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LGBTQ Israelis fear setbacks as homophobic parties win a place in Netanyahu’s coalition
TEL AVIV and JERUSALEM (JTA) — It was the day before Israel’s Nov. 1 election. In a classroom in downtown Jerusalem, Avi Rose was teaching about Jewish identity through art to a group of Jewish students from abroad spending a gap year in Israel. Suddenly, movement outside caught his eye.
Rose stopped his lecture and approached the second-story window. He was unprepared for what he saw. Dozens of religious Jewish youth from the homophobic Noam party were marching down Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, chanting and carrying large anti-LGBTQ signs.
The sight was distressing for Rose, a gay Israeli artist who emigrated from Canada 20 years ago. In 2007, he and his husband, Ben, became the first Israeli citizens to have their same-sex marriage certificate from abroad recognized in Israel.
“I’m teaching this wonderful group of young people that have come from all over the world to have their moment in Israel, to finally be free in their Jewish homeland, to be in this democratic Jewish safe space. And they have to see their own teacher going, ‘Oh my God. There are these people out there who their sole purpose is to hate me.’ And it was a dissonance,” recalled Rose, who lives in Jerusalem with his husband and their 10-year-old twins.
“I mean, what the hell am I doing here if that’s the way we are as a Jewish people?” he continued. “And I was scared. I won’t lie to you. I was scared…. I had flashbacks about what my grandparents went through in Europe. And I had to remind myself we aren’t quite there yet. I’m not at the point [where I am going to] pack my bags and protect my children and get out of here.”
By the end of the next day, 14 members of the union of three far-right parties — Noam, Otzma Yehudit (or Jewish Power) and National Union — became the third-largest slate in the Knesset and the second largest in the governing coalition that Benjamin Netanyahu is now assembling. Netanyahu’s other coalition partners are two haredi Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. It will be the most right-wing conservative, religious government in Israel’s history, and its leaders are already vowing to roll back rights that LGBTQ Israelis have only recently won.
Israel does not permit same-sex marriage. But its Supreme Court has strengthened protections for Israelis who enter same-sex marriages abroad, requiring that the marriages be recognized by the state and ensuring that same-sex couples be permitted to adopt children and pursue surrogacy. Now, a Shas lawmaker could be appointed to head the ministry in charge of granting marriage licenses, and a self-proclaimed “proud homophobe” is poised for a leadership position as well.
“I don’t think they’ll criminalize my marriage or take my children away,” said Rose. “But there is a general sense of fear seizing the LGBTQ community.”
Noam, the smallest of three factions making up the joint Religious Zionism list, has focused on advancing policies that prevent the creation of non-traditional families, such as same-gender parents or children created through surrogacy, which it calls “the destruction of the family.” The party’s election slogan was a call to make Israel “a normal” nation.
A man sits outside Shpagat, a gay bar in Tel Aviv, in November 2022. (Orly Halpern)
In a 2019 tweet, the party outlined its vision for what “normal” means. “A father and a father is not normal,” the list began. It ended by alluding to the party’s opposition to Pride flags: “Asking to remove a flag that represents all this madness — that’s actually quite normal.”
One afternoon last week, two male cooks wearing tight black T-shirts exposing prodigious biceps were preparing for opening hour at Shpagat, Tel Aviv’s first gay bar. “Ohad,” who asked not to use his real name out of fear of being harmed, told JTA that there was great concern among his peers about how the new government would shift budgets, change laws and policies and deny LGBTQ Israelis their rights.
“I’m concerned that we will lose all the rights we gained with the recent government and over the last few years,” said Ohad. The outgoing government, a centrist interlude after more than a decade of right-wing leadership, was the most progressive in Israel’s history in terms of the gay community. “We’re talking about the most basic things, like being allowed to donate blood, being allowed to parent children through surrogacy, cancelling the prohibition of LGBTQ+ ‘conversion therapy.’ It’s both to cancel things and to go backwards.”
Yair Lapid speaks at the Tel Aviv Pride Parade on June 10, 2022, weeks before becoming Israeli prime minister. His government was Israel’s most progressive on LGBTQ issues.(Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Indeed, one of the memes that worried Israelis have shared widely since election results came out reads, “Don’t forget that tonight, we are moving the clock back 2,000 years.”
Another issue is the distribution of government funding. Israel’s Ministry for Social Equality, for example, allocated 90 million shekels ($26.7 million) this year to benefit the LGBTQ community, which included funding for LGBTQ centers in some 70 cities. The education ministry and local municipalities also provide budgets to the Israel Gay Youth organization, and for teaching in schools about LGBTQ inclusion. Avi Maoz, the head of the Noam party, said he wants to cancel “progressive study programs” about gender.
A spokesperson for the Noam party was unable to make Maoz available and declined to otherwise offer comment.
Transgender Israelis could face the most stark changes. About 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide at least once in their life, according to the health ministry, and more than half avoid receiving medical care. Last year, the outgoing government’s health minister, Nitzan Horowitz, who is gay, set new policies to make healthcare more accessible to the transgender community.
Now the fear is that these policies will be canceled, as will be subsidies for sex reassignment surgeries and drugs. “For all the boys and girls who are in the process of defining their gender identity physically and emotionally, it will make their treatments very expensive or unaffordable,” said Ohad. “That can jeopardize their lives.”
It’s clear that the right-wing party leaders are not sympathetic to the plight of LGBTQ Israelis. Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist party, identifies himself as a “proud homophobe.” In August, his party protested the enrollment of a third-grader at a religious boys’ school who had transitioned from his gender assigned at birth.
“There is no place in the national religious school system for such confusion of opinions and views that seriously harm the values, natural health and identity of its students,” Smotrich wrote to the education ministry.
The right-wing parties have trained their sights on Israel’s Supreme Court, which has delivered crucial victories to LGBTQ advocates and other minorities. The parties say the court is out of step with Israeli values.
One of the first legislative measures the next government intends to pass is the High Court Bypass Law, which would allow a simple majority of the Knesset’s 120 lawmakers to override Supreme Court rulings on laws that the court struck down, thereby undermining the court’s ability to protect human and civil rights.
“It will leave us as a defenseless minority,” said Liad Ortar, the head of an environmental, social and corporate governance firm, who spoke to JTA from the Climate Change Conference in Egypt. Ortar and his husband have 8-year-old twins through a surrogate from Thailand.
Liad Ortar, right, is concerned that Israel’s incoming government could enact policies that hurt families like his where both parents are of the same sex. (Courtesy Ortar)
Many LGBTQ Israelis fear that lack of tolerance from government ministers could translate into incitement, harassment and physical attacks in the public sphere, and that the religious right-wing extremists who have directed violence towards Palestinians will now target them as well.
“In recent months there has been a very extreme escalation in what’s happening with the settlers and their violence, including the army, that doesn’t really provide protection,” said Ohad. “Not long ago there was an attack on a left-wing woman activist.… Those people are now going to become the ministers of education and culture. So aside from the Arabs and what the settlers do to them there, the next easy target is the gay community.”
In 2015, a religious Jewish man stabbed and killed Shira Banki, a 16-year-old girl marching with her family in Jerusalem’s gay pride parade — weeks after he completed a 10-year sentence for a similar attack in 2005. Now, members of the Religious Zionism slate have called to abolish gay pride parades.
“It’s not only that we are really afraid and worried about our own future. But it’s also our kids’ future. How will it look? And not just the kids of a gay couple, but gay children,” Ortar said. “We’re going to go back to the time where homosexuality can’t be shown publicly, whether at school or in the public sphere. Where they might beat the hell out of a gay couple because they walked hand in hand. Or cursing children in schools because their parents are gay.”
Not all LGBTQ Israelis are alarmed by the incoming government. Gilad Halahmi, a gay man who lives in Tel Aviv, has been active in promoting the Otzma Yehudit and has developed a personal rapport with its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir. “The fact that he and Smotrich have an anti-LGBTQ agenda doesn’t mean they hate [us],” he said.
Halahmi said he believes his involvement has mitigated Religious Zionist stances on LGBTQ issues, and he also said Amir Ohana, a Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud party who is gay, had helped shift right-wing politicians’ views on those issues. But even without that, he said, the tradeoff to get the policies he wants on other issues is worth it.
“I give up LGBTQ rights, but I get something that is much more important to me in return, which is the economic issue, the security issue, the migration issue, governance,” Halahmi said. “It’s things that are 10 times more important to me than public transportation on Shabbat or whether I’ll get married in Israel or abroad.”
But for those who value religious pluralism and LGBTQ rights — and polls have shown that a majority of Israelis do — the current moment is alarming. On Sunday, Ben-Gvir vowed to revoke government recognition of non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism, in the latest sign that a far-right coalition would seek to create practical changes quickly.
For Rabbi Mikie Goldstein, the new government’s threatened assault on pluralism and LGBTQ rights offers a one-two punch that has him questioning whether he should continue living in Israel. Goldstein, an immigrant from England, was the first out gay pulpit rabbi in Israel when he took the reins of a congregation in Rehovot in 2014. Now, he leads the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in Israel, working to support rabbis and their congregations who belong to the movement, known as Masorti in Israel.
“If I can’t do my work properly, if I’m not accepted — how much can you take?” Goldstein said. “I’m not prepared to give up yet [on Israel] but it’s certainly crossed my mind.”
LGBTQ activists say they won’t give up rights without a fight — and that they are prepared to mount one.
“We are very much united,” said Ortar. “We have a very strong civil infrastructure. The LGBTQ community is very well established in social and demographic groups. A lot of us are in the media, industry, high tech. After the statement about abolishing the parade, you could hear the drums beating. There will be demonstrations if that happens.”
In 2018, some 100,000 people demonstrated — outraged after then-prime minister Netanyahu voted against a bill to allow gay couples to use surrogacy.
Members of the LGBTQ community and supporters participate in a demonstration against a Knesset bill amendment denying surrogacy for same-sex couples, in Tel Aviv, July 22, 2018. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)
Last week, Netanyahu tried to assuage fears and ordered officials in his close circle to tell the press that his government would not allow any change to the status quo regarding LGBT rights. But he did not come out saying it himself.
“This is the time to be angry, not scared,” said Rose. “We can’t be complacent anymore. The privilege of complacency has come to an end. That has to be the message of this election. You have to fight for what you want.”
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For many queer Jews, Pride has lost its joy
I noticed something during last year’s Pride that I could not stop thinking about afterward: silence.
Not total silence. Pride events still filled city streets in San Francisco, where I live. Rainbow flags still hung from windows. But many queer Jews I knew had become quieter in subtle, almost imperceptible ways. Some had stopped posting online. Some had withdrawn from political conversations altogether. Others no longer mentioned being Jewish in spaces where that identity had once felt unremarkable.
A few quietly disappeared from communities they had helped build. Invitations were declined. Group chats went unanswered. One friend told me they hesitated before wearing a Star of David necklace to Pride for the first time in years.
At first, I told myself I was imagining it. Then I began hearing the same thing in private conversations: people calculating whether it was safe to say certain things out loud. Wondering whether expressing ongoing grief over the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 would cost them friendships, belonging or community. Deciding it was easier to remain silent than risk becoming a problem to manage.
I recognized that instinct, because I felt it too.
As a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco who has facilitated support groups for queer Jews since Oct. 7, I’ve perceived a clear phenomenon: While for years, many queer Jews experienced queer spaces as a refuge, after Oct. 7, that sense of refuge became less certain.
The spaces where we built chosen family, recovered from shame, fell in love, and constructed identities used to be shaped by the belief that vulnerability should not have to be hidden in order to belong.
Now, in some of those spaces, it feels like certain forms of Jewish grief have become socially suspect.
In some spaces, expressing horror at the massacre of Israeli civilians has felt permissible only when immediately qualified or contextualized.
In conversations over the past year, I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern: queer Jews becoming more cautious and less certain about what they could safely say in response to pressure to express grief only in publicly acceptable ways.
Silence can be a form of self-protection. People grow quiet when they sense that emotional honesty may carry steep social costs inside communities they still want to belong to.
Some queer Jews no longer attend events they once loved. Others still attend, but carefully. They edit themselves in real time, measuring how much grief they can express before it becomes unintelligible to others.
None of this is unilaterally true about queer communities, which are not monoliths. And many LGBTQ people feel profound anguish over Palestinian suffering, as do many Jews.
But queer Jews are exhausted. The strain of constant self-translation; the effort of proving that mourning one people does not entail hatred of another; and the vigilance required to navigate belonging that feels increasingly conditional have taken their toll.
The loss of a place where you were supposed to exist without negotiation feels existential. And as each Pride passes, certain griefs intensify as they remain unspoken.
This Pride, I’m thinking less about who will show up than about who will remain quiet once they arrive.
What kinds of silence do communities require in exchange for belonging?
Joshua Simmons is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who serves on the American Psychological Association’s Collaborative of Jewish Psychologists.
The post For many queer Jews, Pride has lost its joy appeared first on The Forward.
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Thomas Massie calls for USS Liberty probe, elevating anti-Israel conspiracy theory to House floor
(JTA) — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie took to the House floor Monday to call for an investigation into Israel’s 1967 attack on an American spy ship, giving new prominence to a decades-old conspiracy theory that has become a touchstone for critics of Israel.
“It’s my great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue, to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty,” Massie said. “Fifty-nine years ago today when they were viciously attacked by IDF jets and also after that by torpedo boats.”
The attack on the USS Liberty occurred on June 8, 1967, in the midst of Israel’s Six-Day War. The intelligence-gathering ship was stationed off the shore of the Sinai Peninsula during the conflict when it came under attack by Israeli forces, killing 34 crew members and injuring 171 more.
Israel later apologized for the attack, explaining it had mistaken the boat as Egyptian, and paid damages to the United States and the families of the victims. Multiple U.S. investigations, including by the CIA, have since determined that the attack was a mistake.
Still, the incident has become a rallying point for critics of Israel who claim the attack was deliberate and gained more adherents lately as anti-Israel sentiment has swelled. On Friday, Massie cited a host of U.S. military and intelligence officials he said had cast doubt on the outcomes of the U.S. investigations.
“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” Massie continued. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary in Kentucky, used the anniversary of the incident to call for Congress to pass a resolution honoring the victims of the attack and for a new investigation into the circumstances surrounding it.
The USS Liberty Veterans Association praised Massie’s remarks in a post on X, writing that it was a story that “NO other member of Congress will even listen to.”
Massie is far from the only critic of Israel to use the attack as broader evidence of Israeli misconduct.
Last year, the far-right influencer Candace Owens interviewed a survivor of the attack and tweeted that there was “perhaps no story that can more enlighten you to the deceitful and despicable nature of the modern state of Israel — and its stranglehold on the American government.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has called for the attack to be taught in schools, and the antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes has claimed that Israel initiated the attack to “conceal their troop movements.”
During his speech at Amfest in December, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who devoted part of his podcast last year to elevating the conspiracy theory that the attack was a false flag operation on the part of Israel, told attendees that asking “why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967” does not “make you an antisemite.”
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his organization had been concerned about the “normalization” of Carlson’s views, including his rhetoric on the USS Liberty attack.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” Segal said.
Following Carlson’s remarks at Amfest, the annual conference of the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s, the ADL denounced conspiracy theories about the attack that it said had swirled for decades.
“Despite official findings that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity, these narratives continue to be amplified by actors seeking to inflame distrust and undermine U.S.-Israel relations,” the ADL said in a post on X.
At the conference, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro was also asked about the attack by an audience member, and responded that “the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America.”
Some of Massie’s fellow critics of Israel praised him for bringing up the incident on the floor of Congress on Monday.
“Thank you Thomas Massie for recognizing the heroic members of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by Israel, where 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded,” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former member of Congress. “Why did our ‘greatest ally’ attack us??”
Other right-wing figures, including at least one member of Congress, criticized Massie’s gambit.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tweeted that he had previously believed that Massie was “standing on heartfelt principles and had intellectual backing” even as they did not always agree.
“But comments like this make me question his authenticity,” Crenshaw wrote. “The USS Liberty incident is a tragic one, but it’s an incident with a clear conclusion if one uses any objective analysis of the facts. … Perhaps we are simply witnessing another example of the irresistible incentive to jump on the bandwagon of grifters that guarantee you a specific kind of social media audience and attention that ultimately results in profits.”
Adam Mossoff, a former legal fellow of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, took aim at Massie’s address in a post on X, writing that the Kentucky Republican had “fully gone down the rabbit hole of antsemitism and Jewish conspiracy theories — via the modern American antisemite’s favorite boogeyman, Israel.”
“For the American woke left and woke right, the USS Liberty is the equivalent of the Dreyfuss Affair in France,” Mossoff wrote. “It’s the cause celebres of nationalism and bigotry in which history’s greatest villains — the Jews — can be smeared again with nefarious and evil motives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Thomas Massie calls for USS Liberty probe, elevating anti-Israel conspiracy theory to House floor appeared first on The Forward.
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Tribeca Festival denounces pro-Israel celebrities’ red-carpet jokes about Israeli dog rape allegations
(JTA) — The Tribeca Festival has denounced jokes alluding to allegations of rape against Israeli prison guards made on the red carpet by the comedian and actor Elon Gold and pro-Israel influencer Lizzy Savetsky.
The two Jewish figures made the jokes at the world premiere of Gold’s new film “The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan)” on Thursday, and Savetsky included them in a highlights reel that she posted to Instagram on Friday.
In the reel, Gold notes that it’s significant that the Tribeca Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, included a movie that was made in Israel. The implication was that at a time of surging anti-Israel sentiment, he would not have expected films with an Israeli connection to be admitted.
Then he joked about his time in Israel: “I was only raped by two Israeli dogs.”
Savetsky responded, “I thought they only raped Palestinians.”
“No,” Gold answered, laughing. “I got also a dog.”
The pair were alluding to allegations of sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards against Palestinian prisoners that The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof surfaced in an opinion column last month. One of the most sensational claims, which Israel rejected along with all the others, was that Israeli prison guards use dogs to rape prisoners.
After the comments drew criticism online, the Tribeca Festival said in a statement Saturday that it “unequivocally condemns the offensive and unacceptable remarks” made by Savetsky and Gold.
“Sexual violence and human suffering should never be mocked or minimized,” the festival said. “The comments do not reflect the Tribeca Festival’s values, and we regret the hurt and offense they have caused. We have not been able to reach the filmmakers.”
Pro-Israel activists have condemned the column, Kristof and the newspaper for airing the allegations against Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the newspaper over the claims.
In an Instagram video response to a New York Times reporter asking for comment over email, Savetsky compared the allegations made in Kristof’s column to an antisemitic blood libel.
In a comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Savetsky denied that the jokes she made on the red carpet were “about rape” as the festival alleged.
“It was a joke mocking the NYT story with a horrific blood libel,” she said in a message to JTA. “Any other interpretation is ridiculous and a deflection from the actual issue here which is irresponsible journalism meant to villainize Zionists. Comedy and the arts have always been used to address real issues—the issue here should not be dog rape, which is biologically impossible, it should be the blood libel spread by the NYT.”
She added, “I stand by it with no regrets. The outrage only exposes how the press and those poisoned by anti-Israel propaganda will twist anything to blame the Jews … even when it means justifying a story with zero evidence about something biologically impossible.”
Gold, who also served as executive producer on the film, did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
“The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan)” is an Israeli comedy about a Hasidic ex-comedian who re-enters the comedy world after a battle with addiction to earn enough money to marry off his daughter.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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