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Haifa Pride

On Friday, I trekked up north along with a few other interns, staff members and supporters to help represent Open House in the annual Haifa Pride March. I’m not really sure what I was expecting from it, seeing as I knew it would probably be smaller than the one in Tel Aviv but it did take me by surprise just how different everything was from what I saw in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. At one point, I remarked to another marcher at how the two events seemed completely unrelated and he said, “Yeah, Tel Aviv Pride is very American”. The short of it was that Pride in Tel Aviv was a party and Pride in Haifa was a protest. Tel Aviv was about celebrating how far the LGBT community has come in the city and Haifa was about how much work still needs to be done.

To elaborate, Tel Aviv Pride is somewhat unique in that the municipality funds nearly the entirety of the Parade and the Pride Week festivities. Not only does the city put a lot of money into it, it gets a lot back. Tel Aviv seems to be on the frontier of “gay tourism”, even earning itself the title of the World’s #1 Gay Tourist Spot. On the other hand, as I learned at the march, the Haifa Pride committee is in a similar position to Open House here in Jerusalem, in that they don’t receive any financial support from the municipality for the March.

This rift between Tel Aviv and the rest of the country is apparent in so much of the LGBT discourse I’ve seen in the last few weeks. Numerous people I work with have voiced their frustrations at how when they argue for tolerance for the community in Jerusalem, they are too often greeted with “then why don’t you move to Tel Aviv?” I’ve seen the term “pinkwashing” come up quite a few times now, with a slightly different slant than I’ve heard it in the US. In the context that I’d heard it in the US, pinkwashing stands for how Israel is allegedly touting its status as the best place to be gay in within the Middle East (a title which unfortunately doesn’t mean much) to cover up for the occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. In the context that I’ve heard it here, Israeli LGBT activists point out that the issue with pinkwashing is that it detracts from battles within the community that still need to be fought – basically, bragging about how gay-friendly Israel only really shows the situation in Tel Aviv and glosses over the rest of the country. While, to be honest, I never totally agreed with the term ‘pinkwashing’ as it’s used in the US, I also have started to notice the disproportionate rhetoric for LGBT issues in Tel Aviv compared with the rest of the country, which seems to deal with somewhat more pressing issues than “gay tourism”. Not to mention, it does strike me as odd at just how eager Tel Aviv is to erase the memory of the shooting at their LGBT center three years ago, especially since the gunman still has not been identified. Why is that Jerusalem holds its March on the anniversary of the shooting as a reminder, but Tel Aviv continues to hold theirs in June? All in the name of gay tourism, I guess.

So keeping that all in mind, Haifa Pride definitely seemed like a breath of fresh reality. This is not to say the event was somber, but rather, it was quite inspiring. The theme of the event, as many of the speakers brought up, was that Haifa should be a city for everyone. As such, this wasn’t only a struggle against homophobia, but against racism (one speaker specifically detailed the links between this and the racism that Ethiopian and Mizrachi Jews face in the city), sexism and any other oppression that plagued the city. But what I found most inspiring was the feeling of solidarity going around. Although there were only a couple of hundred people here compared to Tel Aviv’s couple of thousands, the unity among the Marchers, some carrying Israeli flags, some representing Palestinian solidarity, some from LGBT Orthodox groups and a even a couple of Knesset members was really unlike anything I’ve seen before. Many people came over to take pictures with us and to tell us how excited and grateful they were that we came all the way from Jerusalem to march with them and how they can’t wait to do the same in Jerusalem’s March. I left feeling much more uplifted than I did in Tel Aviv, even if this March was much more honest about the situation.

Ayelet

Some pictures:

 

June 24th, 2012 | Category: Uncategorized

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