Queers for Palestine: A Gay Man’s Indictment
As a gay man, I stand appalled while watching my own community wave flags for Queers for Palestine. These activists deliberately ignore the gallows and rooftops from which Hamas and the Palestinian Authority fling gay men to their deaths, yet scream hatred at Israel—the only country in the entire Middle East where I can walk the streets openly affectionate with my husband, fully equal, free from hate, welcomed without reservation, protected by law from any trace of bigotry. In Tel Aviv I am not merely tolerated; I am indistinguishable from any other citizen. That equality is absolute.
Mass movements frequently promise universal love yet collapse into fanaticism. They abandon affinity for grievance, defining themselves solely by the enemy they despise. This inversion—from love to hatred—is the classic pathology of every destructive cult, from Jonestown to ISIS cells: the group coheres not through shared humanity but through shared loathing of a designated devil.
Queers for Palestine embodies this pathology. Supporters willfully blind themselves to filmed executions of gay Palestinians while directing venom at Israel, the state that guarantees the rights they enjoy. They pervert the legacy of gay liberation to applaud regimes that criminalize our existence, exposing a depth of self-hatred previously examined in these pages.
Jew-hatred propels this misdirection. Contempt falls not on actual oppressors but on historic allies. Values invert: freedom is recast as colonialism, barbarism as resistance. Self-destruction masquerades as courage. Israel becomes the indispensable devil binding their coalition.
Ingratitude is the weapon. Those who receive aid later vilify the giver to erase the debt. Jews founded, funded, and led the modern gay rights movement. Harvey Milk—a proud Zionist Jew who attended Zionist youth conferences and rooted his activism in Jewish ethics—would today be denounced by the same LGBTQ organizations that claim his legacy. They would demand he disavow Israel or be branded a self-hating colonizer. Reform Judaism called for decriminalization of homosexuality in 1965; Jewish philanthropists bankrolled every major gay rights legal victory; Jewish organizers marched, bled, and died at Stonewall and beyond. The repayment? Repudiation unless the Jew hates himself first.
This betrayal repeats across causes Jews championed—women’s rights, labor rights, Black civil rights—yet nowhere is the ingratitude more obscene than within the community Jews helped liberate.
We have widened our circle for centuries, seeking justice for all, only to watch ally after ally turn hostile the moment strength was gained. Perhaps the moment has come for introspection. It is time to turn inward, to prioritize Jewish survival, to pour our finite resources into bolstering Israel—the sole fortress where Jews, and gays like me, live free and equal—rather than into movements that reward generosity with knives in the back. Continuing the old pattern invites extinction; choosing self-preservation finally breaks the cycle.
