Rainbow flags were everywhere, moving in the breeze, and they moved me, as I had been invited to join a press delegation attending Tel Aviv Pride and was thrilled to be there. I was excited to report on celebrations that were scheduled, not in spite of the conflict but because such freedoms are what are being fought for just a short distance away.
Last year, Pride, not unsurprisingly, was paused out of respect for the hostages and the war and replaced by a moving ‘Pride and Hope Assembly’, but this year, Israelis decided the legendary party must return. Little more than 24-hours after landing at Ben Gurion, Israel launched its daring raid against Iran and everything changed.
Pride began with a reception hosted by special guest Caitlyn Jenner. The alarm cut through my gin-enhanced sleep in the early hours of Friday 13 June. I scrabbled around my room, grabbing pyjama bottoms and my handbag, then headed down to the shelter – something I’d never done before, despite many trips to Israel.
The main Tel Aviv Pride Parade was set to take place the next day, but all events were immediately cancelled. As the sun came up, the rainbow flags still fluttered in the empty streets. Everyone was ordered to stay near shelters.
The cancellation was a devastating blow to the businesses and workers expecting to benefit from Pride and the tourism it brings in. Millions of shekels are estimated to have been lost as the state of emergency forced the party to end right after it started.
The disappointment was tangible when I asked people how they felt about the situation. “It’s war with Iran,” said a staff member at a beach bar, walking away with an almost resigned shrug.
At the pizza restaurant across the road from the Royal Beach Tel Aviv, where I was staying, employee David had been told he could only offer a takeaway service. But he supported the action Israel had taken against Iran. “We can see again and again how they say they want to destroy us,” he explained. “The Iranian nation are not the enemy. They are good people. But we are scared by the government over there.”
This was the view reflected in other conversations I had. People in the country know that Iran poses an existential threat. Israelis are sadly used to flare-ups of violence and trips to shelters, not least since the atrocities of October 7, but this was far more serious than when Hamas or the Houthis fire missiles.
Jerusalem Pride 2021
As for David’s view on the financial impact on his restricted business? “Money come and go,” he said, stoically.
Over 250,000 people were expected to participate in Pride month in Israel and headed there from both within and outside Israel to join the celebrations in Tel Aviv itself. Zakai Ben- Haim and his partner Yaron Shiloh were in town from nearby Ranana with their daughter. The morning after the attack launched, she sat at breakfast in the bright pink fairy outfit, complete with wings, that she had prepared for the Parade. “We’re the fairy fleet,” explained Ben Haim, himself in rainbow-adorned trainers. “Spreading happiness and rainbows everywhere we go.”
Ben Haim made Aliyah from the US ten years ago and describes Tel Aviv Pride as “the centre of gay life in Israel”. His partner Shiloh, an Israeli who served in a technical role in the Airforce, adds that while the family did consider returning home, “we wake up in the morning and things were as usual. Same breakfast. Same nice hotel. Same beach… people are going and insisting on keeping alive.”
Pride UK 2023
Despite it being orders of magnitude more advanced than its neighbours, there is undoubtedly more to be done on gay rights in Israel, including allowing same-sex marriage. Yet, it is where LGBT Jews can be their full selves.
Darrow, a Californian who I met in one of my trips to the bomb shelter, explained that Israel is “the only place in the world that I feel safe as a queer Jew. Like, I feel safer here, even with the bombings, even with the running to the shelter in the middle of the night, even with all the crazy promises that Iran is making that they’re going to wipe us off the face of the planet.”
It’s an understandable sentiment. In the diaspora, balancing a Jewish and LGBT identity can be fraught. Many LGBT Jews have felt excluded from Jewish spaces, especially Orthodox ones, while simultaneously encountering hostility in progressive queer ones, especially as tensions around the Israel-Hamas conflict have escalated.
Elazar Ben Lulu, an academic at Ariel University who researches issues around Judaism, describes trying to connect the two worlds as a “double dialogue”, one that is often being met with “double discrimination”. In the UK, this has meant Jewish LGBT groups are increasingly absent from Pride events.
Eyal Yakoby, writing in the essay collection Young Zionist Voices, explains this through a DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) lens:
“DEI categorizes all social and political actors into binary classes. There are oppressors, and there are the oppressed. Jews, it turns out, are uniformly considered part of the oppressor class, and are therefore immune to prejudice or injustice.”
For Jews, being “immune to prejudice or injustice” would make a nice change.
As pro-Palestinian activism has intensified, Jewish groups have found themselves marginalised or excluded from queer spaces too. Slogans like “From the river to the sea”, viewed by many as antisemitic, are used by LGBT people at protests and other gatherings, creating a hostile environment for Jewish inclusion.
This dynamic has affected UK Pride events. KeshetUK, the leading Jewish LGBT charity, has pulled out of London Pride for a second year, stating it was “hugely disappointed” in Pride in London’s leadership, which had failed to address its concerns.
Last year Brighton-based group Jewish and Proud was excluded from the march. This year, Brighton Pride organisers said they “weren’t aware of any Jewish groups applying” – a telling detail in itself.
Though organisers insist they welcome all communities and denounce antisemitism, Jewish groups are conspicuously absent. The official line about prioritising “local LGBTQIA+ organisations” doesn’t explain the consistent lack of Jewish presence given the city has a visible and engaged Jewish community.
Elsewhere, Manchester Pride faced a backlash last year for having Booking.com as a sponsor, not because of any LGBT issue with the company, but due to its “accommodation listings in occupied territory”. The grotesque irony of this, seemingly lost on those objecting, is that Israel is one of a relatively small number of countries in the world – and the only one in the Middle East – where LGBT people could safely organise a trip via Booking.com.
Manchester Pride declined to comment to Life on whether Jewish groups would be marching this year. At the time of writing, its website still proudly features marchers in branded Booking.com gear.
In author Ben M. Freeman’s view: “LGBTQ+ Pride in Israel is a beacon to the world, and a symbol of the hard-won rights Israeli LGBTQ+ people have fought for – and continue to defend. It also holds deep meaning for LGBTQ+ Jews in the diaspora, many of whom feel excluded from the wider Queer community because of their Jewishness. Now more than ever, LGBTQ+ Jews – in Israel and beyond – must stand firm and proud in both their identities. This is part of a broader movement of Jewish Pride, where embracing our full selves is an act of courage, resilience, and joy.”
My trip to Israel was meant to be full of parades, parties and rainbow flags. That isn’t how things panned out. Yet as I stood in a sweltering bomb shelter in the middle of the night, the sirens screaming and missiles booming overhead, I felt prouder of Israel and the resilience of Israelis than I ever had before.
