“I stopped reading Facebook feeds,” one of my queer Jewish American friends told me. I won’t say their name, but they are one of the many who showed similar sentiments.
We were speaking about increasing antisemitism among the LGBTQ community, and they were devastated.
Unfortunately, recent events in the Gaza Strip caused a peculiar situation when all Jewish people are blamed for the brutal response of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government; and LGBTQ Jews faced microaggression and direct violence, get insulted and attacked, even at Prides.
First and foremost, I want to say that indiscriminate slaughtering of Gazan civilians is definitely a war crime that should be condemned and avoided in the future, but there are a lot of articles written on this topic by others who are more competent on this topic. This time I deliberately wouldn’t discuss Hamas and Israeli politicians here, because this story is not about them — this story is about the way the LGBTQ community is treating their Jewish siblings right now.
There are not so many visible queer politicians among Netanyahu supporters, and they are not spending time in social media queer groups.
Moreover, right-wing LGBTQ people with connections to the Israeli government don’t care much about LGBTQ communities in the US, the UK, or Russia.
LGBTQ people who suffer from everyday antisemitism are the ones who need community the most. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many families don’t accept their LGBTQ children, and for many queer people, the LGBTQ community became the only family support they had.
And now antisemitism is taking this support away.
Why political opposition toward the Israeli government turned into Middle Ages-style bigotry is a very good question that doesn’t have a simple answer.
For a person who is not deeply into political and social issues, this situation may seem quite typical. After all, people are often used to judging the whole nation based on what their government did, right? Actually, wrong.
As a person from Ukraine, I may say that I spoke a lot about the Russian-Ukrainian war with LGBTQ and progressive activists in the West, and most of them showed enormous levels of compassion to “ordinary Russians,” despite the fact that the vast majority of the Russian population supports the Russian-Ukrainian war. Moreover, even after Russia in 2022 deliberately bombed the Mariupol Theater with Ukrainian children inside, Russians en masse weren’t called “child killers” by the American and European LGBTQ communities, and Russian activists still welcomed at Prides.
So it is definitely not about bombing children.
Also, all LGBTQ organizations in the US, UK, and European Union known to me that now openly support Palestine and call themselves anti-Zionists have never openly spoken up against concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and the genocide of Muslim Uyghur populations in East Turkestan, which is under Chinese occupation right now.
But LGBTQ groups and activists have never called themselves anti-Chinese, didn’t create a “queer for Eastern Turkistan” movement, and didn’t push Chinese LGBTQ people on campus to condemn the actions of the Chinese government.
So, it is also not about fighting Islamophobia.
What is it about? I have been a refugee in three different countries, and I have been involved in LGBTQ activism in some way in Russia, Ukraine, the UK, and the US, and I may say that antisemitism in LGBTQ communities exists in all those countries in some way.
And in different cultural contexts, antisemitism represents itself differently among LGBTQ people.
Me and three other LGBTQ activists in 2018 held a small demonstration in the middle of St. Petersburg on Victory Day, a big state-promoted holiday when Russians celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazism. We were holding posters about the common threats between Nazi Germany and the modern Russian Federation, including the persecution of LGBTQ people.
Suddenly, a very respected-looking man came to us, blaming us for an anti-Russian Western conspiracy just because we criticized the Russian government, and then started to say that the Holocaust never happened. When I yelled back at this man, telling him that I’m partly Jewish and daring him to repeat his antisemitic accusation, the man announced that Jews “paid to live in Auschwitz, so later they would create their own state.”
Ayman Eckford participates in a protest against anti-Semitism in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2018. (Photo courtesy of Ayman Eckford)
No one said anything against this man, but Russians were angry with me for “spoiling a holiday.”
Holocaust denial and everyday antisemitism are extremely prominent in Eastern Europe, from Poland to Russia. It is especially strong in Russia.
Russian pride about “victory over Nazis” is not about fighting Nazi ideology, but rather about being proud of a Soviet legacy. Simplifying Nazis is bad only because they killed Russian Soviets.
Even in state Russian Orthodox Churches, you could buy the “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” Nazi propaganda book.
LGBTQ activists in Russia are generally less antisemitic than the majority of the population, but all the same, they were raised in this culture, so they allow themselves antisemitic jokes and sometimes share Russian supremacy ideas.
So, for them, anti-Zionism is just another, new, and more appropriate way to hate Jews, and they didn’t even try to hide antisemitic rhetoric, especially because many prominent Jewish LGBTQ people moved to Israel or to the US, so the community is mostly non-Jewish.
The situation is quite different in America and Western Europe.
“Why are you supporting Palestine in a way you have never supported people from other war zones, including any other Muslim lands?” I asked my friend and activist from Sheffield in the UK.
“Because there is a first time in modern history when a country committed such an attack against civilians!” They answered me. “Especially with our government’s support.”
I closed my eyes, suddenly remembering the Iraqi city of Mosul that was wiped out to the ground by US-led allies, killing not just ISIS fighters, but also peaceful townsfolk stuck under the occupation of the self-proclaimed “caliphate,” or the Syrian town of Baqhuz Fawqani, where families of ISIS fighters, including babies and pregnant women, were bombed together with Syrian civilians.
And to mention, once again, Russian “clearing” operations and bombings in Chechnya and Ukraine, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s crimes against his own people in Syria, crimes committed by ISIS, or the ongoing war in Mali.
My friend has no idea how wrong they were.
Modern wars are extremely brutal, and there is an ongoing problem of dehumanizing enemies and war crimes that need to be solved. It’s a much broader problem than just Israeli‘s actions, but like one of my Jewish nonbinary friends is saying, “no Jews, no news.”
Anti-Israel graffiti on a building at the corner of 16th and Corcoran Streets, N.W., in Dupont Circle on Nov. 4, 2023. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)
Western antisemitism in the LGBTQ community, including the idea that all Jewish people are extremely privileged white oppressors, is based on a simple ignorance, no less than on prejudice. If in Russia I saw more activists who hate Jews and just want to be anti-Jewish in a modern way, in the UK and US LGBTQ community I saw more people who are generally caring about war crimes. But they refused to make their own analysis and refused to use the same standards for Jews that they use for other minorities — for example, not pushing them to condemn crimes they never committed.
The Palestinian rights movement has one of the biggest and more successful PR campaigns in modern history, while Jewish organizations failed to promote their agenda among non-Jewish populations.
“Most of them [LGBTQ activists and friends] don’t even know what Zionism is, to be really anti-Zionist,” my queer American friend noticed.
But, just like in Russia, some queer people are just bigots who now could show their hate publicly in a way that wouldn’t be condemned by their community.
Ayman Eckford is a freelance journalist, and an autistic ADHDer transgender person who understands that they are trans* since they were 3-years-old.
