| Our Mission |
QATGA is a global collective of activists against hatred, incitement terror and violence directed against members of the LGBT commuity by opressive regimes such as Syria, Saudi Arabia & the Palestinian Authority and other tyrannies and by terrorist groups. Through our diversity we find unity. Through truth to power, we fight bigotry & opression. |
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Israel, Palestine, and Gays By Paul Varnell Originally appeared August 28, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press. LET'S TAKE A QUIZ. No peeking at the answers directly below. 1. Which Middle Eastern country has no sodomy laws nor uses vague charges such as "offenses against religion" or "immoral conduct" to prosecute and imprison gays and lesbians? 2. Which Middle Eastern country has a variety of gay organizations which safely conduct gay advocacy efforts? 3. Which Middle Eastern country has a gay and lesbian community center in its capital city? 4. Which Middle Eastern country holds annual Gay Pride parades? 5. Which Middle Eastern country has members of parliament who actively support and speak out on behalf of gays and lesbians? 6. In which Middle Eastern country did the head of state meet with gay activists? 7. Which Middle Eastern country lets gays and lesbians join its military services? 8. Which Middle Eastern country has broadcast programs about gays and lesbians on its television stations? 9. And a bonus question: When gays in Palestine are forced to flee persecution, what Middle Eastern country do they usually flee to? Answers: Israel Israel Israel Israel Israel Israel Israel Israel Israel The contrasting treatment of gay men in neighboring Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt is well known: Gays are beheaded or sentenced to long prison terms. What seems less well known, however, is the appalling treatment of gays under Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. At least it was less known until Yossi Klein Halevi wrote about it in the August 19th New Republic. Palestine makes rural Texas look like San Francisco. According to Halevi, one young man discovered to be gay was forced by Palestinian Authority police "to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects." During one interrogation Palestinian police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. When he was released he fled to Israel. If he were forced to return to Gaza, he said, "The police would kill me." An American who foolishly moved into the West Bank to live with his Palestinian lover said they told everyone they were just friends, but one day they "found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day," he said. The head of a Tel Aviv gay organization told Halevi, "The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority doesn't just come from the families or the Islamic groups, but from the P.A. itself." Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic religion law, he said: "It's now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A." He recalled that one gay man in the Palestinian police went to Israel for a short time. When he returned to the West Bank, Palestinian Authority police confined him to a pit without food or water until he died. A 17-year-old gay youth recalled that he spent months in a Palestinian Authority prison "where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds." The U.S. State Department, which more and more seems to be living on some other planet, blandly noted in a 2001 human rights report, "In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized and occasionally receive physical threats." That's one way to put it. In the last few years, Halevi reports, hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have fled to Israel, usually to Tel Aviv, Israel's most cosmopolitan city. Many are desperately poor, he says, "but at least they're beyond the reach of their families and the P.A." So it seems clear that Israel is the one country in the region in which gays have legal rights as citizens and live in safety and freedom. Oddly, however, some gays and lesbians over on the anti-capitalist ("progressive") left sympathize with Palestinian terrorists and support the Palestinian Authority. One such fledgling group calls itself "Queers for Palestine," another is named "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism" (as if trying to stop terrorism against Israeli civilians is itself terrorism). To be sure, no one should argue that gays and lesbians must support Israel just because it is vastly more gay-friendly. They don't. They may feel that some other political principles are more important than gay-friendliness. But gays who support Palestine, and they seem almost entirely on the far reaches of the political left, give the lie to the frequent demand made by gays on the left that the rest of us must support some "progressive" politician or position because it supposedly benefits gays, even though doing so would compromise or violate some basic political principle we as individuals may hold. Keep "Queers for Palestine" in mind next time some gay left advocate says that because you are gay you have to support some approved "gay" position. And remember the pit, the sewer water, the bag of feces and the toilet bowl cleaner. |
| S U M M A R Y
Within the Middle East, Israel is the one country in which gays have legal rights as citizens and live in safety and freedom � which makes it all the more surprising that some "progressive" gays and lesbians should rationalize anti-Israel terrorism and support the Palestinian Authority. |
Palestinian Gays Seek Safety in Israel January 15, 2004 By Dan Baron Belying its name, Electricity Park is shrouded in darkness, an ideal spot for curb-crawlers keen to avoid attention as they prowl for male prostitutes at night. The anonymity these streets offer serves as a refuge for the young men who ply their trade in this dismal corner of Tel Aviv. Many of them have far more to fear than the police or the occasional abusive client. Tricked out in drag or the tight, modish attire of Western urban youth, dozens of gay Palestinian runaways eke out a dangerous living on Israel�s streets. For these gay men, life in the seedy parts of central Israel is far better than the virtual death sentences they fled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sani�not his real name�grew up outside Gaza City, in a refugee camp whose clan networks and congestion made privacy practically impossible. He said he realized he was homosexual at age 16, in an encounter with another youth. Sani�s secret was safe from his father, a local sheik, but eventually it leaked out to the Palestinian Authority police. �They brought me in, held me for hours,� he told JTA. �During one round of questioning, they made me strip and sit on a Coke bottle. It hurt. And all the time I was more worried my family would learn why.� Torture by Palestinian Authority security services or vigilante attacks by relatives is a fate suffered by countless gays in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where sodomy carries a jail term of three to 10 years. Islam prescribes capital punishment for homosexual activity. Those who survive torture and attacks either fade into meek self-abnegation or, like Sani, break away. Sani�s freedom came at a price: He had to report other Palestinian gays to the police. But as soon as he got out of the Gaza lock-up, Sani got out of Gaza for good, posing as a day laborer to escape to the safety of Israel proper, where he joined an estimated 300 fellow gay runaways. Now 22, Sani is always on the move, lodging with friends or rich clients he meets at Tel Aviv�s bath houses. If he is short on cash, he resorts to street-walking in Electricity Park. Sani phones home every few months to assure his mother that he is all right�on condition that she doesn�t tell his father and brothers anything about the conversations. �She says they consider me dead, and it�s better that way,� he said. �I have nightmares about them coming to kill me.� According to Shaul Gonen of Agudah, Israel�s homosexual rights association, at least three Palestinian runaways have been abducted by vengeful kinsmen, never to be heard from again. �Being gay in the P.A. is, quite simply, deadly,� Gonen said. Israel�s preoccupation with security also means that the runaways, in the country illegally, run the risk of being summarily deported if caught. �The first danger to them is from family and community, as well as authorities� in the P.A.-controlled areas, Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International told Reuters. �Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there, their biggest problem is possibly being sent back.� Israel signed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees covenant of 1951, guaranteeing asylum for anyone persecuted on the basis of sexual orientation. The country�s Interior Ministry said any gay Palestinian can apply to remain in Israel indefinitely if persecution is proven, but the ministry gave no figures on how many such applications have been filed. Another option for the Palestinians is to seek haven abroad. One gay Israeli-Palestinian couple found a home in Canada, and Gonen currently is campaigning to persuade European Union nations to be more forthcoming with offers of asylum. Many runaways are apparently unaware of their rights, or worried that through some bureaucratic bungle they could find themselves on the wrong side of an Israeli military checkpoint before their asylum application is processed. One 19-year-old runaway told Israel�s Channel One TV that the Al-Aksa Brigade, the terrorist wing of the Palestinians� mainstream Fatah movement, tried to pressure him into becoming a suicide bomber to �purge his moral guilt.� He refused and fled to an Arab village in Israel�s Galilee region. Gonen tells of a Palestinian runaway in Tel Aviv who helped catch a terrorist. The gay runaway grew suspicious overhearing an illegal Palestinian laborer speak. The man�s accent was Gazan, but he claimed to be from the West Bank. The runaway reported the laborer to the authorities via an Israeli friend, and police who arrested the laborer discovered he was a terrorist fugitive. Palestinian homosexuals often elicit more suspicion at home than in their haven of choice, regularly drawing accusations that they collaborate with the Shin Bet (Israeli secret police). Human-rights observers suggest that Palestinian homosexuals, fearing for their lives if exposed, are especially vulnerable to Shin Bet blackmail. But a veteran handler of collaborators, Menachem Landau, denied this. �Gays are already treated with suspicion in Palestinian society,� Landau said in an interview. �So what good are they for covert work?� In Israel, covertness is a way of life for Palestinian runaways. They pick up Hebrew and make all efforts to erase their Arabic accents. Military dog tags and Star of David medallions are de rigeur as an Israeli disguise. They save up money for private medical care in lieu of hospital visits when they fall ill. The Electricity Park crowd has learned to spot plainclothes police from afar. The really lucky ones adopt a new identity altogether. The 30-year-old runaway from a village near Jenin works in a Tel Aviv restaurant using an identification card loaned to him by an Israeli Arab friend. He lives with his Jewish partner in the quiet Tel Aviv suburb of Holon. �With any luck, I�ll go unnoticed until there is peace,� he said. |
Gays Palestinians Fleeing to Israel TEL AVIV -- Though the level of interaction between gay and lesbian Israelis and Palestinians has declined markedly in the last two years of war and bloodshed, the communities still meet regularly in Tel Aviv offering an oasis of tolerance to gay Arabs in the Middle East. P.A. Officers The Aug. 19 issue of The New Republic reported that in addition to waging war on Israel, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority has conducted a brutal campaign of repression, imprisonment and torture against gay Palestinians. A 21-year-old Gazan told the magazine how young gay Palestinians are routinely forced into special police squads used to lure, capture and implicate other gay men. If they don't agree to become informers, they are tortured. The young man told the magazine how he was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head in a bag filled with feces. He was then placed in a dark cell filled with insects he could feel but not see. Interrogators sodomized him with a Coke bottle while officers shouted abuse and cheered. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Repression goes unreported, unaddressed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He now lives illegally in an Israeli village with dreams of moving to Tel Aviv. "No one there cares if you're gay," he told TNR. He knows that his status as an illegal Gazan in Tel Aviv invites deportation if he is discovered, but he says he is safest where he is. If he is returned to Gaza, he says, "The police will kill me... Unless my father gets to me first." "The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn't just come from the families or the Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself," gay rights advocate Shaul Ganon of the Tel Aviv-based Agudah-Association said. "The P.A.'s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators -- though I know of two cases in the last three years where people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals." Since the intifada began, Ganon said, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law: "It's now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A." |
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