We left Princeton early in June, after the annual Pride Picnic, but before most pride events, including the Pride Parade. So it was a pleasant surprise when we saw the posters advertising a pride event in Trieste. I had read the news from last year, and was mildly familiar with the organization running it, Smarza Pride. From what I had read about it last year, it was a mildly rebellious, small, event, with a large emphasis on countering the homophobic government of Italy.
Pride has been a historically left-wing event, and as one leftist group after another became anti-Israel (or rather, showed their antisemitic colors), many queer, Zionist Jews, including myself, became fearful that Pride in 2024 would be mostly made up of anti-Israel events. That was not the case in Princeton, but we went to this event with low expectations.
As we walked to the Passeggio where the event was located, I noticed a person sporting a skirt made of the anarcha-feminist flag and a shirt that read “… against genocide” (part of it was obscured). They were clearly going to the same event we were going to, and it was the first indication that this event included anti-Israel elements.
Once we had arrived there, it became evident that the social and political climate was one very different from Princeton. There was a large group of punks, including one sporting anarchist symbols and another with a shirt showing Che Guevara. Guevara sent gay people to prison camps and publicly called them “perverts”, but these facts seem to hold little sway. I saw a few keffiyehs, and some young adults holding signs in English depicting watermelons, but there wasn’t much else.
The first speaker came by, asking that no one film individuals without their permission (a local journalist with a camera left), and talked quite a bit. Since it was in Italian, I could understand very little of it, but he was talking about queer people and politics, so a standard pride speech. When we got closer, we saw more of the speaker truck that had been sporting a rainbow flag. On the side of it, there was a large Palestinian flag. That was our cue to go.
As we left, I saw the massive police presence. Multiple trucks were stationed there. This appeared to be to protect that event. Later that night, as we walked through the main Piazza, we saw a large group that turned out to be the pride parade from early, having made a procession over. The legality of flying the Palestinian flag in Italy isn’t clear, and so no flags were flown, but red, green, and black colored smoke was being pumped into the air, and there were “Queers For Palestine” posters, a group that it is hard to believe exists unironically. There were Italian chants of “Free Palestine! Communist Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Music was blasting, saying something about Gaza, genocide, occupation, and terrorism. The speaker truck drove out, and most of the procession followed. A few of the people holding Palestinian signs dispersed. The parade looked to be over.
***
This was not a small phenomena. All across the queer world, various organizations have embraced the Palestinian cause as a rallying point. Why? Palestinians don’t want their support. Queer individuals are regularly persecuted, tortured, murdered, and lynched in Gaza. The only reason such acts aren’t as common in the West Bank is because the Israeli “occupation” provides safety and security. Queers in Gaza receive asylum in Israel. Tel Aviv holds the largest pride parade in the Middle East and the second largest in Asia. The speaker of the Knesset, appointed by the right-wing majority, is gay. The facts go on and on, but Israel remains the only safe haven for queers in the Middle East, and Palestinian culture and governments, particularly Hamas, are homophobic beyond the most radical extreme in the West.
Why is it that this cause has become a cornerstone of the Pride movement in recent years? There are a variety of reasons that this is pointed to, but the most common is intersectionality. This is, in short, the view that viewing conflicts and disputes as individual events or “struggles” (i.e. Russia and Ukraine, people of color and racist systems, poor people and poverty) are wrong, and the proper thing to do is to view them all in one lens, and to make decisions on support and activism based on that. This reductionist viewpoint has become far more popular these days (even pre-Covid and Black Lives Matter, the phrase “struggles are connected” had more than tripled amongst books), typically viewed through the “oppressor vs oppressed” dynamic. In this mindset, Israel, being viewed as more powerful than Hamas cannot be supported, and the ally of “oppressed” queer individuals must be Palestine.
This viewpoint is moronic. Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh) is also far weaker than the international alliance against it. Terrorists and other political mass murderers are almost always fighting against a more powerful opponent. Additionally, whoever is “oppressed” can, unlike value-based systems, be twisted to fit virtually any narrative. Russia already does this, by merely claiming to be defending the “oppressed people” of Donetsk and Luhansk against the “oppressor” that is America. With this viewpoint taken to the extreme, it’s quite possible that we’ll see these homophobic groups celebrated at future pride events.
Additionally, this dual-axis viewpoint simply isn’t true. The world is more complex than a system of oppressors and oppressed. If Hamas remains in power in Gaza, life will become worse for the oppressed queers, atheists, women, and general people remaining there. Amongst other causes, the fact still remains that sometimes two just causes are simply not connected. Climate change and gender equality do not depend on each other.
Finally, the queer liberation movement has not gotten to a point in which we can be complacent enough to merely focus on other causes for moral reasons. This is particularly true in Italy. The right-wing Italian government has been rolling back queer rights from the get-go, recently preventing lesbian couples from caring for their children. It does not make sense that rather than fight the many battles that need to be fought for equality, the movement is preoccupied with pseudo-activism for unrelated and even contradictory causes.
During the Cold War, a term was popularized to describe non-Soviet, well-meaning Westerners who, through innocence, supported Soviet policies directly opposed to their viewpoints. Liberals who supported social justice, and, while doing so, supported the tyrannical USSR, were called “useless idiots” by Lenin. This looks to be a similar system. The vast social change, in which a progressive could support regressive, reactionary, oppressive regimes appeared to be sudden, but the groundwork had been laid for a decade. Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response merely gave it an opportunity to burst through the surface. The social justice left, from the heeding of their systems and leaders, supported the Palestinian “resistance”, a far-right, anti-communist, genocidal, theocratic, misogynistic, homophobic government. The Queers For Palestine movement grew out of the reductive intersectionality movement, and thousands of social justice warriors supported their own destruction. Chickens For KFC moved into the political mainstream.
But one fact still remains, that destroys the entirety of the well-meaning veneer; the fact that Jews, the most discriminated and oppressed group, indigenous to Judea or Israel, were never included in this club of oppressed individuals. The intersectionality movement backed freedom for all minorities, except for the Jewish ones. This double standard, consistent in many other radical political movements, confirms what I have long suspected: this movement was, yet again, antisemitic.
***
The Jewish and Zionist movements, ironically, are some of the most pro-queer. Jews are the most accepting religious group of both gay marriage and transgender people–more so than even atheists. Many Jewish queers have reported feeling far safer amongst Zionist groups than pride events. My experiences mirror that.
The day we left for Italy (an adventure in itself), we attended the Run/Walk For Their Lives event in Central Park, calling for the freedom of the hostages. Amongst the many Israeli flags, I spotted a few Jewish pride flags. No arguments or disagreements arose, to the contrary, I saw some people express gratitude. I know that the Jewish community will accept me for being queer, but the queer community does not seem to accept me for being Jewish.
Furthermore, the movement itself is damaged by the radical viewpoints espoused. Doing so alienates allies and other people within the movement. At the same time, it makes alliances with extremist, bigoted, groups that, unlike the pragmatic, moderate, alliance, do not support queer rights. Smarza Pride, the grassroots organization that ran this event, seemed to want to create a radical, “fight the power” movement. But in doing so, it, and other organizations worldwide, greatly damage acceptance. This is foolish, and that was what occurred to me later: this was not Smarza Pride, this was Stolto Pride.
This is not representative of the majority, but it is a coup within the movement that needs to be reversed, urgently. I follow a policy of not attending events that I do not agree with fully, so we left this event. But there is not an alternative pride event here in Trieste. So a shift has to occur within. Queers and allies must stop attending antisemitic events, and begin to call for moderation. And those outside the community should ensure that moderate, non-antisemitic pride events are not ostracized.
Smarza Pride was a disappointing start to our time in Trieste, but it was not a surprising one. The radicalism and false intersectionality present in social justice and queer movements has clearly made it so that pride events all over the world must now support radical, antisemitic, and homophobic causes. We must now fight back against this restructuring, push through reforms, and, when necessary, create queer, progressive, moderate, Zionist, and Jewish movements that pursue true equality and freedom for all.