3 min read
It wasn't the parades and the parties that most astonished my friends going to Tel Aviv for Gay Pride recently, it was Israeli passport control. They had joined the back of the queue at Ben Gurion arrivals with the usual trepidation, being a group of (distinctly non-Jewish looking) men travelling alone and expecting a stern inquisition. On reaching the front of the queue, my friend approached the counter and asked if his partner should join him or wait in line to be seen alone. "Is he a relation?" said the customs official. "Yes, he's my husband," said my friend. "Then of course he should join you" said the official sternly, "you're a family".
It was the lack of sentimentality that made the official's response so moving. He was not seeking to confer special status on my friends, nor was he seeking to make a statement about his "acceptance" or "tolerance". He was just firmly, unthinkingly telling it like it is: you're a family.
There is something wonderful and something deeply Israeli about this. It is at once both nonchalant and profound. And it got me wondering: in how many other countries would gay men be treated with such respect by public authorities? This encounter was a fitting prelude to the main event a few weeks ago, where almost 200,000 people partied and celebrated in Tel Aviv for the annual "Gay Pride Parade". Shops, apartments and hotels spent a week draped in rainbows and Stars of David, the ancient symbol of God's covenant with man, flying alongside the hexagram of the modern Jewish state.
But for all the prettiness of this juxtaposition, I began to wonder why any of this should matter to me, a heterosexual, British Jew. Sure, I have some very close gay friends but then who doesn't nowadays? I have some Scottish friends, too but, trust me, I'm not remotely moved by Burn's Night. There is no doubt that my pride in Tel Aviv's embrace of the gay community is as much about what it is, as what it represents.
It is a metaphor for Israel's vibrant pluralism and love of life. It would have been easy for Israel to develop as a serious, dour, religious place where conformity was what was sought. By contrast, as Julie Burchill wrote of her recent visit, "the first thing that strikes one upon first visiting Israel is that these people appear to bear no relation whatsoever to the bookish, anxious stereotype of the Jew."
This is a metaphor for what is Israel's vibrant love of life
But there was something else that made me take note of Gay Pride this year. It was my knowledge that not far away from Tel Aviv, in parts of Syria, gay men are being hurled off of high buildings to fall, blindfolded, into baying crowds below. If they survived the fall, the crowd put down their iphones to reach for rocks with which to stone the body to death. This is a very modern savagery: isolating people perceived to be different and seeking them out for torture.
The comparison between that glorious celebration of diversity in Tel Aviv with this dark spectacle in Syria is what I find painful and extraordinary. It is my acute realisation that, with the luck of the roulette wheel, born a few hundred miles apart, some gay men will live in joy and freedom and some will die cruelly.
But what is more extraordinary still is that it is not those oppressive states which so many Western liberals line up to attack, but Israel itself. The National Union of Students recently rejected a motion to condemn ISIS on the grounds that the motion was "Islamophobic" but guess which country's goods it has agreed to boycott this month ? Do gay students who form part of the NUS's impressive LGBT platform recognise this irony? While they claim to be on the side of the progressive agenda, they strangle the only democracy in the Middle East that boasts such a thriving and open gay scene.
There is nothing Israel can say or do that could persuade the fanatics at the NUS or the dwindling, failing bunch of boycotters that Israel is a democracy of which liberal people should be proud. But the fair-minded public can learn the truth from these images of modern Tel Aviv, where gay people celebrate; where Arabs and Jews share the same beaches.
This is why it matters that pop stars go and perform, why tourists go and come back in increasing numbers with stories of confounded expectations. The anti-Israel movement cannot triumph over the lived experiences of individuals. And from the moment they arrived at Customs, my gay friends will never again believe the lies told about this rainbow nation.
