Pride and Palestine
Pride began with protest. It wasn’t corporate. It wasn’t performative. And it wasn’t partisan. It was a demand to be seen — to live openly, love freely, and walk the same streets without fear. The rainbow flag was never meant to replace the American one. It was meant to fly beside it. A symbol of belonging, not separation. A call for recognition in a time when being gay could get you fired, banned from serving your country, or silenced in your own home.
That movement was about inclusion. Equality. The radical idea that queer Americans were still Americans.
But somewhere along the march, the mission got hijacked.
Across major U.S. cities, Pride 2025 took on a new script. “No Pride in Genocide” was shouted from floats and spray-painted onto signs. Protesters demanded bans on defense contractors and police officers. They chanted for Palestinian liberation and accused Israel of “pink washing”—the supposed tactic of using LGBTQ rights to distract from Palestinian suffering. “Dykes Against Ge(NO)cide” marched. Campus groups issued ultimatums. The message: solidarity means siding against the Jewish state.
They call it intersectionality. But too often, it’s just erasure.
Intersectionality, when used responsibly, is a tool to understand injustice. But when weaponized, it becomes blind. It punishes identity instead of understanding it. And right now, too many in the LGBTQ movement are closing their eyes to a basic truth: the nation they want dismantled is the only one in the Middle East where they could live free.
In Gaza, ruled by Hamas, homosexuality is a crime. In Iran, it’s a death sentence. In Saudi Arabia, it’s punishable by execution. In Qatar and Yemen, it’s prison. Lebanon’s Pride events are banned or raided. Turkey outlaws public LGBTQ demonstrations. Even in relatively moderate Jordan and Bahrain, being openly gay can cost you your job, your safety, your life.
Contrast that with Israel — home to Tel Aviv Pride, legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, adoption rights, and access to transgender healthcare. It’s not perfect. No nation is. But in a region defined by repression, it stands alone in defending the rights of sexual minorities.
So how did we get here — to a moment where young queers in American cities chant slogans on behalf of regimes that would jail or kill them?
The answer is complicated. Some of it is ignorance. Some of it is peer pressure. Part of it is something harder to name: the romance of resistance. The idea that justice lies with the aggrieved, no matter their agenda. That if a group claims to be oppressed, it must also be righteous. The language of resistance has become a fashion statement. Flags wave. Chants echo. Nuance disappears.
No one is saying Palestinian civilians deserve to suffer. Many Jews — in Israel and around the world — have long supported a two-state solution. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, forcibly removing its own citizens in the hope that peace would follow. Instead, Hamas took over. They didn’t build schools. They built tunnels. And on October 7, they used them.
Pride used to be a space for survivors. Now it struggles to make space for them. The hostages who endured months underground. The women subjected to rape and sexual torture—crimes confirmed, documented, and ignored. In any other context, they would be honored. But when the victims are Jewish, the silence is deafening.
Accusations of genocide for a country defending itself after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Somehow, in a movement built to protect the vulnerable, the one minority excluded from the rainbow is the one that wears stars of David.
When Jewish students are assaulted for simply being Jewish, when Israeli flags are treated as threats, when chants of “globalize the intifada” go unchecked in queer spaces, it sends a message: you are not one of us. Unless you disavow who you are. Unless you hate what we hate.
That doesn’t just alienate critics. It alienates friends. People who marched with you. People who stood beside you when being out wasn’t trendy. They now look at Pride and feel afraid — not because they’ve changed, but because the movement has. Because the cause that once demanded inclusion now traffics in exclusion. Because allyship has been replaced by absolution, offered only to those who pass the ideological test.
Pride was never built on that kind of moral selectivity. The original gay rights movement — from Stonewall to ACT UP — stood for something concrete: life, dignity, equality. It wasn’t about spectacle. It was about survival. It fought to join the table, not flip it over. It treated truth not as a trend but as a principle.
This shift hasn’t gone unnoticed. Jillian Michaels — a public figure, openly gay, and deeply invested in LGBTQ progress — has warned against it. She’s spoken out about the movement’s growing hostility toward straight allies, particularly white men, and the risk of alienating the very people who once fought for equality alongside us. She’s criticized Pride’s descent into theatrics that repel more than they unite. And she’s pointed to the discomfort felt by many Jewish LGBTQ individuals — unwelcome in spaces that now pair their faith or their heritage with guilt. Michaels has said the community needs a return to shared humanity — a Pride rooted not in spectacle but in solidarity.
The consequences are real. When movements become purity tests, people stop showing up. When protest replaces purpose, progress dies. And when corporate virtue-signaling or fetishized exhibitionism overshadows truth, the cause itself becomes unrecognizable.
Supporting human rights is noble. But parroting calls for intifada isn’t justice. It’s abdication. It’s surrendering moral clarity for crowd applause. It’s calling for the destruction of the only country in the region where LGBTQ rights exist — and pretending that’s liberation.
If your feminism ends in Tehran, if your queer activism makes excuses for Gaza, you’ve lost the plot. If your idea of resistance is chanting for violence against the one nation where women vote, LGBTQ people serve openly, and dissent is protected, you’re not helping a cause. You’re desecrating one.
You’d think a movement built on freedom would challenge regimes that deny it. In Saudi Arabia, women still need permission to marry or see a doctor. In Iran, refusing the hijab is a crime. In Qatar and the UAE, marital rape isn’t outlawed. In Yemen, girls are married off and silenced. Inheritance laws favor sons. Testimony counts for half — if it’s even heard.
In Israel, women lead courtrooms, command battalions, protest in the streets, and argue on primetime television. LGBTQ teens grow up with legal protections, recognized identities, and a future under law.
This isn’t nuance. It’s moral clarity.
We didn’t burn flags. We waved them. We didn’t rewrite history. We demanded a place in it. This isn’t cultural difference. It’s state-sanctioned subjugation. And yet somehow, those chanting for liberation at Pride fall silent when the oppressors wear keffiyehs instead of uniforms.
We once stood for the right to live freely, love openly, and speak honestly. If we still believe in those things, then we must be willing to say: some causes do not deserve our solidarity. Some movements, no matter how loud, are not on the side of justice.
If the LGBTQ movement wants to have meaning for all again, it has to remember its roots. We once stood for truth. We stood for dignity. We marched not to dominate, but to be counted.