secret police). Human-rights observers suggest that Palestinian homosexuals, fearing for their lives if exposed, are especially vulnerable to Shin Bet blackmail. But a veteran handler of collaborators, Menachem Landau, denied this. “Gays are already treated with suspicion in Palestinian society,” Landau said in an interview. “So what good are they for covert work?” In Israel, covertness is a way of life for Palestinian runaways. They pick up Hebrew and make all efforts to erase their Arabic accents. Military dog tags and Star of David medallions are de rigeur as an Israeli disguise. They save up money for private medical care in lieu of hospital visits when they fall ill.

The Electricity Park crowd has learned to spot plainclothes police from afar. The really lucky ones adopt a new identity altogether. The 30-year-old runaway from a village near Jenin works in a Tel Aviv restaurant using an identification card loaned to him by an Israeli Arab friend. He lives with his Jewish partner in the quiet Tel Aviv suburb of Holon. “With any luck, I’ll go unnoticed until there is peace,” he said.

February 8, 2004 – Washington Post, Washinton, D.C.

14 Gay Arab (with Israeli lover) From the West Bank Finds He Can’t Go Home Again

by Molly Moore, Washington Post Staff Writer
(Jerusalem) Fuad Musa sensed the suspicion as soon as he walked into the Pasha restaurant in Jerusalem’s middle-class Talpiot neighborhood. It followed him to his table and lingered as he ordered dinner.

” The security guard kept looking at me,” recalled Musa, a towering 28-year-old with an angular face and brown eyes so soft they appear on the verge of melting. He was sure he knew what the guard was thinking: Here is an Arab. He might be a terrorist.
” Before the food came, we stood up and left,” he said, the resentment as raw as if the episode had happened last night, rather than 20 months ago. He hasn’t ventured into an Israeli restaurant since.

A Palestinian living illegally in Israel, Musa said he feels both rage and humiliation when security guards and strangers in the street mark him as a potential terrorist by the pigmentation of his skin and the contours of his face. This happens all the time, he says. But he feels equally unwelcome in Ramallah, his home town in the West Bank, where Palestinian society — even members of his family — treat him as an outcast because he is gay.

Today Musa is a foreigner in both lands, a pariah in both societies.

” He’s a product of the occupation,” said his partner, Ezra Yitzhak, 52, an Israeli Jew who has long been active in peace and pro-Palestinian organizations. “He has everything against him.”

Musa’s personal struggles reflect the intolerance within two societies hardened by numbing death tolls and intractable politics, and cultures alienated by centuries-old hatreds and equally ancient beliefs. Israelis and Palestinians have demonized each other, seeing individuals largely through a prism of collective prejudices.

” The entire conflict is here,” Yitzhak said. “It’s in my house. Not in the city next door. It’s in my house.”

An Israeli court last week gave Musa three months to return to the West Bank, find a third country willing to accept him as a refugee or face imprisonment, all options he considers untenable.

Thousands of undocumented Palestinians have been sent to Israeli prisons or forced back to the Palestinian territories since the start of the current Palestinian uprising against Israel nearly 31/2 years ago, according to Palestinian officials and human rights organizations monitoring the cases.

But Musa and Yitzhak view their case as far more complex, and potentially tragic, because Musa moved to Israel more than four years ago for the same reason that many gay Palestinians have left their homeland — to escape the stigma that Muslim culture imposes on homosexuality.

” Here it’s okay to be homosexual,” he said. “There I feel threatened.”

As one of the few gay Palestinians who have taken their case public, however, Musa said he fears for his life in an Israeli prison, where he would encounter homophobic inmates. He speaks from some experience.

In the previous Palestinian intifada, which broke out in 1987, Musa was a teenager throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. He spent nearly two years in Israeli jails and was released as part of the amnesty that came with the 1993 Oslo accords, which effectively ended the slowly dying conflict.

The peace accords freed Musa from jail, but his sixth-grade education and lack of skills gave him few options for employment, as is the case with many Palestinian men of his generation. Musa turned to crime and was imprisoned again in Israel for stealing a car.
” What’s left for people like him is to be criminals,” said Yitzhak, who met Musa soon after he was released on the car-theft charge. Yitzhak said he was attracted to Musa partly because he believed he could help the affable young man escape his troubled past.

Musa is determined never to go back to prison, but he also fears for his life in the Palestinian territories, he said, where his sexual orientation is widely viewed not only as a disgrace to his family but an affront to Islam.

” If he is sent to the West Bank, it would be very dangerous for him,” said Eitan Peleg, one of Musa’s attorneys. “But he’s staying here illegally. Every minute he is here, he is committing a felony offense.”

Moving to a third country would mean leaving behind Yitzhak.

Though Israel is far more tolerant of homosexuality than Palestinian society, Musa’s initial entry into the Israeli gay community was hardly free of hostility. Yitzhak’s family, although accepting of his homosexuality, was vociferously opposed to Ezra’s choice of an Arab lover.

” Even my mother told me, ‘He will kill you one day,’ ” Yitzhak recalled. Many of his gay Jewish friends “didn’t want to accept a Jew and an Arab together.”

But Musa’s charm and easygoing nature won over most of Yitzhak’s family and friends, Yitzhak said. The two melded easily into Yitzhak’s professional life in Jerusalem, where Yitzhak trained Musa to work in his plumbing business. They participated in the vibrant, open gay community of Tel Aviv — a city that is far more cosmopolitan and socially tolerant than most of Israel, and a refuge for Israeli and Palestinian gays.

” Before the intifada, we would go to films and restaurants,” Musa said. “We’d go dancing in Tel Aviv, go sailing. It was a lot of fun.”
Musa occasionally brought Yitzhak to family weddings and festivities in Ramallah, introducing him as a platonic “friend.” It was a believable cover story after Yitzhak’s many years as a peace activist who traveled frequently to the West Bank in support of Palestinian causes.

” In the beginning, they were suspicious of me and Ezra,” Musa said of his immediate family. “But they never said anything.”
Four years ago, Yitzhak invited Musa to move into his Jerusalem apartment. Although Musa had no Israeli identity card, Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, determined he posed no security threat and issued him a letter of permission to live in the country. But after the onset of the Palestinian uprising, the life Musa and Yitzhak had built on the acceptable fringes of Israel’s legal and societal systems began to unravel.

” People walking in the street looked at me different,” Musa said. “It was a really terrible feeling. You feel bad, like what have you done?

” Because I’m an Arab, every restaurant I go to, they ask for my ID, call the police and check to see if I’m okay,” he continued. “You lose all the fun of going out.”

” There are days when it’s better not to go out,” interjected Yitzhak, whose extroverted personality contrasts with Musa’s shyness. After the incident at the Pasha restaurant, they stopped dining out altogether in Israel.
At the same time, said Musa, “In Ramallah, I would not walk on the streets.”

Early last year, Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published a story about Musa’s efforts to become a legal resident of Israel. The newspaper referred to him by a pseudonym and printed a blurred photograph of Musa with Yitzhak.
Relatives in Jerusalem easily recognized Musa, however, and sent the clipping to his family in Ramallah. His parents telephoned, and Musa says they sounded almost irrational in their anger. At one point, one of them blurted, “We don’t want you as our son anymore!”

Other relatives took turns on the phone. “They were shouting at me, threatening me; they threatened my life,” said Musa, who is from a family of six boys and two girls. “My brothers didn’t even want to talk to me.”

After he hung up, Musa recalled, “I felt lost, like a man who’s not even alive.”

For five months, Musa’s parents and siblings refused to speak to him despite his attempts to call them. Eventually, his 22-year-old brother, Abed, returned his calls, and last fall Abed communicated a message from his parents: “The family said you can come back.”

Musa met with Abed and their father, a taxi driver. He brought along a female friend to keep family tempers in check.
” My father said it was a question of family dignity,” Musa said. After a long, emotional conversation, “I forgave them,” Musa said simply.

He and Yitzhak have not been back to visit them in Ramallah, however.

” Even if his family accepts him,” Yitzhak said, “the future is impossible. Arab society won’t accept homosexuality.”
Today, Musa finds himself in a netherworld where he fears Palestinian suicide bombers — the warriors of the second intifada — as much as any Israeli Jew. “I don’t even park near buses or stand near buses,” he said. “If I’m right there, they would try to kill me also. They don’t care.”

But he said it was painful to sort out his emotions toward the Palestinian bombers: He knows they would kill him in a heartbeat, yet he once fought for their cause and was willing to go to jail for it.

” It’s a very hard and difficult question,” he said, nervously re- adjusting the toffee-colored muffler tucked around his neck to ward off the chill of a damp winter night. “I’m a freedom fighter. If somebody says they are a freedom fighter, you respect him for that.
” They are my blood, my people. I have never stopped supporting people fighting for freedom.”

Just as forcefully, he added, “I don’t agree with blowing up a bus full of kids.”
Still, he said he understands why they do it. “They don’t have alternatives. This is their only force, their only power against Israel with its M-16s and tanks.”

Coming to terms with the way he and Israelis regard each other is no easier, Musa said.
” There are [Israelis] who know me and trust me,” he said. “They even treat me as their son. It’s crazy. Somebody smiles at you. Then the next moment, somebody else looks at you like you’re a terrorist. Sometimes your mood changes 20 times a day. It drives you crazy.”

Some days the emotional swings are so disorienting, “it makes me depressed and not want to live,” Musa said as he sat cross-legged on the pillows that line the living room floor of his and Yitzhak’s Jerusalem apartment. “Sometimes, I drink too much to forget the day.”

The security crackdown, with its military checkpoints, police searches and prohibitions on Palestinian travel, has became a trap for Musa. Police stopped honoring the worn letter from Shin Bet, which once had been accepted as a credible voucher from the government. He estimated that he had been detained more than 60 times in the past year — sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for five hours.

Yitzhak said he spent hours cajoling Israeli authorities and paid thousands of dollars in fines to get Musa out of detention.
In December, the same Israeli policeman stopped Musa twice within two weeks and vowed to get him kicked out of the country or sent to jail, according to Musa and Yitzhak. The courts, although giving Musa two short-term reprieves, ruled that he could leave the couple’s three-room apartment only during daylight, and only to travel to and from work.

Musa contemplated the options Israel may now force on him. Most wrenching, he said, is the prospect of being separated from the partner he adores and the home life he cherishes.

Even though he has reconciled with some of his family members, he said he cannot return to the West Bank: “Over there, I am nothing. I cannot be myself.”

The threat of jail terrifies him even more: “I won’t survive there. People know I’m homosexual.”
As a youngster, said Musa, “I had many dreams: to have a good life, a safe place to live. To have pets and birds . . . to have a normal life, like normal people.”

And then in a voice so soft and flat that it was barely audible: “None of them came true.”

September 16, 2004 – al-fatiha-news@yahoogroups.com

15
Activist launched first Palestinian lesbian group ‘A language no one else is speaking’

by Glenn Kauth
Rauda Morcos is a true radical. She’s a Palestinian lesbian activist who next year plans to protest the Pride parade in Jerusalem. “I’m against the idea of having a celebration at the same time that there’s occupation,” says Morcos, the 30-year-old coordinator of the first Palestinian lesbian group, Aswat. (http://www.aswatgroup.org/english/)

“We have people being killed 20 minutes down the road at the same time as this racist separation wall is being built,” she says, referring to the West Bank towns near Jerusalem that are frequently the site of clashes with the Israeli army and where Israel is building a controversial wall to cut itself off from the West Bank. Morcos’ discomfort with Israeli Pride festivities is illustrative of the challenges she and other Aswat members face: they’re discriminated against as Palestinians living under Israeli rule, as women in a male-dominated society and as lesbians in an Arab community where there’s no official word for “gay.”

“We’re against any type of occupation,” she says. “I don’t want to be occupied as a Palestinian or as a woman or as a lesbian.”
Aswat was formed in 2003 by a group of women who wanted to add a Palestinian lesbian voice to the already thriving Israeli gay movement. The decision to restrict Aswat to women was not a deliberate political act. “We wanted to find a way to break the silence that so many Palestinian lesbians face,” she says.

“For this reason, it was important to bring women together in a safe place where they could talk about their own issues. It was natural.” Today, Aswat has grown to 14 women who regularly meet as a group. They don’t have an office of their own, so they borrow space from organizations throughout Israel and meet in different cities so people from across the country can take part. The group has several members from the West Bank who have to cross several checkpoints to reach the meeting place and who legally aren’t even allowed in Israel.

Other women from inside Israel face the challenge of explaining to their families where they’re going when they come to a meeting. In many Palestinian communities, women aren’t allowed out alone at night, let alone to travel to another city. Morcos gave up her job as a teacher in order to become the full-time coordinator of Aswat. Just this year, the group got funding from three foundations, allowing it to start paying Morcos a salary. Currently, she is on a tour of several North American cities to promote her work and raise funds for Aswat.

She’ll be in Toronto on Thu, Sep 30, 2004 for a poetry reading and reception at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. It’s clear that Morcos is overwhelmed by the pace of change she’s faced since becoming part of Aswat. “I know I’m leading this boat,” she says, “and I’m afraid because it’s a huge responsibility. But I also try to remember that I’m not doing this alone.” She regularly gets stared and pointed at while she walks the streets of her small village in northern Israel, Kufer Yassis. She has also received several harassing phone calls at home. A big challenge is working with Aswat’s so-called allies.

Many Israeli gay organizations, for example, are taken aback by Aswat’s strong anti-occupation stance while many Palestinian feminist organizations are afraid to embrace the dyke movement. “We’re still speaking a language no one else is speaking,” says Morcos. Morcos says it was tough at the beginning, with people shutting doors in her face. “But I’m now at a point where I’ve stopped caring,” she says. “Some doors will shut, but then other ones will open. You just have to remind yourself that it’s all worth it because you’re doing something for women.”

30 May 2005 – BBC News
Produced in conjunction with Radio Netherlands

16
Palestine and homosexuality

Programme aired Mon 30 May 8.30 – 9pm

Eric Beauchemin explores Muslim attitudes to homosexuality through the lives of some of the gays and lesbians forced to flee to Israel. Throughout the Moslem world homosexuality is a taboo, punishable in several countries by death. On the West Bank and Gaza women or men who have sex with people of the same sex face imprisonment and torture. They are also rejected by their families and the rest of society. Several hundred Palestinian gays and lesbians have fled to Israel.

Because they’re Palestinian, they’re illegal and cannot readily obtain asylum in Israel. But having tried in Israel, it is virtually impossible to obtain asylum in another country, as you can only apply for asylum once. While on a recent trip looking at how the Middle East conflict was affecting individuals, Radio Netherlands journalist, Eric Beauchemin, met several gays and lesbians caught in this legal limbo. They talked to him about their experiences being caught up between religion, prejudice and politics.

25 year old Rami fled to Tel Aviv when he was a teenager. ” I am afraid, really afraid. One of the last times I was deported, the Israelis left me on a deserted road. I saw a lot of people from my village and they started asking me what I was doing there. I don’t speak very good Arabic anymore, so they started saying that I was a collaborator. I was afraid they would kill me . I fear my brother and Hamas more than the Israeli police, because if the Israelis catch me, they won’t kill me. They will just arrest me. But Hamas will surely kill me.”

Because they form a relatively small group in the Middle East, gays and lesbians receive scant attention in the media and from society. The director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Bassem Eid, recognises that despite the human rights of these Palestinians being violated, these abuses, he says, pale in comparison to what’s happening to the majority living in the occupied territories. “The homosexuals and the lesbians is the smallest topic right now, which nobody wants to add it, you know, to the Palestinian suffering here. If the situation will calm down a little bit, I believe that this issue must have, (sic), to be raised publicly and more and more awareness should have,(sic), to be spreading among the Palestinian society”.

Useful Links
Radio Netherlands (the Dutch International Service)
Agudah (an Israeli gay and lesbian group:)
ASWAT (Palestinian lesbian group in Haifa)

December 12, 2005 – Posted by Doug Ireland

17
Gay Palestinian Women Appeal for Help

I have received an e-mail appeal for help from a fledgling association of gay Palestinian women, ASWAT. Founded at the beginning of this year, the core group of 20 activist lesbians — with a bit of seed money from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a non-profit associated with the German Green Party and named after the famous writer, who was a Green supporter — established a website in English and Arabic.

The group’s mission statement says that “the ASWAT initiative is to serve as a Palestinian gay women’s group where we may express ourselves, discuss gender and sexuality, define our feminism, and address the conflict experienced by us between our national and gendered identities. The ASWAT group provides a safe space for any Palestinian woman who identifies as lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual, transgender or inter-sexual, where we can break our individual silence through dialogue, self-education, healing and activism.

In addition, we strive to generate social change in order to meet the needs of one of the most silenced and oppressed communities in Israel. We work to reach out to Palestinian and Jewish communities in Israel, and also to collaborate with other like minded institutes, groups and individuals in order to combat the multilayered discrimination we face and to promote women rights.” The group organizes both in the lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority (where open meetings are very difficult) and in Israel. Some 80 meetings have been held so far, seminars and a lecture series are ongoing, and a chat room for queer women is breaking the isolation of Palestinian lesbians, who are often abused by their families.

The e-mail from ASWAT says, “ASWAT has grown significantly in terms of activities and members…Unfortunately, the funds needed for our activities exceeded our actual income, as some tentative supporters changed their priorities. Thus, we appeal to
you to support our work and our ongoing struggle before 2005 ends.”

ASWAT’s website (http://www.aswatgroup.org/english/) has an English-language page on how to donate. Questions about how to help may be directed to donate@aswatgroup.org. A little money will go a long way toward helping ASWAT — so I urge you to send what you can today.

8 August 2006 – gay.com/planetout.com

18
WorldPride supports gay Palestinians?

Despite a call from some LGBT Arabs to boycott WorldPride in Israel, WorldPride organisers – Jerusalem Open House – will express solidarity with gay Palestinians today at a demonstration at the city’s separation wall.

As the WorldPride Jerusalem 2006 organisers wrote, “Holding WorldPride in Jerusalem, the city at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a significant opportunity for our diverse community to raise a different voice, a voice for progressive moral values, inclusion and pluralism.” However, Remy of Helem, an LGBT Lebanese group, said:

“WorldPride in Jerusalem — a parade for love and acceptance in an occupied land, a land which knows no acceptance nor love? Helem supports the international boycott of Jerusalem WorldPride. Lebanese (and many other Arabs) have no right to enter Jerusalem.”

Israel-based Palestinian lesbian activist Rauda Morcos said, “We don’t agree to participate in a WorldPride that does not take a political stand against the occupation”. The demonstration will emphasise problems of the political situation and offer support to LGBT Palestinians who do not have the same resources as Israelis, including those of the JOH. ??Participants will gather in Gan Ha-pa’amon from 830 in the morning and will march to a pre selected spot near the separation wall to express their support.

Other WorldPride highlights this week include an LGBT Clergy Multifaith Convocation: “Reclaiming Our Faith and Our Heritage,” a protest highlighting anti-gay incitement and hate campaigns targeting lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people, and conferences on gay youth, human rights and health.

October 2, 2006 – Guardian Unlimited

19
Coming out in Arabic–Aswat Lesbian Organization

Brian Whitaker reports on a lesbian group’s struggle for acceptance in the Middle East.

When Rauda Morcos heard there was an emailing list for lesbian Palestinians, she couldn’t believe it at first. ” I thought it was a joke,” she said. “Until then, I thought I was the only lesbian who speaks Arabic.” The list was certainly not a joke but, in a society where same-sex relations are still taboo, its members guarded their privacy. The only way a newcomer could join was by personal recommendation. ” Eventually I got in,” Ms Morcos recalled, “and I found a lot of other [lesbian] women who couldn’t be out.”
After corresponding by email for a few months, she thought it would be good to talk with some of the invisible women face to face, so, in January 2003, Ms Morcos and her flatmate called a meeting.

” We had no expectations,” she said, “but eight women turned up. The meeting lasted eight hours and I don’t think anybody wanted to go home.” That, it later turned out, marked the birth of Aswat (“Voices”) – the first openly-functioning organisation for Arab lesbians in the Middle East. ” We realised we had a great responsibility towards other women in our community,” Ms Morcos continued. “We tried to contact many organisations and sent out letters but the only reply came from Kayan [“Being”], a group of feminists in Haifa … Many NGOs don’t count it as a human rights issue or want to be associated.”

Three years on, though, Aswat is firmly established with more than 70 members spread across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel (where the organisation is based). Only about 20 attend its meetings; the need to keep their sexuality secret, plus Israeli restrictions on movement, prevent others from attending but they keep in touch through email and an online discussion forum.
Beyond the group itself, there are also signs of acceptance in a few places. “We do a lot of work within the community, for example with youth groups, counsellors, and so on,” Ms Morcos said. “That proves to me at least that the gay/lesbian movement has started for us as Palestinians.”

Recognition for Aswat’s work came earlier this year when Ms Morcos won the 2006 Felipa de Souza award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. The citation described her as “a true example of courageous and effective human rights leadership”, but Ms Morcos is quick to point out that other women are also doing a lot of work behind the scenes. Speaking to a standing-room-only meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign during a visit to London last week, she explained that necessity has made her the public face of Aswat. Many of the women involved do not want to be identified – often with good reason. “But if we don’t want to come out as persons, let’s at least come out as a movement,” she said.

Ms Morcos’s own coming-out was not entirely voluntary and proved particularly unpleasant. In 2003 she gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot about the poetry she writes. In passing, she mentioned her sexuality – only to find that the L-word turned up in the newspaper’s headline. An article on Aswat’s website describes what happened next: ” All of a sudden, the Arab population of her home town [in northern Israel], which she generally assumed to have no interest in the literary supplements of Hebrew newspapers, seemed to have read the article and had something to say about her. Local corner shop owners made photocopies and distributed it, because, after all, everyone knew it was about the daughter of so-and-so from their own town.

” The consequences of that article were far more serious than Ms Morcos had imagined: her car windows were smashed and tyres were punctured several times, she received innumerable threatening letters and phone calls, and, to top it all, ‘coincidentally’ lost her job as a school teacher, since parents of pupils complained that they did not want her as a teacher.”

Israel legalised same-sex relations between men in 1988. Four years later, it went a step further and became the only country in the Middle East that outlaws discrimination based on sexuality. A series of court cases then put the theory into practice – for example, when El Al was forced to provide a free ticket for the partner of a gay flight attendant, as the airline already did for the partners of its straight employees.

Linking the twin enemies of Israel and homosexuality provides a double whammy for Arab propagandists, as can be seen from sections of the Egyptian press. In an article to mark the 30th anniversary of the October war, a headline in the Egyptian paper Sabah al-Kheir announced: “Golda Meir was a lesbian.” In 2001, following the mass arrest of more than 50 allegedly gay men, al-Musawwar magazine published a doctored photograph of the supposed ringleader, showing him in an Israeli army helmet and sitting at a desk with an Israeli flag.

Israel, however, is not quite the gay paradise that many imagine. There is still hostility from conservative Jews, and some of their blood-curdling statements are not very different from the more widely publicised remarks of Muslim clerics. In Jerusalem last year, the ultra-Orthodox mayor banned a pride march, though an Israeli court promptly overturned his decision. As the parade took place, a Jewish religious fanatic attacked three marchers with a knife and reportedly told the police he had come “to kill in the name of God”.
The gay rights movement in Israel also has a questionable history. Lee Walzer, author of Between Sodom and Eden, explains in an article that the first Israeli activists pursued “a very mainstream strategy” that “reinforced the perception that gay rights was a non-partisan issue, unconnected to the major fissure in Israeli politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict and how to resolve it”. ” Embracing gay rights,” he continues, “enabled Israelis to pat themselves on the back for being open-minded, even as Israeli society wrestled less successfully with other social inequalities.”

The question here is whether gay rights – in Israel or elsewhere – can really be divorced from politics or treated in isolation from other human rights. Helem, the Lebanese gay and lesbian organisation, thinks not, arguing that gay rights are an inseparable part of human rights – as does Ms Morcos. For Ms Morcos, there’s a connection between nationality, gender and sexuality. She has a triple identity, as a lesbian, a woman and a Palestinian (despite having an Israeli passport) – “a minority within a minority within a minority”, as she puts it. Her first concern, though, is to end the Israeli occupation, and she sees no prospect of achieving gay rights for Palestinians while it continues.

Nowadays, the more radical Israeli activists also acknowledge a linkage. In 2001, Walzer recalls, “Tel Aviv’s pride parade, typically a celebratory, hedonistic affair, got a dose of politics when a contingent called ‘Gays in Black’ marched with a banner proclaiming, ‘There’s No Pride In Occupation’.” Later, a group called Kvisa Sh’chora (“Dirty Laundry”) sprang up and began drawing parallels between the oppression of sexual minorities and Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

The issue was further highlighted in 2002 when Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to formally meet a gay delegation. Activist Hagai El-Ad asked: “Is this an achievement for our community, or an example of a lack of feeling, callousness and loss of direction?” He continued: “It would be unbearable to simply sit with the prime minister and, on behalf of our minority, ignore the human rights of others, including what’s been happening here in relation to Palestine for the past year: roadblocks, prevention of access to medical care, assassinations, and implementation of an apartheid policy in the territories and in Israel.

” The struggle for our rights is worthless if it’s indifferent to what’s happening to people a kilometre from here. ” All we get by holding the meeting with the prime minister,” he concluded, “is symbolic legitimacy for the community. What he gets for sitting down with us is the mantle of enlightenment and pluralism.”

Meanwhile, as far as the average Palestinian is concerned, fleeing into Israel is a betrayal of the cause, and gay men who remain in the Palestinian territories also come under suspicion – not always without good reason. There have been various reports of gay Palestinians being targeted or pressurised by Israeli intelligence to act as informers. Whether or not they actually succumb to the pressure, all inevitably come under suspicion. ” Gays in Palestine are seen as collaborators immediately,” said Ms Morcos.

Email:
brian.whitaker@guardian.co.uk
Aswat MIddle East Lesbian website:
http://www.aswatgroup.org/english/gallery.php?article=11

May 16, 2007 – yahoo.com

20
‘We are Palestinian, we are women, we are gay’ by Mehdi Lebouachera

Battling against a deeply patriarchal society, Arab Israeli and Palestinian lesbians are uniting to break the taboo of homosexuality and politicise the right to be female and gay. “We are Palestinian, we are women and we are gay,” is the slogan coined by Aswat, the association campaigning for lesbian Arabs to be accepted in Israeli and Palestinian society, and whose name in English means “voices”. “A lot of lesbians and Arab homosexuals have double lives, marry and lead a secret existence. People say it is forbidden by religion,” says Rauda Morcos, Aswat coordinator, at its headquarters in Israel’s northern city of Haifa.

“Society is hyprocritical. But we are against this issue remaining secret. We want it dealt with as a political and social issue,” she said. In late 2002, Rauda decided to put her money where her mouth was and take action with fellow lesbian Samira, her former roomate. The two women set up an Internet forum for Arab lesbians in Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. A year later they founded Aswat. Today the association, funded by European and US groups, organises monthly and totally anonymous support meetings, raises gay awareness and disseminates information about homosexuality.

“We want people to manage on their own, take their destiny into their own hands,” says 27-year-old Aswat member Rima. “Women have to be given the confidence so that they can then change the mentality around them.” But to be autonomous in a society where the family is central to social life and a self-help network represents a real challenge to that way of life. “No one can publicly declare they are homosexual without support. You need to be strong, even financially, because you need an alternative to family support should you loose it,” points out Rauda.

Her experience is a prime example. When she was “outed” as a lesbian without her consent, she was sacked as an English teacher and her life became a living hell in the northern Arab Israeli village of Kfar Yassif. “People called me up just to insult me. My car was ruined, sprayed with words like ‘bitch,’ ‘lesbian’. My uncles stopped talking to me,” she remembers.

One anonymous story on Aswat’s website alludes to the confusion of being gay in Jerusalem, a predominantly religious city, and the support perhaps acquired from the organisation that allows its author to speak out. “I was on the bus and a guy, who looked like gay and he did not knew about it, sat near me. He looked at me confused and told me ‘nice bag’, I said ‘thanks’. He then asked me ‘it is girl’s bag, you know’.

“I said ‘yes I know’. Some moments passed by, and he still troubled and puzzled, asked: ‘do you like girls of boys?’. I answered the most boring answer ‘none of your business’. “However, today if I were to be asked same question I would have answered I like ‘girls who are boys who like boys like they are girls’, paraphrasing BlurÂ?s amazing song Boys and Girls.” If, with the passing months, Aswat is becoming more visible and widely recognised in Israel, it is also attracting the wrath of the Islamic Movement, which has become an incontrovertible fixture in the Arab Israeli community.

“Under Islamic law, homosexuality is unlawful, a kind of illness that needs to be treated,” said Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsur, an MP in the Israeli parliament and a member of the movement. “Our Arab society cannot tolerate this phenomenum, to allow it to become an overt part of our daily life,” the lawmaker added. It is comments like that which send shivers down Samira’s spine. “We are trying to do our job and not give them more importance than they deserve,” said the 31-year-old out shopping for a Drag Queen theme night in a Tel Aviv nightclub not far from her home in the sprawling metropolis.

She knows that the path is still long and paved with stones for gays, particularly in the Palestinian territories. “We don’t have any illusions. We know, for example, there will be no gay pride in Gaza. But quietly and surely we will change things.” Aswat is starting to snowball. An association, even if for the moment it remains a secret, was set up in Ramallah in March by four gay students. “Officially we do social work against the occupation or the wall. But in private we are trying to help gays,” said one of its founders on condition of anonymity, who has infiltrated Tel Aviv illegally for the Drag Queen night.

June 7th 2007 – The Economist print edition/Reuters

21
It is getting harder for gay Palestinians to seek refuge in Israel or abroad

One time, high heels and a wig saved Imad from prison.

The 22-year-old from the West Bank capital, Ramallah, had been caught in Jerusalem without a permit. On the way to the jail, the police asked him and his friend why they had sneaked into town. As his friend shrivelled up with shame, Imad (not his real name) proudly told them he had come to perform at the Shushan, Jerusalem’s only gay bar. He opened his bag and flourished his outfit with a bristle of sequins. The police, realising that they had caught a couple of drag queens instead of a couple of terrorists, let them go with a warning never to return. “And two days later,” recounts Imad with a gleam in his eye, “I was back, even in the same café where they arrested me.”

But getting back is becoming harder. Israel is rapidly filling in the remaining gaps in its West Bank wall-cum-fence. Recently it took Imad some seven hours to make the usual one-hour journey from Ramallah to Tel Aviv. Soon his drag career, which has rocketed at gay clubs all over Israel (see picture), will be cut short.

Gay Palestinians have long been sneaking into Israel to enjoy a freedom unknown in their own, much more conservative, society. And despite persistent rows such as whether to allow gay-pride marches in Jerusalem—legislator s this week voted, on a first reading, to let the city ban them to avoid offending ultra-Orthodox Jews—Israel likes to promote its reputation for tolerance. Three years ago the Zionist Organisation of America imported some gay Palestinians, complete with disguises and fake names (or perhaps they were all the same man—it was hard to tell) for a pro-Israel college lecture tour. Israel’s main gay-rights group, known as the Aguda, has been working quietly with the government and the tourist industry for three years to promote gay tourism—though a recent newspaper report about the campaign scared the tourism ministry into denying any such campaign.

But despite relatively progressive laws, says Yoav Sivan, a young Israeli gay activist, Israel’s liberalism is more selective than its politicians make out. Over the past 12 years some 60 gay Palestinians have asked the Aguda for help getting asylum because their lives are in danger back home. Hardly a flood—but Israel has not granted one request. Nor will it give residence permits to those with steady Israeli partners, as it routinely does to its citizens’ same-sex partners from other countries. At best, says the Aguda, it lets the Palestinians stay a while to seek refuge elsewhere.

Other states also show little sympathy. Only 20 of the 60 have won asylum abroad. The rest are in jail or living illegally in Israel, as are hundreds more who have not even sought asylum as it means losing any chance of returning home. Samir (not his real name
either) has just run out of time on his latest three-month visa and risks rapid deportation if caught. But after eight years with his Israeli partner, he says, “I’m not going to leave now.”

Israel does give asylum to Palestinians whose lives are at risk—for collaborating with Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service. And sometimes the Shin Bet blackmails gay Palestinians into working for it by threatening to expose them—as does Palestinian intelligence, for that matter. So Palestinians known to be gay are invariably suspected of being collaborators too—which puts them in even greater danger.

October 2, 2006 – guardian.co.uk

22
Middle East dispatch Coming out in Arabic

Brian Whitaker reports on a lesbian group’s struggle for acceptance in the Middle East
(Article historyAbout this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday October 02 2006. It was last updated at 13:46 on October 02 2006.When Rauda Morcos heard there was an emailing list for lesbian Palestinians, she couldn’t believe it at first. “I thought it was a joke,” she said. “Until then, I thought I was the only lesbian who speaks Arabic.”)

The list was certainly not a joke but, in a society where same-sex relations are still taboo, its members guarded their privacy. The only way a newcomer could join was by personal recommendation. “Eventually I got in,” Ms Morcos recalled, “and I found a lot of other [lesbian] women who couldn’t be out.” After corresponding by email for a few months, she thought it would be good to talk with some of the invisible women face to face, so, in January 2003, Ms Morcos and her flatmate called a meeting. “We had no expectations,” she said, “but eight women turned up. The meeting lasted eight hours and I don’t think anybody wanted to go home.”

That, it later turned out, marked the birth of Aswat (“Voices”) – the first openly-functioning organisation for Arab lesbians in the Middle East. “We realised we had a great responsibility towards other women in our community,” Ms Morcos continued. “We tried to contact many organisations and sent out letters but the only reply came from Kayan [“Being”], a group of feminists in Haifa … Many NGOs don’t count it as a human rights issue or want to be associated.”

Three years on, though, Aswat is firmly established with more than 70 members spread across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel (where the organisation is based). Only about 20 attend its meetings; the need to keep their sexuality secret, plus Israeli restrictions on movement, prevent others from attending but they keep in touch through email and an online discussion forum. Beyond the group itself, there are also signs of acceptance in a few places. “We do a lot of work within the community, for example with youth groups, counsellors, and so on,” Ms Morcos said. “That proves to me at least that the gay/lesbian movement has started for us as Palestinians.”

One of Aswat’s main goals is to provide information about sexuality that is widely available elsewhere but has never been published in Arabic. This is not simply a matter of translation; it’s also about developing “a ‘mother tongue’ with positive, un-derogatory and affirmative expressions of women and lesbian sexuality and gender … We are creating a language that no one spoke before”. If women are to find their voice, the language needs to be re-appropriated, Ms Morcos explains in an article on Aswat’s website. “I have forgotten my language. I don’t know how to say ‘to make love’ in Arabic without it sounding chauvinistic, aggressive and alien to the experience.” Recognition for Aswat’s work came earlier this year when Ms Morcos won the 2006 Felipa de Souza award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. The citation described her as “a true example of courageous and effective human rights leadership”, but Ms Morcos is quick to point out that other women are also doing a lot of work behind the scenes.

Speaking to a standing-room-only meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign during a visit to London last week, she explained that necessity has made her the public face of Aswat. Many of the women involved do not want to be identified – often with good reason. “But if we don’t want to come out as persons, let’s at least come out as a movement,” she said. Ms Morcos’s own coming-out was not entirely voluntary and proved particularly unpleasant. In 2003 she gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot about the poetry she writes. In passing, she mentioned her sexuality – only to find that the L-word turned up in the newspaper’s headline. An article on Aswat’s website describes what happened next:

“All of a sudden, the Arab population of her home town [in northern Israel], which she generally assumed to have no interest in the literary supplements of Hebrew newspapers, seemed to have read the article and had something to say about her. Local corner shop owners made photocopies and distributed it, because, after all, everyone knew it was about the daughter of so-and-so from their own town. The consequences of that article were far more serious than Ms Morcos had imagined: her car windows were smashed and tyres were punctured several times, she received innumerable threatening letters and phone calls, and, to top it all, ‘coincidentally’ lost her job as a school teacher, since parents of pupils complained that they did not want her as a teacher.”

Arab society today is riddled with the kind of anti-gay prejudices that were found in Britain half a century ago, and persecution is common. Muslim clerics condemn homosexuality in no uncertain terms, though similar statements can be heard from Arab Christian leaders too, such as the Coptic Pope in Egypt who once declared that “so-called human rights” for gay people were “unthinkable”. With a few exceptions here and there, this is the prevailing attitude in all the Arab countries, but in Palestinian society the issue of gay rights is further complicated – and made much more political – by the conflict with Israel. Israel legalised same-sex relations between men in 1988. Four years later, it went a step further and became the only country in the Middle East that outlaws discrimination based on sexuality. A series of court cases then put the theory into practice – for example, when El Al was forced to provide a free ticket for the partner of a gay flight attendant, as the airline already did for the partners of its straight employees.

These are undisputed achievements but they have also become a propaganda tool, reinforcing Israel’s claim to be the only liberal, democratic society in the Middle East. At the same time, highlighting Israel’s association with gay rights has made life more difficult for gay Arabs, adding grist to the popular notion that homosexuality is a “disease” spread by foreigners. Linking the twin enemies of Israel and homosexuality provides a double whammy for Arab propagandists, as can be seen from sections of the Egyptian press. In an article to mark the 30th anniversary of the October war, a headline in the Egyptian paper Sabah al-Kheir announced: “Golda Meir was a lesbian.” In 2001, following the mass arrest of more than 50 allegedly gay men, al-Musawwar magazine published a doctored photograph of the supposed ringleader, showing him in an Israeli army helmet and sitting at a desk with an Israeli flag.

Israel, however, is not quite the gay paradise that many imagine. There is still hostility from conservative Jews, and some of their blood-curdling statements are not very different from the more widely publicised remarks of Muslim clerics. In Jerusalem last year, the ultra-Orthodox mayor banned a pride march, though an Israeli court promptly overturned his decision. As the parade took place, a Jewish religious fanatic attacked three marchers with a knife and reportedly told the police he had come “to kill in the name of God”. The gay rights movement in Israel also has a questionable history. Lee Walzer, author of Between Sodom and Eden, explains in an article that the first Israeli activists pursued “a very mainstream strategy” that “reinforced the perception that gay rights was a non-partisan issue, unconnected to the major fissure in Israeli politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict and how to resolve it. Embracing gay rights,” he continues, “enabled Israelis to pat themselves on the back for being open-minded, even as Israeli society wrestled less successfully with other social inequalities.”

As part of their strategy, activists sought “to convince the wider public that gay Israelis were good patriotic citizens who just happened to be attracted to the same sex”. As a general principle this may be valid, but in the context of war and occupation it leads into murky territory. Should it really be a matter of pride that openly gay members of the Israeli armed forces are just as capable of wreaking havoc on neighbouring Lebanon as the next person? The question here is whether gay rights – in Israel or elsewhere – can really be divorced from politics or treated in isolation from other human rights. Helem, the Lebanese gay and lesbian organisation, thinks not, arguing that gay rights are an inseparable part of human rights – as does Ms Morcos.

For Ms Morcos, there’s a connection between nationality, gender and sexuality. She has a triple identity, as a lesbian, a woman and a Palestinian (despite having an Israeli passport) – “a minority within a minority within a minority”, as she puts it. Her first concern, though, is to end the Israeli occupation, and she sees no prospect of achieving gay rights for Palestinians while it continues. Nowadays, the more radical Israeli activists also acknowledge a linkage. In 2001, Walzer recalls, “Tel Aviv’s pride parade, typically a celebratory, hedonistic affair, got a dose of politics when a contingent called ‘Gays in Black’ marched with a banner proclaiming, ‘There’s No Pride In Occupation’.” Later, a group called Kvisa Sh’chora (“Dirty Laundry”) sprang up and began drawing parallels between the oppression of sexual minorities and Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. The issue was further highlighted in 2002 when Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to formally meet a gay delegation. Activist Hagai El-Ad asked: “Is this an achievement for our community, or an example of a lack of feeling, callousness and loss of direction?”

He continued: “It would be unbearable to simply sit with the prime minister and, on behalf of our minority, ignore the human rights of others, including what’s been happening here in relation to Palestine for the past year: roadblocks, prevention of access to medical care, assassinations, and implementation of an apartheid policy in the territories and in Israel. The struggle for our rights is worthless if it’s indifferent to what’s happening to people a kilometre from here. All we get by holding the meeting with the prime minister,” he concluded, “is symbolic legitimacy for the community. What he gets for sitting down with us is the mantle of enlightenment and pluralism.”

This mantle of enlightenment and pluralism does not, however, extend to Israel’s treatment of gay Palestinians. For those who face persecution in the West Bank and Gaza, the most obvious escape route is to Israel, but this often leaves them trapped in an administrative no-man’s-land with little hope of getting a proper job in Israel and constantly at risk of arrest and deportation. Meanwhile, as far as the average Palestinian is concerned, fleeing into Israel is a betrayal of the cause, and gay men who remain in the Palestinian territories also come under suspicion – not always without good reason. There have been various reports of gay Palestinians being targeted or pressurised by Israeli intelligence to act as informers. Whether or not they actually succumb to the pressure, all inevitably come under suspicion.

“Gays in Palestine are seen as collaborators immediately,” said Ms Morcos.

January 10, 2008 – Middle East Times

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Israel’s other war

by Mel Frykberg
“We’re fighting for equality,” said Hagai El-Ad. “But if we do it at the price of collaborating with an oppressive and discriminatory establishment, then we’re no better than the millions of other Israelis who’ve already chosen to become hardened and indifferent to the suffering of the other, of the enemy.”

One would automatically assume that statement refers to the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation; it is not. Hagai El-Ad is a Jewish gay rights activist. In a region where homosexuality is regarded as something abhorrent and punishable by law it is ironic that many gay Palestinians fled both Gaza and the West Bank and, with the help of gay Israelis, were able to find refuge in the state which epitomizes their enemy, Israel, and among a community vilified by their own communities back home. “In the eyes of the Jewish majority it is sufficient for the other person to be an Arab to justify almost any humiliation and violence against them. Even if the other is an Israeli citizen, even if she is a pregnant woman, even if it’s a child on her way to school,” stated El-Ad.

In a nutshell this sums up the empathy with which the suffering of Palestinians in general, and especially those in the Palestinian gay and lesbian community, is regarded by the majority of Israel’s homosexual community. “We started a project to help protect and promote the rights of gay Palestinians who had fled the West Bank and the Arab villages in Israel,” Nimrod Baron from Jerusalem’s Open House, a gay refuge center, told the Middle East Times. “And so successful was the program that gay Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have now started their own program aimed at empowering gay members of their community,” added Baron.

Although some Palestinian gays and lesbians are hiding out illegally in Israel in order to escape violence, intolerance and being disowned by their families, significant expatriate groups exist in Netanya and Tel Aviv where many live with their Israeli partners. The police have in many cases turned a blind eye due to the intervention of organizations like Agudah, a gay activist organization in Tel Aviv.

Another problem facing gay Palestinians is that many in their community equate homosexuality with collaboration with Israel. While there is some basis to this, due to Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, recruiting some individuals in return for money or resident permits, this does not apply to all the Palestinians who fled their homes. However, those even suspected of collaborating with Israel face either death or imprisonment. Several years ago Tayseer, a young man from Gaza received a summons from the Palestinian police after he had engaged in homosexual acts. When his family found out, he was severely beaten and warned by his father that the next time he would be strangled. When he refused to implicate others during his interrogation, he was tortured and imprisoned where he suffered constant taunts from interrogators and other prisoners. After his release a few months later, Tayseer crossed into Israel, something which is now virtually impossible due to the strict security procedures. He now lives illegally in an Arab Israeli village and works in a restaurant.

For Jewish gays and lesbians the fight for equality has been a hard one, but one that has borne fruit, despite prejudices from orthodox Jewish groups. Sometimes the prejudice leads to violence. At the 2005’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras three marchers were stabbed by a Jewish fanatic. Israel’s small but powerful orthodox community, including political parliamentarian groups, has been able to enforce its religious agenda on the Israeli public to a significant degree despite the outrage of the majority of Israelis who are secular. Public transport is prohibited on Shabbat, or Sabbath, the Jewish holiday which starts at sunset on Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday, selling pork is illegal, and there is no such thing as civil marriages between Jew and non-Jew. These rules, however, are bent in the less religious climate of Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv. And due to the determination and political activism of Israel’s gay community, Israel today has some of the most progressive gay rights in the world.

“The gay rights lobby here fought their successful campaign, both through the media and on the political level,” Baron said.

Lesbians can officially adopt children born to their partners by artificial insemination from an anonymous sperm donor. Same sex marriages performed outside of Israel are also recognized. Foreign partners of gays receive residency permits while spousal benefits and pensions are extended to the partners of homosexual employees. Israel’s attorney general has also granted legal recognition to same-sex couples in financial and other business matters. Israel’s Defense Forces allow gays to serve openly and even in special units. In 1992 legislation was introduced to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But El-Ad concluded that however rosy the current scenario is, the rights of Israeli and Palestinian gays are inextricably intertwined.

“The struggle for our rights is worthless if it’s indifferent to what’s happening to [gays in the occupied Palestinian territories] a kilometer from here.”

April 2006 – MePeace.org

24
Homosexual Palestinians in Israel – Unspeakable love

by Brian Whitaker,The Jewish Quarterly
Homosexuality in the Middle East and the gay Palestinians who have taken refuge in Israel

www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=218

Open homosexuality is a social and religious taboo almost everywhere in the Middle East. In Iran and most Arab countries, same-sex acts are illegal and punishable by imprisonment, flogging or sometimes death. Even in countries where homosexuality is not specifically outlawed, such as Egypt, generalized laws against “immorality” are used to target gay men. The notable exception is Israel, where same-sex relations between men became legal in 1988. Four years after de-criminalizing homosexuality, Israel went a step further and is now the only country in the Middle East that outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The law has certainly made its impact felt, requiring the military to treat gay and lesbian members of the armed forces equally and, in one celebrated case, forcing El Al to provide a free ticket for the partner of a gay flight attendant, as for the partners of heterosexuals. And in 1998 Israel’s tolerance of sexual diversity attracted worldwide attention when the transgender Dana International won the Eurovision Song Contest.

In an essay on Israel’s gay history, Lee Walzer, author of Between Sodom and Eden (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), explains: “The reasons for gay and lesbian political success during this period from 1988 through the mid-1990s were many. Chief among them was the fact that gay activists pursued a very mainstream strategy, seeking to convince the wider public that gay Israelis were good patriotic citizens who just happened to be attracted to the same sex. This strategy, pursued until recently, reinforced the perception that gay rights was a non-partisan issue, unconnected to the major fissure in Israeli politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict and how to resolve it. Embracing gay rights enabled Israelis to pat themselves on the back for being open-minded, even as Israeli society wrestled less successfully with other social inequalities.”

Across the Green Line in the West Bank and Gaza, however, the picture is very different. The penalty for same-sex acts under Palestinian law is not entirely clear, though in practice this is less significant than the extra-judicial punishments reportedly meted out by the authorities and the threats that gay men face from relatives intent on preserving family “honour”. Writing in the New Republic (19 August 2002), Yossi Halevi described the case of “Tayseer”, a Palestinian from Gaza, who was 18 when an elder brother caught him in bed with a boyfriend. His family beat him and his father threatened to strangle him if it ever happened again. A few months later, a young man Tayseer had never met invited him into an orange grove for sex:

“The next day he received a police summons. At the station Tayseer was told that his sex partner was in fact a police agent whose job is to ferret out homosexuals. If Tayseer wanted to avoid prison, he too would have to become an undercover sex agent, luring gays into orchards and turning them over to the police. Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn’t know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback. Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with faeces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see… During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.”

The key ingredients of Tayseer’s story are repeated in other published accounts given by gay fugitives from the West Bank and Gaza: a violent family reaction, entrapment and blackmail by the police coupled with degrading improvised punishments. The hostility of families is a predictable response from those who regard homosexuality as a betrayal of “traditional” Arab-Islamic values. This attitude is by no means unique to the Palestinians, but while it may be possible in some Arab countries to take refuge in the anonymity of big cities, the Palestinian territories are small, with mainly close-knit communities where it is difficult to hide.

Religious condemnation of homosexuality found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam derive mainly from the biblical story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, which also figures in the Qur’an. In recent decades progressive Jews and Christians have increasingly questioned traditional interpretations of scripture and moved towards acceptance of homosexuality, at least within stable, loving relationships. As for Islam, however, the trend has generally been in the opposite direction – partly because of the weakness of secular or progressive religious currents but mainly because political conditions have led to a growth of religiosity and recourse to supposedly traditional Arab-Islamic values.

Historically at least, the view that homosexual acts should be punished by execution is a feature of all three monotheistic religions. Britain applied the death penalty for sodomy over several centuries – originally on the basis of ecclesiastical law – up until 1861. Today, Islamic law is widely interpreted in the same way by many prominent and widely respected scholars, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shi’a cleric in Iraq, whose fatwa advocating death for liwat (sodomy) was posted in Arabic on his website. A number of gay men have been systematically murdered in Iraq recently and campaigners say the fatwa provided religious sanction and encouragement for the killings.

Four years ago in Israel, a prominent rabbi, David Batzri, also advocated the death penalty. “Homosexuals and lesbians are not only a sickness,” he told Maariv newspaper in February 2002. Last year, during the gay pride parade in Jerusalem, a religious extremist attacked three marchers with a knife and reportedly told the police he had come “to kill in the name of God”. Of course, there are important differences between Israel and the Arab countries – particularly in the reaction to such views. Rabbi Batzri’s remarks caused public outrage and the man who attacked the Jerusalem parade was promptly arrested. In Israel, religious figures and their legal opinions carry far less weight, and the rights of gay people are protected by the state.

For gay Palestinians who feel persecuted at home, the obvious escape route is to Israel, but because of the political conflict this can be fraught with difficulties. As far as most Palestinians are concerned, fleeing into Israel is a betrayal of their cause, while gay men who remain in the Palestinian territories also come under suspicion.

“In the West Bank and Gaza, it is common knowledge that if you are homosexual you are necessarily a collaborator with Israel,” said Shaul Gonen, of the Israeli Society for the Protection of Personal Rights (“ ‘Death Threat’ to Palestinian Gays”, BBC, 3 March 2003). Bassim Eid, of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, explained: “In the Arab mindset, a person who has committed a moral offence is often assumed to be guilty of others, and it radiates out to the family and community. As homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature, it is not hard to link it to collaboration – a crime against nation” (“Palestinian Gay Runaways Survive on Israeli Streets”, Reuters, 17 September 2003).

Regarding gay men as politically treacherous is not unique to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. There are parallels here with Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, when gay men engaged in secret government work were treated as a particular security risk. In the popular imagination, this may well have been seen as an intrinsic part of their psychological make-up, although the fact that their sexual activities were illegal did expose them to the possibility of blackmail by Soviet agents.

Equating homosexuality with collaboration makes it extremely dangerous for Palestinians to return home after fleeing to Israel. One man told Halevi in the New Republic of a friend in the Palestinian police who ran away to Tel Aviv but later went back to Nablus, where he was arrested and accused of being a collaborator: “They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole.”

There is little doubt that some – though by no means all – gay Palestinians are forced by their precarious existence to work for Israeli intelligence in exchange for money or administrative favours such as the right of residence; both Eid and Gonen said they knew of several. Others, meanwhile, are coerced into undercover work for the Palestinian authorities; one 19-year-old runaway stated in an interview with Israeli television that he had been pressurized by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to become a suicide bomber in order to “purge his moral guilt”, though he had refused (“Palestinian Gay Runaways”, Reuters, 17 September 2003).

Estimates of the number of gay Palestinians who have quietly – and usually illegally – taken refuge in Israel range from 300 to 600. Although Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and recognizes same-sex partnerships for immigration purposes, it does not welcome gay Palestinians – mainly because of security fears. This often leaves them trapped in an administrative no-man’s-land with little hope of finding a proper job and constantly at risk of being arrested and deported. Some try to disguise themselves by wearing fake military dog-tags and even Star of David medallions.

“The Palestinians say if you are gay, you must be a collaborator, while the Israelis treat you as a security threat,” Gonen told a news programme (“Palestinian Gays Flee to Israel”, BBC, 22 October 2003). But even if they are neither collaborators nor a security threat, they can easily become targets for exploitation by Israeli men. “They work as prostitutes, selling their bodies unwillingly because they have to survive,” Gonen said: “Sometimes the Israeli secret police try to recruit them, sometimes the Palestinian police try to recruit them. In the end they find themselves falling between all chairs. Nobody wants to help them, everybody wants to use them.

May 2009 – Advocate.com

25
James Kirchick’s “Queers for Palestine?”

On January 28, little more than a week after Israel concluded its brutal military campaign against the Gaza Strip, James Kirchick published the latest installment in his growing corpus of articles about tolerant, gay-friendly Israel and homophobic, “Islamofascist” Palestine. Although Kirchick has published essentially the same article under different titles — “Palestine and Gay Rights” and “Palestinian Anti-Gay Atrocities Need Attention” — and although he regurgitates the same flimsy, unsupported arguments in all of these articles, we do not write to question his intellectual prowess or journalistic qualifications. In fact, Kirchick’s diatribe against Palestinians and the “radical” gay activists who support them would not warrant a response if it did not, in our view, represent something much bigger and more dangerous.

We are two people who come from very different places with very different histories: one of us, Haneen Maikey, is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the director of Al-Qaws (“the rainbow” in Arabic) for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society (www.alqaws.org), and the other, Jason Ritchie, is an American anthropologist whose research focuses on sexuality and nationalism in Israel-Palestine. Despite our differences, however, we share an interest in what is said about lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer Palestinians, and we are equally disturbed each time we read another article by another American, European, or Israeli writer who pretends to offer “the truth” about gay Palestinians by telling simplistic, one-dimensional stories that are based more on racist stereotypes about Palestinians than the reality of life in Israel-Palestine.

We would like to start, then, by clearing up a few misconceptions about Israel, Palestine, and queers. As in most societies, homophobia is a problem in Palestinian society, but there is not some organized, widespread campaign of violence against gay and lesbian Palestinians. Of course, there are occasional acts of violence, much like there are occasional acts of violence against queers in Western societies; and the social norms and mores about gender and sexuality that give rise to such violence create a climate in which many queer Palestinians cannot live their lives openly and honestly. At the same time, however, there are many openly gay and lesbian Palestinians, and they are not, as James Kirchick implies, an insignificant group of a “few lucky Palestinians” who are seeking asylum in Israel: they are actively engaged in changing the status quo in Palestinian society by promoting respect for sexual and gender diversity.

Those of us who know a thing or two about Israel know that seeking asylum in Israel is not an option anyway for Palestinians, who are specifically ineligible for asylum under Israeli law. It may be true, as Kirchick proudly states, that Israel “legally enshrines the rights of gay people,” but it enshrines only some rights for some gay people. Restricted freedom of movement, routine human rights abuses, detentions, checkpoints, and bombing campaigns are among the legally enshrined “rights” of Palestinians, whatever their sexual orientation, in the West Bank and Gaza. And while Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem are granted some legal rights and their living conditions are significantly better than in the Palestinian Territories, Palestinian citizens of Israel, whatever their sexual orientation, are second-class citizens, who face legally sanctioned and everyday discrimination and racism in all areas of life, from courtrooms and boardrooms to hospitals and universities, from the streets of small villages to the streets of Jerusalem, from the floor of the Knesset to the floors of Tel Aviv’s hippest, gayest clubs.

Israel is not, in other words, “an oasis of liberal tolerance,” and Palestine is not “a reactionary religious backwater.” Kirchick’s article is built on the weak foundation of these two myths, and we could excuse such shortcomings as poor journalism — it’s based, after all, not on research or conversations with actual gay Palestinians, but the author’s assumptions and a seven-year-old article written by another journalist — if it did not entail such serious dangers.

In the first place, if we are to believe Kirchick, there are no queer Palestinians: they’ve all been murdered by Palestinian “Islamofascists,” and the “lucky few” who survived have fled to gay-friendly Israel. In fact, there is a vibrant, organized community of queer Palestinians who are working hard to create a just, democratic Palestinian society that respects the dignity of every person. Perhaps Kirchick would prefer to pretend that they don’t exist because, in his view, they might as well not exist. According to Kirchick, “Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews.” If it were true — and we know it not to be true — that all Palestinians hate gays (and Jews), and their hatred has nothing to do with laws or stereotypes or other things in the world that can be changed, then there would be no point fighting for change. The truth is that homophobia is a problem among Palestinians, but racist arguments like Kirchick’s that explain it as a sort of sickness that’s “firmly rooted” in Palestinian society do nothing to help those who are trying hard to change it.

Fortunately, though, the important work of queer Palestinian activists will continue, regardless of what James Kirchick does or does not write about them. What we find more problematic is that he fabricates a story of oppressed gay Palestinians, about whom he actually knows very little, to make an argument in support of a brutal military campaign that claimed the lives of more than 1,200 Palestinians, most of them innocent civilians. Kirchick, and anyone else, is free to blindly support Israeli repression of Palestinians, but we would like to suggest that he not do it by recycling unsubstantiated stories and false assumptions about queer Palestinians, whose suffering, like that of most Palestinians, stems more from Israeli policies than it does from “Palestinian homophobia.”

In the end, Kirchick’s real point of contention seems to be with those gay and lesbian activists in the West who were brave enough to oppose the Israeli war on Gaza. Their opposition, he argues, was akin to “stand[ing] alongside the enthusiasts of religious fascism.” Although many of us have begun the slow process of recovering from eight years of George Bush and his “us versus them” mentality, Kirchick apparently did not get the memo. He views the world — and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular — in simplistic, black-and-white terms: good Israelis/Americans/Europeans versus bad Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims. “But gays will never,” to borrow Kirchick’s own words, “get anywhere as long as they view the world in this constrictive and counterproductive way.”

Where exactly “they” want to go is an open question, and Kirchick proves his own point that not all gays will care about the rights and dignity of other people. But to those of us who do care, we would like to issue a call for a kind of queer solidarity based not on racist assumptions about “others” who look different, speak different languages, or live in different places but on a willingness to listen to each other and stand together against violence and repression, even when some among us try to justify it in our name. That, we think, is what’s truly “obscene,” and the only just antidote to it is a queer movement made up — not, as Kirchick argues, of “oppressed” victims who identify with each other’s suffering — but of courageous queer activists, thinkers, artists, writers, and everyday people who identify with the common dream of a better world for us all.

Haneen Maikey, Jason Ritchie
Jerusalem; Champaign, Ill.

August 17, 2009 – From: Peter Tatchell

26
Jewish Palestinian Gay Activist Ezra Nawi Spared Jail for Resistance Work
20,000 people sign petition, urging “don’t jail Ezra”; Prosecution to seek lesser sentence on 21 September

Jerusalem Magistrate Judge Eilata Ziskind has announced that a final decision on sentencing Palestinian human rights defender Ezra Nawi – an openly gay Israeli Jew – will now take place on 21 September. “At yesterday’s court hearing, the judge was swamped by character witnesses, letters and an online petition with 20,000 signatures from the UK, US and all over the world, urging the court to not jail Ezra,” reports human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.

“The online petition – was organised and coordinated by the Jewish Voices for Peace campaign group.
Ezra faces imprisonment over an alleged riot during his attempts to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army and over an alleged assault on a police officer during his arrest – charges that Ezra, a well known pacifist, strongly denies. Among the witnesses who testified in court yesterday on Ezra’s behalf were Yehudit Karp, a former deputy attorney-general of Israel, and Hebrew University professors Galit Hazan-Rokem and David Shulman.

“Several of the witnesses explained to the court that Ezra’s actions in trying to stop Israel’s bulldozing of Palestinian homes had to be understood in the context of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, aggressive Israeli settlers trying to force the Palestinians off their land, and the extreme poverty of the displaced Palestinian families. In an apparent response to the global outpouring of support for Ezra Nawi, the prosecution has indicated that it is now not asking for the maximum sentence of 18 months to two years imprisonment; although it remains insistent that he should still serve a custodial sentence.

“Ezra has become a legendary figure among the Palestinians in South Hebron, left-wing and pro-peace Israeli activists, LGBT campaigners and international opponents of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Being an out gay man is mostly easy in London or New York. But in the Middle East, it takes real guts, especially when there are fundamentalists on both sides who want to kill gay people.

“By supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people as an out gay man, Ezra is probably doing more than anyone else to undermine the homophobia that undoubtedly exists in sections of Palestinian society. His acceptance by growing numbers of Palestinians illustrates that homophobia can be overcome, even in very traditional communities. It refutes the common stereotype that all Arabs and Muslims are anti-gay.

“Ezra’s exemplary life shows the possibility of unity, solidarity and respect between gays and straights and between Palestinians and Israelis. It suggests that prejudice and division can be conquered; that a kinder, gentler, fairer future can be won for all the people of the Middle East,” said Mr Tatchell.

“Being gay has made me understand what it is like to be a despised minority,” explained Ezra.

Speaking of the harsh anti-Palestinian policies of the Israeli authorities, he laments:

“They can steal their land, demolish their homes, steal their water, imprison them for no reason and at times even kill them. I’m here to change reality. The only Israelis these people know are settlers and soldiers. Through me they know a different Israeli. And I’ll keep coming until I know that the farmers here can work their fields,” he said.

“Several years ago, Ezra had a relationship with a gay Palestinian refugee, Fuad Mussa. Fuad fled the West Bank, fearing ‘honour killing’ because of his homosexuality. Ezra was convicted on charges of allowing his partner to live illegally in Israel. Fuad was jailed by the Israelis,” added Mr Tatchell.

“Because of Ezra’s human rights work, Israeli settlers, police and soldiers have subjected him to a torrent of homophobic abuse.”

“They did not hesitate to out me as a gay man; indeed, they spread rumours among the Palestinians with whom I work that I have AIDS,” reported Ezra. You can watch a film of the protest that led to Ezra’s arrest and charges. Broadcast on Israel’s Channel 1, it shows only passive resistance.

It is not too late to help Ezra Nawi. He will not now be sentenced until 21 September. Between now and then we want to get even more signatures for the online petition. Please email your friends and ask them to take the following action Sign the petition against Ezra being jailed.

10 January 2010 – Haaretz

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Court: Palestinian persecuted for homosexuality can stay in Israel

by Tomer Zarchin, Haaretz Correspondent
In an unusual ruling, the High Court of Justice ordered the state late last week to evaluate the degree to which the life of a young Palestinian is at risk, in part because of his sexual orientation. The Palestinian is asking for permission to remain in Israel because he fears for his life if he is expelled to the Palestinian Authority. Speaking to Haaretz, he said that “in other times, when they brought me to the roadblock the entire village chased me and beat me, and nearly killed me. I prefer to sit in prison than to go back.”

The official position of the state, which was also presented to the court, is that the committee on persons at risk operates in accordance with the office coordinating operations in the territories, and is authorized to address requests of Palestinians claiming to be under threat for their collaboration with security forces. On the other hand, according to the state attorney, the committee is not authorized to discuss the cases of those whose behavior is seen by Palestinian society as being “morally degenerate,” including prostitutes, criminals and drug addicts.

The Palestinian, in his 20s, maintains that his life is threatened because of his sexual orientation and because he has been marked by Palestinians as having cooperated with Israel.

Former sex worker
A native of Nablus, he fled his home at 12 and came to Israel as a result of violence and abuse at the hands of his father. At one point he worked as a male prostitute in Tel Aviv’s Gan Hahashmal. Six months after living in Israel, he returned to his family in Nablus. In the PA he was arrested by Palestinian intelligence who suspected him of collaborating with Israeli security forces. He says that he was jailed, tortured and abused until he was forced to admit such collaboration.

Following his forced confession he was jailed at a facility near the Muqata’a for what he says was two years, waiting for a death sentence to be carried out for alleged treason. The young Palestinian petitioned the High Court through attorney Yohanna Lerman, a public defender, said that during IDF operations he managed to escape and was asked to identify those who jailed and abused him openly, exposing his own identity. Following his exposure to the Palestinians as appearing to “collaborate” with Israeli forces, he was granted temporary permits to stay in Israel by the Shin Bet. During his stay in Israel the young Palestinian was arrested and jailed for his involvement in acts of violence and theft.

The committee evaluating the degree to which Palestinians are at risk for alleged collaboration with Israel decided in November that the young man was not at risk. The committee also said that he failed to meet his commitment to avoid illegal activities, which in turn threatens public safety. The state argued in response to the High Court petition that many Palestinians who have claimed similar risk to their lives for collaboration are actually threatened because Palestinian society considers their behavior to be “morally degenerate.”

“This unfortunate fact cannot impose on the State of Israel the legal responsibility to allow every Palestinian from such groups to live in its territory,” the state attorney’s office wrote. The court ruled that there must be an authority capable of taking responsibility on deciding whether a threat exists and what its nature is, in areas that are not necessarily linked with collaboration.

“To date the committee, the state and the court avoided interfering, but now the judges have asked that there be a collective approach that also includes the issue of sexual orientation,” Lerman said, pointing out that both local and international law state clearly that someone whose life is at risk cannot be abandoned.

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