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Friday June 27, 2003

At Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade: Oaklander joins throngs of the 'weird and wonderful'

ABBY COHN and JENNY HAZAN
Special to the Bulletin

Dara Silverman of Oakland hadn't realized that Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade would fall in the middle of her monthlong trip to Israel.

When she found out that it did, the 30-year-old political organizer jumped at the chance to join the throngs of celebrants and marchers in last Friday's second annual event.

Visiting Israel for the first time on a Palestinian solidarity mission, Silverman is a queer Jew active locally in such movements as Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for a Free Palestine.

She described the parade's mood as "fierce and joyous and proud and angry -- and loving."

Silverman joined about 60 Israeli, Palestinian and international supporters of a group called Black Laundry, who donned sandwich signs bearing slogans referring to the oppression of both gay and Palestinian people.

"Their message is something that I think is very important, which is that you can't fight one oppression or occupation without fighting another," said Silverman in a phone interview Tuesday from Israel.

The parade was postponed for a week after the suicide bombing of a bus that took the lives of 17 people, including American immigrant and gay rights advocate Alan Beer.

Wearing a black T-shirt, Silverman marched with a sign that read: "Stop the Occupation" in English on one side and "Make Love Your Only Occupation" in Hebrew on the other.

Noting that the parade was just the second ever in Jerusalem, "it's a really different feeling," she said. "The effect of queer people being out in public is something new and exciting in Jerusalem" compared to San Francisco.

"The fact that people weren't jaded and were making political connections to other struggles and seeing they were all connected was really exciting to me.

"I love being Jewish," Silverman said, noting that her political activism comes from "a place of tikkun olam and Jewish values."

Jerusalem's Safra Square was full of rainbow-striped flags, umbrellas, hats, scarves and ice pops as participants gathered to kick off the march. It was dubbed the Love Without Borders Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade.

"This is the best pride event," said 24-year-old Yovar Rabinovich, a lesbian from Ramat Hasharon. "Pride in Tel Aviv is so mainstream and commercial. You can only be gay, young and beautiful. Here, it's still open. You can be all sorts of different things. There's room for everyone weird and wonderful."

The crowd included one young woman in tzitzit (and little else), a teenage boy in a hot pink tutu with matching water wings, and one angel-winged, bare-chested, rainbow-painted lady.

Like last year's inaugural event, many marchers used the parade as a platform for voicing left-wing political views.

"I think it was exciting because people aren't jaded about doing queer activism here," said Silverman, who thinks that similar parades in the United States have lost their political edge and "gotten very co-opted by big corporations."

Also in attendance were members of the Meretz and Shinui political parties, which seek full recognition of gay and lesbian couples.

The march's start at Jerusalem City Hall followed recent remarks by newly elected Mayor Uri Lupoliansky, who called the parade an abomination in comments to the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Lupoliansky had initially backed the gay community.

Standing across the street from the square with some 24 demonstrators, haredi protester Baruch Ben-Yosef asserted, "they are desecrating our holy city with their perversions."

Three days earlier, vandals tore down and burned dozens of rainbow flags. The banned, right-wing Kach movement claimed responsibility, but Jerusalem police have made no arrests.

Parade organizers were nonetheless satisfied with the march. "At the end of the day, the city did not pull back on a single commitment that it had made in terms of demonstrating support," said Hagai Elad, director of Open House, a community center for gays in Jerusalem.

For her part, Silverman was likewise pleased and noted that the counterprotesters were "so small compared to the numbers of people there to celebrate their queer identities."

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