Israeli Queers Revolt

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When was the last time you heard of a demonstration against a beauty contest? It might seem like a flash from the past, but the Israeli queer group, Black Laundry (Kvisa Sh’hora), took an old-fashioned protest target and turned it into a witty and pointed demonstration against the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands.

“We all dressed as drag-queens —girls, boys, butches, trans, everyone. It was our own alternative beauty show,” said Dalit Baum, one of the Black Laundry founders. Their signs helped spectators make connections between the beauty event and the dominant political crisis. “Glamor Won’t Cover the Crime: End the Occupation,” they said. And with even more bite: “Children in Ramallah (on the West Bank) aren’t Hungry; They’re just on a Diet.”

Dalit says the group does not hesitate to salvage from the past. “We found a leaflet from the 1970s women’s movement in Tel Aviv and used their slogan— ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re mad’.”

Black Laundry began life at Gay Pride 2001. A small group of Tel Aviv lesbians and gays felt that they could not support Pride-as-usual in light of the occupation, so they distributed a leaflet in the bars and clubs seeking queers with an interest in protest. To their surprise, over 250 folks joined their contingent, well appointed in black and pink and sporting the wittiest prettiest placards of the day.

The press found them even more fascinating than the usual drag queens so they received a great deal of attention. Organizing around the statement “No Pride in Occupation,” their most popular slogan was “Gay & Palestinian: Freedom Twice Denied.” By making connections between homophobia and the occupation, Black Laundry brings Israeli gender politics to a new level. Dalit explains their original motivation. “It felt impossible to celebrate our civil rights in a carnival atmosphere when we knew what was being done in the occupied territories just a short distance away.”

The humor used to highlight their issues makes Black Laundry the darling of the media. They can be quite outrageous. For example, to counter the commercialism of Pride, when every rainbow colored object—from key rings to porch awnings—becomes a saleable “Souvenir of Pride,” Black Laundry asked the contingent of Palestinian gays and lesbians who were arriving from Ramallah (only those with foreign passports) to gather up empty tear gas grenades and bring them along. The West Bank was littered with hundreds of spent canisters left by the Israeli Army. Piled into supermarket trolleys, each grenade was decorated with a pink sticker saying “Souvenir of Ramallah.” Unfortunately, the empty grenades were seized by the police at the march as “dangerous objects.”

“Why then,” Black Laundry people asked them, “do you throw them at people?”

Following their smash-hit appearance at Pride, they decided to become a permanent group. They now have over 130 on their list- serve and biweekly meetings attract over 30 activists. The mix presently favors women in their twenties and thirties. There is a minority of Sephardic members (Jews whose families come from Arab, African, and Spanish countries, and who can experience ethnic discrimination in Israel). Some Israeli Palestinians (from villages within Israel’s pre-1967 borders) make it to actions, but the danger of being out is quite high, particularly for women. Palestinians from the occupied territories are prevented from participating by the Army’s extreme restrictions on their movements.

What the members share is a commitment to feminist process (consensus, rotating chair, diversity of ideas) and an aesthetic of outrageous and visual expression underlying a “joined-together” politic. Thea Gold, 27, involved with Black Laundry for 8 months, puts it this way. “If different oppressed groups—women, queers, Palestinians, the poor—realize that the same forces are keeping us down, it could help us all focus and combine our struggles and make them more effective.”

Black Laundry is very active and consistently manages to take the most provocative approach to old institutions. Besides their presence at the beauty contest, they also joined the annual Take Back The Night march.

This June, Jerusalem had its first Pride demonstration in an atmosphere so charged that it attracted world media coverage. “Jerusalem is a heated city,” Thea says, “the religious conflicts are strong and the political battles endless.” The Municipality reluctantly agreed to award them a license for the event, but unlike the local government of Tel Aviv, they provided no financial grant. The group organizing the march welcomed the collaboration with Black Laundry, who turned up dressed in black T-shirts with phosphorescent pink identity signs saying: Dyke, Butt Licker, Masturbating Lesbian, Slut. Their signs were in the six main spoken languages of Israel: Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish, Russian, and Amharic (Ethiopian).

Their messages, again, creatively made the connections. “Transgender and not Transfer,” they said, rejecting the call by right-wing Israelis to expel Palestinians from their own land. “Jerusalem: One City, Two Capitals, All Genders” suggested a solution for the city that both peoples claim. In a brilliant co-optation of the protests of the homophobic right-wing religious people who say that the war on the Palestinian people is impoverishing Israel, they carried “Homosexuals and Lesbians in Solidarity with Ultra-Orthodox Poverty.”

Black Laundry pays attention to the cultural details and finds ways to transgress in a language which speaks to the whole population. For instance, it is a tradition, at the entrance to Jerusalem, to post wedding announcements with the first names of the bride and groom prominently displayed. Using the exact graphic style of these commonplace signs, Black Laundry plastered the city’s entrance with “Ruth and Miriam” and “Zvi Yossel loves Menacham Levy.”

The members to whom I spoke all believe, as the slogan says, “The Occupation is Killing us All.” Hadas Sandler, a professional lifeguard, sees the Israeli Army’s violence in the territories affecting women in Israel. “It impacts on us here. There’s now so much violence towards women and trafficking in women. I know it’s connected to the occupation and what we allow ourselves to do to Palestinians.”

The political roots of Black Laundry can be traced directly to Women in Black, a protest movement begun in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in January 1988, just weeks after the start of the first intifada (Palestinian uprising). The Women in Black model of a unified visual image and a regular weekly demonstration in the same location spread throughout Israel, so that at one point there were 39 simultaneous weekly vigils around the country. The model got picked up in Europe and the States and eventually around the world. Women in Black was nominated for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Last year they mobilized simultaneous actions in 150 cities around the world for the anniversary of the Occupation.

Black Laundry is also set to be fruitful and multiply. There is a New York city branch of Black Laundry preparing to march in their city’s Pride and a group in San Francisco. There is something very contagious about the poetry with which they convey complex connections. As one of their recent banners declared: “Free Condoms, Free Palestine.”

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Sue Katz has published on the three continents where she has lived, including 14 years in the Middle East. She has completed her first novel, Above The Belt, which takes place in an Israeli martial arts institute during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. To contact Black Laundry, KvisaMail@yahoo.com.