Jerusalem in Heels
In 2006, drag queens, LGBTQ communities and friends, both Palestinian and Israeli, defied political expectations and social convention with rambunctious displays of heels and makeup in a denial of the darker elements of greater society. Shushan, a tiny West Jerusalem bar, was a place where Palestinian performers could dress up as classic Arab divas such as Um Kalthoum. Whether for an Orthodox Jew or a West Bank Palestinian risking checkpoints, the place had an air of acceptance, if only an illusory one. Shushan closed in November 2007. There has been nothing like it in Jerusalem before or since, and there could not be now. A city where today a Palestinian can be attacked for speaking Arabic on the street is not a city where a Palestinian can dress as an Arab chanteuse in a West Jerusalem bar. Palestinian queer organizing is now a quarter-century old. What activists once called pinkwashing, Israel’s sale of itself as the region’s gay haven against a Palestine cast as uniquely homophobic, they now name as a tool of the occupation itself: the same intelligence services that recruit, blackmail, and make a queer Palestinian a suspect in their own community.