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The Board of Supervisors voted to endorse World Pride Jerusalem. This has effectively
taken sides in an international conflict of fundamental importance to people of our community. Where was public comment?
Queer people from around the world have been invited to lend our endorsement
of and moral support to the dispossession and disappearance of an entire people, the Palestinian people. Well-intentioned
people of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer communities are invited to cross an international picket
line. We are asked to journey to Jerusalem in August of this year for World Pride 2005 to celebrate in a march whose
theme is ?ove Without Borders.??What is not said is that the march is taking place in a city that has a 25-foot concrete
wall running through its center. LGBTIQ people are asked to break a boycott called because Jerusalem is occupied in violation
of the same international laws that condemn the occupation of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain.
Palestinian
queers who live just 10 minutes away from where this march begins will be stopped at military checkpoints from joining this
celebration. They will not be allowed to participate in a festival in the city in which many of their parents were born. LGBTIQ
people are invited to celebrate Pride in Jerusalem unless we are Muslim, or unless we are from the Middle East, because most
people in the Middle East are automatically excluded from Israel.
In a moment of ecumenical hatred Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim religious leaders have come together to denounce a queer event being held in a Jerusalem they claim as sacred.
Here in the United States we are not unfamiliar with religious bigots. They occupy the highest and the lowest posts of government.
Hatemongers persecute us as queers us because we live and love and are fabulous. They dance on the graves of our loved ones
murdered by their holy hatred. Every day they attempt to exorcise us from this world. And every day we resist they fail. The
struggle for queer liberation has given the world instances of marvel and beauty.
It is a terrible thing to see the
results of our beautiful struggle stolen and sullied and used to justify the oppression of all Palestinians, queer and straight,
for the simple fact of living and loving and being fabulous as Palestinians. It is claimed that Israel is the only place
in the Middle East where it is ok to be queer, with the implication that straight Arabs are somehow more homophobic than everybody
else in this world. Neither Gwen Araujo nor Matthew Shepard ever set foot in the Middle East. Straight people hate us here
and everywhere with a murderous equality. The government of Israel is not building a wall around an entire country because
it is attempting to create a queer safe space. It is stealing more and huge sections of land.
We live in a troubled
world. Words like genocide and ethnic cleansing are used far too often for decent people to like. For those of us who strive
for social justice, victories can sometimes seem few and far between. At the same time the state of Israel was being created
by forcibly expelling 700,000 Palestinians and by confiscating Palestinian land, the white-supremacist National Party was
coming to power in South Africa. The decades-long struggle for the liberation of South Africa is one of those moments of victory.
The campaign to divest from and boycott of apartheid South Africa was a unifying factor for people around the globe. Desmond
Tutu and Nelson Mandela have said that Israeli apartheid is similar to, and in some ways more oppressive than, apartheid South
Africa. In Israel, a group of academics have joined the call to boycott. ?llow us to remind you that the divestment
movement against South Africa? apartheid started precisely in the same way, with small groups applying democratic
pressure on their local authorities.??
Jerusalem Open House (JOH), the local sponsor for World Pride 2005 describes
itself as a ?rassroots, activist organization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender (LGBT) people who live
in Jerusalem and the surrounding area.??Its mission statement says it will ?dvocate for social change on issues of
concern to our constituents, taking action to promote the values of tolerance and coexistence.??JOH has a Palestinian Outreach
Initiative to ?each out to LGBT Palestinians from the greater Jerusalem area.??nbsp; Jerusalem Open House has to demand
that the government of Israel open the checkpoints which riddle the ?reater Jerusalem area??and allow all Palestinian
queers to come and celebrate World Pride.
Queers Undermining Israel Terrorism (QUIT!) supports the work of Jerusalem
Open House in fighting queer oppression. We respect that LGBTIQ people and organizations within Israel and Palestine will
decide for themselves how to relate to World Pride. We also know that queer Palestinians cannot be free until all Palestinians
are free. Therefore, we ask queer people internationally to honor the travel boycott of Israel and not attend World Pride
2005 in Jerusalem.
Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!)
Www.quitpalestine.org, (510) 434-1304
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