By: Ahmed Muhamed Hamdan, Special to the Montreal Jewish News
When you see activists marching under the banner of “Queers for Palestine,” it feels like stepping into an upside down world. The very people chanting slogans in solidarity with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would, if they lived in Gaza or the West Bank, face persecution, prison, or worse. It is not solidarity. It is willful blindness.
Take Hamas. In February of this year, documents surfaced showing how the terror group executed one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, after months of imprisonment and torture. His “crime”? Alleged homosexual activity. Other cases in the same files detail recruits accused of “sodomy” or “homosexual conversations,” punished harshly, sometimes with death. Since seizing power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas has enforced hardline Islamist rule through its Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. This morality police cracks down on anything deemed immoral, including dress, dating, and queer identity. Gaza’s penal code, a holdover from the British Mandate, criminalizes same sex relations with up to ten years in prison. That is the “liberation” Queers for Palestine is cheering.
Some defenders argue, “Well, that is Hamas, not all Palestinians.” But the record of the Palestinian Authority, dominated by the PLO in the West Bank, is not much better. In 2019, PA authorities banned the LGBTQ group Al Qaws, calling its work “harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society.” Though the ban was later lifted, the message was unmistakable: queer organizing is not welcome here. The climate on the ground confirms it. In 2022, a gay man, Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, was brutally beheaded in Hebron. His murder was widely understood as an anti LGBTQ hate crime. It was not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of violence and intimidation in Palestinian society, where homosexuality is deeply stigmatized and queer people live in fear of family retribution, mob violence, or official harassment.
This is why the Queers for Palestine movement looks absurd to many outside observers. Solidarity, at its best, should lift up the oppressed and demand accountability from the powerful. But here, LGBTQ activists are throwing their support behind regimes and factions that would jail, torture, or execute them if they lived under their rule. Israel, by contrast, has robust LGBTQ protections including marriage recognition, military service, pride parades, and an active political lobby. Yet many of these activists demonize Israel as the unique oppressor while embracing Palestinian movements that embody the very oppression they claim to fight. It is a moral and strategic contradiction that undermines their credibility.
This is not to say that queer Palestinians do not exist, or that they do not face unique struggles tied up with occupation, nationalism, and social stigma. They do. But their voices are often drowned out when Western activists uncritically chant “From the river to the sea” alongside factions that openly persecute queer people. In the name of solidarity, they erase the lived realities of LGBTQ Palestinians who fear both Israeli checkpoints and Palestinian vigilantes.
Western queer activists are quick to denounce microaggressions on college campuses, yet fall silent when Hamas executes a gay man or when a Palestinian is butchered in Hebron. They march against “pinkwashing,” the idea that Israel highlights its LGBTQ record to cover up its treatment of Palestinians, yet fail to ask why Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not need to pinkwash at all. The answer is simple: they do not bother pretending to respect LGBTQ people. They persecute them openly and with impunity. This selective outrage amounts to complicity. By failing to confront homophobia where it is most deadly, Queers for Palestine ends up endorsing a world where queer lives are disposable so long as the killers are framed as victims of Israel. That is not progressivism.
If solidarity means anything, it must be honest. It must be rooted in a willingness to hold all parties accountable, not just the ones that fit a convenient ideological script. True queer solidarity with Palestinians would center the voices of LGBTQ Palestinians themselves, those forced to flee to Tel Aviv for safety, those hiding their identity in Ramallah, those silenced by Hamas in Gaza. Instead, Queers for Palestine rallies shout slogans that embolden the very forces hunting these people down. It is performative radicalism built on the backs of invisible victims. And it misses the point entirely.
The queer struggle is about dignity, freedom, and life without fear. Those are universal values, not bargaining chips to be traded for ideological points. To stand with Hamas or the Palestinian Authority while ignoring their treatment of queer people is not just ridiculous. It is shameful.
Ahmed Muhamed Hamdan is a queer Palestinian who fled PLO territories due to persecution.
