After the major media success and publicity in 2000 of Rome World Pride, the group behind the event, InterPride (International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Coordinators), elected the organization Jerusalem Open House to organize a similar event entitled "Love Without Borders" in Jerusalem in August of 2005. On May 14, 2005, however, Jerusalem Open House decided to cancel the parade. The organization announced that probable Israeli demonstrations against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s supposed pullout and dismantlement of Israeli settlements in occupied Gaza prompted them to move the parade to August 6-12, 2006.

Surprisingly enough, throughout their web-site and press releases, the Israeli organization hardly, if ever, mentions the presence of Palestinians. On the "Love Without Borders" website, under the heading "Security," Jerusalem Open House declares: "Contrary to what you may see on television or in the newspapers, Israel is a very safe place to visit.  Since the outbreak of the second intifada (which is widely accepted to be over) security has become very tight here." The second intifada as "widely accepted to be over" is a grand claim: Palestine/Israel is still as tense as it was when the second mass uprising known as the second intifada first began in 2001. As a form of collective resistance, the intifada ebbs and flows depending on the political climate as imposed by the Israeli government. Being as such, the organization of Palestinian resistance depends on the plausibility of the circumstances, since border closures, housing and territory destruction, and the imprisonment of Palestinian men and women is effectuated at the whim of Israeli security forces from governmental demands.

Moreover, in 2000, the then Prime Minister Ehud Barak approved of what would later become known as the "wall"—a concrete structure that separates Palestine from Israel. Rather than following the armistice agreement, now known as the Green Line, between Israel and Jordan in 1948 (notice here the blatant absence of Palestinian litigation), the wall illegally cuts into Palestinian territory. A de facto annexation for the Israelis, the mammoth concrete "wall" is a border that cannot be removed from the Palestinian vista. In its final realization, the wall will measure 403 miles long, with an average height of 25 feet. Compared to the now destroyed Berlin Wall, which was a total of 96 miles and an average height of 11.8 feet, Israel’s wall is meant to silence and forcefully make the Palestinians disappear. Ravaging the land, destroying countless homes, and subjugating Palestinians to a cruel isolation, the wall is a forced border that humiliates Palestinians. Any form of mobility, whether by foot, car, or horse, is futile—an average mile could take hours to travel. As a form of illegal containment (the UN has criticized Israel for the walls construction repeatedly), the government of Israel clearly seeks to eradicate the everyday life of Palestinians.

Contrary to what may seem like silence on the Israeli front regarding these infractions, Israel also has its dissidents—including, surprisingly enough, many lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered. The Tel-Aviv based direct action group Kvisa Shchora (Black Laundry), is one such organization (www.blacklaundry.org). Black Laundry’s mission is simple: "There is no pride in the oppression of others. There is no pride in occupation." Before the date change of World Pride 2005, Black Laundry did not boycott the event but insisted on remaining as a presence. "We don't actively encourage anyone to visit Israel to take part in World Pride events, or in any kind of global consumerist gay culture, but we will organize events and present radical alternatives to international queers who do decide to visit. We hope that queers coming to Jerusalem for World Pride will consider joining our activism against the occupation and for social justice in Israel and Palestine."

Black Laundry is notorious for their demonstrations against the Israeli occupation; the group has been a permanent fixture in Pride Parades held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. For many, including your Queer Palestinian-American writer, Black Laundry jolts preconceived notions of how Israelis, and primarily queer Israelis, apprehend the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Another surprise comes from the US, where Queers Undermining Israeli Terror (QUIT) is also vociferous against Israeli occupation and terror (www.quitpalestine.org). The Berkeley, California based group initiated the Boycott World Pride 2005 web campaign (www.boycottworldride.org). They have also "settled" a Starbucks in Berkeley, a sit-in that targeted Starbucks CEO Harvey Schultz’s major support for the Israeli state. An example from Palestine is ASWAT (Voices), a group of gay women in Haifa who push for equal rights in Palestinian society.

For many queer activists involved in Palestinian rights and resistance, sexuality is always an issue—as it is with everything else. To put it bluntly, Palestinian society does not welcome alternative lifestyles. Journalist Eric Beauchemin investigated this tension that many gay Arab men experience daily in the BBC radio programme aptly titled "The Gay Divide." Traveling through Palestine, Beauchemin encountered gay men and women who are ostracized, punished, and threatened because of their sexual identity. According to the BBC in 2003, at least 300 gay Palestinian men illegally escaped into Israel to evade sexual persecution at the hands of practicing Muslims who claim that homosexuality is a practice that breaks with the Qu’ran. Gay men who flee Palestine only face further troubles in Israel—the uncertainty of living as an illegal citizen, deportation, and the persecutions common to persons whose nationality automatically labels them a security threat. Palestinians who cross the geographical divide of Palestine/Israel to live their lives as gay men or women and are then forced to return to the Occupied territories because of discriminatory Israeli immigration policies, only face more incrimination and hate from Palestinians.

In order to survive in Israel, many gay Palestinians become prostitutes. Palestinian film director Tawfik Abu-Wael’s 2001 short film Diary of a Male Whore, considers this tense reality. Even while experiencing sexual pleasure at the hands of his clients, Esam, the protagonist, is constantly reminded of his hometown in Palestine. Without comprise, Abu-Wael inflicts violent images of Esam’s past while he services his Israeli client. The violence of experiencing transgressive pleasure (Esam’s) and the pleasure of conquering, and thereby dominating, the violence of Palestine through pleasure that is economically exchanged (Israeli client), are conflicting points of view that are potently witnessed through images that wreak of destruction. The sexual contact between Esam and the anonymous Israeli is a site of sexual and political economies, both of which are entrenched lived experiences that underline the inherent circle of violence associated with Palestine and Israel—the oppressor and the oppressed, the East versus the West. Esam, like many gay Palestinians trying to live their identity, reside in a world that is neither here nor there. Palestinian homosexuality remains an issue that breaks the chord of societal acceptance in Palestinian culture, a chord that, once broken, can elicit grave consequences for those who brake it.

The true test of a future Palestine, I believe, is anchored by the social position gay men and women will have as Palestinian citizens. Caught in the net of sexuality, identity, and nationality, they underscore the particular difficulties for a people in the midst of forging their own state. What will be their status as citizens if Palestine becomes its own state? How will Palestinian society and culture apprehend alternative sexual orientations? With Westernized Israel occupying it on every side, how will Palestine grapple with sexual identity? To be sure, Arab culture in general, unlike the West, does not accommodate open homosexuality. For better or worse, queer or gay sexuality cannot be found in any industry, culture, or city quarter. Palestinian society, like many others, is indigenous in this respect: bound by tradition and ritual. Palestine’s current socio-political disadvantage ties its efforts primarily towards basic human rights for the whole population—the question of homosexuality, as another pertinent voice in the coming state that is Palestine, is one texture that can only add to the plight of an autonomous Palestinian nation, society, and culture. Perhaps I am breaching a utopian boundary, an imagined, if not imaginary, social and cultural body that coordinates and sustains itself through plurality. However fixed Palestinian tradition may be, it is still a plausible outcome—one only needs to think of Huey P. Newton’s work to foster dialogue between the civil rights work of the Black Panthers (one also thinks of the Mizrahim, or Black Panthers, in Israel), Gay Rights, and Women’s Liberation.

Like Cheryl Clarke has written in her seminal essay of 1983 "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community," without addressing and confronting the issue of oppression as a state of affairs that affects the whole community struggling for equality, there can be a "failure to transform" that very community. In Clarke’s case, homophobia is counterintuitive to the struggle, that of equality for all black Americans. For Palestinian society, one forcibly encroached by Israel (the racial supremacy of Israel also resembles that of white American attitudes), the "failure to transform" is of equal measure. What Clarke says of homophobia as experienced in black communities in the US is also applicable to gay Palestinians living in Israeli occupied territories, homophobia breeds on a homophobic culture. The power to transform such hate against homosexuality can be one instrumental measure for Palestinian culture, especially when oppression affects Palestinian society entirely. As a form of political intersection, the struggle for Palestinian equal and civil rights can only build itself stronger as a struggle that confronts issues such as homophobia, heterosexism, and racism.

Queers involved with Palestinian issues are thus in a bind—one that pulls at the polemical strings tugging our sexuality and politics. While we voice our opinions on the war waged against Palestine at the hands of the Israelis, to express their sexuality, many gay Palestinians flee the very society, culture, and land we seek to support. Trying to disengage one’s sexuality from one’s ideology, when both are so closely intertwined, is a challenge. It is, however, not a stumbling block. Rather, it remains as another generative dialogue, voiced by many queers, for the coming statehood of a free Palestine. Rather than remain silenced, queer resistance to the acts of ignorance, racism, and genocide effectuated by the Israeli government against the Palestinian population can only benefit the necessity of bearing witness to the issue that is Palestine.

World Pride 2005, "Love Without Borders," is a frightening example of how Palestinian identity is in a constant threat of being consciously eradicated from the homeland that is rightly their own. Moreover, it is an event that undermines the very meaning of what queer activism and politics are all about—the prospect of freedom. The title of the event itself wills Palestinian identity to be non-existent, a disappearing act in the making. In the final analysis, that is what genocide hopes to achieve. Palestinians, in their quest for international recognition as a people, culture, identity, and society, will not concede to a state of invisibility. Queers from many parts of the world understand this at once. The internationally recognized motto created by AIDS activists in the group Act Up serves well here, both for Palestinians and Queers alike, "Silence Equals Death." As unlikely bedfellows as they may be, queer solidarity with the Palestinian cause is one example of how personal politics can activate the awareness of an international social body.