Israel, Palestine, and Identity Politics in the LGBTQ+ Community

Recently, Vancouver’s Pride Parade was aggressively disrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors.

According to the Daily Hive, “A group of masked protesters holding banners and Palestine flags blocked the parade route” and, eventually, bullied the organizers of Vancouver Pride into cancelling the parade.

Unfortunately, Vancouver’s Pride Parade is not the only LGBTQ+ event that pro-Palestinian protestors have forcibly disrupted.

In fact, pro-Palestinian protestors and demonstrations have violently disrupted and curtailed Pride parades and events across Canada, as well as the United States of America, such as the Toronto Pride Parade and NYC Pride.

Furthermore, pro-Palestinian protestors have often themselves explicitly espoused fervently homophobic beliefs and ideology. In fact, around the world, pro-Palestinian protesters have been accused of “bringing violence, homophobia and antisemitism to the front door of state conference.”

And yet, despite the fact that the pro-Palestinian cause and its cohort have demonstrated themselves to be vicious opponents of the LGBTQ+ community and emphatically homophobic, the LGBTQ+ community has nonetheless consistently repudiated the state of Israel and remained a stolid champion for the pro-Palestinian cause.

For example, Queers Artists for Palestine has stated that “queer people are no friends to Israeli apartheid.” and that “queer liberation is fundamentally tied to the dreams of Palestinian liberation: self-determination, dignity, and the end of all systems of oppression.”

In addition, various Pride events have actually refused to allow Jewish organizations to participate in their respective parades and marches. Brighton & Hove Pride, for instance, recently excluded the Jewish LGBTQ+ group, Jewish and Proud, from the Brighton & Hove Pride Parade, due to the fact that Jewish and Proud, somehow, “did not meet the criteria for the Pride Community Parade’s clear aims of representing, promoting and celebrating local LGBTQI+ communities.”

Sadly, the LGBTQ+ community has become utterly beholden to the inane dictums and tenets of ‘identity politics’.

Specifically, due to the modern advent and onset of identity politics within the LGTBQ+ community, the legitimacy of any person or people’s respective social plight and perspective has become contingent upon its ability to immediately exhibit the requisite diversity criteria and intersectional location.

In fact, it has become nigh-inconceivable that any person or community might suffer or become marginalized and oppressed, without explicitly displaying any of the necessary ‘diversity criteria’.

Therefore, since the Jewish people have been consistently misconstrued and misunderstood as a rich, white, homogenous mass throughout the modern era, the Jewish community’s ‘whiteness’ has functioned as the impetus to not only deny the plight of the Jewish people and delegitimize the state of Israel, but to also disregard the antisemitic violence and terrorism that the state of Israel and the Jewish people are forced to endure at the hands of Palestinian organizations, such as Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Moreover, since the advent of identity politics has firmly ensconced anyone who is rich, white, or male as a source of socio-political malaise and a locus of oppression, the Jewish community’s ‘whiteness’ has also been used to locate the Jewish people and the nation of Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinian people and the de facto origin of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the LGBTQ+ community has remained a steadfast ally of the Palestinian people, it is readily apparent that the Palestinian cause and its homophobic cohort have not the slightest desire to reciprocate the support that they have received from the LGBTQ+ community, much less co-exist in society alongside any queer people.

Verily, the LGBTQ+ community must begin to refuse the shackles of identity politics and the predetermined conclusions that its onset has forced upon queer people everywhere.

Instead, the LGBTQ+ community must begin to embrace its longtime allies in the Jewish community, regardless of their appearance and the ultra-white stereotype that the media and politicians have so carefully cultivated.