Love, Rage and the Occupation, Part 3: the JOH protest vigil (2006)

Remember I posted about my article Love, Rage and the Occupation, which got published on Journal of Bisexuality? So, I discovered that I can put the text on my blog without breaching copyrights. Now everyone can read it for free. Hooray!

Since this article is very long, I’m going to be posting it in parts over the next few weeks. This is part 2 out of maybe 8-9, so stay tuned for further updates.

Previous:
Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine – Part 1
Love, Rage and the Occupation, Part 2: Queeruption (2006)

Second story (2006): the JOH protest vigil

In that summer, the Jerusalem pride march was canceled.

Jerusalem Pride became a hotly contested territory three years after its inception. From 2002 and until 2004, it ran annually, relatively smoothly and with few negative side effects. However, the parade came to national attention in 2005, when a single terrorist (an orthodox Jew) stabbed three of the attendants with a knife, with intent to kill. (Interestingly enough, the person who jumped the perpetrator and caused his arrest, was one of the Jerusalem bisexual activists). When, one year later, the Jerusalem Open House¹ had started organizing an international pride parade in Jerusalem (under the ironic title of “Love Without Borders”²), a city dominated by religious populations sprouted a hitherto-unforeseen coalition between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities not to let us dirty perverts march in “their” city. The police’s official reason for denying permission to march was… the Lebanon war, deciding it was “unsafe” to march at such a time.

Previous years: The pink black block in Jerusalem Pride. Credit: Oren Ziv

Love, Rage and the Occupation, Part 2: Queeruption (2006)

Remember I posted about my article Love, Rage and the Occupation, which got published on Journal of Bisexuality? So, I discovered that I can put the text on my blog without breaching copyrights. Now everyone can read it for free. Hooray!

Since this article is very long, I’m going to be posting it in parts over the next few weeks. This is part 2 out of maybe 8-9, so stay tuned for further updates.

Previous:
Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine – Part 1

First story (2006): Queeruption

My story begins in one of the critical moments in the history of queer anti-occupation activism in Israel¹, one that many of us now recall as a seminal moment in our personal histories as activists. This was the summer of 2006. Black Laundry, the first queer group decidedly working against the occupation, had just finished dying out only a year beforehand, and I never got to be a member. (By the time I had heard of their existence – thinking, for the first time in my life: “Oh my god! There are others who think like me!” – they had already begun to disperse. Later on I heard that even had I known of their existence on time, I couldn’t have joined – they refused to accept bisexuals [a policy which some claim later changed]).