An Israeli court in Tel Aviv ruled Sunday that Palestinians who are seeking refuge in Israel due to their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or other sexual identity can be granted asylum because their lives may be in danger under Palestinian rule.
The Jerusalem Post reported:
LGBTQ+ Palestinians in danger due to their sexual orientation can request asylum in Israel, the Tel Aviv District Court for Administrative Affairs ruled on Sunday, according to KAN news.
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The Palestinian who filed the appeal has been living in Israel since 2015 and claims that his life is at risk in the Palestinian territories due to his sexual identity. In the appeal, the Palestinian described how he was pushed into coming out to his parents after he refused to marry the woman they had chosen for him and how his father responded by attacking him and calling for additional relatives to assault him as well.
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After realizing his life was in danger, the Palestinian ran from his home and got into Israel. After hiding in Israel for a while, the Palestinian contacted the Civil Authority through an organization that helps LGBTQ+ Arabs to request a residency permit. The request was refused at first but after further proceedings, he received a temporary permit.
One reason the issue is legally murky is that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — now struggling in the wake of revelations that over a dozen of its staff members took part in the Hamas terror attacks of October 1 — is supposed to provide aid to Palestinian refugees, who are considered outside the UN Refugee Convention that the Israeli court applied in this case.
Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, who is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, is appealing the ruling, for reasons that were not immediately clear. Arbel is considered among the more “progressive” members of a religious community that generally rejects homosexuality. The legal status of Palestinian “refugees” is a thorny political issue that Israel may not want to resolve in its own internal courts.
Regardless, it remains true that Israel is the only safe place in the Middle East for openly LGBTQ+ people to live as they wish.
Many critics have commented on the phenomenon of “Queers for Palestine,” in which LGBTQ+ groups in the West march in support of a national movement that rejects their existence. As Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax in October: “The best proof that this is all antisemitism…is that these groups that they support hate gays — they hang them — hate transgender people, hate women, treat them as third-class citizens. And yet, these protestors are willing to give them a pass on these core issues, as long as they also hate Jews and the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is Nazism [2023].”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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