This past May, on the cusp of LGBTQ supporters around the world, on the cusp of "Pride Month" around the world, glamorous billboards stood in the hottest districts of London, Amsterdam and New York, telling the public to do something new in June of this year. This year, visiting Israel is considered “the best place in the world to celebrate a different pride week,” which includes a fun beach vacation in Israeli cities or a night out in Israel’s gay clubs that welcome all religions, languages and gender identities as promoted by Tel Aviv.
Israel is proud to be the most open country towards the gay and transgender community in the Middle East today, having decriminalized homosexuality without officially recognizing same-sex marriages, eliminating discrimination against them in employment in 1992, allowing them to enlist in the military in 1993, launching their annual marches in 1998, and finally It gave them the option to adopt children in 2005. Although conservative Jewish circles inside Israel still maintain reservations about the spread of homosexuality, there is wide social acceptance of this trend, as indicated by a poll conducted in 2017, in which 79% of Israeli respondents expressed their support for same-sex marriages.
As for Tel Aviv, it won global recognition for its openness to gays, with 43% of gay groups from around the world saying that it is their favorite city for a vacation, in a survey conducted by a website dedicated to gay affairs in cooperation with American airlines.
Israel is a gay haven
In Tel Aviv, the bustling metropolis dubbed the "gay capital of the Middle East," the LGBT community, known as the "LGBT community", is neither intimidated nor anxious about expressing its identity, as its residents place rainbow flags on their buildings. And they raise them during their events, which is available to them since the nineties, when the city is famous for its "pride" rallies, which are no less enthusiastic than their counterparts in various Western capitals.
It is not limited to Tel Aviv today, but the presence of homosexuals reaches conservative towns such as Harish, located in the Haifa region in the north of the occupation state, a town where there is a large percentage of Jewish extremists, and despite that homosexuals have been active in over the past years.
When the occupying state was established, it inherited the same laws enacted by the British colonizer, and prohibited homosexuality, as was the custom in most Western countries at the time.
But two decades later, the first gay bar opened in a private apartment in Tel Aviv, and a series of other gay clubs followed as homosexuality spread into the Western public sphere in the 1960s and 1970s.
With the advent of 1975, the first Israeli organization to protect gay rights was established, and in 1988, which was called the "Gay Revolution in Israel", the movement towards legalizing homosexuality began by prohibiting various forms of "discrimination", which culminated in gradual successes for the community. Homosexuals throughout the nineties and the beginning of the new century.
With the passage of time, it was no longer limited to openly gay soldiers serving in the occupation army, but these people reached the centers of political decision-making in the Israeli Knesset. "Uzi Evin" was appointed as the first Israeli legislator for the LGBT community in 2002, while the number of members of The gay Knesset in June 2020 reached a new record in which six gay male members became representatives of parties from across the political spectrum, including the Likud party led by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although it is a supposedly conservative party and has close relations with extremist Jewish groups.
Left-wing Meretz member Uzi Evin, Israel's first gay lawmaker (Getty Images)
Israel has always played the card of being the only liberal country in the Arab region that is dominated by authoritarian and religiously conservative regimes.
In this context, she used her "sexual openness" as a magnet for "sexually oppressed" youth in the Arab world as part of that propaganda policy, as few Arab youth actually resorted to it as an oasis of sexual freedom in the region.
In turn, Tel Aviv uses their stories to promote its presence in the Middle East and the attractiveness of its social model, which naturally conceals the settler face of its regime.
One of the most famous Arab faces that Israel succeeded in attracting early is "Mahmouda Riyad", who was born as a male to an Arab family in the Galilee in the 1940s, then traveled to Israel and underwent a sexual transformation in the 1960s and worked in prostitution, and finally changed her Arabic name to the Hebrew name "Naomi" .
“I was filmed at the time of committing the act and the recording was transferred to my family. They beat me and treated me violently.. and I am unable to get a job because I do not have a suitable salary or suitable working conditions,” this is what was stated in the testimony of a Palestinian who stood before an official committee in the Israeli Knesset, which met in June Last June, to hear several testimonies from gay Palestinians who fled the Palestinian Authority to the occupied territories.
The young man hoped that this committee would allow Palestinian homosexuals to work in Israel, as the occupying power is already attracting many of them in their quest for asylum to a third country.
Indeed, not long after that session, Israel granted some 90 LGBTQ Palestinians temporary asylum permits in Israel.
The way the Israelis deal with Palestinian homosexuals has completely changed. At first, the Israeli security and military intelligence services blackmailed Palestinian homosexuals with the aim of gathering information and recruiting them, before the Israeli official establishment today moved to a new approach, which is to lament about their condition, claiming that they face discrimination and harassment on a larger scale. Since 2019, the Palestinian Authority has banned the East Jerusalem-based organization Al-Qaws, which supports gay and transgender rights, and prevents it from organizing events in the West Bank.
For this reason, last February witnessed the opening of the first shelter for Palestinian gays and transgender people in Israeli areas, and the idea of opening shelters for these people arose for the first time in 2019, following a violent incident in which a 16-year-old boy from the Arab town of Tamra was exposed Israeli stabbed and beaten by his brothers.
Shelters for gay Palestinians from the occupied interior are now being opened to "protect" them by Israelis, and to be supported by guides who speak their Arabic language.
It can be said that Israel's treatment of homosexuals among its "Palestinian" enemies is in its agenda to make itself a magnet for homosexuals globally.
Therefore, there are many groups that are active on the Internet to create a community for gays who do not speak Hebrew, and to help them face the bureaucratic and cultural challenges they face if they decide to be the "new residents of Israel".
Liberalism before Sharia in the issue of homosexuality
Hundreds of thousands of gay Israelis and foreigners participated in the "Month of Pride" march in the city of "Mitzpe Ramon" in the south of the occupation state at the beginning of June 2022, and they passed by waving rainbow flags near a secondary Jewish religious school without changing their course, ignoring what the owners of The school is of conservative orthodox Jews.
The march was held in the image that was planned with the protection of the occupation police, but it was not that easy on all occasions.
There are explicit threats against homosexuals by the most extremist Jewish groups that constantly undermine the image of a sexually open country, and some of these have already carried out their threats, as in August 2009 when two people were killed and eleven people were injured during a shooting at a gay youth center in Tel Aviv, In July 2015, Shira Banki, a 16-year-old girl who had come to take part in a "pride march" in Jerusalem to support her gay friends, was murdered.
In the midst of its trade-offs between the ultra-Orthodox elements within it and the liberal image that it promotes in the West, Israel is biased in the homosexuality file specifically to the latter image, and grants protection to homosexuals by the Israeli authorities, and under the auspices of prominent government officials, such as the Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, "Mickey Levy" who addressed The crowd at a gay rally said, "You have the right to love whoever you want, you have the right to marry whoever you love, and you have the right to raise a family like everyone else. These are not privileges but basic rights of every citizen."
In recent years, new decisions have been issued in favor of homosexuals in the education sector, as the section that includes transgender students has become one of the most important sections in Israeli schools, and about four years ago, the Psychological Services Unit in the Ministry of Education began working on drafting guidelines for dealing with school children. of "homosexual or transgender".
Since 2016, the Ministry of Education has allocated special costs for courses taught by outside organizations on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The gay community in Israel got rid of a new obstacle early this year when the ban on surrogacy for same-sex couples was lifted. The Jewish state has banned surrogacy within its territory since 1963.
The recent gay march in Israel culminated in the arrival of one of them to the position of Minister of Health in Israel. Nitzan Horowitz was behind many qualitative decisions taken in favor of gays before he succeeded in reaching the important ministerial position.
Horowitz is considered a leader of gay and non-gay equality, and his efforts have led to the repeal of a decision banning conversion therapy (the conversion of a person from gay to heterosexual) and subjecting health practitioners to sanctions.
The gay minister also ended restrictions on gay blood donation. Prior to August 2021, a blood donor was asked if they had had a homosexual relationship 12 months prior to the donation date, which would have prevented them from donating.
Therefore, Horowitz declared his victory, saying: "There is no difference between blood and another, discrimination against homosexuals in donating blood has ended."
In general, it can be said that the advancement of the homosexual situation as it exists in Israel would not have taken place without the infusion of huge government funds. The so-called Ministry of Social Equality allocated $26.7 million this year for the benefit of the LGBT community, the largest amount of its kind to fund LGBT centers in about 70 years. district, while Tel Aviv is proud to have allocated $1.85 million to the gay community in 2022, including four million for “Pride Month” activities. In fact, the city that does not stop investing in projects serving the gay community will allocate $9.2 million to build a new gay center in a park Meir, the largest gay project in the history of Israel.
If accusing the Israeli government of highlighting gay rights comes in the first place among many policies to conceal its crimes against the Palestinians, then Tel Aviv’s great effort to convince homosexuals in the world that an emerging society suitable for them exists within Israel also stems from its desire to assert its liberal supremacy on its neighbors in the Middle East, and its exploitation of the issue of homosexual support to promote Israel globally.
Commenting on the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs promoting the matter in Europe and the United States, Joanna Landau, founder and CEO of Vibe Israel says: “What these ads do is much more than just encourage tourism to Israel, what they really do is tell the story of Israel. Which not enough people know, and even celebrate it.”
While Israel has been highlighted in recent years as a hotbed of Jewish extremist and settler groups, the Israeli state still appears to be balancing its policies in which its liberal image occupies a central position as part of its propaganda in Western circles.
Although the extremists have succeeded in removing the Palestinians from their homes, and the most liberal politicians from power over and over again, they are unable to confront the advance of homosexuals in the occupying country. Adjusting its international image, and concealing the settlement reality - as usual - with the achievements of the "liberal oasis" in the Middle East.