Trans Talk
By Veronica Zerrer
Editor’s Note: Connor Maddocks has taken a leave of absence for personal reasons, but in his stead will be local trans community leader, Veronica “Ronnie” Zerrer.
I recently attended a rally against anti-semitism. Since Hamas’ attack on Israeli concert goers and kibbutzim occurred on Oct. 7, 2023, I wanted to support Israel in general and my Jewish friends.
I knew there were LGBTQ people who side with Palestinians and Hamas, but one transwoman there, accented in a black-and-white-checkered keffiyeh, and wearing a surgical mask, held a placard reading that “no trans woman would be free until Palestine was free.” She’s not alone. Go to any campus ruckus against Israel today and you will see the flag of Palestine accompanied by the rainbow banner and chants of “From the River to the Sea …”
Lenin once described useful idiots but it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to ignore the evidence out there that Palestine is not a safe place for anyone LGBTQ.
I doubt that Queers for Palestine know very much about the history of the people they’re agitating for.
Do they know that Palestinians staged pogroms against Jewish immigrants from 1920 through 1929, burning Brits and Jews along the way? Do they know the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (a relative of Yasser Arafat) toured concentration camps during WWII?
In a 2001 book entitled Hitler and the Holocaust the historian Robert Wistrich outlines the visit to Germany of the Grand Mufti, meeting with Hitler and the SS. You don’t really think they were exchanging falafel recipes, do you?
Do Queers for Palestine know of Arab nations and Palestinian rejections of peace offers in 1937, 1948, and 2000?
Speaking with many young transmen and transwomen today, I get the feeling they think history started once they were born. So many dismiss the idea that Jewish people belong in Israel as much as the Palestinians do. Queers for Palestine, however, conflate Zionism with colonialism, when in reality Israel is more a project of homecoming and national rebirth, a return that has been nearly 2,000 years in the making.
It is not just The Bible that articulates Judaism’s place in the region. One example, Empires of Trust, by the historian Thomas Madden, describes three major Jewish revolts against Roman rule in the years 66-79 AD, 115 AD, 132 AD, and numerous minor insurgencies clear up to the year 200.
With each revolt, more Jewish identity was stamped out. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Jews were thrown out of Judea by the Romans, provincial boundaries redrawn, renamed, and repopulated. But alienation from place did not stop the yearning for the homeland. Indeed so strong was the hope, the wish, the ache for Israel, that sometime in the 1300s Jews started adding L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim (Next Year in Jerusalem) at the end of Passover Seders.
How are LGBTQ people really treated in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and under Hamas? According to the LGBTQ Human Dignity Trust, a colonial era British Mandate law remains in effect in the PA. Under those sections, sexual violations can be punished with up to 14 years in prison (for those wonks who want to get into the weeds, reference Sections 152 (1) (b) (c) and 152 (2) (b) of the British Mandate criminal code, as well as PA draft penal codes Articles 258 and 263).
While Human Dignity Trust reports the anti-LGBTQ laws remain in effect, they are not rigidly enforced. But Amnesty International reports that threats and attacks against gays receive scant investigation or adjudication. As late as 2019, the PA announced that LGBTQ groups were forbidden to meet in the West Bank when the Al-Qaws LGBT Palestinian group wanted to hold a conference in Nablus. The PA said, “[LGBTQ] are harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society.” And in October 2022, 25- year-old Ahmed Abu Murkhiyeh, a gay Palestinian, was beheaded after he was discovered to be seeking asylum in Israel. It’s pretty telling when a Palestinian is compelled to apply for asylum in Israel.
Maybe it is truly unsafe for Gays in Palestine. While only 8% of Palestinians approved of honor killings in a June 2019 poll conducted by the BBC Arabic News, it also revealed that only 5% of Palestinians accept LGBTQ people.
In his 2020 book, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Professor Sa’ed Atshan of Swarthmore College links the LGBTQ struggle against homophobia and transphobia to the struggle for Palestine. Last November in an article in them, Dr. Atshan could only muster a tepid explanation of Hamas’s attacks of Oct. 7, explaining that while it was a horror, the Israeli dead should be seen in the context of the cumulative asymmetry of casualties between Israelis and Palestinians over the span of the conflict.
The article mentioned in them was entitled “Why Queer Solidarity with Palestine is Not ‘Chickens for KFC.’” I don’t know. It certainly sounds that way to me.
–Veronica Zerrer is the author of “Memoirs of a Cold Warrior, a Novel.” She is retired from the US Army and active in the local LGBTQ community. In 2023, she was appointed to the California Veterans Board by Gov. Newsom. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Ugh. Of course it’s a fucking “veteran”. And what’s more a fed and an apologist for US anti-communism. Queers need to get militant about kicking cops and apologists of US imperialism out of our spaces. If you’re reading this, do anything in your power to get cops, zionists, and the DNC out of your local pride before we’re completely compromised by assimilationists.
No group is a monolith. There’s lots of Americans who hate LGBTQ people, does that mean we should kill all Americans? Obviously not. Israel is conducting a genocide and ethnic cleansing upon the Palestinians and none of what you write above justifies that. None of it.
Just because your ancestors lived somewhere and were kicked out, yes horrible, does not grant you express permission to kick people out of their homes and slaughter them when they refuse.
You wanna talk about history? Look up Zionist Nazi Transfer Agreement.
The reason trans and Palestinian liberation are linked is because their existence threatens that of the wealthy, mostly white, elites who rape land for resources and people for labor. In America, queer people are widely treated as less-than-human sexual perverts. Anti-Arab propaganda similarly deems Arabs as savages who kill white people purely because they hate them and wish be granted 72 virgins in heaven, a sexual aim. BTW that’s not the reason Palestinians are fighting Israel. They’re fighting off occupation and robbery of their homeland.
The news stories around the rapes on Oct. 7th have been debunked while stories are coming out right now regarding the IDF sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners. Literally the NYT just reported findings of soldiers sodomizing young Palestinians with red hot irons, some dying from this torture. The accusations of rape in Israeli detention centers is overwhelming.
The only genocide that we are guaranteed to learn in American schooling is the Holocaust and, yeah, we can see that one is playing out in front of our eyes right now. Thanks for the laugh!
To act like there are no queer Palestinians/arabs is just plainly ignorant. You act like Israel is all accepting of the LGBTQ+ community when they haven’t legalized gay marriage themselves. BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS come before any other rights. I can’t advocate for the LGBTQ+ community when my OWN life is in danger. So respectfully, shut up. Zionism is a colonial project that has robbed the Palestinians of their RIGHTFUL HOMELAND.
This is the most Islamophobic, anti Arab post I’ve seen. Take your disgusting dehumanization and misinformation elsewhere. Pinkwashing no longer works, we’ve seen the truth.
Such zionist propoganda bull
Queer Palestinians in Gaza cannot be queer if you KILL them all!!!
Maybe start there if you are worried about queer rights in Palestine.
EVERYONE SHOULD BE STANDING AGAINST GENOCIDE. The author conveniently brings up October 7th, with no mention of the previous 75+ years of displacing, raping, imprisoning and killing Palestinians. Not to mention, stealing and selling their organs. Zionists invaded Palestine, and need to get the fuck out! You can totally be for gay rights, and be on your Free Palestine grind!
Its funny and by funny I mean quite bullsh* how this whole article was written about Queer Palestinians and their experiences and you happen to not be apart of either of those. Surprise! I would think if you are apart of the lgbtq community you’d understand quite well how people often center themselves in places they shouldn’t. If a straight white woman wrote an article about how she feels unsafe in gay spaces and put all kinds of bullshit facts/articles and people were influenced by her opinion that would be extremely upsetting wouldnt it?? Or would you ask the people calling her out to hear her out?? You as a white women who drips in privilege don’t get to insert yourself in a place you can’t speak from. You don’t get a pass just because you are apart of a marginalized group. If this article wasn’t a total garbage pile of anti islamist and anti Arab propaganda I would have maybe, just maybe, taken it a bit more seriously. The way everything was worded as to such never have the state of Israel take even a little of responsibility for anything its ever done is quite telling of just how you may treat black and brown bodies in your very own lgbtq community. Or how you never mentioned the many beautiful and incredible ways Muslims and Arabs alike have helped and lived with the jewish community. Not to mention the fact there are Palestinian Jews. It’s quite sad really how you don’t even see how even speaking for the transcommunity supporting Palestine is harmful, trans people are already so often silenced. Also, how many “facts” or “articles” do you think will be enough to justify the current extermination of the Palestinian people ’cause that seemed to be a very blunt objective of yours here. I hope no one is influenced in the slightest by your words and if they are I hope they are influenced to speak up even louder for the Palestinian people.
Yes, really. Wow, not surprising coming from a US Army veteran. I’m queer af. Lesbian in a relationship for 5 years. Issue an apology and delete this. Love and absolutely telling that this article mentions nothing of the 47,000+ Palestinian humans murdered with US weapons
and US money and US citizens serving
in IOF. The fact that NO UNIVERSITIES in Gaza are left standing. Mosques have been destroyed by IOF with US weapons and support as well as churches and hospitals. What an absolutely disgusting article! It is very telling why this publication gets very little support. Shame on y’all. I have queer palestinian friends and they have never felt welcome at San Diego Pride. And having the military in pride. Yikes. Anti-Palestinian racism and pinkwashing. Do better. ????
This is an extremely bigoted and ignorant article aimed to spread misinformation and make queer people believe that Zionists, those ethnically cleansing and committing genocide against millions of people, are allies with the queer community when Israel is actively bombing queer people in Gaza to dust. The real homophobia in Palestine is Israel slaughtering queer Palestinians and their loved ones. Please take this down and apologize, this is extremely misleading, harmful, and disrespectful amidst a genocide. Stop trying to justify a genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been occurring for the past 75 years, your white supremacy, racism, and disgusting morals are showing.
This is grossly reductive and misinformed. Please, read anything by Ilan Pappe or Norman Finkelstein, and stop pink washing.
Thank you for taking the time to educate yourself and speak from a place of reality. It is not easy to inform this community when people respond based on the easier, misguided narrative rather than digesting the facts you laid out so thoughtfully and accurately. The fact that queers are dying in Gaza when others are dying is upsetting, no more nor less than it is that any innocent people are dying due to Hamas’s horrific attack–and their use of the entire Gaza strip as their army base. This does not mean that Israel is targeting LGBTQ because of course they are not. And while there are not laws in Israel against LGBTQ, has anyone here read the Hamas charter? Or even taken a look at documents found in their schools? Or the words coming from their very own mouths about how they were instructed to kill anyone among them suspected of being LGBTQ –on the spot? It is beyond insane for this community to champion those who hate them. And to your point, the uninformed act like Israel is taking over a foreign country, despite thousands of years of history and the Jews having returned to ”The Land of Israel”. The land OF ISRAEL–OF the nation of Israel. Jews were there thousands of years ago all praying at one central temple. The first was destroyed by the Babylonians and when it was rebuilt, the second one was destroyed hundreds of years later by the Romans. Both stood long before there was a dome of a rock, which was built on its remains– and long before Arab Muslims left the land and called themselves “Palestinians” and then demanded the right to return. A right they would not have needed had they never left. They left post-Holocaust to make it easier for the surrounding Arab countries to slaughter all the Jews so (they thought) those Arabs could come back to an Israel that was Jew-free. Just ask those Arab Israelis who stayed–and therefore still have full rights, to vote, to work, to still be Israeli Arabs. Only the ones who ran became refugees, and were not absorbed by a single other Arab nation–they were kept in limbo as the newest excuse to attack Jews. And so the so-called cycle was set in motion. And as for a ceasefire, that is what they had on October 6th. So we saw how well that worked.
There is literally not a single reasonable response in these comments.
Absurd level ad hominem attack.
I don’t like these facts. All the things you said, if true (I’m not going to check), are terribly uncomfortable. So the author MUST be a terrible person. And we should silence them by removing articles I don’t like.
Did I do that right?
The comments on this make it unambiguously clear that anti-Semitism of the most old fashioned kind has found a warm welcome in its new home on the left. That so many LGBT folks now seem to wholeheartedly support the same groups and ideologies that ceaselessly call for their annihilation is just unfathomable. The conflict in Israel is the continuation of a region-wide genocidal campaign against Jewish people that has been going on for more than a century and which has resulted in the literal extermination of Jewish people throughout North Africa and the middle east. The difference in Israel is that there, Jews were able to fend off their executioners. It is this, that enrages the antisemitic left. Jewish refusal to roll over and die.
A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 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 company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International’s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.
Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing”—a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.
It’s a good article. Sorry for the idiots in the comments, they’re coping hard.
The five comments on here are ignorant. Anti Arab? Go be queer in the middle east see what happens. While I don’t agree on how Israel bombed Gaza killing innocent people, Israel is safer for LGBTQ+ than any Islamic country. But like I said if you want to be stubborn go be openly queer in any Islamic country, you’ll find out what happens soon enough.
Thank you from a queer woman in Israel. I knew Ahmed, he was such a sweet young man, always willing to help anyone. His friends in Beersheva were devastated by his cold blooded murder.
I notice that the people that disagreed with this article have not refuted and facts presented.