Hotline for Israel/Palestine and Queers for Palestine

The first edition of The Violet Files

"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
—Frederick Douglass

My dream is to have a regular column where I chronicle people and groups working across the red and blue divide. I want to spend the next year steeped in depolarization efforts, in opening the Overton window, in creating a craving for viewpoint diversity. Here’s one example of such an effort.

Creative Commons/Montecruz Foto

I am not an academic, and yet twice I’ve attended the conference of the Heterodox Academy, a group committed to “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.” Perhaps I’ve gone because I want the values they uphold to permeate all of society, not just the academy. After all, a lot of the Very Bad Ideas we’re reckoning with at the cultural level first sprouted in the ivory tower. Maybe some Very Good Ideas can sprout there and, eventually, replace them. (Also, Meghan Daum told me to go, and I tend to do what she tells me to.)

A great thing about the conference was its focus on the positive. Speakers didn’t just rail against the censorious environment of the university; they offered examples of programs and people pushing past it. And while it seemed like most protest-camping/gluten-free-bagel-eating college students were suddenly interested in free speech only so they could tell Jews to go back to Poland, there are, in fact, still some inspiring college students around. Even at Harvard.

One of them is a rising senior there named Shira Hoffer. She created the Hotline for Israel Palestine ten days after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel “in response to an urgent need for nuanced engagement with the region in the face of imminent war,” per the website. Around two dozen volunteers “from different political, religious, and national backgrounds” answer questions texted to them, offering multiple viewpoints, and without telling people what and how to think.

Here's a quick sample:

Lisa Selin Davis:

            Hi. Could you help me understand “queers for Palestine?”

HOTLINE:

            Hi. Thanks for an interesting question. Queers for Palestine refers to the movement among LGBQT people in the US and Europe to act publicly in support of the Palestinian struggle.  This article, describing a variety of demonstrations and gatherings, appeared this past February in the  online journal Prism:

https://prismreports.org/2024/02/05/queer-people-organizing-solidarity-palestine/

There is a certain irony to this movement, not lost on some commentators, that support and free expression for gay people in Palestine is not very strong. This opinion piece appeared on Fox News just this morning:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/pride-month-note-queers-palestine

Please let us know if these help you understand a little more clearly.

The Prism article notes:

“Queer Palestinian people have always been the leaders of their own resistance against Israeli apartheid, and non-Palestinian LGBTQIA+ people around the world have supported the call to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine for decades. On Jan. 6 in Northampton, Massachusetts, at an event called Queers for Palestine, transgender Palestinian poet and activist Yaffa said that Israeli genocide on Gaza has killed every LGBTQIA+ person they knew in Gaza before Oct. 7 and every LGBTQIA+ person in they [sic] connected with after Oct. 7, too.”

The article quotes activists asserting that “indigenous peoples around the world were queer before colonists brought homophobia to their societies” and that “bringing up transphobia in Palestine in response to ‘Free Palestine’ is simply a distraction, much like any other answer to ‘Free Palestine’ other than ‘yes.’” 

This, of course, is one of the great fallacies of the modern discourse around both indigeneity and gender—that non-Western societies were universally tolerant and celebratory because some of them had carved out a category for gender nonconforming, same-sex attracted people. Alas, most of those societies were and are deeply homophobic, booting feminine men out of the male category because of their femininity. While it seems to be true that we Westerners eradicated these categories in some Native American cultures, not all indigenous cultures had them, or needed them. And asserting that indigenous folks were “queer” is pure presentism: imposing modern, western categories onto the past.

The indigeneity=queer liberation fallacy is, I think, rooted in a romanticization of people of color, the new association of darker skin tones with purity, lighter ones with danger and evil. Same old story, with the characters flipped for a progressive audience.

As for the piece in Fox News, it provides some information that could be useful in picking at the claims in the piece above, but its tone is dispiriting.

“Have you noticed how on June 1 global corporations give their logos a rainbow makeover in order to show their support for the LGBTQ community,” the author asks. “But have you also noticed that those same corporations leave the logos of their Middle East affiliates untouched? Did you ever realize it’s because almost everything LGBTQ is banned in those cultures and countries? And that the Palestinian territories are one of the most oppressive of the bunch?”

It goes on:

“Palestinians don’t recognize same-sex marriage, nondiscrimination in employment, and refuse to investigate hate crimes against gay and transgender people – in the territories, gay sexual activity carries a sentence of 10 years in prison.

It can also cost you your life.”

And:

“The U.S. State Department's West Bank and Gaza Strip 2022 Human Rights Report found that ‘human rights organizations in Gaza did not monitor and refused to address LGBTQ+ issues" and noted that in Gaza "there was no visible LGBTQI+ community.’”

Does that mean that “queers” in America can’t find some solidarity anyway, can’t locate themselves somehow in the Palestinians, can’t identify or root for them? No. Does it make those with “queers for Palestine” signs idiots?

Well, that I didn’t ask. I followed up this way:

Lisa Selin Davis:

            Thank you. It feels like each of these articles is very biased—the first saying westerners invented homophobia and all older countries are fine with trans people. And the other is very snide. I guess I want to know if the Queers for Palestine folks are sincere and feel aligned with Palestinians because they are both perceived/perceive themselves as oppressed, or if they're just really poorly informed and making everything into a simple oppressor/oppressed binary...

HOTLINE:

            We will not make those decisions for you. It's a very complex question. People of all stripes and variants are trying, sincerely, to express solidarity. Maybe it's all the same struggle, maybe not.

            Please let us know if we can help.

I guess they can’t help me with this particular issue—not really. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping others who’ve been silenced with the accusation that “Just Asking Questions”—like “Is it more complex than Israel=bad and Palestine=good” is code for “wishing genocide on people.” JAQing off, as apparently I’m calling it, is viewed as a cynical attempt on the part of the askers to normalize the questioning of that-which-shall-not-be-questioned: subjective “truth.” Maybe, for all those people living in censorious, charged environments, having an outlet that permits—that encourages—asking questions is a big deal. And, sure, I could have looked up articles on conservative and liberal news sites myself. But maybe I wouldn’t have without consulting the hotline…so it did help?

The Hotline is part of Hoffman’s larger vision, the Institute for Multipartisan Education. “IME is a resource hub dedicated to supporting educational institutions in fostering curious and constructive disagreements in and out of the classroom. We offer partnerships and custom resource design, and develop a curriculum based on our principles but tailored to the needs of the specific institution.” Sounds like just what so many schools need.