The reality of life in Palestine is the lack of safe spaces and all legal rights and civil rights to LGBTQ people in the territories are due to how law and politics and culture behave as it functions in reality under the powers to-be.
Factors Driving the Reality on the Ground
Historically, homosexuality has been illegal in the Gaza Strip under the British Mandate and Egyptian administration. It continues to be an illegal act under the Hamas authority.
In the West Bank, even though there isn’t a precise and contemporary PA penal code establishing capital punishment for homosexuality, the relationships are still quite criminalized as remaining Jordanian law requires that same-sex practices be punishing and as a result of serious social policing measures enforced in the context of PA rule.
The Post-Modernist Queer Movement
The recent attack on Israel by Hamas that has left 1400 Israelis dead and over 200 taken hostage disproves the mistaken belief that all social justice movements seamlessly align.
There is no anti-discrimination legislation, same-sex relationships are not acknowledged legally, and there are no mechanisms to protect LGBTQ people from state-sanctioned violence or violence at the hands of other individuals.
Within ultraconservative patristarchal societies it might not come as a surprise family honor takes precedence over all of one’s individual rights. For many of these societies homosexuality is not seen solely as a social taboo; indeed it presents an assault on existing norms. As an LGBTQ person born and raised into such environs, the process of simply coming out may be equivalent to facing instant and public exclusion, the violence of your own family members (“honor violence”), and the danger of your being targeted by the local paramilitary and state elements.
But the deep absurdity of the paradox is that all these people parading through Western cities to call for attention to the Palestinian cause would almost certainly, by simply living openly under the authority of Hamas or in the general framework of the territories’ customs, be put to death, imprisoned or tortured.
Authentic solidarity needs intellectual honesty, though. When activism in the West sacrifices the life experience of the people that it purports to support – abandoning universal human rights in favor of targeted ideological affinity – it’s not crafting freedom; it’s committing a carefully orchestrated offense against awareness.
When a movement demands silence from you, or glories in an order that would have your being locked in prison or worse, inquire, whose freedom?
