At the regular Saturday Pro-Palestine Demonstration on June 8, a great many of the usual pro-Palestine demonstrators, including the JudeoBolscheWiener*innen, were instead a part of a pro-Palestine bloc marching with Pride. They marched against Zionist Pinkwashing and against traitorous sponsors like McDonalds and the Israeli Embassy. At the Pride Parade, they marched against the false claim that a colonial occupation can offer a safe space for Queers, for Jews, for anyone. Queers, trans men and trans women, gays, lesbians, nonbinary people, allies, and all the rest of the colorful, diverse rainbow of humanity cannot be free as long as Palestine is not free. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Unlike the guarantees of safety that Queers for Palestine receive from the organizers of the regular Saturday demos, we expected hostility from Zionists, anti-deutsch and liberal marchers at the Pride Parade. Happily, Queer pro-Palestine comrades, our allies and we were safe. It seems many in Vienna’s broader Queer community recognize the hypocrisy of Zionism.
The occupiers and their genocide-denying supporters, like the silent SPÖ and Greens, like the homophobic and antisemitic ÖVP and FPÖ, lie to us that the violence in Gaza is against religious fundamentalists who would murder everyone who does not conform to a strict, patriarchal, heteronormative life. Presenting the Palestinians as less enlightened and therefor worthy of destruction echoes the attitude of Euro-American colonists who treated Native Americans much the same way Israel treats Palestinians now. It’s a lie. The occupier isn’t concerned with Pride or Love or Liberation. The occupier is not more „civilized.“ The occupier has shown us their true face all too clearly in the world’s first live-streamed genocide. Instead of Love, they offer Hate. Instead of Liberation, they offer Annihilation. And for us Jews, queer and otherwise, they hurt our pride and offer only mockery and shame.
It is also a lie that a secular democracy is fighting religious fundamentalism in Gaza, or elsewhere in Palestine. It doesn’t matter much to indigenous peoples who governs the occupation, and so it doesn’t change the miserable circumstances Palestinians are forced to live under, either inside the ’48 borders or inside the ’67 borders. But it may help Austrians who still identify with Israel to take a closer look at the Knesset.
The occupier’s government is made up of many fundamentalist, religious parties. Parties like Shas, the second largest in the coalition, whose name sounds like a Viennese word for excrement, call homosexuality a disease. HaTzionut HaDatit, the latest incarnation of Mafdal, is another religious fundamentalist, Jewish supremacy party in the coalition, opposed to same-sex marriage. A third group of fundamentalist parties supporting the genocide is represented under the name „United Torah.“ The ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide of these far right, fundamentalist parties must be defeated. They cannot be allowed to claim the rainbow flags of Pride. Queer liberation activists around the world and in Tel Aviv know, there is no Pride in Genocide.
Today’s Pride Parade exists because of the liberatory struggles of the 1960s, because of the Stonewall Intifada, led by BIPOC trans women. The movements for queer liberation and radical feminism grew alongside the anti-imperialist struggles throughout the global south and the struggles for human rights among the colonized peoples living in the belly of the beast. After the destruction of European Jewish life, a holocaust inspired by the genocidal phases of colonialism, most Jews lived in the United States (5.8 million compared with 2.3 million Jews in occupied Palestine at that time). Rabbis and other Jewish activists marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and looked towards a global „Promised Land“ of peace, love and equality. Jewish members of SNCC like Schwerner, Goodman and Dottie Zellner joined in the direct actions of the Freedom Summer, Jewish Yippies like Tuli Kupferberg and Nancy Kurshan demonstrated against the imperialist Vietnam War. In South Africa, after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, activism grew and Jews like Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Esther Barsel, Norma Kitson, Hilda Bernstein, and Ronnie Kasrils were among the thousands of white Jews who worked with the Communist Party and the ANC to end apartheid there.
Meanwhile, the Zionist Occupation was suffering from economic recession and mass emigration. Thousands of the European Jews who had landed there after the Nazi genocides were leaving occupied Palestine, heading for California or even returning to countries like Austria and Germany where they felt more at home, a phenomenon sometimes called „Remigration.“ (achtung! ironie!)
So threats from neighboring countries galvanized a new generation of Zionists, calling themselves „New Hebrews“ and „Sabras,“ who launched a war of aggression against Syria, Egypt and Jordan. For those countries, the war of June 5-10 1967 was a setback, the Naksa. For the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, it was a new beginning. A new, more militant generation of Palestinians recognized that the anti-imperialist struggles in other colonized nations was their struggle as well. A new steadfastness, a new commitment was born. Palestinian communists, poets and intellectuals were at the forefront of this new resistance. The European movements of 1968 stood in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, with Jewish personalities like Daniel Cohn-Bendit becoming prominent.
For the Zionists, it was the end of what they called „old Jews,“ for example the minister of religious affairs at that time, Zerah Warhaftig. „Old Jews“ like Warhaftig, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, thought the army should be for defense, and should never attack first. But in the younger generation, the Zionists, in an echo of internalized European style antisemitism, had already achieved their goal of eradicating what they considered the weak, diaspora culture of Holocaust survivors. Born in British Mandate Palestine, perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing we call the Nakba, terrorists and war criminals like Mosche Dajan and Jitzchak Rabin shouted „charge!“ When the smoke cleared, the occupation had extended to the Golan Heights, to the Suez Canal, to the River Jordan. The Zionists decided to keep most of it. They began to debate how to replace the Palestinians living in the newly conquered territory and out of these debates came ever more right-leaning parties and social movements, all the way to the terrifying Kach Party of the Kahanites, a terrorist movement banned but represented in the current coalition through the party of Ben-Gvir, himself a convicted terrorist. Before the 1967 War, religious political parties in the Knesset were more centrist, whereas today they fully support the genocide of the Palestinian people. Since the 1967 War, communists and the broader left have been marginalized. You can’t base a socialist vision on ethnic-cleansing. This is why Hadash, the leftist group in the Knesset calls itself „non-Zionist.“
Today, the center of the Zionist political spectrum is represented by a soldier named Benny Gantz, who sat on the Gaza Genocide “Security Cabinet.” Occupation, apartheid, genocide, this is their political center. This is why we can say that today’s Zionism is Fascism. Gantz had threatened to resign on June 8 if Netanyahu failed to plan an end to what they call a war, a plan for continued occupation, or a plan for a puppet, like the PA in the West Bank. He finally resigned on June 9, and it had zero immediate effect on the bombing or the siege or the torture. That’s your centrist? That’s the Zionist’s best hope for Peace? It’s sickening. Gantz’s resignation follows on the resignation of three other “Security” Cabinet members, leaving only the two wanted by the ICC: Netanjahu and Yoav „we are fighting human animals“ Gallant.
Zionists believed in the European antisemitic stereotype of a bookish, urban Jew concerned with intellectual and spiritual questions and unwilling or unable to fight.
They sought from the beginning to build a new culture, a culture that idolized military might and agriculture, very like the Völkisch ideals of the Germans they had fled.
With the 1967 war, that stereotype was no more. In the eyes of the empire, „Israel“ was no longer a kind of dumping ground for unwanted Jews. It had become the colonial outpost we see today. A nation of mercenaries, a fortress on the 1970s and 80s Cold War boardgame map, not the promised land of milk and honey. It became a land capable of launching thousands and thousands of kilograms of explosives at civilians, hospitals, schools, a land capable of Ansar III and torture camps like Sde Teiman. And let us not pretend that this violence isn’t a continuation of the Israeli terrorism that presaged the 1947 Nakba, we only wish to point out that any illusions of „secular democracy“ have burned away. Today, the same hawks and war pigs and Bidens and Nehammers try to tell us this armed enclave, this land of concrete and iron walls, a land of drones and assault rifles, an occupation led by apocalyptic religious fundamentalists whose parties have names like „Jewish Power“ … that this coalition of fascists is a democracy? A „Western Outpost“ in the „Clash of Civilizations“?
But the global struggle we find ourselves fighting, the struggle against global crises like environmental destruction, war, famine, disease, is not some orientalist fantasy of ancient Greeks and ancient Persians. It’s a struggle between people who care for the land and each other, against people who care only for conquest and profit. It’s the struggle of the indigenous peoples of the world against the forces of Empire. It’s the age-old class struggle. It’s the struggle for feminist and queer liberation. It’s an anti-racist struggle. And we JudeoBolscheWiener*innen want a world where all people thrive, so we must stand with the anti-colonial struggles of the indigenous. We must stand for the liberation of Palestine.
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