I admit that I have never found Pride activities to be particularly enjoyable, nor have I found a queer community to be a good fit most times. And at times I’ve unfortunately loathed the queer community, often out of totally invalid grievances stemming from my own pain and feeling out of place. However, I’ve slowly learned to love the queer community and realize my place in it simply wasn’t where I was looking. It took meeting someone who challenged my self-perception through love and desire for me to realize I’d taken a narrow view of myself, even though I knew that I’d wanted to see a certain balance all along. Relating to ourselves makes it easier to relate to others and a bit more difficult to hate.

This isn’t about my struggle to escape the hyper-masculine and hyperfeminine confines of gender our society has created. It’s about an intolerant sentiment I hear too often from other Jews, especially fellow Zionists, an attitude that I know lacks historical perspective. Seeing that viewpoint in Israel used to scare me, now I worry moreso that it doesn’t just represent the same unreasonable hate that it does in other countries and is instead a harbinger of something deeper that’s threatening to fracture Israeli society. It’s easy to dismiss criticism from the Diaspora, yet this is a concern based in seeing a parallel here in the United States and in a history too taboo to invoke comparison with.

Despite that, I’m going to try and explain the parallel with some nuance, since I hope we’re past calling each other capos over disagreements. And I’m sure you see where I’m going with this, so let me be clear that I’m not saying that Americans or Israelis are Nazis like Gustavo Petro has clumsily implied. Rather, what I see is a vacuum of leadership, communication, and unity that lets the coercive, violent, and power-hungry step into the breach behind a banner of leadership.

Someone said something recently and I don’t know if he was Jewish or not, but it illustrated the problem perfectly, “they were annihilated once; it seems like the time has come to annihilate again,” stating a potential intent to attack participants in Israel’s Pride month. That statement is not an uncommon........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)