Kate Raphael-Bender - Queers Boycott Pride in Jerusalem (2005)

Speaker 1: World Pride, an international queer celebration and festival, was scheduled to take place in the city of Jerusalem from August 18th to the 28th, 2005. Under the slogan Love Without Borders, the event aimed to bring queer people from the international community to Jerusalem, one of the most militarized, divided, and segregated cities in the world. Here, we speak with Kate Raphael Bender, a Palestine Solidarity activist based in San Francisco and a member of QUIT, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. QUIT recently launched an international boycott of World Pride, and many groups signed on. Recently, the organizers of World Pride decided to postpone the event for at least one year due to this summer's Gaza withdrawal. Kate will reflect on the inherent contradictions of holding world pride in Jerusalem and how to bring about real freedom for all. I'm on the phone with Kate Raphael Bender, who joins us from San Francisco, where she's based as an activist. Thank you for coming on to our program today, Kate.

Kate Raphael-Bender: Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker 1: So today we're going to be talking about World Pride Day in Jerusalem. There was actually recently a decision made by the Jerusalem Open House to postpone World Pride Day tentatively until August 2006 because of the Gaza withdrawal and the protests that they're expecting to have in Jerusalem this summer. Does this represent somewhat of a contradiction to you in terms of what World Pride Day is supposed to represent versus the realities of the political situation on the ground?

Kate Raphael-Bender: Yeah, I mean, you know, we're not taking any credit for the decision to postpone, but we definitely feel that it's indicative of really the apartheid structure of Israeli society, that even progressive organizations, and I think that Jerusalem Open House, which is the driving force behind World Pride Jerusalem, is... generally speaking, a progressive organization that tries to be inclusive in a certain way, you know, they didn't seem to notice that they were in a war zone until there was a situation that was going to affect Israelis, you know, and that involves troops being mobilized in a certain way against Israelis and Israelis being mobilized against the troops, you know, where when Palestinians were the only real target though the really military and they were the only ones really offering you know that for so long with really been the K is that only people who are directly suffering on a day-to-day paper on a daily basis from the occupation and the fact that there is really a war a constant war going on in that land against the indigenous people there the only people suffering from that on a really daily basis are Palestinians, and especially, although not only, the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. And so it's possible for people in Jerusalem, even people who think of themselves as conscious and progressive people, not to really be aware of it. And the fact that all along we have been saying and others have been saying it's inappropriate to have a pride celebration in the middle of this basically attempt, ever-increasing effort by the Israeli government to finally take the land and expel the people who have been living on it for generations, and the struggle of the Palestinians to hold on to their land, that this is not the time and place to be celebrating world pride. You know, that's fallen on deaf ears, but suddenly they're saying, oh, we can't do it because there are security issues and there are threats to stability that are affecting Israelis.

Speaker 1: Maybe to back up a bit, can you tell us a bit about World Pride Day, what it aims to represent, but also what it represents to you and why groups such as Quit and other queer groups are boycotting it right now?

Kate Raphael-Bender: All I know really is that it's organized by a group called InterPride, which is created from... board members or participation by board members of pride organizations all over the world so basically the idea is to create kind of a super pride that we all have our pride celebrations in june or some other time usually in the summer and then you know the idea is to have people from all of those local pride celebrations come together for sort of a big huge super pride celebration The first one I know was held in 2000 in Rome. And so this was meant to be the second, and a number of cities bid for it, was my understanding, and Jerusalem Open House asked to have it in Jerusalem, and their bid was accepted. And so they became the host organization, and they, I think in consultation or cooperation somehow with the Enterprise Board, named the celebration love without borders and so i think that they did that you know it's tending to say that they did it cynically and i actually know that they didn't you know i think that they felt that by doing that they were somehow acknowledging the contradiction of the situation that they're in and you know wanting to say that despite everything and despite the you know huge attempt to divide us that queer's all over the world are going to come together here to celebrate love without borders. And we feel that it's really the height of kind of arrogance and a bizarre, twisted sort of irony to say that you can celebrate love without borders in a city that has a 25-foot concrete wall in the middle of it that's being ever expanded to separate more and more people from not only from each other, not only from the only places where they can get support as queer people in the land of Palestine and Israel, at least open support, but from their ancestral homes, from the homes that their parents many times grew up in, and even from the homes that they may have grown up in because people are being daily dispossessed to build this wall. Now, I do want to say... that I think that Jerusalem Open House and some of the other Israeli queer groups are not quite aware of how the event and their theme is being used outside the country. And I know that for them, the reasons that they wanted to have world pride in Jerusalem really are to protest the bigotry that they confront on a daily basis from the religious right. and mainly the Jewish religious right, which is very, very powerful in the whole country and especially in Jerusalem. There's always been attacks. Like every year when they have the pride celebration in Jerusalem, the religious right mobilizes to try to stop them from being allowed to have it. And then given that they always are allowed to have it, they will come out and protest it and say, They'll tell them the mayor will decide that they can't take the route that they want to take. So they feel themselves embattled, and that's, I think, the reason that they see bringing a large contingent of international queer to Jerusalem as a positive thing to do and as a progressive thing to do. And we don't have any problem with that. We wouldn't have any problem with that in another context. But, you know, the problem with it, like we do support their attempts, you know, their work, which is really excellent, I think, and in many ways is quite inclusive, to support queers in a climate of growing religious fundamentalism and religious involvement in the government and therefore, you know, thereby growing homophobia. Yeah. And so I think that they're a little bit unaware of the ways that this celebration is being promoted outside the country, and at least I know especially here in the U.S. by groups such as Blue Star PR, which put out a DVD last year that they distributed. I don't know if they did it all over the country, but I know that here in San Francisco they handed out 10,000 DVDs which basically are saying, come to Israel to celebrate the great freedom that queer people have. It's the only place in the Middle East where you can be as queer as you want to be. And by the way, Israeli queers are the best-looking people in the world. And it's based on that. I think that when Jerusalem Open House people talk about the event and we've talked directly to them, you know, people, representatives from their organization about it, they always talk about it as a protest. They don't say, come to Jerusalem and see how great it is to be queer here. And I don't think that they see it that way, and I don't think that they necessarily are quite aware. Like, I know one of the staff people who was interviewed in this video we asked her about it, and she's Palestinian, and she runs the Palestinian Outreach Program, which, you know, is a very groundbreaking organization. program that Jerusalem Open House has started and we asked her if she had seen it and if she knew how her quote was being used because it's actually really very strange in the context of the video and she said no she kind of makes it a practice not to watch movies that she's in you know and I totally understand that but I think that it's not very responsible for any organization that's doing something like this that's reaching out to people from all over the world to not pay attention to how other groups outside the country are perceiving what they're doing and are representing what they're doing. And in that context, it's definitely the case that the freedom, the relative freedom that queers have in Israel and that women have in Israel to do everything from serve in the army to... get married or at least be domestic partners and adopt children. Israel is pretty liberal in that respect, and that's being used to promote Zionism and to promote thereby the dispossession of the Palestinian people to justify the intensifying occupation and the hardship that is just daily increasing on on five million palestinians living in that land and especially now with the wall you know and so that's why we feel that there is an international travel boycott on israel that's been called by many organizations and arab countries and many um progressive organizations all over the world have joined the call for divestment from israel and a boycott on things that support the Israeli government, like tourism. And this is potentially a big source of revenue. It's a big promotion for the Israeli government to have queers coming and spending tourist dollars, paying to fly into the airport and paying to stay in hotels and paying to go out to clubs and eat in restaurants in Israel. And we feel that it's wrong. that it's basically asking queer people to cross an international picket line, and we're asking people not to do that. And now with the postponement, I think that many progressive groups around the world will be asking Enterprise to think about another venue to think about moving the event forward. to a more appropriate country.

Speaker 1: Speaking of protests, one of the slogans on the Boycott World Pride website was there was a postcard with a photo of the apartheid wall saying that Stonewall was a rebellion, and in fact that this stone wall being the apartheid wall is just that, it's apartheid. Maybe you could speak a bit about this kind of phenomenon of having these pride days around the world that are really just kind of consumer festivals and that kind of break from queer movements as a social movement and linking that movement with the Palestinian struggle.

Kate Raphael-Bender: Yeah, I mean, Quit was started by... a group of queer who has worked together for a long time and many of us have been or are currently members of a group that started as lesbians and gays against intervention and that was primarily against intervention in Latin America in the 80s but actually always and even back to the mid-1980s had a strong position in support of Palestinian liberation and in support of the position that palestine needed to be an issue on the agenda of the left here and one of our issues so i'm a member of legay and what which is now called queer insurrection but we're still legay and we one of our issues over the years has been the commercialization of pride and that we have used the slogan it's a movement not a market And it's a community, not a commodity, because we have definitely seen here in San Francisco the Pride celebration. I mean, we've seen it go from Lesbian Gay by Trans Freedom Day to being called Pride, which tries not even to use the words Lesbian Gay by Trans Queer too visibly on their logo and Our slogan is queer rights are human rights and human rights are queer rights. And if people can't be free as human beings and if they can't be free to have the nationality that they are born with, if you're subject to apartheid, if you're not even allowed to go from your village to the next town or into the city, then you definitely cannot exercise any freedom as a queer person. So we do not support putting queer rights on backburners. We demand full rights for all queer people, Palestinian, Israeli, U.S., and everywhere. But we also feel that a part of that means fighting for all human liberation. And so in that context, we feel like you can't be – In support of Palestinian queer rights and not be opposed to the occupation in every possible way and as strongly as possible. And so we say that if Jerusalem Open House and InterPride want to support queer rights and rights for Palestinian queers, they need to first dismantle the apartheid system and then invite the world to come and witness that and, you know, challenge the remaining homophobia that I'm sure would be remaining for everybody living in that land. And we would all be really delighted to do that.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much.

Kate Raphael-Bender: Thanks.