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To many, the fact that I am queer, trans and Jewish seems to stand at odds with the fact that I spend my nights and weekends fighting for a free Palestine; however, I see all of my identities as core components of the reason why I fight for Palestine.
On a warm Sunday morning in April, I was getting ready to play ultimate frisbee at India Point Park. I was warming up with someone in the group and I mentioned that I needed to leave early to head to a Jewish-led Palestine solidarity event. Every Sunday, I lead a grief space for those killed in Gaza where we meet at the Providence pedestrian bridge by Plant City to share teachings, songs, and poems. We end with the mourner’s kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning.
In response to this my friend just said, “That seems ironic.” The comment took me off guard. To many, the fact that I am queer, trans and Jewish seems to stand at odds with the fact that I spend my nights and weekends fighting for a free Palestine; however, I see all of my identities as core components of the reason why I fight for Palestine.
For decades, queer and trans Jews have been a visible part of the Palestine solidarity struggle, especially here in the United States. Like many queer and trans Jews, I organize with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest Jewish anti-Zionist grassroots organization in the country. In the local Rhode Island chapter, many of our leaders are queer and trans people. There has never been another point in my life where I have gotten to be in community with this many queer and trans Jews.
Having lost so much Jewish community over politics since October 7th, and having already been at the margins of normative Jewish community as a non-binary person, I have found a home in JVP. At a meeting this winter, having gone around the circle with our names and pronouns, I realized that at least 75% of us were trans or gender nonconforming. While this is not normal at a synagogue, it does seem fairly typical of young, anti-Zionist Jewish organizers.
As queer and trans people, we are already deeply tapped into intersectional fights for liberation with the understanding that all struggles are intrinsically linked, because all systems of oppression reinforce one another and cannot be fought in isolation. Let’s use policing as an example to dive into this further.
The kind of police force and violence used against queer and trans folks during the Stonewall Riots is inflicted on Palestinians every day. Under Israeli occupation and apartheid, all Palestinian people experience overpolicing, surveillance, and violence. Given that American police and the Israeli military exchange training, weapons, and software, the ways in which Palestinians and marginalized Americans are policed has significant overlap.
For example, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, a movement with significant queer and trans black leadership, the Baltimore police department was shown to have used excessive force that was directly linked to the training they received from the Israeli military. It is clear how my fight as queer and trans person is linked to Black and Palestinian liberation. All of us are fighting for safety from an establishment that has always defended white, cis-hetero patriarchy.
These kinds of links are why it makes sense that many leaders within the Palestine solidarity space are also queer and trans Jews. Sarah Schulman, a queer, Jewish woman and one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Peace, was also instrumental in the ACT UP movement. Since the early 2000’s, Schulman has advocated for academic boycotts against Israel and vocally called out the practice of “pinkwashing.”
Pinkwashing is a tactic used by institutions and corporations around the world. It is used by the Israeli government to distract the world from their human rights violations against Palestinians, tokenizing pro-LGBTQ culture to use as a veneer of false liberalism. Though Israel has highly publicized pride parades and queer nightlife, the fact is that right-wing homophobia is normative in Israeli culture, and gay marriage is not legal in Israel.
As a queer person, I fight for Palestine because no amount of rainbow capitalism can cover up the fact that the Israeli government is homophobic, intolerant, and racist. Superficial public relations campaigns voicing support for LGBTQIA+ rights are not going to distract me from Israel’s exploitation, mass murder, displacement, and imprisonment of Palestinians.
I know what it is like to live in the margins of the mainstream. For me as a non-binary Jewish person, I have been unable to participate in many family functions that maintain gender segregation, and even in non-orthodox synagogues, I am used to being surrounded by people who are not like me and do not understand my life experience. After having already come out to my parents about my sexuality at 23, and my gender identity at 27, I had to “come out” again to them at age 30 about my anti-Zionist identity. This political coming out actually went the worst of all of them, but it was necessary.
I have spent the past years lying to them about my politics and the organizing I do, and I even lied to them about spending almost two weeks in the occupied West Bank visiting Palestinians on the other side of the apartheid wall. While navigating this strain in our relationship has been challenging, I also feel better knowing that I am more fully living out my morals as an anti-Zionist Jew.
Long before October 7th, 2023, there was already so much about Judaism and questions of belonging in the mainstream Jewish community that I had to interrogate and reimagine for myself. I never felt aligned politically with the people I was sharing ritual space with. I felt, and still feel, that many of my fellow Jews have so thoroughly misunderstood what Judaism tells us about the fight for justice and the value of life. Seeing as I already had to question my place in Judaism and Judaism’s place in my identity, it also felt natural to question and refute Zionism in its entirety, both as a concept and as the backbone of American Jewish identity.
There is a level of complacency that exists when you can show up in a space and know that you are living the normative experience. You do not have to question why systems function as they do because they work for you. In understanding links of oppression and what it means to be in solidarity with people with different lived experience than I do, I am proud to have moral clarity about why it is that I stand with other queer and trans Jews as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Jackie Goldman (they/them) is public health researcher and community organizer in Providence, Rhode Island.