Tel Aviv Pride

Declan Hill on sexual fault lines,

There are few better ways to understand the complex social and political fault lines of Palestine and Israel than the streets of Tel Aviv on Gay Pride Day.

It is also a great party: tens of thousands of good-looking people from a range of genders, sexes and ages mixing it up in scanty clothing, under a blue sky and hot sun, while superb house music is pumped out of every conceivable restaurant and bar.

Tel Aviv is not Jerusalem. There are few communities of the strictly religious, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, in this city. However, it is still Israel, so as it is Friday, as soon as the first rays of sunset are felt, the whole party stops. The parade rolls up and Shabbat begins. For the next 24 hours, much of Israeli society has an enforced Sabbath rest. Restaurants, stores and transportation are largely closed down. Even some of the elevators in the five-star, international hotels get switched to automatic, so that Conservative and Orthodox Israelis do not have to operate a mechanical object during their holy day.

This is the wonder of multicultural Tel Aviv. An hour before sunset, the city was full of nearly naked people gyrating and grooving in celebration of same-sex relationships. Now the calm of a religious holiday takes over and the streets are almost deserted.

Yet beneath the calm are deep fault lines that divide both the Israeli and Palestinian societies.

For example, one of the largely unspoken secrets of these neighbouring societies is that it is often difficult to tell their people apart. These are two communities that have lived side by side for millennia. They share cultures, identities and attitudes in ways that neither side likes to admit.

I was once driving through the West Bank in a shared taxi with a dozen seeming-Palestinians. The taxi was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint. The soldiers gave one young man (as is often the case) a hard time. He refused to let them see his identification papers. The man spoke fluent, vernacular Arabic and had been sitting quietly in the back of the taxi chatting with various passengers in a friendly way. Finally, the Israeli soldiers forced him to show his papers. The man was revealed to be an undercover Israeli agent whose cover was now completely blown. The Palestinians in the taxi roared with laughter at his discomfort and the other soldiers’ embarrassment. However, until the moment of checking his papers, neither the Palestinians nor Israelis could tell what side of the divide the man was on.

What this inability to figure which side of the divide can mean at Pride Day is that gay Palestinians — often dubbed “The Invisible” — can dance away unhindered on the streets of Tel Aviv in ways that would be impossible for them in Ramallah or Gaza. There is a small, but steady, flow of gay refugees who flee the largely conservative views of Palestinian society.

However, before a reader comes to the view that Israel is always a tolerant, modern country, while Palestinian society is always archaic and conservative: there are more divisions to understand in this complex place.

As with almost everything else here, the sexual is political.

Many Palestinian gay activists claim that the homophobia, which does exist in their communities, has been exacerbated and heightened by the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service.

They claim that Palestinian homosexuals are often targeted for blackmail by Israeli agents to become informants, otherwise their sexuality will be revealed. Thus the sexual question becomes part of a larger struggle for political control.

Nor is all of Israeli society open to differing expressions of sexuality. Attempts to hold Gay Pride Day in traditional Jerusalem are often met with violent protests, not by Palestinians, but by conservative Jewish groups.

And on the eve of this year’s parade, Israeli police announced that they had — finally — caught the man they believe was responsible for the murder of two gay teenagers in 2009. According to investigators, the killer had opened fire at a gay community centre “because of the biblical edict to attack homosexuals.”

So it is nice to see tens of thousands of people enjoying themselves on the streets, seemingly far from nationalistic or religious conflicts. If only every day in Israel and Palestine could be so happy.