Abstract
Tel Aviv is known as one of the world’s top gay travel destinations. But, asks
Strolling through the balmy streets of Tel Aviv, it would be easy to believe you had arrived in the promised land for gays and lesbians. Same-sex couples hold hands at the bijoux coffee stalls along leafy Rothschild Boulevard, and on Hilton beach, men with chiseled abs play matkot, a unique ball game beloved by Israelis.
Nearby is Independence Park, once upon a time the city’s first cruising hotspot. Rainbow pride flags flutter on numerous verandas and there is very little, if any, homophobic harassment in the city, which has long had openly gay city councillors and an annual raucous pride parade. Tel Aviv is out, proud and regularly voted as one of the world’s top gay travel destinations.
Whether this utopia really represents Israeli society outside what many citizens derisorily call “the Tel Aviv bubble” is less clear.
Israel’s image as a gay haven is often used as a political tool not only in the domestic sphere, but far more frequently and publicly in the service of Israel’s international diplomacy.
Zionist lobbyists enthusiastically exploit Tel Aviv’s liberal image as a counterpoint to the persecution many gay men and women experience in surrounding Arab countries. What better example demonstrates, they argue, that their country is “a villa in a jungle”, as it was famously described by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak? They like to highlight how remarkably enlightened the Israeli Defence Forces are when it comes to gay rights – in 1993, they opened the draft to all, regardless of sexual orientation, and partners of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) career soldiers enjoy now the same benefits as heterosexual spouses.
Others, however, say this is nothing but “pinkwashing” – using LGBT rights to mask the realities of an ongoing, brutal military occupation. In Israel and abroad, some LGBT activists claim their cause is being manipulated for propaganda purposes, arguing that it’s impossible to separate gay rights from wider issues of equality. While Israel continues to oppress the Palestinians, the country deserves no credit for its promotion and protection of gay rights.
On the other hand, many assert that Israel deserves credit for the distance it has travelled towards equality and tolerance for gay people. Arthur Slepian, who runs A Wider Bridge, an organisation which aims to build stronger ties between Jewish LGBT communities around the world, feels that the claims of “pinkwashing” are both unfair and unhelpful. “The pinkwashing accusations really devalue the work of Israel’s LGBT community, who have worked hard for the past 25 years or more to secure their rights and to make LGBT people a visible and proud part of Israeli society,” he says. He adds that, on the whole, Israel has been an impressive promoter of LGBT rights and equality.
ABOVE: The Israeli draft is open to people of any sexuality
Credit: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters
But the real issue is that in Israel, as in many other countries, LGBT rights bring the fault lines between secular liberal values and religious ones into sharp focus. For example, consider another, much smaller, pride festival that is held each year just 45 minutes’ drive from Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, the holy city, those organising the event to celebrate the LGBT community must take significant security precautions, because the festival has in the past been marred by a number of attacks and violent demonstrations. In 2007, the government approved legislation allowing the Jerusalem city hall to prevent further parades from taking place. The legislation was never passed, but the fact that steps were taken to restrict the event illustrates that it is in many ways vulnerable.
“Orthodox Judaism is very hostile to LGBT people and trans people in particular,” says Nora Grinberg, a 63-year-old trans advocate and activist. “In Israel, the official and public Judaism is only Orthodox. There are little islands of conservative and reform Judaism but they give way to a brand of Orthodoxy that in recent years is more extreme and retrograde.”
This religious hegemony has an impact on the lives of all Israelis, regardless of sexual orientations. For instance, while it’s true that gay couples enjoy most of the same rights as straight couples, Israeli law does not permit same-sex marriage or civil partnerships and marriage ceremonies are carried out by the religious establishment.
Homophobic rhetoric from right-wing politicians and religious sectors is as unremarkable as anti-Arab discourse. In a political culture where narrow interest groups are regularly courted, politicians often shamelessly play and pander to their constituents, and this can include responding positively to homophobic views expressed by some of them.
In November 2013, Moshe Abutbul, the newly re-elected mayor of the mostly Orthodox town of Beit Shemesh and a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said: “We have none of those things [gays] here. Thank God, this city is holy and pure.”
Abutbul hardly improved matters when he backtracked, saying that he was not aware there were gays in his town and that he had been talking about paedophiles anyway.
Israel’s Palestinian community is often deeply traditional, leading to some hostility towards LGBT people and issues associated with them. Also among the large Russian-speaking community there are those who mirror the anti-gay tendencies of the Putin government back in Moscow.
“Most homosexuals are people who experienced sexual abuse at a very young age,” Anastassia Michaeli, a Russian-born former parliamentarian from the right-wing Israel is Our Home party (Yisrael Beitenu), which is associated with, and widely supported by, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, told the Knesset in June 2012. “They are miserable, these homosexuals… Eventually they commit suicide at the age of 40.”
The most recent government, formed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu earlier this year, is a rare thing in Israeli politics – a coalition that does not include any of the country’s ultra-Orthodox parties. It does, however, include the Jewish Home party (Habayit Hayedhdi), an extreme right-wing religious party that champions settlements in the West Bank while also trying to cultivate a certain aura of liberalism in order to attract secular voters.
LGBT rights bring the fault lines between secular liberal values and religious ones into sharp focus
The party has not been keen about openly addressing LGBT issues, but in recent weeks it has strenuously opposed a series of legislative amendments, along with members of the Israel is Our Home party (Yisrael Beiteinu), that would have granted same-sex parents equality on tax and mortgage benefits. They argued that these amendments, put forward by the more centrist parties in the coalition, were an attempt to introduce same-sex marriage by stealth.
The economics minister and leader of the Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennet – who, as the right-wing’s main standard-bearer in Israel’s parliament, recently called the Palestinians “a thorn in our backside” – explained his party’s opposition to the amendments, and subconsciously perhaps, articulated the conflicting attitudes to gay rights within Israeli society.
“These are two clashing values,” he said. “I am for ‘live and let live’, but this clashes with the values of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Bennet views both LGBT equality and Palestinian independence as intolerable. Not all Israelis agree, but the state has yet to define just what these values are, and what they mean for its conflicts, both internal and external.