First published in The Washington Blade, December 1, 2006
The month of November was one of fault and redemption for the state of Israel, recognizable through the prism of the lives of its gay citizens.
The fault lay in the response by small, yet vocal, segments of the Orthodox Jewish community to the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade, originally scheduled for Nov. 10. Though this was to be the city’s fifth annual parade, ultra-religious Orthodox youth took to the streets in the weeks before in violent rioting and some rabbis denounced the event as an abomination on Judaism’s holiest city.
This outrage was nothing new for Israel. Last year an Orthodox man stabbed three parade-goers and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Ultimately, parade organizers reached a compromise with the city’s police (who were not opposed to a parade on principle but were fearful at the possibility of violence) and held a rally at a Jerusalem soccer stadium.
In an ironic ecumenical twist, religious fundamentalists from both the Jewish and Muslim communities came together to condemn the parade. It’s disappointing that this unusual and erstwhile cooperation was motivated by a common bigotry, rather than, say, a shared realization that terrorism and military occupation is hurting both Israelis and Palestinians. Yet finding peace in the Middle East has always proved more difficult than raining down epithets on the gays, reliable targets for fundamentalists of all confessional stripes.
The Lord, however, does work in mysterious ways. A mere two weeks after the riots, redemption came in the form of a 6-1 decision by the Israeli High Court of Justice ruling that gay couples legally married outside of Israel must receive recognition by the country’s marriage registry.
The response from ultra-religious members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, was vocal. “We don’t have a Jewish state here. We have Sodom and Gomorrah here,” one member remarked. Yet Israel will continue to thrive as a Jewish state not in spite of, but because of this decision.
Watching the various reactions to these events, the diversity and contradictions of Israel could not have been made more clear. Two hostile and always-competing values of Israeli society were on display: intolerance and pluralism. Those Jews who burned cars and streetlights in riots leading up to the Gay Pride parade proved themselves to be just as fanatical as the Muslim fundamentalists they often criticize. The court’s decision moved Israel away from religiously sanctioned discrimination (de facto law in the Arab world) and in the direction of the progressive West, once again demonstrating that Israel stands alone among Middle Eastern countries as a place where gay people live in dignity.
Having just returned from my first visit to Israel, I was amazed at its vibrancy. Contrary to the image that many anti-Zionists purport, Israel is not some white, colonialist settler state oppressing dark-skinned Palestinians, as comforting as this image might seem to those with stubborn leftist political agendas. A great portion of Israelis claim Middle Eastern and African backgrounds; Israel is not an ethnically pure nation of Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin).
Let it never be said the religiously pious are completely lacking in a sense of humor. One young, observant Jewish man I spoke with delivered a characteristically Jewish response to the events surrounding the canceling of the Gay Pride parade: It was not the abomination of sodomy, necessarily, that the ultra-Orthodox opposed, but rather the threat that the parade might prompt the return of the World Pride festival, (originally scheduled for August of this year but canceled in the wake of the recent Lebanon war).
“We don’t want all those foreign gays coming here to take our gays,” he laughed. In other words: we want our Jewish boys to find other nice Jewish boys. Apparently the threat of intermarriage — the precursor to the dreaded phenomenon of assimilation — traverses sexual orientation.
Last week’s court decision was a step forward not only for the state of Israel, but for Jewish people the world over. As a Jew and a Zionist, I could not have been more proud.