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In LA, pro-Israel groups hold inaugural Pride conference to counter ‘Queers for Palestine’
Some 120 pro-Israel LGBTQ community members gathered in Los Angeles last week for the inaugural Pride for Israel conference, organized by Zionist advocacy outfit StandWithUs and other Israeli and Jewish groups.
Speakers at the November 9 conference, including former hostage Emily Damari, who was released from Hamas captivity in January as part of a January 2025 Gaza ceasefire, celebrated the gathering and expressed frustration with the worldwide LGBTQ community’s pro-Palestinian leanings.
In a joint statement, organizers — StandWithUs, US pro-Israel LGBTQ group A Wider Bridge, the American Jewish Committee of Los Angeles and the Israeli-American Council — said Israel has “long stood out as a safe haven for LGBTQ people in the Middle East,” and accused the broader LGBTQ community of having, since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, sided with “‘Queers for Palestine,’ a cause rooted in ideologies that criminalize, oppress and routinely murder LGBTQ people.”
Damari, who has spoken widely about hiding her lesbian identity from her Hamas captors out of fear they would kill her, put it more succinctly at the conference, according to queer Scottish Jewish music journalist Eve Barlow in her “Blacklisted” Substack.
“You guys may be for Palestine. But I can tell you, Palestine is not for you,” said Damari. Barlow reported that Damari saw Queers for Palestine activists on Al Jazeera while she was in Gaza.
The sold-out conference was attended by people from around the world, and did not receive funding from the Israeli government, StandWithUs co-founder and CEO Roz Rothstein told The Times of Israel in an email. Due to concerns about anti-Israel protests, the conference location, a West Angeles hotel, was not publicly disclosed, Rothstein said. There were no such protests, she added.
Some conference attendees described feeling a need to hide their identity amid the war in Gaza. One unnamed Jewish gay man quoted by Barlow said, “I took a long time to come out of the gay closet, but after October 7, I had to go back into a Jewish closet.”
Speaking alongside Barlow in a panel titled “When Inclusion Excludes,” Tanya Tsikanovsky, the daughter of Soviet Jewish emigres........
© The Times of Israel
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