In recent years Tel-Aviv has ostensibly become an oasis of peace and sex liberation within the Middle-East. As a result, the global LGBTQI+ community is doubly eager to promote the city and the country, as Israel is the only place that can offer a safe and fun holiday destination where not only is queerness accepted but highly promoted and galvanised. Every year Tel-Aviv hosts probably one of the most bubbly and eventful gay prides in the world, making New York and San Francisco envious and peripheral to the LGBTQI+ movement. One only needs to type up ‘Tel-Aviv’ on Youtube and the first results to appear will certainly look plentiful of rainbow flags and six packed boys dancing on the back of a techno-bandwagon. The plethora of vlogs and youtube channels that promote Tel-Aviv are storming the web, and it is by no means hard to come across statements such as this:

‘’It’s great to see that people around here are all about peace and able to be themselves, it’s a really cool thing to see.. especially somewhere in the Middle-East’’. Yes it is true that the queer community has found a safe heaven within the Middle-East, and it is also true that ‘love is love’ and there are no fetters to querness on that strip of shore on the Mediterranean sea. Yet, it is worth asking if the girl with the heart-shaped sunglasses and pink-feathered boa in the video really meant that ‘’people around here are all about peace and able to be themselves’’ or if she was just oblivious of the Palestinian queers - the forgotten queers of Tel-Aviv. As the movie The Bubble shows, being a queer Palestinian in Tel-Aviv is not easy; the racism that Arabs have to endure within queer circles is an endemic problem even within the progressive queer-frendly bubble. Palestinians, in and outside of Israel, suffer greatly from the check-point logic of apartheid that ripples in all strata of social interactions. (Ritchie, 2015 ) tells us about the many instances in which Arab-Israeli citizens have been ‘bounced back’ at the entrance of gay clubs for the sole reason of being Arab.

The check-point logic of blocking Palestinians on their way to Nablus or Haifa remains a reality even within the gay club scene, which according to the lady in heart-shaped glasses, should be ‘’all about peace and [people] able to be themselves’’. Bouncers decide who to let in the club based on subjective criteria, where most times Arabness is the defining factor to be ‘bounced back’. The skin colour, a small twang in the accent, or an Arab name on the ID are sufficient canons to deny access into the club. But if they manage to enter, logics of discrimination still hinder the fun of Arab-Israeli or queer Palestinians, as bar tenders can sometimes be reluctant to serve them. In her own account, Ritchie reports the words of an Israeli bartender: ‘’It’s not racist, They just don’t pay, and if they do, they don’t tip’’.

For Palestinian queers the stigma of Arabness is thus a constant obstacle to fun and self-expression, which defies the fabricated image of Tel-Aviv, where ‘’being all about peace and able to be themselves’’ becomes a constant challenge for certain queer subjects. Even within Israel’s first gay dating site ‘’Atraf’, stating one’s ethnicity is a compulsory criterion, whereas concealing it by ticking the box ‘’rather not say’’ automatically means ‘Arab’. Because Arabs are virtually excluded from Israel’s gayfication process, as a queer Arab on a dating site it is easy to encounter statements such as this ‘’Sorry, Arabs are not my type’’ or ‘’You are Arab, but are you clean?’’. (Ritchie, 2015) The cyber-space of gay dating thus becomes another site for discrimination of Palestinians, irrespective of their queerness. Unfortunately, the reality of the bubble of Tel-Aviv discloses some nasty contradictions, and with a more attentive eye one can easily discern the harsh truth, that the queer ‘rainbow’ is encompassing all colours but ‘brown’.

While gay tourism floods the streets of Tel-Aviv all year round, and millions of Shekles are devolved to boast the tourism influx, the realities of LGBTQI+ outside of Tel-Aviv still sit on thin ice. While  from some of the pro-gay policies that Israel is pursuing, the country seems to be remarkably progressive, homophobia is far from being uprooted. The Haredi community, namely the ultra-othodox Jews, who follow the Hachala (Jewish law), have a staunch opinion regarding homosexuals that more or less stands on this predicament: (Leviticus 20:13,) "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.'' Although this is by no means the overarching attitude of the Israeli government, for one branch of it , namely the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), this stance still upholds. As facts show, the Knesset has hindered most laws that were supposed to grant rights to the LGBTQI+ community. The struggle of the Israeli queer is far from over. Ouside of Tel-Aviv the realities of queerness are not as liberal as they seem, in fact every year at the Jerusalem gay-pride a counter-march takes place in which some ultra/othodox Jews throw eggs at the marchers and showcase banners that write ‘’You Are Subhumans’’.

Given this, one may wonder why Israel is so eager to promote itself as the pioneer of gay rights in the Middle-East whilst still struggling to achieve gay rights within its legislation and among its civil consensus. Whilst glancing at the work of scholars and activists alike, one starts to wonder whether the outspoken promotion of a ‘gay-friendly Israel’ is actually concerned with LGBTQI+. If homesexuality were to be the defining criterion to be part of Tel-Aviv’s rainbow bubble, we would hardly find any instance of discrimination towards queer Palestinians - which unfortunately is not the case. In this sense, if being Palestinian is already a determining factor for being discriminated, not only being queer does not alleviate it but only adds another layer of inequality. 

But if queerness is not necessarily a construing criterion for being accepted in Israeli society, why is Israel so concerned with LGBTQI+ rights in the first place? Unfortunately, the answer is rather bleak. Because the Israeli government was so concerned of its assertive and conflict-based image worldwide, the easiest way out of the all-encompassing dull militarism was to appeal to the gay community worldwide to redefine its image. The promotion of LGBTQI+ rights and gay tourism falls under the project ‘Brand Israel’ which was orchestrated by the zionist US-Israel ambassador Ido Aharoni.. The idea to undergo a total make-over of Israel’s image makes us wonder why the country is so desperate to appear progressive in the eyes of the West, while  staunch opposition on homosexuality suggests the contrary. Well, precisely because Israel is not ‘’all about peace’’ and on the contrary is involved in an all-out oppression of Palestinian people, the need to appear fun, cool and queer makes all the more sense. 

With the rise of the pro-Palestine movement of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and general dissent for Zionism, the state of Israel gradually came to acquire devilish and despotic connotations in the eyes of the Occidental left. In this context Ido Aharoni may have ingeniously thought : why don’t we give the left what the left wants, gay rights!. Unfortunately for him, the radical left is widely accustomed to these neoliberal attempts at ‘’Pinkwashing’’ gay rights, however for the more conservative and liberal left this stratagem seems to have worked well. In fact, the remaking of Tel-Aviv as the (self-proclaimed) ‘’Gay-capital of the Middle-East’’ is incredibly effective at eclipsing Israel’s crimes on Palestinian people and in turn justifying its presence in the region as the ‘Pioneer of Human Rights!’. 

Love in Tel-Aviv is not for all, as Palestinian encounter in clubs and dating sites the same logics of oppression and discrimination that they find at the check-points. The ‘gay-friendliness’ of Israel not only is excluding Arabness, but it is specifically fabricated against Arabs and Palestinians for the sake of justifying their oppression. ‘Love is Love’ is Tel-Aviv’s motto…but what about the Palestinians? Don’t they have the right to love, to access dating sites without feeling ashamed of being Arab, without being bounced back by the security guards and needing to ‘call it a night’? Don’t they have the right to rave on the beach and kiss a he, she or they? While the occupation persists, you can rest assured: they do not.

Written by Bianca M.P