The Terminal

It’s 3am and I’m back in Terminal 3 of Vienna International. I’m on day three of travel as I attempt to get from LA to Israel. There is not a person in this terminal other than the rogue cleaning staff. I feel like Tom Hanks in that movie with Catharine Zeta Jones. Alas, I would rather be here awaiting my fate than stuck in my windowless airport hotel room. Why have I been paralyzed in Vienna (with the Ultravox chorus, and “Edelweiss” looping in my head) for almost 24 hours? She’s going to say antisemitism. Antisemitism.

Antisemitism. The word is not an overreaction. Here I am, passport in hand, watching the departure board flicker, because a theocratic regime thousands of miles away decided Jews celebrating life – any life, including gay life – deserves ballistic missiles.

Since October 7, the ability to travel to Israel – the only Jewish state – has been challenging. Few airlines are prepared or equipped to fly there, and Israel’s own airlines have been running reduced schedules. So while Jews have self-determined in our indigenous homeland, our freedom to move in and out of that homeland has been squeezed somewhat in these years following our own 9/11 as a result of security challenges. Last night as I was awaiting to board my last leg to Tel Aviv, the Iranian regime decided to end its hypothetical “ceasefire” and began a ballistic missile campaign across the country, after months of ‘quiet’. A friend on the ground called immediately anticipating that my flight would be cancelled (it was). Schools are closed across the country. Ben Gurion Airport remains open for now, but many airlines have stopped all flights, including mine.

I am trying to get to Israel. That’s it. I’m trying to go to the Jewish homeland because the Foreign Ministry invited me to come and celebrate Pride in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I’m a card-carrying lesbian with consistent morals as regards human rights, liberty and freedom, which therefore makes me a Zionist, too, and a feminist for that matter. Labels aside, I’m also in need of a good time and I’m promised that a good time exists at Israel Pride. I’ve never been to Israel for Pride. Pride in Israel is the only Pride of any significance in the entire region of the Middle East, and competes with Pride celebrations in the biggest Western countries. Can you think of any other democracy in the world that’s so difficult to get to because it is constantly under threat from a theocratic regime that surrounds it on eight fronts? A theocratic regime that believes being gay is punishable by death?

Iran executes people for same-sex acts. Hamas and Hezbollah have no concept of gay rights; their charters and sermons treat homosexuality as a Western disease or Israeli import to be eradicated. In much of the Palestinian territories and broader Muslim world, Pride isn’t cancelled – it’s inconceivable. Israel, by contrast, has served openly gay soldiers and politicians, hosts one of the region’s few legal same-sex marriage recognitions via civil registration, and runs Tel Aviv Pride as a major international event. The contrast isn’t propaganda. It’s reality.

For the last few years, Pride in Israel has been cancelled. The regime’s mission is to ensure that. Not only does it need to protect its investment with the decades-long “pinkwashing” accusation against Israel (Iranian propaganda insists that Israel is lying about its LGBT civil liberties and freedoms), it is seeking to destroy any representation for LGBT in the region, because - to the regime - Israel’s civilized, democratic, rights-oriented society is of deep shame to the goals of Islamic rule.

Pride in Israel is thus inherently a permanent target; and silencing it is a great victory for the regime. Pride and the hypocrisy of the LGBTQ+ community has been the subject of these essays for many months lately because the surgical removal of Jews in the Diaspora from Western rainbow communities has graduated from being a grievance to a catastrophe. Pride parades are Judenfrei in Europe, in liberal parts of America, in Australia, all over. After reaching blood-boiling point last week following multiple stories from Europe about harassment and abuse of Jews by the “Queer” community, and our exclusion from parades, from parties, from bars and clubs, I understood more than ever how vital it is that we can return to Israel, that we can gather as Jews in a diverse country and celebrate who we are without fear of being bullied out of our own movement. And yet, Israel faces a different existential threat upon its Pride: total annihilation of its people, of its country. Quite unifying when you think about it…

As Queers for Palestine will go to this year’s parades centering their Palestinianism with flags and scarves of terror, they don’t for a moment understand the privilege they have to celebrate rights that were secured by their elders while ushering in the most dangerous - and criminally, the most obvious - enemy to their dignity and future survival. They don’t understand how lucky they are to have the rights they do. Rights secured, in no small part, by liberal democracies who were once willing to defend themselves and not appease enemy states –including the Jewish state they now treat as the villain. They wave the flag of a movement whose founding documents call for their death, then demand Jews in the Diaspora accept exclusion from the very movement their predecessors helped build. It’s a civil union between historical illiteracy and moral exhibitionism.

Tonight, Israel’s retaliative airstrikes on IRGC terror assets in Iran continue. No doubt as dawn breaks across Europe and America, the usual suspects – mainstream outlets and campus radicals – will frame Israel’s retaliatory strikes as unprovoked aggression, ignoring the barrage that triggered them. The “anti-war” marches will swell with the same crowds who stayed silent when Iranian proxies rained rockets on Israeli civilians, or when its leading regime in Iran executed thousands of its young protestors this January. None will mention the psychos that keep attempting to exterminate the Jews once and for all. They will devote their energy to banning Stars of David from Pride, and chanting for the Jihadists instead. A fatal idiocy.

So I’m going to keep traveling. Onwards to Poland, and then - I hope - homeward to the Jewish state. I never imagined traveling back to Poland where half my family escaped pogroms in order to attempt to reach Israel, but today it feels strangely poetic. We fled this part of Europe to escape, dreaming of a place where Jews could exist without begging for permission. A century later, I’m traveling through that same soil, not as a refugee but as someone insisting on the other side of the promise.

My spirits are high. I will get to Israel. I will celebrate this week with the best of Israel: gay, straight, Jewish, non-Jewish, Black, white… This isn’t about land or politics. It’s about humanity, life and survival. What Pride is supposed to fight for.