Of course, degrees of acceptance for gays are relative, and the LGBT community in Israel has complaints. A same-sex civil unions bill hasn’t yet passed the Knesset. Still—compared to many other places—the Jewish state would seem to be paradise.

What’s the worst place on earth for gays? Probably Uganda, but—with the exception of Morocco and partly of Lebanon and Jordan—the Arab and Muslim Mideast comes in a close second:
• In Iran—whose President Mahmoud “Wipe Israel From the Map” Ahmadinejad said in 2007 “we do not have homosexuals”—there over 100 executions for “homosexual tendencies” between 1979 and 1990. In 2005, Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, were hanged for sodomy after their age was “judicially increased” to 19 to justify capital punishment.
• In Saudi Arabia—where the penalty for homosexuality ranges from whipping and imprisonment to stoning—the government in 2000 reported sentencing nine men for offenses including cross-dressing. In 2007, the Saudis were accused of sending British mosques material urging the killing of gays as well as the subjugation of women.
• In the Palestinian territories, open homosexuality is tantamount to suicide in Gaza’s Hamastan, while in the West Bank—where, in theory, less draconian laws going back to the British Mandate are still in force—in fact, persecution against gays is rife. A 12 year-old boy, accused of homosexual acts, was subject to house arrest for three years before he fled to Israel. The BBC reported in 2003 that hundreds of other Palestinian gays—often framed on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel—have fled to the Jewish state. They prefer exile there even if the Israeli authorities sometimes don’t completely trust them.

How have LGBT activists aligned with the BDS movement reacted?
• In the UK, they occasionally were critical of the intolerant state of affairs of affairs—until the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) warned them off. At the Gay World Pride Parade in London in July, 2012, there was no hint that anything was amiss in the Mideast except in Israel on the “pinkwashing” placards carried by BDS marchers who tried to shout down a pro-Israel gay contingent at Trafalgar Square after the March.
• In the U.S., after activist Sarah Shuman’s op ed on “pinkwashing” appeared in the “New York Times” in late 2011, a Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) Conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) defined that term as a “deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.” (See James Kirchick in “The Tablet” for June 14.) This Orwellian terminology—translated into real world Israel-bashing—means that the Jewish state would be damned for oppressing gays, but since it is mostly same-sex tolerant, it’s damned instead for using that as a cover for oppressing Palestinians.
• In Canada—where Queers Against Israel Apartheid (QAIA) has been active since 2008—QAIA initially listed complaints against mistreatment of gays in the Arab and Muslim world in small print, so to speak, at the bottom of its posters. Subsequently it got the same message as in the UK, and has become deaf, dumb, and blind to the broader Mideast outrage while revving up its campaign to sponsor an “Israel Apartheid” poster in Toronto’s LGBT Pride Parade.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not the attempt by B’nai B’rith of Canada and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to convince Toronto’s City Council, the funding agency, and the March organizers to ban participation by a QAIA “Israel Apartheid Float” is wise. But contrary to the BDS Movement’s LGBT front—which likes to picture itself as “a martyr to free speech— that is really NOT the issue. We know because both sides in the Toronto dispute agree that “hate speech” should be banned from the Parade.
One side contends “Israel Apartheid” is an accurate description, while ignoring Israel’s attempts to negotiate into existence a free and independent Palestinian state. The other side points out that no country in the Mideast is as diverse and open as Israel where Muslims, Arabs, Christians, and others are represented in all professions, and serve in the military and the Knesset and on the Supreme Court. The Jewish state has welcomed and embraced Vietnamese “Boat People” and Cambodian refugees from genocide, and gay, lesbian, and transgender people from all over the Middle East.

Are the facts on the side of tolerant Israel? Well, don’t bother LGBT activists in the pocket of the BDS Movement with the facts about the Middle East!