Gay Pride in Israel

Thousands of people attended the tenth annual gay pride parade in Tel Aviv on June 6, including A. and me. Since the parade went up Ben-Yehuda Street, just a block from our apartment, it was easy and convenient for us to attend, and we managed to get a few photos.

The signs in the picture below say "because education brings change."

What, I joked, would Theodor Herzl have made of this? I don’t know what Herzl would have thought about a gay pride parade – probably it would have shocked his nineteenth-century bourgeois sensibilities – but in a funny sort of way, it seems to me, the parade points to a realization of Zionist aspirations. As David Hazony recently noted in the June 11, 2008, issue of The New Republic, the Zionist movement expressed a yearning and a desire for Jews to become a “normal” nation. (For Zionists, that primarily meant an end to their abnormal mode of existence – “refusing to assimilate into other cultures, they were expelled from countries across Europe, forever needing to regroup in another host nation” – and possession of the “normal tools for [national] survival – such as land and [political] power.”) Hazony raised the questions whether Israel is now a normal country, and whether normalcy is overrated. Leaving aside the second question, it seems to me that gay pride parades have become a kind of indicator of normalcy, at least in the liberal democracies of the West. To put it differently, normal countries (in the West) have gay pride parades, and Israel is no exception. This is not to say there is no hostility or intolerance toward homosexuals in Israel – more on that below – but it does mean that homosexuals are not violently suppressed with the sanction of the state, as they are in the Palestinian territories and in other countries in the Middle East.

In Israel, opposition to gay pride parades is far stronger (or, to put it differently, the parades are less normalized) in Jerusalem than in Tel Aviv. “Unlike similar events in the more religious capital [Jerusalem], which have sparked bitter right-wing protests and violent demonstrations,” Haaretz reported, “the Tel Aviv parade faced little resistance.” “The parade here is different from the one in Jerusalem,” said one Tel Aviv parade participant. “Here, we celebrate the freedom and rights that we have – it's a festival, a happening, it's a joy. In Jerusalem, it’s simply a demonstration for human rights.”

Last year, a group of mostly religious Knesset members tried to ban the gay pride parade in Jerusalem. (According to Haaretz, their effort made little progress.) And, as the date of this year’s gay pride parade in Jerusalem neared, there was a spate of legal maneuvers and public denunciations from the religious sector. (I should add that opposition to the gay pride parade is not confined to ultra-Orthodox Jews, but seems to unite religious communities – Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – that are more often divided. Sadly, nothing unites people like intolerance.) The ultra-Orthodox have demanded a halt to the gay pride parade on a variety of grounds. Some appeals (presumably the ones intended for their own communities) have been overtly religious. For example, one rabbi flatly declared that homosexuals are “evil criminals that have no place with the God of Israel.” Other appeals have been non-religious (probably with non-Orthodox Israelis in mind) or have combined religious and non-religious rationales. For example, it has been argued that the parade threatens public order or (as Jerusalem’s Orthodox mayor put it in a letter to the Israeli Supreme Court) “offends, deliberately and unnecessarily, the feelings of Jews, Muslims and Christians, who view its sheer existence, and the blatant manner in which it takes place, as a desecration of the holy city and of the values with which they were raised.”

All of this grousing in Jerusalem about gay people marching in a parade grates against my American liberalism. (Of course, there is plenty of intolerance of homosexuals in America too, but it doesn’t comport easily with what Gunnar Myrdal once called the American Creed.) The British liberal John Stuart Mill said it best: “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.” That goes for homosexuals, I should think, as much as heterosexuals. So what struck me as interesting about the denunciations of the gay pride parade in Jerusalem was how religious opponents of the parade sometimes used liberal language and reasoning to justify their illiberal ends. I suspect that this reflects the constraints of Israeli political culture (which, though not exclusively liberal, nevertheless contains important liberal components), and the ineffectiveness of overtly and purely religious appeals beyond the ultra-Orthodox sector. I say that these appeals used liberal reasoning because they did not seek to ban the parade for the sake or well-being or salvation of homosexuals (a kind of we-know-what’s-best-for-you paternalism), but rather to prevent homosexuals from inflicting purported harms on others. Within liberal political thought, as the quote from Mill indicates, this is usually deemed a legitimate reason – sometimes the only legitimate reason – for restricting the liberty of competent adult individuals.

I don’t find this ploy very convincing. In his celebrated essay “On Liberty,” Mill defends individual liberty as a necessary condition for individual self-development. Objecting to what he calls the “Calvinistic theory” that “man needs no capacity but that of surrendering himself to the will of God,” Mill argues that G-d could not intend human beings to be “thus cramped and dwarfed,” but rather “gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded” and “takes delight in … every increase in their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.” Regarding the prevention of injury to others, Mill explains that “the means of development which the individual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the injury of others, are chiefly obtained at the expense of the development of other people.” In other words, while restrictions on individual liberty are generally bad because they stunt the individual’s self-development, it is justifiable to restrict X when X’s actions would stunt the development of Y. The implication here is that “injury of others” consists chiefly in hampering their self-development. But I don’t see how the gay pride parade hampers the self-development of ultra-Orthodox Jews. On the contrary, it could be argued that the parade fosters the self-development of its religious opponents.

In the first place, as Mill points out, they might learn something from “different experiments of living.” “This cannot well be gainsaid,” he notes, “by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices.” Now, I suppose this argument would hardly convince the haredim because they believe the Torah (as interpreted by their rabbis) has already revealed the best and most perfect ways and practices for them. Consequently, as far as they are concerned, they have nothing to learn from others, least of all from homosexuals. And perhaps they are right. As Mill points out, “different persons … require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another.”

Even so, the gay pride may still benefit its opponents in another way: it may force them to reflect upon and better understand the reasons for and value of their own ways and practices. As Mill points out, though customs may be good and suitable to the person who practices them, “yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it…. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties…. It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.” Without the stimulus of “different experiments of living,” especially those that are perceived to challenge or threaten one’s own, there is little impetus to develop the human faculties that Mill describes here, and instead of “an intelligent following of custom” one is likely to wind up with “a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.”

Three thousand people attended Jerusalem’s seventh annual gay pride parade on June 26, almost three weeks after the Tel Aviv parade. A. and I were not in the city then, so we didn’t attend. I don’t know if any of the parade’s religious opponents used it as an opportunity to develop their mental and moral faculties and to cultivate a more intelligent following of custom. However, I was happy to read that at least they did not mar this year’s parade with violent demonstrations, as they have done in the past. Perhaps that’s a start.