On the morning of the 7th of October, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas orchestrated a multi-pronged assault against Israel from the Gaza Strip. Their fighters breached the heavily fortified border, committing a mass murder of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, including young children. The political discourse surrounding these brutal events and the war that has come in its wake, especially in the West, has been tinged with a misguided transposition of Western identity politics onto the Middle East that collapses all nuance and reduces a complex situation into a simple binary of “oppressor versus oppressed.” As such, leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestine (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This simplistic view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine” brandished at anti-Israel rallies. It’s worth exploring just how incoherent this concept is.
On the surface, “Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlpool of ridicule and criticism due to the fact that LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world, and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized with variations like “Chickens for KFC” or “Blacks for the KKK”, which highlight the basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with the Islamic right they so readily champion. Israel is at the forefront of LGBT rights in the Middle East. In Israel, LGBT people are visible members of society with legal protections, civil rights, and a plurality of public acceptance.
Palestine, by contrast, is quite a different story. The UCLA Williams Institute’s 2021 global report on LGBT acceptance rated Palestine came in at 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in good company with most of the region. Amnesty International’s 2020 report on human rights highlights the criminalization of male same-sex relationships in Gaza, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, with a conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination or harassment.
Another disconcerting element of “Queers for Palestine” is that it popped up in prominent left-wing anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rallies in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attacks. Western support for Hamas, under the guise of Palestinian liberation, overlooks the deep-seated radical Islamist ethos driving the organization, which, if unbridled, would jeopardize the very freedoms cherished by LGBT people across the developed world. Anyone who doubts this should try being gay, bi, or trans in most of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) Muslim-majority countries. Virtually all of these nations have laws that criminalize homosexuality and being trans, some of which carry the death penalty. Human Rights Watch’s “Everyone Wants Me Dead” report succinctly encapsulates in its title alone the perilous environment faced by LGBT individuals in these regions.