TEL AVIV, Israel — Over 100,000 people from across the globe gathered in Tel Aviv on Friday to celebrate Pride Month — the biggest one of its kind in the Middle East.
The event was organized by the city government of Tel Aviv, along with its Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) Center.
Last year’s event got cancelled hours before it was scheduled to begin due to escalating tensions in the region, following Israel’s military strikes in Iran.
Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Sharren Haskel, said this is “the second time Iran tried to sabotage the pride parade.”
The first Pride demonstration in Tel Aviv took place in 1979, while the modern, large-scale Tel Aviv Pride Week began in 1998.
Israel claims to be the most progressive country in the Middle East when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. In 2015, transgender Israelis could legally change the gender marker on their national ID cards without needing gender-affirming surgery.
While it is not the first in the region to enact such a policy — as Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a historic fatwa in the 80s, which permitted gender confirmation surgery and subsequently allowed transgender individuals to change the gender markers on their birth certificates — Israel takes pride in strides it is making for the LGBTQ+ community as homosexuality continues to be illegal in most parts of the region.
However, despite the claim and the large-scale event that draws hundreds and thousands annually, other LGBTQ+ rights in the country continue to be stalled, with same-sex marriages still not recognized.
One of the hindrances is the country’s highly religious population, with about 74 percent Jewish, 18 percent Muslim, and 2 percent Christian, among others.
Jonathan Gill Rosen Maman, chairman of Havruta, a religious LGBTQ+ organization based in Tel Aviv, told The Manila Times that acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals and adherence to religious values should not be viewed as mutually exclusive goals.
He believes that the country can embrace diversity while remaining faithful to its religious traditions.
"Our societies are so polarized, and everything is a zero-sum game," Maman said.
He warned that growing political and social polarization often stems from fundamentalism rather than differences in opinions.
"If you're moderate enough, you're entitled to be right-leaning or left-leaning, but you have to make room for people who have opposing views," he said.
According to Maman, Israel's challenge is not choosing between religious values and LGBTQ+ inclusion but finding ways for both communities to coexist through dialogue, mutual respect, and a rejection of efforts to silence dissenting voices.
"We cancel all the time. Right people cancel; left people cancel. That is something that we need to let go of," he said.
The polarization has seen extremes in previous Pride events. In 2016, an "ultra-Orthodox" man stabbed a 15-year-old girl during the Jerusalem Pride March, which locals say is much more political than that of its Tel Aviv counterpart and garners only a few thousand people.
The following year, because of the incident, Jerusalem Pride saw an increase in participation, drawing 40,000 protesters demanding accountability from the Israeli government as well as justice for the girl who was killed.
Alon Reichman of Tel Aviv’s Rainbow tour told The Manila Times that the differences between the two lie in their history.
“The personality of Tel Aviv is much more Israeli and the personality of Jerusalem is much more Jewish,” he explained, highlighting the stark contrast between the two Pride celebrations.
To prevent this from happening again, Reichman said it is important that both Pride events unite to forward LGBTQ+ rights.
“We can't only be in Tel Aviv; we need to do it in Jerusalem. We need to fight for rights there,” he said, highlighting the growing movement in Tel Aviv to join the demonstration in Jerusalem.
Pinkwashing
For LGBTQ+ activists in the country, the staging of a Pride march is not enough.
In an interview with The Manila Times, Anat Nir, an LGBTQ+ activist, accused the Israeli government of “pinkwashing” — or using its progressive image on LGBTQ+ rights to deflect criticism of its treatment of Palestinians and other human rights concerns.
“Israel seems like a very liberal place for the LGBT community, and it’s sometimes true, but many of our rights are based on Supreme Court rulings, not on legislation,” Nir explained.
Nir noted that the legal protections enjoyed by Israel’s LGBTQ+ community are not enshrined in law but rest on judicial decisions. This makes them vulnerable to political shifts, especially as efforts intensify to reshape the Supreme Court.
Nir added that the current political climate in the country is making the Supreme Court “more conservative,” which she said could “roll back” all of the rights they achieved through their activism.
Also, significant government budget earmarked for local Pride events across Israel has been suspended. The result, she says, is a chilling effect on LGBTQ+ visibility and safety outside Tel Aviv.
“We had a big, big, big budget to create local Pride all over Israel so people could feel safe and come out. Now, that’s on hold. Violence is increasing, and fewer young people are coming out,” Nir said.
Nir also pointed to a surge in anti-gay propaganda, much of it imported from its ally the United States, which is fueling a more intolerant climate.
“Anti-gay propaganda is starting to sink in. Many of the texts are coming from America, and it’s making things harder for our community,” she said.
Nir accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “pinkwashing”: promoting Israel’s LGBTQ+-friendly image abroad while neglecting or undermining those rights at home.
“He talks about gay rights in English, but not in Hebrew,” Nir said. “It’s a tactic to distract from other issues, especially the conflict with the Palestinians."
Nina Halevy of Gila Project, Israel's first and oldest nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing transgender rights, echoed Nir’s sentiments.
Halevy told The Manila Times that, similar to the regressive policies in other countries, like US President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" which recognizes that there are only two genders in the country (male and female), Israel is also regressing in LGBTQ+ rights.
“They want to showcase; they want to have a big pride with floats in Tel Aviv once a year, but underneath this facade, things are really not okay,” Halevy said.
She highlighted the growing struggles of the transgender community in the country, where police target transgender people when they protest.
Her group revealed that in their recent protest, a transgender woman was harassed by police officers.
“Having a very ultra-right-wing government at the moment, very fascist and very ultra-religious and messianic, as well as being corrupted, it's very difficult for us right now because the police are very, very openly politicizing any sort of political demonstration,” Halevy said.
She added that violence against transgender people in the country has been increasing. While they cannot provide numbers, their group alleged that the police are targeting trans women during their protests.
"Trans people are arrested; they're treated horribly by the police, and they're targeted,” she said.
Gila Project said it did not attend the march this year to protest the alleged pinkwashing.
"Pride does not belong to the government, which uses our identities to whitewash a reality of destruction and criminal policy. And it does not belong to the pinkwashing that enlists our queerness into agendas that stand against human rights and social justice,” the group said in a statement.
Instead, the group said it will continue to work in outreach areas and highlight the intersectional struggles across marginalized groups within and outside of the LGBTQ+ community.
“That is exactly why we cannot celebrate a liberation that is not liberation for all. You cannot cry out against the dehumanization done to us without seeing the dehumanization done to others in our names — and that is exactly why we are here,” the group explained.
For Nir, the solution to making Israel’s LGBTQ+ movement more progressive lies in linking LGBTQ+ advocacy to the broader struggle for human rights — including Palestinian rights and a lasting peace.
“There should be a Palestinian country and an Israeli country next to each other, living in peace,” she said. “We as a gay community, in my eyes, need to make sure that we’re fighting for everyone’s human rights, not just our own.”
Nir cautioned against complacency, urging the LGBTQ+ community to resist being used as a “fig leaf” for state policies and to push for genuine equality and justice.
“If we want our human rights to be respected, we need to fight for the human rights of others as well. That’s the only way forward,” Nir said.
