Two weeks ago, I sat in shock, reading my email from Israel and Palestine. My heart and soul hurt all weekend as I tried to make sense of the two gruesome murders of children at the hands of Jewish Israeli extremists — the stabbing death of 16-year-old Shira Banki during Jerusalem’s LGBT Pride March and the burning death of Palestinian baby Ali Dawabsheh in the West Bank a few hours later. There is no sugar-coating this — both of these murders were acts of terrorism committed by Jews, misguided by extremist ideology that has been growing in Israel for decades and is now more embedded in the government than ever before.
We in the LGBT community and we in the Jewish community cannot look at the tragic stabbing during Jerusalem Pride as simply an act of extreme homophobia or minimize it as the act of one fringe lunatic. We cannot divorce this tragedy from the broader context that bred it, nor shed our responsibility as Americans. We are Israel’s closest ally and we support Israel politically, economically and militarily more than any other country. Yes we are 8,000 miles away, and do not live in the same conditions, but we have a unique responsibility to speak and act on our convictions and our particularly influential relationship.
Many political and religious leaders in Israel have rightly and forcefully spoken out against these two horrific acts. But as Israeli political analyst David Grossman wrote in Ha’aretz, “What is difficult to understand is how the prime minister and his cabinet ministers are able to distinguish between a fire that they have been stoking for decades and this most recent conflagration. It is hard to conceive how they are capable of not seeing the connection between the occupation regime that has been continuing for 48 years, and the dark, fanatic reality that has been forged at the frontiers of the Israeli consciousness — a reality whose agents and disseminators grow more numerous each day, a reality that is now growing closer and closer to the mainstream, and is becoming increasingly more acceptable and legitimate in the Israeli street, in the Knesset and at the cabinet table.”
We must not accept rhetoric and condolences over action from Israel’s leaders. We must demand concrete actions such as ending government funding of extremist settler groups as was revealed by Israeli think tank Molad last week. We must hold officials accountable in the aftermath of these tragedies. As the syndicated columnist Douglas Bloomfield wrote, “Is he [Netanyahu] ready to apply the law equally and treat Jewish terror groups like Hilltop Youth, a network of violent young settlers linked to illegal West Bank outposts, and price taggers, with the same firm hand his forces use against Arab terror?” We must also support Israel’s critical civil society entities such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and B’Tzelem, which are upholding the country’s democratic values when its leaders fail to. (Locally, the New Israel Fund is an excellent conduit for such support.)
Over the years, I’ve marched in Jerusalem LGBT Pride twice with my own daughter, who is now 16. I even co-chaired World Pride in Jerusalem during a war with Lebanon in order to bring needed support from the U.S. Jewish and LGBT communities to the movements in Israel and Palestine. During my visits over the past decade, I’ve also marched in protest against Palestinian home demolitions by the Israeli government, the “security fence” that keeps Palestinians from their jobs and land, and observed soldiers’ unnecessarily harsh behavior at checkpoints in the West Bank. I’ve seen with my own eyes the human impact of the occupation and of the expansive settler movement, which is supported not only through Israeli government policy and funding, but by private funding from American Jews as well. As a lesbian and a Jew, with relatives and friends in a country I love, I believe with all my heart that these are interrelated oppressions. A single-issue, LGBT-only approach misses the most important lesson of these horrific and interrelated events for the LGBT community, just as an anti-Orthodox or anti-haredi approach misses the point for Jews.
In the midst of the heartache I’ve felt over these events, the email that upset me the most was the one that said, “This march would not be permitted in any other capital city in the Middle East.” The insistence on perpetuating the view of Israel as superior to its Arab neighbors in a moment of such Jewish extremism is not only offensive, but it cuts to the core of what is wrong with this perspective. As David Grossman went on to write, “In this sense, both acts of violence that took place a few days ago — the murder and stabbings at the Pride event in Jerusalem and the murder of the baby — are interrelated, and derive from a similar worldview. In both, hatred itself — bared and primal — constitutes among certain people a legitimate, ample reason to commit murder, to annihilate the hated human being.” As LGBT people, we must do better than that — because our lives actually depend on it. As Jews, we must not allow a double standard to separate our response to the killing of gays (or in this case of Shira Banki, a straight ally of the LGBT community) from our response to the killing of Palestinians.
Kate Kendell, one of the LGBT movement’s foremost leaders, argued in a recent San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece that the American LGBT movement must now turn to fight racism after our long-fought marriage equality victory. So too must we as LGBT people and as Jews understand and commit to fighting holistically against both the racist and homophobic policies in Israel and Palestine.
I believe Israel’s imperfect democratic systems are strong enough that next year’s Pride will be a safer event. I believe Israel’s LGBT activists have the courage to continue to march. My own 16-year-old will be back in Israel next summer as a Diller Teen Fellow during Jerusalem Pride and I hope she marches with pride, in protest, and in safety. I must believe that the next generation will do a better job understanding difference and working for peace than we have.
I also believe in our own imperfect democracy that gives us the privilege and opportunity to voice our dissent in safety and security. It is therefore our responsibility to make the most of that privilege and to speak out against the systems of oppression and hatred here and abroad. May Ali and Shira’s names be for a blessing — and may they inspire all of us to take action towards a more just and sane world.
Julie Dorf is the former co-chair of Jerusalem World Pride 2006 and founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. She lives in San Francisco and is currently senior adviser for the Council on Global Equality. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the council.