LGBT rights in the State of Palestine
LGBT rights in Palestine | |
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Status | Mixed legality:
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Family rights | |
Recognition of relationships | No recognition of same-sex couples |
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Homosexuality in the Palestinian territories is considered a taboo subject; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people experience persecution and violence. There is a significant legal divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the former having more progressive laws and the latter having more conservative laws. Shortly after the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank in 1950, same-sex acts were decriminalized across the territory with the adoption of the Jordanian Penal Code of 1951. In the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and under Hamas' rule, however, no such initiative was implemented.
Public opinions
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2024) |
Polls of public sentiment towards LGBT people in the Palestinian territories find it is overwhelmingly negative. A Global Acceptance Index (a measure of the relative level of social acceptance of LGBTI people and rights) report ranked Palestine at 130, noting that very little change in acceptance occurred between 2010 and 2020.[1]
Legal status and criminal law
On 18 September 1936, the
The decriminalization of homosexuality in Palestine is a patchwork. On the one hand, the British Mandate Criminal Code was in force in Jordan until 1951, with the Jordanian Penal Code having "no prohibition on sexual acts between persons of the same sex," which applied to the West Bank,[6] while Israel stopped using the code in 1977.[9] On the other, the Palestinian Authority has not legislated either for or against homosexuality. Legalistically, the confused legal legacy of foreign occupation – Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Egyptian and Israeli – continues to determine the erratic application or non-application of the criminal law to same-sex activity and gender variance in each of the territories.[10] A correction issued by the Associated Press in August 2015 stated that homosexuality is not banned by law in the Gaza Strip or West Bank, but is "largely taboo," and added "there are no laws specifically banning homosexual acts."[11]
In 2018,
Civil rights
In the
Palestinian National Authority
In August 2019, the Palestinian Authority announced that LGBT groups were forbidden to meet in the West Bank on the grounds that they are "harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society". This was in response to a planned conference in Nablus by Al-Qaws, a Palestinian LGBT group.[15][16][17] Following backlash, the ban was later withdrawn.[18]
Gaza Strip
Scholar Timea Spitka stated that in Gaza,
Israel
It has been reported that the hostilities homosexual Palestinians face has led to many seeking refuge in other countries, such as
In mid-2022, the Israeli government told the Israeli
Vigilante violence
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There are very few reliable reports of vigilante violence by Palestinians against LGBT people. One rare exception was a recent murder in the West Bank region.
In October 2022, Palestinian police arrested a suspect who beheaded a 25-year-old male Palestinian,
There was also a 19 year old
Violence within militant groups
The only openly LGBT person known to have been killed by Palestinian militants is
Al-Qassam Brigades (militant wing of Hamas)
In February 2016, it was reported that
Lions' Den - Nablus
In April 2023 it was reported that Zuhair Relit (also known as Zoheir Khalil Ghalith), a Palestinian living in
Palestinian Activism
In the early 2000s, two established groups formed to provide support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) Palestinian people living within the borders of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. Al Qaws ("The bow" in Arabic, referencing a rainbow), the first official Palestinian LGBTQ organization, was founded in 2001 as a community project of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance[40] to specifically address the needs of LGBTQ Palestinian people living in Jerusalem.[41]
In 2015, a Palestinian artist named Khaled Jarrar painted a rainbow flag on a section of a West Bank wall, and a group of Palestinians painted over it. Jarrar said that he painted the rainbow flag to remind people that although same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, Palestinians still live in occupation, and criticized the paint-over, stating that it "reflects the absence of tolerance, and freedoms in the Palestinian society".[42]
Aswat
In 2002, a second group formed to specifically address the needs of Palestinian lesbian women, named Aswat ("Voices" in Arabic), was founded and based in Israel as a project of the Palestinian feminist NGO Kayan, at the Haifa Feminist Center. Aswat started as an anonymous email-list serving to provide support to Palestinian gay women, and developed into an established working group, translating and developing original texts related to gender identity and sexuality into Arabic.[41][43] Aswat's efforts brought results, while also facing multi-faceted challenges. In 2003, co-founder Rauda Morcos was outed by the Israeli tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth after agreeing to an interview, despite asking her sexual orientation not be included in the article, which led to significant personal backlash.[44]
In 2007, Aswat held its first public conference in Haifa, Israel: 350 people attended the event, which marked the first five years of the organization's existence and the publication of a new book in Arabic about lesbian and gay identity. The conference was reported to be problem-free, although it met opposition by the Islamic Movement in Israel (a grouping of Arab Muslims), which publicly called for the meeting to be cancelled, and urged its community "to stand against the campaign to market sexual deviance among our daughters and our women" resulting in some 30 people protesting outside the venue; the same group issued a fatwa against Rauda Morcos because, Morcos said, "according to them I was ‘the snake’s head‘".[45][44][46]
Nisreen Mazzawi, co-founder of Aswat, stated that LGBTQ Palestinians, being stateless, face "oppression, whether conscious or unconscious, also within Israeli organizations" because "LGBTQ Israelis identify with the state even before their queer identity, and they will not stand with LGBTQ Palestinians simply because both are queer. They will fight against Jewish homophobes, but ... (LGBTQ) Palestinians will remain on their own.”.[46] In 2004, Aswat had 14 members.[47] In 2007, the group, which includes women from the West Bank and Gaza, had 30 active members and about 50 women participating in the email list.[48]
Islamist opposition
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2024) |
Islamist groups in Palestine comment on LGBT issues far less often than
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
In 2010, the organization Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS) was formed, aimed at challenging Israeli representation of gay life in Palestine and pinkwashing. They also run a website called Pinkwatching Israel.[41]
Palestinian queer organizations like Al Qaws describe themselves as "queer-feminist" and
During the
Summary table
Same-sex sexual activity legal | West Bank: Legal since 1951 for males; always been legal for females Gaza: Males (and females): No consensus on legal applicability of British 1936 Sexual offences provisions to homosexual conduct |
Equal age of consent | West Bank: (18 years) Gaza: For males / For females |
Anti-discrimination laws in employment only | |
Anti-discrimination laws in the provision of goods and services | |
Anti-discrimination laws in all other areas (incl. indirect discrimination, hate speech) | |
Same-sex marriages | |
Recognition of same-sex couples | |
Step-child adoption by same-sex couples | |
Joint adoption by same-sex couples | |
Gays and lesbians allowed to serve openly in the military | |
Right to change legal gender | |
Access to IVF for lesbians | |
Commercial surrogacy for gay male couples | |
MSM allowed to donate blood |
See also
- Human rights in the State of Palestine
- LGBT rights in Israel
- LGBT rights in the Middle East
- LGBT rights in Asia
References
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Further reading
- Atshan, Sa'ed (2020). Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. ISBN 978-1-5036-0994-5.
- Schulman, Sarah (2012). Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. ISBN 978-0-8223-5373-7.
External links