Refugee Status
The
New Republic Magazine, August 20, 2002
Tel Aviv Dispatch
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Tayseer, as we’ll call him, a 21-year-old Gazan whose
constant smile tries to conceal watchfulness, learned early on that to be gay
in Palestine is to be a criminal. Three years ago his older brother caught him
in bed with a boyfriend. He was beaten by his family, then warned by his
father that he’d strangle Tayseer if it ever happened again.
It happened again a few months later. Word gets around a
refugee camp, and a young man he didn’t know invited Tayseer into an orange
grove. The next day he received a police summons. At the station Tayseer was
told that his sex partner was in fact a police agent whose job is to ferret
out homosexuals. If Tayseer wanted to avoid prison, he too would have to
become an undercover sex agent, luring gays into orchards and turning them
over to the police.
Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and
hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn’t know
arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback. Tayseer fled Gaza
to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was
forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack
filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with
insects and other creatures he could feel but not see. (“You slap one part
of your body, and then you have to slap another,” he recounts.) During one
interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.
Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow
prisoners for being a homosexual.
When he was released a few months later, Tayseer crossed
into Israel. He now lives illegally in an Arab Israeli village and works in a
restaurant. His dream is to move to Tel Aviv. “No one there cares if
you’re gay,” he says. These days, though, he knows that an illegal Gazan
in Tel Aviv risks being deported and that he’s safest staying where he is.
And if he were sent back to Gaza? “The police will kill
me,” he says. “Unless my father gets to me first.”
With bombs once again exploding all over Israel, and the
Palestinian territories under seemingly permanent curfew, the woes of
Palestinian homosexuals haven’t exactly grabbed international attention. But
after spending two days with gay Palestinian refugees in Israel, I began to
wonder why the liberal world has never taken interest in their plight.
Perhaps it’s because that might mean acknowledging that
the pathology of the nascent Palestinian polity extends well beyond Yasir
Arafat and won’t be uprooted by one free election. Indeed, the torment of
gays is very nearly official Palestinian policy. “The persecution of gays in
the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn’t just come from the families or the
Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself,” says Shaul Ganon of the Tel
Aviv-based Agudah-Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender
in Israel. “The P.A.’s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them
collaborators—though I know of two cases in the last three years where
people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals.” Since the intifada,
Ganon tells me, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law:
“It’s now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A.”
A gardener we’ll call Samir, who has fled the
territories for Israel, told me of a gay friend who was a member of the
Palestinian police and ran away to Tel Aviv: “After a while he returned to
Nablus, where he was arrested by the Palestinian police and accused of being a
collaborator. They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they
decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They
denied him food and water until he died in that hole.”
International human rights monitors have all but ignored
gay Palestinians’ plight. The U.S. State Department’s recently released
human rights report for 2001, for instance, blandly notes, “In the
Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized, and
occasionally receive physical threats.” As Ganon explains it, “The
Palestinian human rights groups are afraid to deal with the problem. One
Palestinian activist told me that Israelis need to raise the issue because
they’ll be shut down if they try to. Amnesty Israel is sympathetic but their
mandate is limited to Israeli human rights violations. And the international
human rights groups say they’ve got a long list of pressing issues. When
Israeli police harass Arab Israeli homosexuals, I send out reports, and
then—oh, you should see how quickly the human rights organizations get in
touch with me to investigate. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.”
Because the world hasn’t forced the P.A. to tolerate
gays, Palestinian homosexuals are increasingly seeking refuge in the only
regional territory that does: Israel. In the last few years hundreds of gay
Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have slipped into Israel. Most live
illegally in Tel Aviv, the center of Israel’s gay community; many are
desperately poor and work as prostitutes. But at least they’re beyond the
reach of their families and the P.A.
Still, for these refugees life in Israel means subsisting
on the margins. Ganon, my guide to the community, heads the Association’s
outreach to Palestinian gays. He is a big man with a goatee who spends his
nights on the Tel Aviv streets where Palestinian gay prostitutes gather,
providing food and clothes and trying to keep them off drugs and out of jail.
Over the last four years Ganon has waged essentially a one-man campaign to try
to interest human rights groups in Israel and elsewhere in their plight.
He’s helped about 300 Palestinian gays in Israel and estimates that probably
twice that many currently live here illegally without access to legal
employment or health care and under constant threat of deportation. “No one
here cares about us,” says Samir, the gardener, who lives with his Israeli
boyfriend. “I’ve written to all the government ministries, to all the
newspapers, asking for my status to be recognized. No one even bothers
answering.”
According to Ganon, during the last year police have
generally stopped arresting and deporting Palestinian gays because of his
efforts. He has even worked out a quiet arrangement with Tel Aviv police,
providing them a list of Palestinian gays under his sponsorship and providing
those gays with Association membership cards to show their affiliation. The
goal is to reassure local police, who are primarily on the lookout for
Palestinian terrorists, that these Palestinians pose no threat. (The
exceptions to this arrangement are Palestinian gays with security records and
those from Gaza, whom the Israelis see as inherent security risks because of
Hamas’s popularity there.) Some Palestinian gays, though, say they see no
recent change in police policy and still feel hunted.
An American we’ll call William finds himself in the
Palestinian gays’ no-man’s-land. Last year he and his Palestinian
boyfriend, whom we’ll call Ahmad, moved into Ahmad’s West Bank village—a
move that in retrospect seems mad. “We told the people in the village that
we were friends, and for a while it worked,” says William. “But then one
day we found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the
five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning
and burning. We fled to Israel that same day.”
Now they live in hiding—mostly from Ahmad’s brothers,
who have searched for the couple in Tel Aviv and threatened to kill Ahmad.
Though William has appealed to human rights groups around the world, and to
the U.S. Embassy for an American visa for Ahmad, he’s gotten little
response. One American gay-advocacy group offered to help Ahmad get asylum
after he arrives in the United States. But getting him there is precisely the
problem, and William refuses to leave without Ahmad. And so here they are, an
American Christian and a Palestinian Muslim stranded in the Jewish state, with
no money and no work, living off the charity of friends, dreading the
reappearance of Ahmad’s brothers, and waiting for help they know will almost
certainly not come.
On a recent humid Tel Aviv night, in an area of shabby
cafes for foreign workers and neon-lit sex shops, a half-dozen Palestinian
teenage boys with gelled hair and sleeveless shirts sit on a railing, waiting
for pickups. Ganon is here, as he is most nights, checking on “my
children.” “Does anyone need condoms?” he asks. “How about clothes?
Who hasn’t eaten today, sweethearts?”
A police car slows down, and the boys call out,
“Identity cards!” and laugh. The police ignore them and drive away.
The teenage prostitutes, refugees from the West Bank,
live in an abandoned building. They tell me that sometimes a client will offer
them a meal and a shower instead of payment; sometimes a client will simply
refuse to pay in any form, taunting them to complain to police. And sometimes
police will beat them before releasing them back to the streets.
A 17-year-old refugee from Nablus named Salah (a
pseudonym), who spent months in a P.A. prison where interrogators cut him with
glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds, tells Ganon that he has been
stopped by Israeli police no fewer than four times that day. He recites the
names of the different police units who stopped him by their acronyms. “Try
not to do anything stupid,” Ganon says.
“I’ve tried to kill myself six times already,” says
Salah. “Each time the ambulance came too quickly. But now I think I know how
to do it. Next time, with God’s help, it will work before the ambulance
comes.”
Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor at TNR.
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