How the Intersections of Queer and Palestinian Identities Swipe at the Achilles’ Heel of Zionism

I didn’t care much for Palestine growing up. It didn’t bother me, per se, but it had no place in my journey towards being a fully-fledged Canadian boy in a fully-fledged Western world. If anything, its presence in my life ran the risk of distracting me—or deviating me altogether—from the course I was determined to complete. Such distancing from one’s roots is often the obstacle that immigrant families are forced to contend with upon moving West. As it turns out, however, my own family was hardly up for contention, at least not on this matter. Beyond enforcing the use of Arabic in the home, and the predominance of Arabic cooking at the dinner table (done more for my mother’s convenience than out of cultural pride), there was very little push in my household for me to retain my Palestinian identity. In fact, my father often suggested I hide it to give myself easier access to this foreign land full of hostile Whites.

And I was all too happy to take advantage of this leeway.

There was such appeal for me in the Canadian identity throughout my youth. Yet it wasn’t really the need to belong that fuelled me towards it, as it so often is for children of immigrants. Many of the kids in my orbit, both at school and around the neighbourhood, were first-generation Canadians themselves, and never judged my Palestinian or Arab identity any more than they did their own. Rather it was a matter of status. I was only two years old when my family immigrated to Canada, and as such, I was the only member to remain unaffected by the world from which we came. That made me different. That made me special. Canada—the national manifestation of mayonnaise on white bread—thus held in it a sense of mystique, a code I could crack while the rest of my family fumbled through realms of confusion, alienation, and powerlessness. This country would belong to me, as I to it, and through it I would conquer the world.

Eventually I realized that there was more to my link to the Canadian identity than just status. It wasn’t simply the fact of being an inevitable product of Canadian society that differentiated me from this family. My family. The circle of people I knew I’d be tied to forever without ever being given an answer as to why. We got along some of the time, but there was always a barrier, as definitive as that of the West Bank yet never concrete enough to be able to know how to climb it. Indeed, there was something special about me, something I was told was wrong, was sinful, was something Arabs never really are unless they’ve been corrupted by an outside force, the very one to which the younger me had gleefully submitted himself. Just as I saw the Middle-East as having tainted the rest of my family, making them as regressive and uncultured as Canadian media depicted them, the world to which we immigrated had in turn tainted me, the course from which I refused to deviate now met with a stark left turn that itself seemed a deviation. I suddenly felt as though I’d been sold a lemon. Queerness was by no means what I’d signed up for. Yet there I was, too far gone to turn back.

It took time for me to accept my sexuality, helped in large part by my time in New York City, the most diverse city in the world, which greatly expanded my notions of what humans could be and how they could live. The journey at times felt painfully languid; at other times, frighteningly rushed. But everything happened exactly when it was meant to happen—including my parents’ eventual decision to embrace it rather than simply ignore it—and I came out stronger and wiser for it. My time in New York also made me less indifferent to my Palestinian identity, which suddenly seemed to me to be interesting. Special. Palestine was the world’s underdog, the little country that could, the one so many of the progressives around me were rooting for, including its name in their chants at anti-Trump rallies that focused primarily on women and Mexicans. I was one step closer to being a fully-fledged Palestinian boy in a fully-fledged Western world. But I wasn’t quite there yet.

Most mentions of Palestine I had heard growing up centered on what we lacked. On what was stolen from us, and by whom. “The Jews” were often spoken of unfavourably in my household, the words mired in insidious generalizations that usually failed to distinguish between the ethno-religious identity and the political ideology that made fervent, mostly successful attempts to hijack it. This from the same family, my family, that I’d so often heard making insidious generalizations about another minority group—one to which I myself belonged.

My family members are intelligent, but not intellectual. They have never been the kinds of people to whom I would turn for an enlightening conversation about politics, art, or humanities, because they never approach such matters with the nuance or depth required. It was therefore easy to dismiss their claims about Israel. It was easy to write off their tempestuous insistence that we deserve to get back what’s ours as little more than the inane rants and ramblings of a group of narrow-minded people. So while I began to lean more into my Palestinian identity, I did so with the same Western privilege that drew me away from it in the first place. The resulting mindset was one that valued peace over liberation and demonized armed resistance. A view that both countries had much to offer the world, and the same right to exist. In other words, I was a liberal Zionist.

As the years went by, however, I felt more intensely the sense of something missing. Something stolen. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but it became evident in my writing, a lack of voice from someone who seemed different enough, special enough, to have a lot to say. Then, in 2021, when several homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah were set to be demolished by the Zionist state, something in me began to assemble, the pieces of my life, of myself, that seemed always to graze one another only to fall short from actually forming something whole. I began to notice the same sense of entitlement that I myself possessed growing up in Canada. The feeling that I could conquer the world, and that the regressive, uncultured Arabs around me would never be able to stop me.

The pinkwashing on which Israel heavily relies to fend off accusations of oppression and present itself as the liberator of queer Arabs whose own countries would kill them, had, in a way, worked on me. Not as overtly as it does on other queer Westerners, all too happy to fly over there for Tel Aviv Pride. But it did prevent me from seeing the Zionist state as the cartoonishly evil villain that it is, for surely there must be goodness in an entity that values a group that too few others do. What’s worse is that it had turned me against my family, and by extension my people, not completely but just enough to ignore the complex reality of queerness in Palestine. A reality that discards the European influence of anti-LGBTQ criminalization in the Middle-East—a case of turning someone into a monster and then calling them one—and the centuries of colonialism that have all but ensured the Global South never thrives off its own resources. How exactly is a country expected to progress under the weight of the roofs that collapse onto them whenever the West drops a bomb? What priority is enlightenment supposed to take when basic necessities like food, clean water, and healthcare have long been scarce and pre-carious? The fact that there are so many pro-LGBTQ allies and advocates in a country like Palestine is a testament to the humanity and compassion of its people. What excuse does the West have for its increasing anti-LGBTQ sentiment, particularly against trans folks?

This is to say nothing of the countless queer people in Palestine, frequently blackmailed into serving as informants for the Israeli state, at least when they aren’t being killed by the rockets it launches, which seem to have missed the memo about their sexuality. And yet Israel is ostensibly saving these Palestinians with a free pass into their own homeland, offering them a hand to delegate the blood that stains it. Some queer Palestinians take the bait, trading collective liberation for proximity to power, and become the state’s hasbarist props in the process. Those who refuse are gaslit with claims of what their own people would do to them, their Palestinian pride mocked with comparisons to “Chickens for KFC.” That mocking, however, is what fuels so many of us, masking, as mocking often does, a deep sense of unease.

The older I get, the more connected I feel to both my queerness and my Palestinianness. Intersectionality is the way forward, and this fact is what frightens the Zionist movement, so devoid of diversity—in race, religion, age, disability status, and yes, sexuality and gender identity—that its ethno-supremacist nature can be seen even without the genocidal onslaught it’s been waging. Just as the many different pieces of my identity are coming together within me, so too are the pieces of this broken world slowly but surely assembling, connecting, uniting for a free Palestine and a better, more beautiful future.

Image by the American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department from the Library of Congress.