Group’s goal: Advancing LGBTQ rights in Israel
Twoweeks ago, severalmarchers carrying Pride flags bearing the Star of Davidwere asked to leave the Chicago DykeMarch. The controversy that followed led organizers of the event to issue a statement in which they explained their reasons.
The Star ofDavidwas “triggering” people, and making others feel “unsafe” and “threatened,” at an event the organizers saidwas “pro-Palestinian.” The expelled marchers were “disrupting” chants by replacing theword “Palestine” with “everywhere.” Oh, and theywere “Zionists,” in otherwords, they demanded equal rights for Jewish people at an event that prided itself for its “tolerance” and “intersectionality.”
Muchwasmade of the fact that one of the expelledmarchers is a staff member at AWider Bridge, a progressive Jewish LGBTQ organization, which DykeMarch Chicago described as having “connections with the Israeli state” and being “rightwing.”
Others have alreadywritten about the anti-Semitism of asking Jews— and only Jews— to renounce their symbols. Iwon’t rewrite those arguments, but I’d like to correct the record about AWider Bridge.
I recently traveled with AWider Bridge to Israel, along with 30 other American LGBTQ communitymembers— almost all of whomidentified as progressive liberals— on one of their mission trips to Israel.
The main part of AWider Bridge’s mission is advancing LGBTQ equality in Israel, something all LGBTQ people everywhere should support. As part of its efforts to engagewith American LGBTQ communities, A Wider Bridge facilitated meetings for us with Arabs, Jews, Druze and Ethiopians. We met residents of Tel Aviv, Afula, Haifa, Jerusalem, the Golan, Nazareth, and yes, theWest Bank: Bethlehem, Ramallah, and even a Palestinian refugee camp.
Throughout almost twoweeks of meetings, not once did AWider Bridge try to push a narrative onto us. In contrast to DykeMarch Chicago, AWider Bridge does not enforce some ideological purity test— it presents an ongoing conversation, not dogma.
Whenwe met with a right-wing Likud member, the next meeting would be with amember of the Knesset fromthe Labor Party. Ifwe met with an Israeli peace activist, then the next daywewould go to Ramallah with activists advocating for Palestinian causes.
Without AWider Bridge, Iwould not have met with the head of Zimam, a Palestinian organization based in Ramallah, devoted to nonviolent advocacy for Palestinians. Norwould I havemet with theMoroccan-Israeli activist Avi Buskila of PeaceNow, who is advocating for peace and justice for Palestinians and an end to Israeli settlements.
Since the Chicago DykeMarch incident, friends ofmine on social media have spread falsehoods about AWider Bridge— that they advocate violence, or support the oppression of Palestinians. These accusations are flatly untrue and have zero basis in fact.
We had many, many hours of conversationwith directors, deputy directors, and boardmembers of A Wider Bridge, and while therewere many different opinions about the “best” course of action, they all took as their starting point that Israelis had to find away of living peacefully with their neighbors. It’s tragic to see so many people uncritically accept untruths, and be so willing to believe theworst.
Finally, another argument Dyke March Chicago uses against Israel, and AWider Bridge, is to accuse them of “Pinkwashing,” that is, using Israel’s LGBTQ-friendly policies as smokescreens to advance their putatively anti-Palestinian agenda. But if the charge is that it’swrong to use the LGBTQ community, its events and its symbols, to advance a specific political or ideological agenda, howis that different from what DykeMarch Chicago is doing?