This coming August, thousands of people from around the globe will convene in Jerusalem to march under a banner of respect for human dignity, liberty and tolerance for diversity, in “WorldPride Jerusalem 2005,” a series of events sponsored by the Open House, the city’s gay and lesbian center.
Recently it has been argued by an unholy coalition of American fundamentalist Christians and Jewish Israeli right-wing clergy and politicians that an event in which gays, lesbians and supporters champion these values publicly is somehow incongruent with the sanctity of the Holy City. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jerusalem is not merely a heavenly symbol to adherents of various faiths; it is a vibrant, Earth-bound metropolis inhabited by over 600,000 real, live humans. The city is the largest single municipal district in Israel, incorporating the seat of national government, three university campuses, various colleges and centers of industry and commerce. Demographically, the city is a microcosm of Israeli society, its population a conglomeration of minorities: Armenians, Copts, Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, Christian and Muslim Arabs, secular, religious and haredi Jews of various ethnic backgrounds and over 50,000 gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons.
One important difference between the city’s various other subgroups and its sexual minorities lies in the fact that the latter are largely invisible, relegated to this status by the subtle forces of oppression: stigma, prejudice and dogma. Of all these minorities, only young gays and lesbians grow up within families in which alienation, and the risk of rejection or eviction, is often the rule if a fundamental aspect of their humanity, their sexual orientation, is revealed.
We’re told that the controversy is not a question of “rights,” that the right of any minority to demonstrate is secure in modern Israeli society. And we are asked, “But where is the sensitivity, the judgment in holding such a march in a town where it starkly offends local sensibilities? Couldn’t it be held somewhere else?”
I believe the most appropriate response to these questions is to be found in the following incidents: Not long ago, two 19-year-old Jerusalemites committed suicide. Both of them had recently enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces; one had begun his army career as a cadet in the pilots’ training program. The young man — intelligent, talented and cheerful — the product of a prominent secular Jewish family, left a letter explaining that as a gay man, he saw no future life possible for himself, no one to turn to and no way he could ever disclose or pursue his gay identity, given the atmosphere of oppression prevalent in the society in which he had grown up.
The young woman had enlisted in the IDF despite her Orthodox roots. She too had excelled in her secondary school education, but she had made the unforgivable error of disclosing her lesbian orientation to her family, who promptly rejected her and then responded with denial when the young woman developed behavioral symptoms as a result. She preferred her own demise to a life filled with the prejudice and stigma she had encountered within her family upon disclosure of her sexual orientation.
These are not isolated incidents. They represent the inevitable outcome of the intolerance which plagues Jerusalem in 2005, a society in which each constituent
minority has found its favorite object of hatred … in a neighboring minority.
Political and religious leaders, teachers and parents are powerless to prevent expressions of verbal and physical violence based on prejudice and stigmatic stereotypes; indeed, they sometimes play an active role in propagating it. Examples are public pronouncements by right-wing and haredi politicians such as Vice Mayor Eli Simhayov, Knesset member Uzi Landau and former Health Minister Shlomo Benizri, respectively, condemning gay pride celebrations and even suggesting that the entire gay and lesbian population of Israel be incarcerated in closed psychiatric wards.
Such statements by elected authorities cannot merely be discarded as fanatical ravings, even if they are. The power invested in such politicians translates into a sinister influence over hearts and minds of countless constituents; therein lie seeds of an infinite cycle of stigma, prejudice and violence.
Ironically, some of those perpetrating the current campaign of verbal violence against the gay and lesbian community represent minorities which themselves suffered persecution over the course of centuries, even genocide, merely because their belief system differed from that of their compatriots.
Obviously, “pride” events could, and indeed do, take place in other cities around the world, as well they should. But it is precisely the intolerance and the denial of basic human rights here and the need for renewed hope and optimism that combine to make it so necessary and worthy to conduct these events in Jerusalem, now. The ubiquitous symbolism ascribed to Jerusalem increases the likelihood that WorldPride will have far-reaching implications for Israeli society in general, and for other societies as well.
The fundamental problem of Jerusalem is not an absence of consensual geographical borders. Rather it is the spiritual boundaries of ignorance, intolerance, stigma and prejudice, despite the decades’ old physical unification of the city, feeding the religious and ethnic strife that continues to permeate life in Jerusalem.
The existence of a gay and lesbian minority here, and its aspiration to create a new, sane optimism and openness in the city of their birthright, does not contradict the values or standards of any creed. Only when the various peoples who inhabit this metropolis “beat their swords into plowshares” can Jerusalem rightfully regain its title as “the Holy City.”
That is what WorldPride Jerusalem 2005 is about.
Jerry Levinson is a psychologist and co-founder and former chairperson of Jerusalem’s the Open House, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender center.
TWO VIEWS:
Gay pride festival in Israel — sacrilege or celebration?
Follow Jewish law, don’t fool with it