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During Pride Month in June, the Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) by CAM monitored a series of incidents indicating an apparent post-October 7th trend of Jewish and pro-Israel communities facing increasing discrimination and hate at Pride marches and related events.
Under the guise of human rights advocacy, some Pride participants chose to inject anti-Zionist rhetoric and misinformation about the Jewish state into events meant to celebrate the LGBTQ community and its contributions to society, marginalizing many Jews who might have otherwise wanted to participate.
Attempts to marginalize or exclude Jewish and pro-Israel voices from Pride events are unfortunately not a new phenomenon. In 2017, organizers of the Chicago Dyke March, who described the initiative as a “grassroots mobilization and celebration of dyke, queer, bisexual, and transgender resilience,” infamously removed participants who were waving a Pride flag adorned with a Star of David on the grounds that the symbol “made people feel unsafe.” The march organizers subsequently said that those behind the flags had used “Israel’s supposed ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to pinkwash the violent occupation of Palestine.”
A recent report from A Wider Bridge, an organization that aims to bolster relationships between Israeli and North American LGBTQ communities, details several instances of discrimination and hate targeting members of the Jewish LGBTQ community since Hamas’ October 7 massacre, noting, “Jewish LGBTQ individuals have been subject to harassment, exclusion, and violence within spaces that should be havens of solidarity.”
According to results from an October-November 2024 survey of LGBTQ Jews conducted by A Wider Bridge and the Eshel organization, 82% of respondents endured “harassment or exclusion from LGBTQ online communities” and “67% of respondents wearing visible Jewish symbols reported antisemitic experiences.”
All this despite the fact the Equaldex database, which analyzes the state of LGBTQ rights globally, ranks Israel as the most LGBTQ-friendly country in the Middle East.
The “Pinkwashing” Narrative Drives Anti-Israel Hate
Driving the rising anti-Israel sentiment seen in Pride events is the narrative that the Jewish state engages in “pinkwashing,” which the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement describes as “an Israeli government propaganda strategy that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians.” The BDS movement further contends that “Israel’s pinkwashing agenda seeks to portray itself as a fun-loving gay haven while using racist stereotypes to depict Palestinians as backward.”
Such framing is spurious. Far from a deceitful “portrayal,” Israel is, in fact, a safe haven for members of the LGBTQ community, especially when compared to other countries in the region. The NGO Freedom House has noted that “discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal” in Israel and “gay and transgender Israelis are permitted to serve openly in the military.” One organization observed that the LGBTQ community in Israel was “the only such community in the Middle East to enjoy significant legal protections.” Tel Aviv is home to the Middle East’s largest Pride parade.
Meanwhile, the “political interests of LGBT+ people, who face widespread discrimination and the threat of violence in Gaza, are not addressed by those in power,” meaning Hamas, per Freedom House. In the Palestinian Authority-ruled ares of Judea and Samaria, “LGBT+ people continue to face bias and threats that seriously obstruct their political participation in addition to compromising their physical safety,” and the Palestinian Authority does not “specifically prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
None of these facts is a function of an Israeli ruse to mask “oppression” of Palestinians, but of Israeli freedom and democracy. Free societies are invariably more tolerant of minority groups than authoritarian ones are. Yet, the “pinkwashing” narrative is designed to obscure this fairly self-evident reality, evoking antisemitic stereotypes of manipulative Jews seeking to hide a malicious ulterior agenda.
Such a frivolous narrative has nonetheless gained steam in some progressive circles due to a commitment to solidarity with groups perceived as experiencing similar oppression, prompting activists to equate the situation of Palestinians to that of the LGBTQ community. A corollary to this framework is the portrayal of Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination in Land of Israel, as a supremacist ideology.
An accurate description of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, is not malevolent Jewish-Israeli “oppression” of Palestinians, but an Israeli struggle to survive amid persistent, eliminationist threats and terrorism from Hamas and other Iran-backed terrorist groups. As a liberation movement for a minority that was nearly exterminated by Nazi Germany and faced subjugation, massacres, and pogroms around the world, all who purport to stand for the marginalized should admire, not shun, Zionism.
Yet, superficial framing supported not by honest analyses but rather platitudes and sloganeering clouds judgments, fueling a paradoxical phenomenon whereby activists who stand for LGBTQ rights are hostile toward the country friendliest to the LGBTQ community in the Middle East. As a result, Jews who seek to participate in Pride events worldwide find themselves unwelcome and even explicitly excluded.
This is unacceptable. The values of liberty and equality that render free democracies relative havens for minority groups should be cherished, not maligned, and antisemitic narratives that distort the truth about Israeli society must be thoroughly refuted and firmly rejected.
Incidents recorded by the ARC in June 2025 included:
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- In early June, Medea Benjamin of the far-left group CodePink wore a shirt reading “you can’t pinkwash genocide” at the Pride march in Washington, D.C., spreading the falsehood that Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas and free the hostages kidnapped on October 7 is an attempt to destroy the Palestinian people.
Today at World Pride in DC, we marched carrying Gaza in our hearts.
Because liberation means nothing if it’s not for all of us.There’s no Pride in silence. No Pride in apartheid. No Pride in Genocide pic.twitter.com/5KWVpULN5Y
— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) June 7, 2025
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- In early June, a musical group pulled out of a planned interfaith service hosted by Brooklyn’s Kane Street Synagogue as part of Brooklyn 2025 Pride, citing the synagogue’s “public alignment with pro-Israel political positions.”
- In mid-June in Wales, the group Cymru Queers for Palestine blocked the path of a Pride march, displaying a sign in front of Cardiff Castle reading, “Profiting from genocide,” apparently to protest the march’s sponsorship links to Amazon and other companies allegedly complicit in Israeli “genocide.”
- In late June, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign participated in the Dublin Pride march, decrying “Israeli apartheid,” slurring the Jewish state as a “genocidal entity,” and accusing it of “pinkwashing.”
- During a late June Pride march in Toronto, anti-Israel protesters displayed a sign reading, “Pride partners with genocide.” Also at the Toronto Pride march, a couple wearing keffiyehs held a sign saying, “Stop using my sexuality to justify genocide.”
Hamas supporters disrupt the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto today. They are calling for an intifada, which means indiscriminate terrorism. pic.twitter.com/hzSkmvxvHZ
— Israel Now (@neveragainlive1) June 29, 2025
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- Agitators confronted the Jewish contingent of the Toronto Pride parade with shouts of “F*ck Israel,” “F*ck the Zionist flag,” and “Pride supports genocide,” apparently in response to the sight of a black flag with a rainbow Star of David.
Jews are threatened at the Pride Parade in Toronto today. pic.twitter.com/hBvWCsS3Vz
— Israel Now (@neveragainlive1) June 29, 2025
- Ahead of San Francisco’s annual Trans March, the Palestine Contingent said in its participation announcement, “stop the war on Iran and the genocide of Palestine, stop the war on immigrants and attacks on trans people.”
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