Love Rage and The Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

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Journal of Bisexuality
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Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

Shiri Eisner
a a
PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community, Tel Aviv, Israel
Available online: 16 Feb 2012
To cite this article: Shiri Eisner (2012): Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/ Palestine, Journal of Bisexuality, 12:1, 80-137 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2012.645722
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Journal of Bisexuality, 12:80137, 2012 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1529-9716 print / 1529-9724 online DOI: 10.1080/15299716.2012.645722
Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

SHIRI EISNER
PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community, Tel Aviv, Israel
Downloaded by [Tel Aviv University] at 03:47 17 February 2012
This text narrates the writers story as a bisexual activist and, through it, also the story of the bisexual movement in Israel so far. In addition, the text endeavors to highlight the strands of militarism, violence and racism in Israeli culture, with a focus on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. This is meant to achieve two things: rst, to deconstruct the false separation between the two elds of LGBT rights and antiwar activism; and second, to promote the principles of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, encouraging solidarity with the Palestinian people and nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation. KEYWORDS bisexual history, bisexual politics, radical bisexual politics, anarchism, feminism, transgender, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, intersectionality
INTRODUCTION: WHO I AM AND WHY IM WRITING

My name is Shiri. Im 28 years old at the time of this writing, I live in Israel and have been an activist on feminist, queer, antioccupation and animal rights issues for nearly 7 years now. Ive been a bisexual activist for almost 3 years. This text tells my story as a bisexual activist, and through it, I hope, also the story of the bisexual movement in Israel so far. In addition, I hope to show my readers the strands of Israeli militarism and its culture of violent and racist occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people, which weave through all of our lives and all of our experiences here. With this I hope to achieve two things: rst, to deconstruct the false separation between the two elds of LGBT rights1 and antiwar activism, emphasizing connections between oppressed groups and their struggles; second, to promote the principles of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, encouraging
Address correspondence to Shiri Eisner, The Women and Gender Studies Program, Tel Aviv University, PO Box 39040, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel. E-mail: bisexual.revolution@gmail.com 80
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actions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation.2 The BDS is a call made by more than 60 Palestinian academic, cultural and other civil society federations, unions and organizations (and supported by hundreds of organizations worldwide), for a comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. The BDS lists three goals: ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied by Israel in June 1967, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and acknowledging the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 1948. The BDS is a global nonviolent movement, opposed to all forms of violence and racism (including anti-Semitism). However, the BDS focuses not only on ending the occupation, but also in building a better society, thus the BDS endorses and is endorsed by many queer, feminist and other organizations. On the queer side of the BDS, we emphasize the connection between the occupation and the oppression of Palestinian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Israel and in Palestine. The occupation does not differentiate between queers and nonqueersthus, under the occupation, Palestinian LGBTQ people are denied even the most basic human rights such as freedom of movement, medical care, education and so on. Palestinian LGBTQs living inside Israel face systematic, legalized apartheid policies that discriminate against them in all walks of life, rendering them de facto second-class citizens (Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, 2010). In addition, Palestinian and Israeli LGBTQs are being cynically used by the Israeli government and Israeli propaganda in order to pinkwash Israels international public image. Israeli government, through the Ministry of Tourism, makes use of the relative tolerance toward Jewish LGBTQs (especially in Tel Aviv), as a way of diverting attention from the many Israeli war crimes performed in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territories and inside Israel itself. Thus, on the backs of the Jewish and Palestinian LGBTQ communities, Israeli propaganda can market a false image of Israel as a liberal progressive gay haven, while demonizing Arabic Middle Eastern cultures and presenting them as inherently LGBT-phobican Islamophobic notion whose goal is to further justify Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the occupied territories as well as against Palestinian citizens of Israel. The cost of pinkwashing takes its toll not only from Palestinians, but also from Jewish LGBTQ people, as incidents of violence, discrimination, harassment and mistreatment are discretely silenced so as to prevent injury of Israels progressive image. In addition, pinkwashing helps the government in convincing the Jewish LGBTQ community that no further rights need to be won, that all is well and that theres nothing left for us to do but join their shiny new brand of homonationalism. From a bisexual and transgender standpoint, its also worth noting that the process of pinkwashing not only
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erases the fact that bisexuals and transgenders have no legal recognition or rights in Israel (contrary to gays and lesbians), but also erases and silences inner community violence against usperpetuated not only for our being bisexuals and transgenders, but also for our activist communities extensive involvement in the struggle against the occupation.3 This article consists of a sequence of stories from my personal history as an activist.4 The reason why I chose to tell this story from my own perspective rather than take the more dignied stance of an academic researcher is threefold. First, by telling the story from my personal point of view, I denounce a single, unied, master narrative. Whereas the events that I describe have certainly existed inand inuencedwhat is so often called the public sphere, I still acknowledge that some people may have experienced the events I describe, in ways that are different from my own. Different people have also given different interpretations to the meanings of the same events, including ones different from mine. Experiences and views vary, and I would be reluctant to claim my view as a denitive one. Second, living in a patriarchal, masculinist world, we all learn to appreciate certain values over others: objectivity over subjectivity, universal over personal, rational over emotional. The values associated with masculinity are socially rewarded with respect, dignity and status and are attributed more importance (within and without the academia). On the other hand, the values associated with femininity are perceived as awed, undignied and often even inappropriate. Indeed, in polite Western society, speaking of ones feelings or personal life is often frowned upon. Of course, these values are also racially charged: the former, masculine ones often linked to whiteness and Westernness, and the latter, feminine ones, to race and third-worldness. Thus, it is my intent to undermine and subvert these values through use of a personal narrative and emotional writing. By this I mean to suggest that emotions, subjectivity and personal perspectives are central to our experiences as people and should be respected as crucial to our understandings of the world. I feel that to claim a space and to incorporate these values in my writing is a political act of feminist and antiracist subversion. Third, telling the story through my eyes is conducive to my understanding that, as us feminists like to say, the personal is political. In this, I not only mean that exterior circumstances shape and often determine our lived experiences, nor only do I mean that the experiences in our lives have political meaningsI also mean to suggest that for many of us, who devote our lives to activismthe separation between the personal and the political, the private and the publicis neigh nonexistent. Is suffering physical violence by the police more or less personal than suffering violence at home? Do ones friends and lovers touch our feelings more deeply in bed than on the streets? Is the struggle against our families, our teachers and our peers more or less painful, more or less passionate, more or less intimate, than the struggle against the system, the government and heteropatriarchy? Activists
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embody, in our physical bodies and in our selves, the lack of distinction between these two imagined worlds. Nothing is personal that is not political. Nothing is political that is not personal. In addition, I would like to think of this lack of differentiation as bisexual in character, marking a collapse of boundaries, a destabilization of binaries and a breaking down of order. A disclaimer should be made as to why Im writing these storieswhat should be made of them, and what should not: This text is not here to tell you about a strange land, far, far away. It is not here to be exoticized as the tale of a developing bisexual movement in a developing or backward part of the world, where brown-skinned savages ght with one another. The call for solidarity under the BDS (or for solidarity with the Israeli bisexual movement) is not to be taken as an appeal to a higher, whiter moral guardian. Nor is this text, in its better parts, to be taken as buying into Zionist pinkwashing propaganda of presenting Israel as the friendly progressive LGBT haven it markets itself to be. What this text is about is the violence and difculties that we all experience in our communities. It is here to enlighten similarities rather than differencesthe difculties described herein are not unique but exist everywhere, should be addressed by us all.5 This text is here to encourage political responsibility and accountability in all of us, in our communities and in our countriesthe Israeli occupation could not have existed without the active nancial and political support given it by the United States of America, United Kingdom and other Western countries. This text is also here as an alternative activist model for whomever might want to start their own radical bisexual movement, in their own area. It is here as inspiration for change within the existing bisexual movement in the United States and Europe, in terms of critical perspectives, ideology and activist methods. And nally, it is here for whomever wishes to learn or study about Israel, its bisexual movement, its radical queer history and the queer struggle against the occupation. Some of the experiences I describe in these stories are difcult, violent and traumatic (including descriptions of physical violence, death and grief). If you think that any of the stories might trigger past traumas for you or make you otherwise uncomfortable, please consider reading this piece (or the relevant parts of itespecially the seventh and eighth stories) somewhere that feels safe for you and at a time when you have emotional support available should you need it.
FIRST STORY (2006): QUEERUPTION

My story begins in one of the critical moments in the history of queer antioccupation activism in Israel,6 one that many of us now recall as a seminal moment in our personal histories as activists. This was the summer of 2006.
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Black Laundry, the rst queer group decidedly working against the occupation, had just nished dying out only a year beforehand, and I never got to be a member. (By the time I had heard of their existencethinking, for the rst time in my life: Oh my god! There are others who think like me!they had already begun to disperse. Later on I heard that even had I known of their existence on time, I couldnt have joinedthey refused to accept bisexuals [a policy that some claim later changed]). My friends and my ofcial hang-out at the time was Salon Mazal, the Tel Aviv infoshop (a center for alternative political information, as well as a library, a workshop space and a vegan restaurant). This was where all the cool gay and lesbian radicals used to hang out (the cool transgender radicals had, at that point, not yet migrated from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv). Their clique was very closed, however, and I never felt comfortable going there alone. Until this day I cant place my nger on the cause of the cold treatment that my friends and I often received: Was it our bisexuality? Did they think we were straight? Did they create a closed culture whose standards we couldnt achieve? Or was is something else completely? Today I know that I was not the only one feeling left out of those circles, and still the reasons for this remain hazy. Despite this, my friends and I still loved the place, as it echoed with our activist passions, provided us with learning and tools through the many books, zines and workshops, as well as being, of course, an awesome hangout where you could get a full vegan meal for the price of ILS 20 (equal to about US $5). When I heard that the people from Salon Mazal and the leftovers from Black Laundry were organizing an international queer anarchist gathering in Tel Aviv (the ninth international Queeruption), I immediately became excited about the idea. The event was planned many months in advance, and I knew that an organizing committee was meeting weekly at the Salon. However, the tension of the event dispersed for me when I realized that I was feeling too shy to actually attend an event organized by people I knew but did not seem to acknowledge me. My then-partner and I suggested to host a workshop about queer heterosexual sex (a very bisexual topic, at a time before we started thinking about bisexuality politically). However, the organizers failed to contact us, and I never did attend the gathering place. Where I did come into contact with the Queeruption was the demonstrations that took place that summer. On July 12, 2006, the Lebanese terrorist7 group Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers on the border of occupied south Lebanon. In response, the Israeli military bombed Lebanons capital Beirut, its airport and many of its hospitals, schools, power plants and infrastructure and killing 1,191 of its citizens over the course of the next month. This murderous attack, thinly disguised as a response in self-defense, had very quickly come to be known as the Second Lebanon War and was widely supported by Israeli government, parliament, media and public.
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However, not everyone joined to the sound of the war drums and the smell of blood and rethe demonstrations against the Israeli attacks on Lebanonand later the warstarted out on the very day the attacks began. The rst demonstration, held in front of the Ministry of Defense (such an Orwellian name), attracted 200 to 300 people. The second day, a 100 more. By the end of the week, we had a full-edged antiwar march attended by well over 4,000 people. By the end of the war, wed had demonstrations of more than 10,000 (all large numbers in Israeli terms). In light of the war, the Queeruption camp, which was intended to be a creative workshop and activist space, had changed its plans and converted into a queer antiwar activist headquarters, responsible for the nowmythological Pink-Black Block during the demonstrations against the war. Participants were requested to show up in pink-black clothes, and we were handed pink ribbons to tie around our wrists, necks, bags. Some of us even tied them across our mouths or eyes, in reference to ubiquitous hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil of Israeli militarist fascism. The block also included a drumming band, whistles and other noise makers, chanting, jumping and dancingmaking our resistance loud, queer and celebratory. In that period, there was at least one demonstration every week, if not every day, and I attended each and every one of these blocks. Although I still (was) kept at distance from most of the people involved, I began identifying faces, began to make some friends, receive some smiles. I always attended with my own friends, too, and so I never felt alone. The demonstrations were delightful. We danced, jumped and shouted in the streets, drawing the attention of the protesters, the media and the spectators. I remember us marching, in the biggest demonstration, on Even Gvirol St.,8 the street echoing with our drum beat, our chanting. A moment later, we were standing in place, then jumping, running and then dancing in a circle to the sound of the drums. Through all our pain and rage, passion and fury, our anger and celebration, we created something new: a spark, a life force. And in that moment, of protesting against the occupation, being loud and anarchist and queer and surrounded by my kind, all at the same timein that moment, I had found my political home. We werent spared of police (and other) brutality, of course. One of the biggest demonstrations we had, ended in Maggen David Square, a small square that couldnt t the large crowd gathered. Inevitably, people started owing unto the road. However, before we even nished gathering everyone into the square, the policeon foot and on horseshad already started violently pushing us into the sidewalk (and, inevitably, into each other). There was no space inside the square, and on the other side of it the police were all too happy to push uswhen we failed to be pushed for lack of space, we were beaten and arrested by the police. The situation nally became so hard, that the protest organizers (feminist women) had called out to all women on the loudspeakers, to stand between the protesters and the
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police in order to defend our friendsthe policemen are often less brutal with those of us who pass as female. I remember standing there between the lines, feeling scared and deant. I was lucky enough to prevent a few arrests that day. After our protest was over, the police disappeared from sight, leaving us alone to deal with violence from the counter (prowar) demonstration from across the street. Many of us had to stay in the square to protect the stage and sound equipment from vandalism, evading the counterprotesters violence as we did so. An argument I had with one of the Zionists from across the street (who came to speak to us), ended with him shouting again and again, Amir Peretz9 wants peace, in your heart you know this!
SECOND STORY (2006): THE JOH PROTEST VIGIL

In that summer, the Jerusalem pride march was canceled. Jerusalem Pride became a hotly contested territory 3 years after its inception. From 2002 and until 2004, it ran annually, relatively smoothly and with few negative side effects. However, the parade came to national attention in 2005 when a single terrorist (an orthodox Jew) stabbed three of the attendants with a knife, with intent to kill. (Interestingly enough, the person who jumped the perpetrator and caused his arrest was one of the Jerusalem bisexual activists). When, one year later, the Jerusalem Open House (JOH)10 had started organizing an international pride parade in Jerusalem (under the ironic title of Love Without Borders11), a city dominated by religious populations sprouted a hitherto-unforeseen coalition between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities not to let us dirty perverts march in their city. The polices ofcial reason for denying permission to march was the Lebanon war, deciding it was unsafe to march at such a time. On August 10, the JOH organized a protest vigil against the cancellation of the parade by the police. This was the fourth (and, as it turned out, last) week of the war, and many Israeli ags were to be seen among the rainbow ags of the vigil. Most of the people were standing quietly, some were singing Jewish songs. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly Zionist. I arrived independently with my friends, and a few minutes after we arrived, the two Queeruption buses came in as well. People joined in with signs, chants, ags and lots of energy, and we joined them, chanting, waving ags and making noise. The slogans, however, though queer, were mostly focused on the war. This was later debated within the community: some thought it was legitimate for us to bring our own messages to a protest meant for our community. Others thought that changing the message was insensitive and that priority needed to be given to the queer message over the antiwar message, in the spirit of community solidarity. Although I didnt think so
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then, today my opinion leans toward the latter, and I feel uncomfortable about the hijacking of the message such as we did.12 In addition, I feel uneasy about the priority that the occupation takes here above and beyond every other topic, to the extent of silencing other activist issues. Whats not debated, however, is the police brutality that then ensued. Even though Israeli law permits any size of gathering, including chants of slogans as well as signs and ags (so long as theres no march and no speech), the police often makes its own rules by deciding that chanting is illegal, that a certain number of people is illegal, or that certain content is illegal. The police started brutalizing us maybe 10 to 15 minutes after the Queeruption arrived. Their reasons: we were chanting, we were many, and we were waving Palestinian ags (In fact, only one of us was, and its perfectly legal. But hey, whats that to the police, if theyre making it up anyway?). The JOH organizers watched idly by as policemen hit the protesters, dragged us, threw us into the street and arrested two of our friends. Only later, while sitting and waiting for the arrestees, did we hear JOHs ofcial response, claiming not only that we broke the law, but also that we were harming the gay and lesbian struggle in Jerusalem. Of course, they lent us no legal support or assistance in releasing our friends from arrest. We had to rely on our own.13 From the moment that two of us were arrested, our protest ended, and we found ourselves making our way on foot to the police station where they were taken. I found the groups lawyer Yossi Wolfson and told him all the details that I could about the arrest that I witnessed so that he could talk to the police on our behalf. The whole group sat and waited until the day went dark and the notorious Jerusalem night cold kicked in. We froze, we ate, we sat and played or chatted. I got interviewed by the media for the rst time in my life (answering questions from the GoGay Israeli news site reporter). I dont know how long we sat there when, nally, a policeman came out from the station and asked for two people to sign release bonds for the two arrestees. I volunteered to sign for my friend Carmel, and another volunteered to sign for the other arrestee Yotam. When we came out of the station, all free to go, the group joyfully cheered. We took the bus back to Tel Aviv with the Queeruption. I was dead tired as I got back home, at 2 am that morning.
THIRD STORY (2006): THE MARCH THAT DIDNT MARCH

Eventually, the Jerusalem pride march was postponed to November, though clouds were constantly hovering over its head. We knew that the police was only looking for excuses not to let us march due to the wide opposition that the march encountered from religious communities in Jerusalem, as well as the general public. The most widespread public sentiment regarding the
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Jerusalem pride march, from that year on and until now, was that it shouldnt be held there due to its offensiveness toward religious communities. Now, at that point, the march had been rescheduled and postponed several times already. The polices noticeon the eve of the marchthat the march was to be canceled and converted to an enclosed event, came as no surprise to us. Many of us have discussed the subject beforehand. Wed been planning a Pink-Black Block for the march, and many of us decided that in case of cancellation, we would march anyway. The ofcial reason for the cancellation of the march was yet again related to the occupation and Israeli military violence. A week beforehand, the Israeli military forces invaded the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun and killed 50 of its inhabitants. A week later, just in time for the pride march, the police pulled its by-now-familiar trick of using the ubiquitous Security Situation as an excuse to cancel our march, citing a fear of retribution action as the ofcial reason for canceling. We all knew the real reason, of course. That evening I took the bus to Jerusalem to participate in an emergency Pink-Black Block meeting. Before I went from Tel Aviv, we had already started forwarding e-mails calling people out to march with us. Liberation doesnt happen through a happening, and rights are not attained by asking nicely, the e-mail read, We dont need the police or the supreme court to ght for our rights. Changes happen when women rise up and proclaim: This is where we stand! We cannot do otherwise!Tomorrow we march, we cannot do otherwise. At this point, I need to take a step back, and explain who these we were: The illegal pride march in Jerusalem was, perhaps, the rst queer action that I had directly organized. The initiative came from my friends (at the time), following prior conversations on the topic. I went to the meeting in Jerusalem as a representative of our initiative to make sure people came to protest with us. The reason Im stressing this is that all three of us were bisexual, and although this was a time when we werent really thinking about bisexual politics, we were still making a difference and changing community history in a way that is often unacknowledged. In fact, during and after our action, all news coverage (in Hebrew and in English), as well as community discourse, referred to our protest, the organizers and the participants therein, as either as gay or homosexual (although even the protest itself included people of many sexual orientations and gender identities). The meeting in Jerusalem that evening was charged, you could feel the excitement and the tension in the air. Lots of people were present, and everyone was angry with the police, though not everyone agreed on what should be done about the situation. Some of us wanted to protest illegally, others wanted to bring our messages into the enclosed pride event. Eventually, after realizing that we couldnt reach consensus, we decided to split into two groups. Those of us who wanted to march went home,
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those who wanted to join the event (which later came to be known as the pride cage), stayed there to make signs and posters. The meeting ended at midnight. I was excited, impatient and utterly terried. I hardly slept that night. When morning came, I was still just as impatient, just as tense and scared as I had been the previous night. When my friends and I got there, we caught a glimpse of the police bus driving away, carrying off 30 people into arrest. What happened was this: the media publicized our action before we started it. The journalists notied the police and extreme right-wing activists, both of whom were there to meet our group that morning in the Bell Garden (our meeting place). The right-wing activists came all set with knives and other sharp weapons. (As my friends and I got to the garden, they yelled at us and taunted us from afar.) The police arrested everyone in our group for illegally marching, while everyone was sitting on the ground. The right-wing activists were left to their own. In fact, one of the excuses the police had used to justify our arrest was defending us against the right-wingers. Taking a step aside here for a moment to explain who these rightwingers were and what were they doing there: Baruch Marzel, Itamar BenGvir and their group of fellow activists are Jewish settlers most well known for their extreme right-wing opinions and their provocative support of ethnic cleansing of all non-Jewish people in all territories occupied by Israel.14 These people, who arrived in hopes for a rerun of the 2005 LGBT-phobic stabbing, are people most infamous not for their violence against queers, but against Palestinians. This fact matters highly because it allows us to see that the sources of violence in Israeli society always remain the same, no matter toward whom they happen to be aimed. Whether it is violence against queers, Palestinians, women, Mizrahis,15 migrant workers, refugees,16 or any other marginalized group in societythe source always seems to be militarist Zionist ideology and values. In this case, it was the very same people who came to hurt us, that would normally hurt Palestinians. So, my friends and I were watching as the police bus drove off, carrying off 30 of our friends, Baruch Marzel to our side, taunting us and telling us to be ashamed of ourselves, and lots and lots of policemen all around. When we approached the entrance to the garden, the cops told us to stay away. My partner kept walking, taunting the cops while practicing his legal right to walk down the street. When they went for him, I tried to prevent his arrest (by holding onto him in the manner we usually practice in demonstrations), calling our friends for help. But our friends stood by and watched as the cops pushed us into one of their cars. (I never asked them why. I guess they decided they didnt have much chance, and didnt want to get arrested along with us.) We were then driven off to the police station, where we joined our friends on the bus of arrestees. I remember feeling a bit relieved when we got there. What I feared the night before came true, and in a way it diffused the tension. I dont
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remember the arrest itself as being so bad, though right now, while writing, its surprisingly hard for me to think about. We all stayed on the bus and decided on solidarity arrestsliterally, that no one is free until everyone is free. We also refused to get off the bus before the police complied with our request to let us all stay together. The rst 2 hours were actually kind of fun and felt more like a queer school trip than anything else. We sang queer songs at the cops and kissed each other in front of them. Leading a bus full of people in singing Monty Pythons Lumberjack Song was one of my personal high points that day. We used our cell phones to read news reports about ourselves on the Internet. We laughed at the ways in which the news depicted us and got angry about the JOHs response (famously, they said: We have nothing to do with those anarchists from Tel Aviv). We spoke, we laughed, we sat and we waited. But as the hours wore on, the suffocation and closeness of the bus became harder on everyone. People grew more tired and less patient. I got into a ght with my partner, which in hindsight I mark as the rst crack in our relationshipa crack that would, 6 months later, bring about our breakup. Because we refused to get off the bus, we couldnt even go to the bathroom. There was no water or food, either, as no one had thought of bringing any, and as the policemen were decidedly unconcerned about our needs. I didnt wonder why none of the people in the other Pink-Black Block were coming to the station (to help us and to bring us food). Only years later, did I hear that at the same time as we were arrested, the people who went to the pride cage were busy sitting down and trying to reach consensus about what to do. Finally, the policemen started letting us make rounds to the bathroom, taking turns of two at a time. Shortly afterwards, they nally relented and allowed us to stay together for arrests and questioning (though they only took about ve of us for this, and only people passing as male). In the meanwhile, we moved from inside the bus to the courtyard of the police station, where we sat in the shade. When some of our friends arrived with food and drink (which they passed to us through the bars of the courtyard), we were nearly ecstatic. We nished all the food in 10 minutes. After sitting a little bit longer, we decided to have an improvised self-defense class, in which one of the participants taught us how to avoid arrest (we hoped the cops would appreciate the irony). Our lesson was cut off prematurely, as the police decided to let us all go. The sun was setting, and we walked toward the city center. It was a Friday, and those of us who came from Tel Aviv had missed the last bus back.17 We stopped for a few minutes on a cliff, observing Jerusalem saturated with the golden light of sunset. Down below, like a concrete snake, lay the separation wall, dividing Jerusalem into Jewish and Palestinian parts, imprisoning those on the side of Palestine. I remember looking at that wallthen relatively newand feeling utterly desperate.
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INTERLUDE (20062008): INTERSECTIONS AND IN-BETWEENS

A week after the arrest, we returned to Jerusalemthis time to Zion Square, at the city center. What started out as a single protest vigil turned out to be a year-long campaign in which our group stood at the square for one hour every Friday afternoon, rain or shine, carrying signs, waving ags, giving away iers and talking to people about the importance of the pride march. At the end of each vigil, we performed a symbolic march of our own, walking up the street with our signs and ags. These vigils were highly successful and became well known in the community, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, attracting more and more participants each week. Today they are thought of as one of the contributing factors to the approval of the Jerusalem pride march the following year. I think about all these things as part of my bisexual activist history. Not only because I was involved with organizing them as bisexual, but also because this is where and how I learned how to be a bisexual activist. The activist methods, ideology and critical thought that Ive learned through my radical queer activism were the basis from which I came to tread on bisexual ground. I have learned to look at power structures with a keen eye, I learned to criticize normativity (hetero-, homo- and bi-), I learned to identify racism, sexism and transphobia at a glance, even at their most sophisticated forms. I learned about the strong connections between all of these things and capitalism, nationalism, fascism, Zionism and the occupation. I learned about inner-community hierarchies and how eagerly the good people ghting for our rights will throw us overboard at the rst sign of trouble and at the service of their own interests. I learned about violence, love, passion and leadership. I learned solidarity, rage and pride. All of these things I took with me to my bisexual politics and activism. Politics and ideas were not the only thing I acquired, though. Slowly, the community that gathered around the Pink-Black Block, and the pride vigils morphed into what later became the transgender community. The radical politics stayed, but the focus changed. We started talking more and more about transgender politics, about transgender identities, about cissexism and about transphobia. During that time, I was quite involved with that community. I attended parties and other activities, and participated in the rst transgender blocks in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. I connected to transgender politics in a very deep way and started reading a lot about the subject, what I read resonated with me. Never completely. The texts Id read and the discourse in the community focused mostly on transmasculine experiences. I connected with the idea of gender as mutable, of deconstruction of the gender binary and of denaturalization of sexbut the experiences described were never mine. I didnt think about that as anything out of normal, thoughmy experience as bisexual has well prepared me to having to step just a few inches aside in order to t the images I was reading and talking
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about (never quite addressed to me). For a long time these issue echoed, but I did not feel entitled to call myself genderqueer. I never felt like I was queer enough or trans enough. The change came about when I was handed a ier about genderqueer identity in the rst transgender block in Tel Aviv. It explained that some genderqueer people arent always visible as such, and that you dont need to look or act a certain way to identify as genderqueer. That was the moment I acquired a new identity. My experience with the transgender community continues being signicant to this day, as my relationship to and with the community has been highly contested and often difcult. This community spokeand still speaksmy language. It is a radical, fabulous, colorful, political, creative space for people of multiple identities, and there was a period of time when I felt I too had a place in it. In that community, I found language, politics, friends and loversbut I also found pain, loneliness and isolation. Increasingly, I felt dislocated. Constantly moving these few inches aside, being addressed to as something I was not, was becoming increasingly taxing for me. It seemed that being bisexual was out of the range of possibilities in the spaces I inhabited. Passing as a woman also rendered me invisible in terms of my genderqueer identity. I imagine a lot of people might have thought of me as a straight ally rather than a full member of the community. In fact, for years I had internalized that attitude myself and imagined that I had less of a right to speak about transgender issues or for transgender people, a notion which I had only recently started to deconstruct. And of course, speaking about biphobia was never well rewarded, either. Eventually, it was the feeling of alienation which I felt with the transgender community that gave way to my need to form a new bisexual community. But that was later. The rst transgender block in Jerusalem took place 2 weeks after the rst one in Tel Aviv. The year was 2008. I was riding in a car with my friend Mark (who had recently come out as an FTM transgender18), another FTM trans friend, and two other bisexual genderqueersall coming to participate in the march together with the transgender block. I do not recall the march itselfwhat came afterwards was much more important. The rst drop of water that germinated the seed of bisexual activism in me. After the march, we reached the Bell Garden, where a stage was set and speeches were made. (Some of the people from the blockand especially from our cardecided to yell out bi and trans every time one of the speakers said gay and lesbian.) Midspeeches and among the crowd, I saw one of the people from our car speaking to someone and heard the words bisexual group in their conversation. An interlude is now in order. Throughout my years in the LGBT community (as I entered it at age 16 and to that day), I was always looking and waiting for a bisexual group to open. While in high school, I participated in the GLBT Associations19 youth group but stopped going after a while
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because it was mainly intended for gay males. I attended the lesbian youth group twice, and never returned again, as it was intended for lesbians only. In those years (during and long after my participation in those groups), the GLBT Association constantly ran an ad in the Pink Times magazine,20 saying that a bisexual group will soon open. I used to call them every now and again and ask when the group would start meeting, but it never came through. Eventually, I stopped trying. When in 2005 a rst-ever bisexual support group was started in Jerusalem (by the rst Israeli bisexual organization, Bisexuals in Israel, in cooperation with JOH), I chose not to attend, as I felt Jerusalem was too far for me to travel to on a monthly basis (this was before the pride vigils, when I arrived there every week). Two thousand and ve was also the year in which a rst-ever bisexual block marched in Jerusalem Pride (organized by Bisexuals in Israel)but I was not there to see it, nor did I hear of it. I knew that Bisexuals in Israel existed, and yet Id never managed to nd a way to contact them or join them. In 2006, on the eve of our illegal march, the Jerusalem bisexual group was preparing for a block at the pride cage. Their notication e-mail read: There is a rumor running around that a march is still being held. This rumor is false and misleading! If such a march takes place, it will be without security or permission. (I didnt give it much thought back then, but reading it now, the irony is not lost on me.) My friends and I were actually planning to march with their blockbut naturally, our plans were changed as we organized the illegal march. And so, for years I was waiting for a bisexual group to open, for a bisexual community to start, for something to happen . . . all the while, I was busy doing queer activism and not really thinking much about bisexual politics. I remember conversations with my friends about biphobia and bisexual erasure. We sometimes talked about how we felt ignored and marginalized as bisexuals in the queer community. However, our conversations never went deeper than that, and it seemed as though there was always something more important to do or to talk about. In fact, I never felt that doing anything was an option at all. I remember one day visiting with a friend and seeing the Bisexual Politics anthology (Tucker, 1995) on the shelf. (The book had come from the GLBT Associations library after my friends partner got kicked out of there for having married a man, thus proving herself actually straight. She was the Associations bisexual community coordinator.) I remember feeling like I should be reading this book, like this was importantbut something prevented me from picking it up. As if it wasnt quite important enough, or as if it was too important, and I was afraid of discovering something that hurt. An e-mail I wrote to bisexual activist Elad Livneh21 only a few days before the march that didnt march describes my intense emotional reaction to biphobia on the Internet and cites this reaction as the reason why I wasnt more involved with the online forum. In 2007 when Bisexuals in Israel stopped its activity, I was too busy doing other things to notice . . .
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And now the year was 2008, I was standing in the Jerusalem pride parade and watching my friends talking to Elad Livneh, who was inviting them to join the rst bisexual support/social group in Tel Aviv. I immediately became excited and joined the conversation. I introduced myself to Elad, with whom I had only spoken online before, and asked about the group, wondering aloud how it could have happened that I didnt know about it. He told me that the group was relatively new and was meeting once a month at the new Tel Aviv LGBT center. I was literally overjoyed. This was something I had waited for, for years. It was another month before I nally made it to the group for the rst time, but this one month had started a huge change in my life and my activist history. The rst drop was an e-mail Elad sent to the group on June 30, 2008. Along with technical details about the next meetings place and time was also a request sent to Elad by one American bisexual activist, a woman of whom Id never heard before, by the name of Robyn Ochs.22 Robyn was editing the second edition of an anthology of personal texts by bisexuals from around the world and had requested Elad to reach out to the Israeli community for texts. This lead into two things: One, I had read one of my rst books about bisexuality: Getting Bi (Ochs & Rowley, 2005)23; and second, I wrote a text for its second edition. This latter action was no less than historical for methis was my rst bisexual activist action, leading into many after it. It was also my rst publication in a book, which got me very excited. My essay was deeply inuenced by the impression Ive had of the book when I rst read it. I was not pleased with many things I found therealong with the happiness and excitement of nally reading a book reecting some of my own experiences and discussing bisexuality explicitly, I was also deeply discomforted by the gender binary language and liberal/assimilationist politics that Id found in most of the essays. In my own text, I sought to distance myself as far as possible from that discourse, and I did so by rejecting the word bisexual and identifying as pansexual instead. My essay identied gender binarism and assimilationism with the word bisexual , while setting pansexuality as more radical, more queer and generally more evolved than bisexuality. These were my views at the time, and I now nd them typical to (many parts of) pansexual discourse. Today I recognize this type of view as resonating with biphobia, situating bisexuality as an oppressive/privileged/nonpolitical other in contrast to other identities that are somehow naturally more subversive/radical/politicala practice old and familiar in the language of LGBTQ.24 Today, whereas I still vehemently oppose mainstream bisexual discourses gender binary language and liberal/assimilationist leanings, I now place this notion not within the word bisexuality, but within the historical development of the mainstream bisexual movement in the United States and Europe, which lead to this kind of problematic politics. That said, to this day, despite my passion and appreciation of the bisexual movement in general, looking at mainstream
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Western bisexual groups and their politics, I am constantly (and painfully) reminded of the reasons why people would want to disown the movement and take on a different identity. As to the word bisexual itself, I now think its a very powerful word with many radical political meanings, which can be used as epistemological bases for the deconstruction of many hierarchiesin discourse and in activism.25 Another error that I wish I could now correct, I only learned by reading another essay in the book after receiving my copya text by Richard M. Juang (2009). Richard spoke about racialized26 people and our families of origin, about how we learn to be ashamed of our families and to emphasize distance from our cultures of origin as proof and grounding of our queerness. He then proceeded by offering an alternative narrative, describing how his family and familial space contributed to the development of his bisexual and genderqueer identities. I identied with the essay on all those three grounds, of being bisexual, genderqueer and racialized. After reading it, I realized that I had performed the same mistake that Richard was talking about in his essay: I wrote about my Mizrahi family as a conservative, limiting, backward space. This was my attempt to vindicate Israel from orientalist views, writing that not all families in Israel were like mine. However, I now realize that through this attempt, I was only reinforcing the very same attitudes towards racialized Israelisnamely, the Mizrahi women of my family (who are assertive, erce and beautiful). I also wrote about my identity, the place where I live, and the transgender community I then inhabited. I spoke about loneliness, isolation and oppression. I nished the essay with the words: I want to step away from all of that. I want to create something new. Im not sure what this thing is. Maybe you could help me? This was my call out for a new kind of activism. For a new kind of community. From that moment on, I started slowly taking on that notion, taking more and more steps to create the kind of bisexual space that I had always wanted to have for myself.
FOURTH STORY (2008): FIRST STEPS AND BEGINNINGS

After writing the essay for Getting Bi, the next thing I did was design a ier for the bisexual group at the LGBT center. I enjoyed my rst meeting with the group but was disturbed by the overwhelming majority of cisgender27 men in a group which aspired to gender mixed. I worded the ier in a way that I hoped would appeal to women and gender deviants and explicitly mentioned that the group was open to people of all sexes and genders. Thus, bringing more people to the group had become my rst bisexual activist project. I photocopied and handed out the iers, I advertised the group on many places on the Internet, and I even fought my terrifying stage fright to come up on stage at the community transgender party (DressUP)
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and invite people to the group. I was hopeful and motivated, and I had found a new passion within myself. Looking back, this was probably the moment when things clicked. As I designed and printed the ier, I realized that throughout my years of queer activism, I had never thought to put these two things together: my bisexuality and my activism. Although I had activist skills and was putting energy into queer issues, and though I had always thought about and was disturbed by bisexual erasure, though I always sensed the need for a political bisexual communityI had never thought of making the connection between these two things. It was as if this wasnt an option at all, not even a question to be raised and then rejectedit simply did not exist. As I started working on the ier, I was able to identify this virtual nonoption as internalized biphobia. Bisexual erasure ran so deep in my mindand in the minds of my fellow (bisexual) activiststhat we simply hadnt realized that this was a topic we could actually work on. Marginalization of the importance of bisexual issues was also deeply embedded within usseemingly, there was always something more important do to. Today I realize that the struggle against biphobia, as a social structure, is a struggle for our lives, a struggle for our survival and for our very existence. In a world in which bisexual people kill themselves, get sick, lose their homes, their families, their friends, their communities, their support, their jobs, their money, their education. In a world where people get bashed, beaten, killed, raped and much much more, all as a result of biphobia28in a world dominated by structures of monosexism,29 cissexism, heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, nationalism, militarism and many more forms directly inuencing the lives of bisexualsin a world such as this, ghting the struggle against biphobia and monosexismand every form on Earth that is linked to itis not only necessary, but also essential. At that time, I didnt know about all these statistics of horror. However, the realization that the bisexual struggle was a struggle for myself, for my own life, and for the lives of many other bisexual people, had now taken root in my mind. This realization has since lead every one of my actions in bisexual activism and will probably remain so for the rest of my life. One more thing I started doing at the time was writing. I had published my rst GoGay article on bisexual erasure on November 19, 2008, in which I wrote about various instances of bisexual erasure that I had seen in the radical queer/feminist community. At the end of the article, I called out to all people of the bisexual spectrum30 to unite and create a political community and activism to subvert bisexual erasure within the LGBTQ community.31 I wrote:
In the last two years a transgender community was started, which did not exist beforean active, political and creative community, addressing important issues which have never been addressed before. Lets do the
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same for ourselveswe also have needs, we also experience oppression, we also need spaces for speaking, for information, for support and for culture. Once we let ourselves be heard, once we see ourselves as we arethen others will surely follow our lead. (Eisner, 2008)
I emphasize this passage not only because of its status as my rst public call-out for a new Israeli bisexual movement, but also because of my mention of the transgender community as the inspirational source for the future bisexual community that I had in mind. The reason why this matters is that in Israel, the bisexual community has grown out of the transgender community, inheriting many of its traits, activist methods, thought and language. Furthermore, in Israel, the bisexual community was founded, and is led, by genderqueer and transgender people, fundamentally incorporating a nonbinary, gender-deviant and feminist perspective basis. I nd this a particular point of strength within the bisexual movement in Israel, subverting much of the problematic gender-binary discourse and self-congratulatory transgender tokenism suffered by many bisexual communities in the United States and Europe, and creating a truly radical platform for rethinking sex, gender and sexuality. Without deconstructing binaries of sex and gender, we could never deconstruct the binary of sexual orientation. If the goal of the bisexual movement is to transform society and to end hierarchical sexual binaries, the rst thing it needs to do is to break down the system of sex-gender-sexuality32 and rebuild something new, starting out from zero.33 I nished the article by mentioning the new bisexual group at the LGBT center and invited people to attend. At the time, I believed that the existence of the group was important and essential to raise awareness of bisexuality and create a political bisexual community and activism. I continued with my efforts in advertising the group and in getting people to join, for many months, believing that the only reason why they didnt come was internalized bisexual erasure and lack of awareness. However, at the same time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable within that group, sensing what I experienced as sexism and cissexism. The group continued being a cis male-dominated space, and I felt an increasing pressure to be the educator on these issues for the group. In addition, the people in the group seemed resistant and reluctant to do bisexual activism, and my attempts to push for such were encountered with not much more than appreciation for my own efforts. Whereas this won me respect with some of the group members, it was also very draining for me, and I found myself nally attending the group less and less frequently, and attending only out of a sense of obligation to an obscure bisexual existence proved by the existence of the group. Finally, I realized that the group had stopped working for me and stopped attending. The group, however, is still active and remains the longest-running bisexual activity currently in Israel.
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FIFTH STORY (20082011): THE B-MOVIES

When I was still attending the bisexual group, some people raised the idea that we might dedicate some of the groups meetings to watching movies together. The idea clicked with memovie screenings are incredibly easy to organizeand being a lm student, this was a natural eld for me. I had been looking for ways of expanding events, increasing community formation and visibility for the bisexual community, and so the idea of forming a bisexual lm club seemed important and fun. I contacted the LGBT center and suggested to start a monthly bisexual lm club. I use the word suggested , though in practice it was more like requested . Our LGBT center often seems to carry the notion that by allowing us to organize activities for them, they are in fact doing us a favor. In fact, at that point I had so much internalized the exclusion of bisexuals from anywhere LGBT that I really was convinced they were doing us a favor by allowing us to use their space. In the subsequent years, this treatment repeated itself many times, as the center refused to give us a price discount (despite their self-professed policy to discount events targeted at marginalized communities, and despite many peoples complaints of not being able to pay the entrance fee), and as the center kept moving us between rooms, rescheduling and sometimes even canceling our meetings, all according to their needs. During our second year, the center had one-sidedly decided to move the day of the club from Thursday to Sunday, causing the club to lose its group of regulars and sending the club into a year of temporary coma. Nonetheless, during its rst year of activity, the club had become an alternative bisexual group space for those who felt uncomfortable with the bisexual support/social group. The space within the club (which we named B-Movies) was decidedly feminist and trans-inclusive. The people who showed up were exactly the kind of people that I felt the other group was missing: women, trans people, feminists and radicals. Today I see the club as yet another seed from which what is now the bisexual community rst sprouted. Some of the people from the rst B-Movies group were later also among the founders of our bisexual organization, Panorama, and among the instigators of the new wave of bisexual activism. The club is currently still active, running monthly each rst Wednesday of the month, after having been moved last year (its third) to the local anarchist/queer/vegan bar, the Rogatka, and subsequently, becoming a free entrance event. The Rogatka is a nonprot club run by a volunteer anarchist collective for the purpose of providing community space as well as community resources, usually hosting radical political events, queer/transgender parties, punk shows and vegan workshops and events. These days, all bisexual community activities, save for the social/support group at the LGBT center, are held there. This choice of place is, of course, not coincidental and
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is one of many elements symbolizing the bisexual communitys connections to the various forms of radical politics and communities in Israel.
SIXTH STORY (2009): TEL AVIV PRIDE MONTH

Around April 2009, Id published an article on GoGay (one of many at the time) giving advice to LGTs on how to be good allies to bisexuals. Following the article, I found myself in conversation with one political partner of mine, trying to think up of ways to increase bisexual visibility and to further encourage the formation of a bisexual community. Once again, the transgender community served as direct source of inspiration for us, inheriting its grassroots community-building techniques. How about organizing a bisexual party? she wrote to me in an e-mail, Parties do wonders to visibility, theyre fun, positive, and they contributed loads to the transgender/queer community. Thus, we decided to organize a bisexual pride party for the Tel Aviv pride month. We named the party MESS-e-BI (pronounced: mess-ee-bee, literally meaning: bi party) and set the date for the night of the Tel Aviv pride parade. We knew that this would not be a one-time event, but a regular night, and put much thought into it accordingly. Our model for the party was similar to that of the queer and transgender parties, featuring music and dancing, alongside drag performances by community members. The signicance of the drag performances for us was in allowing the community a space in which to be creative, while creating a unique style of performances for the bisexual community parties. In addition, the connection that this manifested to queer and transgender subcultures was also important to us, as we saw (and continue to see) ourselves as part of those communities, and embrace these histories as our own (acknowledging that bisexuals have always been part of them anyway). We invited DJs and drag performers we knew from other regular nights, such as the Tel Aviv-based DressUP, and the Jerusalembased Gevald! As this was the rst party, most of the performers were not, in fact, bisexual (as there wasnt much of a community at the time to form such a pool), however many of the performances focused on bisexuality as a topic. We wanted everyone to feel welcome at the party. As bisexuals, we were all too accustomed to the painful reality of bisexual erasure and exclusion, as well as the feeling of never being named and thus never truly invited to queer parties and events. As a method of ensuring that people of all sexual orientations and gender identities felt welcome and invited, we explicitly wrote that the party was open to people of all sexes, genders and orientations. In addition, we included a long grocery list of sexual and gender identities, including bisexuals, pansexuals, omnisexuals, bi curious, questioning, unlabled, lesbians who like boys, gays who like girls, queers, lesbians, gays,
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straights, transgenders, genderqueers, intersex, butches, femmes, BDSM34 people, poly people, allies, partners and friends.35 The party was also decidedly nonprot and nancially accessible. Financial accessibility was particularly important to us, as we were aware that many in our community (as in any marginalized community) are unable to pay the high fees of many normal, prot-oriented parties. It is worth noting here that, as I mentioned above, bisexuals have been found to be statistically more likely to suffer from poverty than gay males, lesbians or heterosexuals (Ulrich, 2011, p. 27). However, even regardless of this factthe bisexual community (in Israel and anywhere) includes people from many additional marginalized groups, including women, transgender people, people of color, disabled people, working-class people, youth and many more populations for whom money could be a problem. We therefore decided to have a three price range for the party: a regular price of ILS 30 (around US $8.5), a discount price of ILS 25 (around US $7), and a pay-as-much-as-you-can rule, for those who didnt have enough money to pay either. Our invitations always clearly state: No one is left outside for lack of funds. In addition, we chose to hold the party on a Thursday (and not the more traditional Friday), so as to make sure that people had the option to arrive and leave by public transportation. The prots of the party were to be divided between the performers, the DJs, the organizers, and everyone else who helped out. Another aspect that was important to us was sexual safety at the party, and the importance of creating a space with awareness of sexism and transphobia. We were aware that sexual (and gender) harassment is present everywhere, and that though theres really no way of avoiding it completely, there still are many ways of raising the issue to the surface and addressing it. For this purpose, we decided to include a team responsible for dealing with sexual harassment at the party, and in addition, we read out a few guidelines about consent at the beginning of the party (and continue to do so at each party). We requested people not to touch others without rst asking permission, we asked to be aware ofand to mindthe boundary between looking and staring, we mentioned that not everyone uses the same pronouns as they might seem to and that asking rst is a good idea (an especially signicant point in Hebrew, where you is gendered), we asked people not to take pictures of others without permission, and requested people to be aware that not everyone at the party is necessarily bisexual, and thus not everyone are interested in being approached or hit on by members of any gender. We publicized the party everywhere, online and off, also receiving exposure through the ofcial pride month calendar published by the Tel Aviv municipality. We were very excitedthis was the second-ever bisexual party in Israel (having been preceded by a party in 2006 in Jerusalem, organized by the old JOH bisexual group, by then already dispersed), the rst one in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rst one to receive so much attention. We were making history.
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Another thing that happened around that time was the creation of a national bisexual and pansexual mailing list for the community in Israel. Up until May 2009, all discussions about bisexuality and all invitations to bisexual events usually circulated around the transgender mailing list (trans.il). This kept going until members of trans.il had started complaining that bisexuals were hijacking the list. One day I received an e-mail from a transgender pansexual member of the trans.il list, suggesting me to start a new list for discussing bisexual topics. Once the list was founded, it started growing exponentially, and by the time only one week had gone by, 50 people were already registered, and lively discussions were taking place about the bisexual community, our goals and the future of bisexual activism. Today, the list is almost 3 years old, includes more than 250 registered members and is used as the main platform for bisexual activist organizing in Israel. Around that time, the founding of our new bisexual/pansexual organization also took place. It was late April, and I had decided to organize a bisexual/pansexual block at the Tel Aviv pride parade. When I spoke to the person in charge, he notied me that a large corporation had decided to donate money to print banners for the various groups in the parade (in return for printing the companys logo on the back of the banner and receiving free advertising with the added PR benet of being a donor). This corporation, however, had set one condition, which was that banners should only be printed for older and more well-established groups. In practice, what this meant was that for the person in charge to be able to pass our bi group off as a well-established one, I needed to make up a name, design a logo and then send it to him. After I went home, I got online and started speaking to a friend of mine, and asked him if he had any creative ideas for a name. The name he came up with was Panorama, corresponding with pansexual, as well as giving the feeling of a wide range of identities. Thus I had notied the organizers of the pride parade, that the name of the bisexual group would be Panoramabi and pansexual community. At rst, I really thought that the name would be just thata name. But very soon I saw that it took on a life of its own. Panorama quickly became not only a name, but also a representation, an ideology and an activist community. Very soon we started discussing and having debates about the organizations purposes and its agenda. However this came later . . . for now, Panorama was a name on a banner to be printed for the parade. The name of the organization, as well as the fact that I was organizing the bisexual/pansexual block, had also won me a ticket into the semisecret inner-circle of the decision-making mechanism in the Tel-Aviv LGBT community. For the rst time, I was invited to a prepride parade meeting, intended for the heads of organizations in the community. A side-step is now in order. The Tel Aviv pride parade has been taking place ofcially since 1998 (with precedents since 1987), and up until 2006 had been organized by the GLBT Association. In 2006, the Association lacked the
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funds to organize the annual parade, a problem that resulted with a takeover of the pride parade by the Tel Aviv municipality. In 1998, I was a 10th-grade high school student and very passionate about what I thought of at the time as gay and lesbian rights. I had no idea that these parades that I attended in years 1998 to 2000 were the rst ofcial ones in Israel, I only knew that it was important for me to be in them. However, this was not an uncomplicated choice. Even when the GLBT Association was still in charge of the parade, the parade itself had been mostly unbearable. Firstly, it should be remembered that June in Tel Aviv is very very hot. Marching on the streets in the hours of the afternoon is no small thing for anyone; however, this is something that I, and many others, are willing to bear, if the purpose is important. However, the real problem for me was the structure of the paradea succession of trucks playing loud music and advertising various commercial sponsors, mufing the sounds of the actual LGBT blocks; the various (straight) city ofcials on stage stroking their own egos for hours on end; and no clear political message but that of a consumerist partywas never my idea of a demonstration for social change. I felt that the parade was vacant, vapid and at. I found myself attending yearly only by principle but feeling like being there meant absolutely nothing. Eventually, I stopped going (not without a pang of guilt). Now, if the parade was commercialized and vapid under the GLBT Associations direction, then under the municipalitys it became even more so. Throughout the years, the trucks only became larger, the sponsors became bigger, and the political message became even more diluted. As the Tel Aviv municipality was now responsible for the parade, the municipality and its functionaries now determined the messages, the agenda and the content of the parade itself. Municipalities, of course, are not interested in resistance by their very naturea resistance to LGBT-phobia36 and a demand for liberation would naturally be threatening toward the governing structure of city and state. In addition, a pride march as demonstration would surely have driven the sponsors away and given the community one less opportunity for being good consumerists under capitalism. The municipality thus chose to further emphasize the party, the consumerism and the vapid parts of the parade, while conveniently neglecting the political messages, the protest and resistance, presenting the illusion of a happy, united Gay, Gay, Gay and Gay (GGGG)37 community and happily treading over the concerns and needs of virtually every marginalized population under LGBTQ. As the years went by, the municipality, along with the Israeli government, had found yet another use for the pride parade in Tel Avivpinkwashing. The governments Ministry of Tourism along with the Tel Aviv municipality, had discovered that by emphasizing Israels tolerant attitudes toward GGGGs and by presenting Tel Aviv as the gay-friendly haven of the barbaric homophobic Arabic Middle East, they were managing to divert attention away from Israels war crimes, genocide and ethnic
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cleansing made against the Palestinians, thus successfully creating a false image of Israel as a liberal progressive Western country, a beacon of White light in the darkness of the Middle East. Thus, a new kind of propaganda was sproutedthat focusing on the meager rights given to Jewish gays and lesbians (only) in Israel, while dismissing severe oppression made by the Israeli government against Palestinian queers (and the whole Palestinian people), and sweeping under any rumor of anti-LGBTQ violence and oppression in Israel made against Jewish queers. And 2009 was the year when the method of pinkwashing had rst started gaining momentum. Two thousand and nine was the 100th anniversary of the founding of Tel Aviv by Ashkenazi38 colonialists on Palestinian land (including the Palestinian city of Jaffa). The entire year was marked by various celebrations organized by the municipality, which, in turn, had also claimed the pride parade as part of its colonialist celebration campaign, giving it the title of 100 reasons for pride (obviously, a title that would never have been chosen even by the most assimilationist parts of the community itself). The municipality imposed the message with the help of the wealthy corporate sponsor responsible for printing the bannersunderneath the logo of each group, was printed the slogan-reference, One reason for pride. Unfortunately, this was also the message carried on the banner of our bi block. Attending my rst prepride parade meeting at the LGBT center, organized by the municipalitys representative, was quite a negative experience for me. I had arrived to see a room full of people from the various LGBTQ organizations in the community, seeing the faces that held the power. Out of maybe 40 (or more) people in the room, I was the only out bisexual, one of two out transgender people in the room, one of three Mizrahis in the room, and one of 10 female-identied people. To tie this all together, I was certainly the only female Mizrahi genderqueer bisexual person present. Each of these factors would have placed me in a lower status and power in a room full of Ashkenazi gay cis menall of these combined have placed me as one of the most marginalized people in the room. I do not write this by way of complaint or self-victimization but to emphasize the power structure within the community. The community, more often than not, is ruled and represented by its members who have been benefactors of privilege in society. Those who are in power inside the LGBTQ community are the same ones who would have been in power in general society had it not been for their one deviation from the standardtheir homosexuality. Thus, the agenda often presented as the LGBTQ agenda, or the LGBTQ struggle for rights, in fact reects the interests of this narrow group of people, for whom the only barrier from living their normal, privileged lives, is their inability to marry or to legally exploit the bodies of brown women in poverty to beget children and raise normative families (AKA surrogacy and adoption). Indeed, when theres food on your plate and your stomach is full, youre free to concern yourself with more important matters.
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In that meeting I had experienced this entire social structure personally. The method used to run the meeting was open, a method meaning that whoever speaks the loudest gets the permission to speak, and a method by which the ones with the most authority and privilege would receive the most opportunities to be heard as well as having their opinions respected and listened to. Speech is a political issue. When people from marginalized groups speak, people attribute us less authority and less importance. People listen less and respond less. They quickly dismiss our views as marginal and ignore our suggestions. As a result of these experiences, we learn that what we have to say is less important, less worth noting, not as smart or as significant as what other people have to say. We internalize dismissive treatment of ourselves and learn to dismiss what we have to say in advance. When we do speak, we have to reassure ourselves a thousand times that this is important enough to say, that we should make ourselves heard. And upon speaking, we are once again met with the same silencing treatment. This is what it means to be a person from a marginalized group in any setting involving people of privileged groups and is true for every kind of marginalization and privilege present, be it bisexual/monosexual, queer/heterosexual, transgender/cisgender, feminine gender/masculine gender, Black/White, disabled/able bodied and so on. To counter this construct, people should be aware of their privileges in relation to people from marginalized groups and pay attention to the space that each person takes up in the conversation. People of marginalized groups should be encouraged to speak, and people with privileges should take care that they dont take up more than their proportionate space in the discussion. Of course, none of this was acknowledged or addressed in the meeting I attended. I sat quietly for most of the meeting and watched the important people talk, feeling like I had nothing much to say, and much less opportunity to say it. However, at some point, the meetings host (the mayors adviser on gay issues, Yaniv Waizman) went through the ofcial pride month program, reading out the titles and descriptions of each and every party listedevery party, except the bisexual one. Suddenly, there was something important worth saying. I waited until he nished speaking so I could make a comment about the party (and hopefully, thereby subtly insinuate towards the small, automatic exclusion that happened). However, as I started speaking, I was ignored and cut off by another speaker, a gay cis man. The man spoke for 10 minutes, after which I tried to speak again and was again cut off, this time by someone else. I spent the next 20 minutes trying to speak, each time starting and being ignored and cut off by someone else. This wasnt done intentionally, of course. No one in the room knew me. However, the entire outset made it very clear that I was not one of the important people in the room, was not part of the group of leaders, whose job is to speak and be listened to. When I nally did manage to speak, my news of the party were encountered with positive response;
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however, when Waizman looked at the paper in his hands to look at the event that he had missed, he read it out as bisexual and fun-sexual party (mispronouncing pansexual ). This showed me how little people knew (or cared) about the bisexual community, despite their own self-professed good intentions. I spent the rest of the month being entirely stressed out about the party and the parade, a kind of stress that was to repeat itself many times over in the following year, and that was characteristic of my activism at the time. At that point, I was working pretty much alone, making decisions and working on things generally by myself. I did this as I was certain that there was no one to do it but me, and that if I did nothing, well, then nothing would be done (an unimaginable option for me then, and one which I still struggle with today). Today I see this as resonating with the feeling of isolation that many bisexual people feel in regards to the community and also in regards to activism. I see this as a political issue inuenced by the effects of internalized biphobia, because part of biphobias destructive effects on all of us, is creating a disconnection and a separation between us (as bisexuals, as queers and as people), leaving us isolated and lonely, overburdened with work and quick to burn out as activists. In addition, doing things alone creates a power imbalance, meaning that few people have control over agenda, resources and organization. Throughout these rst months I worked alone because I felt as if I had no one else to do this work with (and in many ways, I didnt). This left me exhausted and created a dynamic within the bisexual community in which on the one hand, all the hard work is cast upon me, and on the other hand, other people are structurally barred from accessing power. Today I realize that sustainable activist work needs to be done together, creating groups and communities to help each other with work and with providing emotional (and other) support. The solidarity that we can experience through a shared struggle is also a counterattack to the societys biphobic structures isolating us from one another and is a revolutionary way of creating an alternative to the alienation and separation of mainstream society. The disability justice movement calls this interdependentness and notes the necessity of connections between people as central to creating sustainable activism. In addition, using this kind of ethic allows us to subvert social values such as individuality and self-reliance, which glorify not only isolation but also able-bodiedness. Working through an ethic of interdependentness, politics is no longer something left outside of our relationships and our personal lives, activism is not only something we do, but also something we live. Our lives and our relationships have political meanings, and changing our lives is just one more way of ghting oppression and bringing about the revolution.39 The MESS-e-BI was held on June 11, the eve of the Tel Aviv pride parade, and was a huge success. To date, the rst MESS-e-BI was the largest
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one yet, attracting many dozens of people. We opened the party with a word from the organizers, receiving a great applause as we welcomed people to the rst bi and pansexual party in Tel Aviv, and invited people to join us in building our new community. True to our origins, the MESS-e-BI performances underline an understanding of drag as political, not only in the way of being gender subversive (Butler, 1991), but also as a tool of raising and addressing various political issues. The performances, thus, are never merely there to entertain but are also perceived as located on a spectrum of political activism. Concurrently, the performances at that rst party were many and diverse, running from light entertainment to bisexual pride, to LGBTQ solidarity and issues of feminism. During the breaks between performances, the DJs played music while some people danced and others went outside to socialize. The evening ended at a late hour, and we received many compliments for the wonderful evening, asking when the next party was being planned. Five hours after getting home, I had to wake up and organize the bisexual stand at the pride happening, and then the bisexual block at the parade. My levels of stress and exhaustion peaked as I went to the Meir Garden, where the happening was held. The bisexual stand shared a table with the BDSM standan apt intersection, as the BDSM group was organized by bisexual activist Pnina Moldovano, and as my lover, who came to help me with the stand, was dressed entirely in (vegan) BDSM gear. I had one bisexual ag, custom sewn for me for the bi party and for the bi/pan block, which I spread out on the table as a cloth. I also brought free purple ribbons for visibility, and cotton bisexual bracelets that Id crocheted in advance (for sale). Id also received an additional ag and some bisexual pins from one of the participants of the transgender block, who didnt need them anymore. In addition, I received lots and lots of bisexual stickers left over from previous years, by Daniel Hoffman, the founder of the late Bisexuals in Israel. All of these, in addition to the large banner we received from the LGBT center, contributed to our visibility, which was modest but important at the parade. Our block was attended by about 10 people (most bisexual people I knew had decided to march with other, more important blocks), but the atmosphere was good and the consequence was historical. To the best of my knowledge, this was the rst bisexual block in the history of the Tel Aviv pride parade. I remember returning home from the parade, exhausted and aching, so tired that I couldnt even sleep. I lay on the bed with my lover, watching the sunset from the window coloring the room with gold and feeling relieved that everything was over with. Acknowledging that during the previous weeks, I had exhausted myself half to death, I decided not to participate in any other pride events or marches that year, and to focus on resting and recovering instead.
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SEVENTH STORY (2009): JERUSALEM PRIDE

[Trigger warning: This story (as well as the next one) contains descriptions of violence that might be difcult to read. If you suspect this might be triggering for you or make you feel uncomfortable in any way, please consider reading these parts of the text in a place that feels safe for you and when you have emotional support available.] On June 25, the day of the Jerusalem pride march (held that year to honor 40 years to Stonewall), I woke up deciding once again that I had no intention to attend. I had an exam that day, and in the days before it, I was not concerned with the march or its contents but rather with studying. However, all this changed when I checked my e-mails that morning, to discover that at the very last minute that the JOH had relented to (awesome) pressure from the transgender community and added a transgender speaker to the list of speeches on stage. A week beforehand, the Haifa pride march took place with a stage and speeches that included only one woman (a heterosexual ally) and a multitude of gay and straight white cis men. In response, two feminist activists, lesbian and bisexual, demanded the right to speak on stage and after some pressure and much insistence were given the microphone as the last speech. They spoke trying to remind people of the erased voices of women, bisexuals, lesbians, transgenders, Palestinians and all the other marginalized voices in the community. They sought to emphasize that the pride parade was supposed to represent and sound the voices of all groups in our communities rather than just one, and to point out the unequal distribution of power, status and agenda within and across our communities. Following their speech, in the week preceding the Jerusalem pride march, both these activists sent e-mails to the JOH to ensure that the pride march would include a bisexual speaker. The JOH responded by saying that it was already too late, that the speeches had already been set, that speaking was limited to heads of organizations, and that bisexuals didnt need a speech anyway, as our needs would be covered by the multitudes of (yes) gay and straight white cis men. The JOHs excuses fell short as I read JOH Director Yonathan Ghers e-mail to the trans.il mailing list, at 10 am that morning, stating at the last minute, that the JOH would permit a transgender speaker to go on stage. The speaker (who was unafliated to any organization) was allotted 3 minutes, thus proving that last-minute changes were indeed possible, if the spirit was willing. At 11 am, I called Gher, presenting myself as the head of the bisexual organization Panorama and demanded that the bisexual community would be allowed a speaker. If the JOH only wanted heads of organizations, I said, I was more than willing to speak as one myself. I spent the rst 5 minutes of the call just trying to convince him to hear me out rather than hang up the phone. After I spoke, he hung up on me anyway.
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Immediately after that call, I called my political partner who organized the rst MESS-e-BI with me, and who had gone up on stage in Haifa the week beforehand. I told her that we were facing a rerun of last weeks events and told her to brace herself. She and I then called some other people to join us in our action, and I also notied the bisexual mailing list of a last-minute bisexual block at the Jerusalem pride march. Thus our protest action was born. Before I start describing what happened, I need to make it very clear that when I thought of repeating the action from Haifa, what I was expecting was the same kind of response from the JOH as the two activists received from the organizers of the Haifa pride march: I expected that we would go there, argue with them a bit, pressure and demand and then be allowed a few minutes on stage. The idea that what actually happened, might happen, did not even occur to me, and when it did, it left huge imprints on my psyche. To this day, what happened there remains the one most traumatic event in my activist history, as well as the rst and only such event in the history of the Israeli LGBTQ community. Taking the bus to Jerusalem, I was tired and tense. Although I took the ride that was organized by the Tel Aviv Universitys LGBT group, there was no one there I knew, and I sat alone, feeling scared, furious and silenced, holding tight to my bisexual ag. I couldnt stop thinking about what I might say when I got on the stage, and I thought I would surely die. When I got to the march, I located our little action group, which consisted of ve peopleonly to be split again into the bi block and the transgender block, as two of us remained with the bisexual block, and three marched as transgender. Our bi block in Jerusalem was a bit smaller in size than the one in Tel Aviv but perhaps more visible. We shouted slogans that we invented on the spot and had more bisexual ags than we had in the block in Tel Aviv. During the march, I was somewhat distracted from my anxiety, proud to be part of the bi block and feeling happy that people attended. After the long walk of the march, we nally arrived at the Independence Garden, where the stage and the speeches were held. The speeches and performances were already long under way, and we were scared that we would lose our momentum. The stage was surrounded by a plastic security fence and attended by security forces (reminiscent of the 2005 stabbing). It is worth noting that security guards in Israel undergo training by the military. In fact, the preferred people for such jobs are the ones who have had combat training during their military service. Many of the people who nd jobs as security guards are ones who were combat soldiers during their mandatory military service, thus daily engaged and well versed in the various forms of violence extracted by the Israeli military toward the Palestinians. The JOH hired private security services; however, the security companies in Israel form part of the spectrum of militarism in our society, true to the origins of
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their training and to military security policies in Israel (read: violence and brutality, as well as racial proling of Palestinians and Mizrahis). We jumped the fence. Our plan was to occupy the back stage area and to refuse to leave without receiving the right to speak. Our plan was based on radical nonviolent protest, creating a conict without harming people or property, and we were sure we would be heard. However, from the moment that we jumped the fence, the security guards were upon us. One guard took me by the hands and dragged me on the asphalt path, hurting my ankle in a way that took a month to heal, while another guard was going after my friends. As I was being dragged, I called out to the people in our group, and they came running for me, avoiding the other guard and combining their arms together with mine so as to prevent him from carrying me away. We sat on the grass, then, next to the path on which I was dragged, arms still combined, while the GLBT Associations Chairman Mike Hamel, acting as representative of the JOH, came to speak to us. We requested to be allowed on stage, asked to be given one minute, even 30 seconds, anything just to be able to speak our message. Hamel refused time and again, saying that it was already too late, that the police would shut them down, that our perspectives were already covered by (once again) White cis-gay-male speakers. To our counterarguments, he replied claiming that we were in fact the violent ones and that we were the ones seeking to silence different voices, completely ignoring the physical violence that had just taken place, as well as the silent violence of current and historical muting and erasure of bisexual voices from the LGBTQ community. Throughout all this mess, I failed to notice that one of us, Lilach, had disappeared out of sight. I was too occupied with trying to avoid getting beat up and then trying to get the JOH to relent, that I completely missed out the fact that Lilach had gone elsewhere. And thus, when I heard the word bisexual spoken on stage, the feeling that we actually succeeded was sudden, surprising and completely surreal. I instantly got up and ran toward the stairs leading to the stage. I didnt hear what Lilach was saying, but as I reached the stage and climbed the stairs I heard her saying, Soon theyre going to take me out by force. And then everything ickered again. The same guard who dragged me before was now jumping me and pushing me down the stairs, almost making me fall. As I reached the grass, he grabbed my wrists, bending my arms behind my back. I remember shouting out in pain, trying to sit down on the ground so he wont be able to drag me again. I remember him saying something, which only later my friends told me was, Shes going to get arrested today. Everything was fast and slow and blurry. Pictures taken from the scene show Mike Hamel standing idly by and watching as the guard did what he did to me. At that moment, though, I didnt know what was going on, certainly not who was watching. All I knew at that moment was pain and survival. Then somehow, eventually, the guard let me go. Only
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later had I been told that the people I was with had ripped his hands off of me. A step aside. Just as the security guard had received his training in a military context, so was my response based in military trauma, as I had suffered violence before at the hands of police and military. It is worth noting that physical and other forms of violence are a routine occurrence as far as things are concerned for Palestinians (including those with Israeli citizenship). Many Palestinians need do nothing more than to practice their legal right to freedom of speech, to nd themselves arrested for months without trial or release, for such charges as terrorism, assault of police ofcers (code word for brutally arrested) and other groundless claims. In general, the acceptable notion among police and military in Israel is that any protestviolent and nonviolent alikeagainst the Israeli occupation, constitutes an act of terrorism or support thereof. As to Israeli Jewswe are spared of prison time, however we do receive our dose of nice brutality in demonstrations. As I was beaten by the guard, where I went in my head was the village of Bilin. Bilin is one of the many Palestinian villages which the Israeli separation wall had disconnected from the peoples land and livelihood. It is also one of the prominent centers of solidarity struggle against the occupation, involving Palestinian, Israeli and international activists. For many years now, the village has been hosting weekly nonviolent demonstrations against the separation wall, each Friday afternoon. These demonstrations are routinely encountered with severe military violence, including use of tear gas, ash bangs and rubber bullets. Many people have been injured and some killed over the years by the IOF40 attacks on the protesters. I was in Bilin only once, years before, in 2006, and experienced all of these things that were previously only words. The experience of violence of an extent that I had not expected was the same in both these cases. The armed violence Id been exposed to in Bilin and suffered by the IOF was certainly more severe than the mere dragging and kicking Id experienced at the Jerusalem pride march; however, the undertone for me was the same. It was the violent attempt to silence resistance, it was the violence directed toward those who refuse to shut up, it was the same pain of trying to break out of the cycle of silence and violence and oppression and deathand being encountered only by the same blank face of the system that created the need to protest in the rst place. It took me a month to fully recover from the trauma of being in Bilin. And though I didnt know it then, on the backstage of prideit took me over a month to recover from what happened in Jerusalem. Finding myself sitting on the grass, short of breath and dizzy, disoriented and hurt, I stared around in confusion. My friends were nearby, shouting to the journalists that were standing near the stage, that bisexuals were in Stonewall, too, that we deserved a place in the community. It took me a few seconds to reorient myself to the shouting and the cameras and the crowd.
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In my head, I was still falling, falling, falling. I got up from the grass and shouted that Stonewall was an illegal action, that the rst pride march after Stonewall was organized by a bisexual, that without her we would not have been there that day. The next point in time that I remember nds me sitting on the grass in a distance from the stage, alone and crying. The people from that action group were not my friends, nor people I felt close to. Now Id lost them and had no one else. I tried to look but couldnt move one step. I felt like I was dying. I sat and didnt even try to move or try and stop the tears. Bisexuals are the sexual orientation group most likely to suffer from depression (Ulrich, 2011, pp. 1112, 14, 24), and this tendency has certainly not skipped me. I spent many years of my life dealing with depression, which in time has made it easy for me to identify it, and slowly learn how to deal with it. That moment was a learning moment. Depression and biphobia teach us that were alone. They teach us that were worthless. They teach us we deserve the pain. And as I sat there crying I realized that this was what was happening, and I remembered: two weeks beforehand, at the MESS-eBI, Lilach had given me the only hug I had received all night. Later, when the party ended, we had a tiny conversation about friends and support, and I could tell she was a good person. I also knew that though we werent close, and hadnt known each other for so long, we liked each other. I took my phone and called her, asking where she and the others were. Apparently they went right beside the stage, standing close together with the people of the transgender block, whom had also shared their megaphone with us so we could keep protesting from the crowd. I sat there with Lilach and started crying again, this time being surrounded by people who cared. Lilach hugged me on one side, and my friend (who wasnt yet my friend) Aylam Bar-Shalom put his arms around me from the other. I must have cried for 20 minutes, all the while hearing the hosts on stage praising the good atmosphere and saying how fun it was to be there, how good to see a march oh-so inclusive. This was the rst (and so far only) time that an LGBTQ organization in Israel had extracted physical violence against activists from the community. It was also the moment when the bisexual movement in Israel was born. When the speeches were done, we split up, only to rejoin together at the DressUP party held in the center of Jerusalem right after the march. I was falling apart. I wanted to go home, but I didnt want to go alone. I ended up staying for the entire night. Lilach stayed with me the whole time, hugging and me comforting me. I was starving and was grateful for the vegan food stand that the organizers had set up on the balcony (because I had no money on me, they also gave me food for free). The DressUP organizers called us up on the stage, where we spoke about what happened, and where we nally received the support that we expected from the community. When I think about that evening, everything shows up tinged with black and grey,
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a snowy haze, the aftermath of violence, the need to stand and smile and act as if were all still human. Some of the march organizers from the JOH attended the party. Every moment was tinged with the feeling of trying not to collapse, trying to hold together and hold on for just one more second, just one more, and then another, until I can nally get home. Almost no one made eye contact with me. When it was Lilachs turn to perform, she went up on the stage with her guitar and dedicated her song to me. It was a song about love and the revolution, about creating change together, about love, sisterhood, rage and pride.41 I saw the way she looked at me, the sound of her voice and the look in her eyes, and I knew she fell in love with me. Although our relationship only started a few months laterhere, among the pride, violence, struggle, pain and hopewas the seed of our love. After a long, long walk to the car, we took a ride back home with a friend. Four of us in the car, the hour was late, exhausted and ruined we spoke about bi politics. We spoke of the transgender community, about the JOH, about our feelings of erasure and homelessness, we spoke about the bisexual community that we wanted to build. We wanted a place where we would feel at home. A place to feel included and to be celebrated. Bisexuals are like weedswe grow between the cracks, between the plots, wherever we are is the wrong place, always a disturbance, always ripped out. We wanted a place to feel welcome. We wanted to change the community. And we wanted to change society. I woke up the next morning to an Internet buzzing with discussion about us and our action. It started with the GoGay news report about the march, including our action, and continued throughout the next month at an average rate of two articles per week, all writing and commenting about our action. As expected, most articles, and the overwhelming majority of reader responses, were negative. We were accused of any ill imaginable and possibly attributable to usviolence, aggressiveness, silencing behavior, even elitism and chauvinist machoism. A response article was published by one of the volunteers at the JOH, accusing us of lying in our telling of the story (which was published in GoGay 2 weeks after the incident). None of the articles discussed the violence against us or the JOHs responsibility for the exclusion and the violence that took place. The reader responses looked even worse, not only accusing us of all of these things, but also speaking out what the dignied published respondents were thinking but couldnt possibly say without outing themselves as biphobic: Why are bisexuals trying to insist on their place in the community? Bisexuality doesnt exist, bisexuals arent part of the community, and even if they were, their needs are all already covered by the struggle for gay assimilationismno unique bisexuality exists. Again and again, the articles and the reader responses tried to silence us, urgently and violently.
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What nobody realized was that all this dirt, all this biphobia and all of this silencing, was in fact forming a long and meaningful discussion in the community, speaking and addressing issues about bisexuality and bisexual people as a group, starting to engage with a topic that so far had been so deeply silenced nobody bothered to think about it. An additional benet was that many bisexuals had heard about the action through the GoGay coverage and became aware of the bisexual movement, the bisexual community and bisexual politics. The community thus grew exponentially. Nevertheless, that time was hard for me, and for over a month, all I felt was being haunted by the incident. The physical violence of the JOH and the verbal violence of the articles and the responses seemed to exist on a single continuum of silencing and erasure. It wouldnt let me go. I felt like I could not move on, lonely, depressed, stuck and constantly under attack. Little solidarity came by way of the community, little comfort or support was offered to me. A particularly disturbing memory is of a social event at the Rogatka, only a few days after the march. I came into a space where all the people present were people I knew, from the radical queer and transgender community. Everyone also knew about what happened at the march, and the way we were treated with violence. I half-expected and half-hoped that people would approach me, ask about it and offer solidarity and sympathy, but none came. In fact, nobody even said hi. There were, however, a few specs of light throughout this long ordeal: The rst positive article about us was published one day after our action and was written by the chief editor of GoGay Tal Eitan. Tal congratulated us for our boldness and our daring, expressed solidarity with our goals and urged the bisexual community to unite into a new political movement. He wrote:
I was lled with happiness as I heard that a group of bi activists went up on stage, took over the microphone and told the organizers exactly what they thought about bisexual exclusion from the speeches. I was happy to hear that there are still people who can see the fences separating between pride and outside [. . .] that there are underdogs, who bite and scratch and kick, and make a lot of noise, and make a lot people angry, but remind everyone of what truly matters. (Eitan, 2009)
Another speck of light was an e-mail that I, and the rest of our action group, received a few days after our action from a friend of mine, one of the organizers from JOH. My friend wrote sensitively, taking responsibility and apologizing for what happened, offering sympathy and constructive suggestions for the future. And though he wrote personally, and not as a representative of JOH, his e-mail was the only such expression of accountability that we had received from any member of the JOH, even until today.
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A third was the second positive article published about us on GoGay, written by former head of the late Bisexuals in Israel Daniel Hoffman, an article that, in many ways, had sealed the month of horror and left us with some time to catch our breaths. In an article titled A Letter to Fritz,42 he wrote:
I promised I would update you when something important happened. So here it comesremember I told you that even the holy city of Jerusalem had started hosting pride marches? That was a few years ago. And you remember I updated you that for the rst time, in 2005, proud bisexuals marched there as well? So now, four years have passed, and again the community awoke to the sound of bisexuals, also in Jerusalem. A group of activists create perfect mayhem as they burst into the speech stage and one of them manages to reach the microphone, to snatch it and protest the bisexual exclusion by the rest of the community [. . .] Only a few seconds which gave birth to a shower of words, responses, interpretations, opinions, offenses, slander, attery [. . .] Later, the opinion articles started sprouting. The dirt was tossed from every possible direction and the erasure machine came into action, with emotional responses, with logical responses, with demagogic responses abound, with contradicting facts and the ofcial responses. And perhaps this is a blessing in disguise? Perhaps the renewal of public discussion of bisexuals is in fact the central part[. . .]? Today the bisexual community is struggling from a place of powerthe stable space it claimed for its own. Suddenly you can read a reader response accusing the bisexual community of being aggressive and imposing its opinion on the majority. I didnt know if that was sad, na ve or gladdening [. . .] Back then you told me: So what if they hate? When you hate it ends up blowing in your face, and I told you that in Hebrew it was also a pun.43 For the hatred that was inside the community, blew up in its face at the Jerusalem march. And after the blow-up, after the ght, well create a world of peace, the sound of silence. I only hope we use that sound for listening, for cooperation and for creativity. (Hoffman, 2009)
It took me a few more weeks until I felt like I was starting to recover. What happened in Jerusalem had a deep effect on me, which continues to inuence me to this day. Thinking today about what happened, I know that what hurt me the most was not the violence itself (as this was something I was already used to in various demonstrations and protests), but rather the fact that it was directed at us from within the communitythe only place in the world that we expected to accept us, the community that we considered ours. To have been treated like that by members of your own community, by an organization whose self-described goal is to promote understanding, tolerance and cooperation, is to be derided and dismissed in the most painful way possible: to be betrayed by the ones you trust the most.
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Our action has won us publicity, discussion, acknowledgment and a new bisexual movementbut the price we had to pay was dear. Today, I dont regret our action, nor do I regret its results; from that moment on, we could no longer be ignored as a community (even if only as lip service), and for that achievement, I would have done it again. People heard about us, our community grew and our struggle started. However, I still wish that things could have been different, that the price would not have been so painful.
EIGHTH STORY (2009): FROM BAD TO WORSETHE BAR-NOAR SHOOTING

I was nally starting to recover from the Jerusalem action: I remember the week when I nally started feeling like I was doing better. I had a university paper to write that I had not yet started due to the emotional distress I was undergoing, and at that last week I decided that I would begin writing after the week was done. I thought that the worst part was over, and that now I might be able to focus on resting, calming down and healing from that long month of June. On Saturday, August 1, 2009, an anonymous man came into the GLBT Associations youth club (the Bar-Noar) and started shooting. Twelve were injured, and two killed: 26-year-old Nir Katz, and 16-year-old Liz Troubishi. The killer was never caught and still roams free. An article I wrote and published on GoGay the next day describes my response, and the way that many of us had felt that night:
I was home last night when I received the message about the Bar-Noar shooting. There were no headlines on the newspapers yet, and no reports, but rumors have already started running: a man came into the GLBT Associations house and started shooting people. Eight were injured, we didnt know if anyone was dead. The moments afterwards turned into one constant ow. Suddenly from eight, the number rose to ten, suddenly there were two dead. Suddenly there were phone calls, whos okay, whos not, who knew whom, who was there, what happened. Suddenly, names started appearing. Im still not sure I know what happened there. I went to sleep at midnight knowing I might have to wake up and join an emergency meeting. The phone might not have woken me up, but my fears, my thoughts and my sadness did. I slept very little, turning over in bed. Waiting for the night to end. Between one nap and the other, I fear. A deep, helpless, irrational fear: what if this killer breaks into my house, kills me too? I lie in bed and try to forget. And toss, and turn, and toss, and turn. For a few minutes, I dream everything is okay. And how imaginary was that fear? The killer really did break into my house, and the killer really did murder me. And my blood, and my
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entrails, are right there on the oor, and the crying, and the hurt and the mourning, are all right here. Only this house was my metaphorical house, and II was other people. What this killer broke was the doors of our community, our doors of safety, and he killed and shot and injured us, who were inside [. . .] I cant get away from the feeling that none of us is safe, ever. That we all always need to stand guard and to struggle. To never forget or sink into complacencythis hatred is around us all. This hatred is rooted so deep in our society. The same night when half of my friends attend a demonstration against the deportation of the refugees.44 One day after a Facebook friend tells about military violence at a Palestinian wedding (a picture of his shirt, stained with blood). The same day when I read a discussion on the transgender mailing list about uniforms, military, occupation and aggression. One day after I receive a new book, Getting Bi, in which a text of mine is published, and cry out of excitementbecause heres a book that does not ignore me, heres a place where I, too, am present. And into this maelstrom fall the gunshots, the bodies, the wounded. And I wonder why I ever tried sleeping.
That Sunday afternoon, a protest vigil took place in Rothschild Avenue by the place of the shooting. Scared and exhausted after a sleepless night and a day of work and worry, I came to the vigil holding my bisexual ag. I found Lilach, my friend and fellow bi activist Cameron, as well as others, and together we hurried toward the speech podium that the municipality representatives had placed there to take over the protest, which was put together organically by members of the community. In times of trauma, its sometimes easier to drown yourself in tasksall day Id been trying to call the people of the municipality and let them know that the bisexual community wanted a representative to speak at the vigil. I couldnt catch them (and, of course, they didnt think to contact us). And so, my friends and I yet again repeated our method of approaching the organizers and asking to speak. After a few moments of convincing, they gave us one minute at the end, and one of us went up to speak, a speech that, perhaps was to the bi community, just as historical as our action in Jerusalem 2 months beforehand, as it located Panorama and our community, not only as vocal about queer politics, but also about the politics of government and state. It also later created many inner bi community debates, questioning our political positions as a community, and especially Panoramas, as an organization. Our representative spoke about the connections between the violence and militarism in Israeli society and the act of murder performed the night before. About a society in which hatred, fear and dehumanization is not only a standard but a social demand, a society built upon walls, separation and segregation, a society where every group foreign from the mainstream is fair game for attacks, oppression and marginalizationa society that produces
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violence, a society that produces murder. She spoke about the shooting not as an isolated incident but as an event intricately woven inside and sprouting out of a social atmosphere of violence, militarism, racism, sexismand LGBT-phobia. In a society where its okay to attack celebrants of a wedding (if youre the army and if theyre Palestinian); in a society where its acceptable to deport refugees running for their lives, for the only crime of being non-Jewish and Black; in a society where one out of four women gets raped and one out of three assaulted and yet survivors are being silenced, ignored, disregarded or harassedin a society like that, it is also acceptable to shoot into a youth club, when the only crime staining the people within is being LGBTQ.45 After our representative spoke, the vigil ended and people started going home. A picture taken and later put up on Facebook shows me sitting at the side of the avenue next to the road, holding my ag and leaning my head on Lilachs shoulder, trying not to cry. I was supposed to meet my family for dinner that evening and started contemplating whether now was a good time to come out. My body felt sore, and I was tired and miserable. Id spent the 2 hours in between at an open Re-evaluation Counseling (RC)46 meeting, organized and held that day to provide support for members of the LGBTQ community. I had to go early, run home, change my clothes and drop my ag off, then meet my family at the restaurant. When I got there, they said I looked good. I felt like I was dying. On Monday, a large meeting was held at the Tel Aviv LGBT center to discuss community response to the shooting, convened by the municipality. Similar to meetings about the Tel Aviv pride parade and pride month, this meeting, despite its owery title, was not in fact meant for consultation, but rather for updating community organizations and delegates on decisions already made behind closed doors. We came to the meeting on Monday evening to be told that a large rally will be held in Rabin Square on Saturday, and that the rallys slogan would be the militarist expression, familiar to us from Israeli right-wing politics, We are not afraid. We were given to understand that a speakers list was already well under way and that the entire rally was already being organized. But this is not all that happened. On the night of the shooting, a new radical queer group (the Pink Coalition) had formed, as a response to the shooting, to inner community politics, and the way that things were managed. As I already mentioned, those in power positions had tried their best to take over the protest and to keep grassroots responses from happening. They also maintained a clear separation between the shooting and all other forms of violence in our society. When Israeli government and Knesset members had started offering their condolences (doubtlessly for their own political PRs rather than for any real sorrow), rather than to take the opportunity to protest the governments own responsibility for mass murder, ethnic cleansing, racism, capitalism, sexism, LGBT-phobia and many more
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abuses performed and perpetuated by the government and its members those in power within the community embraced the attention and tried their best to cooperate. Needless to say, what this cooperation necessitated was presenting the government and media with nothing but palatable opinions, identities and faces within the LGBTQ community. Anyone too radical, too angry and hurt, too visibly queer or trans, too dark-skinned, too female, too disabled, and so on, was discretely removed from public attention and the eye of the media.47 Two more disturbing responses to the shooting were militarism and internalized LGBT-phobia. The militarist discourse of Were not afraid (of our enemies) had hurt our ears and hearts, as people of the community were struggling for a space that would contain the multitude of emotions, sorrow and mourning that ew from us. Many of us were deeply anxious, some suffering post-traumatic stress. Many people didnt feel safe enough to go out of their houses unaccompanied. We were sad and afraid, and the militarist and patriarchal attempt to silence our sadness and our emotions made us frustrated, angry and depressed. In addition, from the moment the shooting happened, leading gures within the GGGG community (notably, biphobic, transphobic and sexist gay public gure Gal Uchovsky) had taken upon themselves to cast the blame on the community itselfaccusing closet cases of being responsible for LGBT-phobia and the social ostracism of LGBTQs. An especially notorious article was published on GoGay by American Jewish gay porn director Michael Lucas, titled A Letter to the Cowardly and Despicable Closet Cases, blaming bisexual men and other closet cases for the shooting. All of these things were very much felt while we convened at the meeting. The air was tense, we knew it was going to be hardthe power relations we were already so accustomed to ghting within the community had risen to a volume that made us realize that this was going to be intense. But honestly, nothing prepared us for what happened next. At the beginning of the meeting, a group of lesbian feminist activists attempted a takeover of the meeting, an action that I was incredibly happy though fearfulto see. As Yaniv Waizman (who convened the meeting) ran late, the women started the meeting without him. Coming to the meeting fearing for my chances of speaking and being heard, I immediately felt relieved when lesbian feminist activist Yaara Chotzen rose up and started conducting the meeting, stating that it will be held using feminist methods and making sure everyone would be heard. What followed, however, was an outcry amongst the people present, who were apparently just waiting for the mighty leader to arrive and show the little girls their rightful place. During the meeting, and from the moment that Waizman arrived, we were rst reprimanded, and then silenced more and more vocally. The meeting blew up and broke off in the middle over matters of power, representation and speech: Who had the power to determine
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the message? Who had the power to choose the communitys response? Who had the power to decide who gets to speak out on stage, and who gets silenced? All of these issues were also reected in the meeting, as we were constantly yelled at, cut off, and (as always) accused of violence and aggressiveness. A friend of mine, suffering from post-traumatic stress, had started breaking down in the entrance hall of the center and (as she later told me) got violently pushed by the manager of the LGBT center for making too much of a fuss. The meeting broke off and yet again reconvened, but without change of attitude or willingness to listen to those of us who were different. After 3 hours of mayhem, we went upstairs for a queer support meeting. As we reached the room, I collapsed on the stairs crying. In my head, I went back to Jerusalem, where I and my friends were beaten and kicked off of the stage for attempting the very same thing: to let our voices be heard. Just like then, I and my friends had confronted those in power in attempt to speak for ourselves, hoping to nd a space of acceptance, a crack of solidarity, only to be pushed back, silenced and excluded once more. Its worth noting the reasons for our silencing, which exist on two levels: the visible and the invisible, the spoken and the unspoken. On the visible/ spoken level, the most oft-cited reason for the silencing that tookand that keeps taking- place, is our radical left politics. This is worth noting because our opposition to the occupation is held in particularly problematic regardthe connection that we sought to expose, between the shooting, the occupation and racist violence in Israel was one that most assimilationists had strongly opposedespecially in that speaking out those opinions would ruin their newfound romance with the government. On the invisible/unspoken level lies biphobia, transphobia and lesbophobia: the belief that our groups, our opinions and our struggles are at best marginal and unimportant and at worst an impudent disruption to the proper course of community organizing and agenda. As it turned out, the pressure worked. With no small effort, after the meeting and the mayhem, members of the Pink Coalition, including myself, had activated as much pressure as possible on the municipality and its functionaries to let bisexuals, transgenders, lesbians and Palestinians have a representation on stage at the Saturday rally. And so, in a rally 3 hours long, after 20 minutes given solely to our LGBT-phobic President Shimon Peres, and many minutes given to various straight and gay White cis men, the one lesbian speaker received 5 minutes to speak, the transgender speaker received 2, the bisexual speaker received 30 seconds, as did the gay Palestinian speaker. Following the meeting, the municipality had also changed the slogan of the rally from Were not afraid to Moving on with pride, a slightly less patriarchal/militarist message. This was the rst time in the history of the Israeli LGBTQ community, that a bisexual representative had been invited to speak on stage in advance. Later on, the municipality was applauded by the community for the wide diversity it had allowed. Little did
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they know that the real work was done by us, the grassroots activists, and that without our pressure, no one would have gone on stage but the same old junta of the GGGG elite, conveniently leaving us outside. Seven months later, we discovered that the murdered activist Nir Katz (R.I.P) had identied as bisexual for many years of his life, preferring to be unlabeled throughout his last few years. Nir had written an article against biphobia in 2005, in which, among other things, he wrote: A bisexual is anyone who identies as such [. . .] and no one has the right to deny him of his identity, especially people from the gay community (Katz, 2005). In light of his words, it is sad, infuriating and ironic to think about the way his bisexuality was conveniently erasedalong with his veganism and his antioccupation activismall in favor of speaking about him as gay and as an ex-soldier, to the pride and glory of the State and the community. I did not attend the rally. The week of protest and ghting ended for me in a candlelight Take Back the Night march, organized and attended by the Pink Coalition on Thursday evening. We walked on Rothschild Avenue, where the shooting took place, and continued to HaChashmal Garden in south Tel Aviv. There we held an open stage, where I read out my text of pain, rage and mourning that Id written in the beginning of that week. As I read it out, I felt all eyes upon me, I felt them listening, and I felt my text taking shape within the minds and hearts of those who listened. I spoke with pain and with rage, with fear and no hope, choking back tears, I let my voice shout and then break. I nished reading to lift my eyes from the paper and see the eyes of the stage host red and bright with tears, and lifting my eyes to the audience, I saw those tears again, reected. I had never been listened to like that: understood. As I walked down from our improvised stage, I felt that for one moment, we had succeeded in our goal. For one moment, we created the solidarity, the attentiveness, the listening and support that we all had been craving, pursuing and aching for all week. For just a moment, our community was hurt, mourning, angry and depressedbut also soft, strong, loving and accepting.
NINTH STORY (20092010): PROCESS, CONFLICT AND (PARTIAL) RESOLUTIONS

The Jerusalem action and protest vigil speech had created many discussions and debates within the bi community regarding our ideology and politics. One particularly emotional response to the protest vigil speech on the bisexual mailing list, accusing the speaker (and the rest of us) of inserting politics where it didnt belong marked the beginning of a 2-year long debate (never completely resolved, always somehow alive) about our communitys political identity. Very soon, discussions were sparked up as to whether our
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communityand our organization, Panoramashould be ofcially identied with left-wing politics as well as with feminism, or whether we should stick to the one topic of bisexual politics while remaining silent regarding other issues. Another question arising strongly was whether we, the activist core of Panorama, were representative of the bisexual communityfor, regardless of Panoramas ofcial political status, we were all well known as feminist, anarchist and radical queer activists, and there was no disguising the fact that this is who we were and those were our opinions. At that point in time, Panorama was still named merely Bi and Pansexual Community, and the stance that I maintained at the time was that we should avoid vocalizing our feminist, anarchist and state-related political opinions while doing bisexual activism. My reason for this was my hope that the organization would be as inclusive as possible for anyone wanting to join, worried that setting up such a political standard would put many people off. Many others, however, felt that the organization that we had founded together could only be inclusive of us if we could be open about our opinions rather than attempt to hide them. We needed a space where we could feel at home, and where we could enjoy the fruits of our labor by allowing ourselves free expression and promotion of the ideas in which we believe. In addition, as the status quo is always determinant in the formation of communities, keeping silent on certain issues often results in tolerance of these same problems within the silent space. As society is sexistremaining silent on matters of feminism would maintain the presence of sexism in the community; because society is racist and militaristremaining silent on these matters would maintain the same. We did not want to buy into the status quo of silence and oppression, and we did not want to accept these things in the community we were striving to form for ourselves. Panoramas rst meeting was held on August 25, 2009, and its agenda likewise reected the tension between these two perspectives. During the meeting, we had decided to add the word feminist to our name, thus changing the name of the organization from PanoramaBi and Pansexual Community into PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community. The left wing political debate, though, remained unresolved. The meeting itself, however, was held at the Left Bank cluba left-wing community center and the Israeli communist partys headquarters. The location, of course, bore its own message and was a sign for the decisions to come. Other topics discussed at the meeting were our goals regarding bisexual community and politics, as well as ideas for actions and activities. In the short term, many of the things remained spoken rather than done, and yet we had created a source of inspiration for the long runindeed, many of the actions we discussed back then, are now coming into fruition, whereas others have been around for much longer. Panorama meetings are managed using feminist and anarchist methods: anyone can show up at the meetings; moderation is rotated with each
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meeting (while also encouraging people who never moderated before to volunteer); speaking is done in turns, either through rounds or through a list (wherein whoever raises her or his hand is put on the list and given a turn to speak); it is forbidden to cut each other off mid-speech, and to save time, we use anarchist sign languageusing our hands to convey agreement, request to interrupt, offer a technical point, and so on. Thus we make sure that everyone is given a chance to speak her or his opinion and to listen to others. Decisions are made by consensus. Another bylaw was resolved unanimously on the second time that we convened: each meeting shall be accompanied by a vegan cake. Our second and third meetings were convened on April and May 2010 and held in my house, discussing the left-wing political issue, and nally resolving that Panorama will be ofcially identied as a radical left-wing organization, without derogating from its focus on bisexual politics and bisexual activism. However, this debate has never entirely ceased and is constantly alive within the communityno longer so much on the mailing list, but certainly in online forums. Many people still feel unrepresented by Panorama and its radical activist core, creating an urgent need for a second bisexual organization in Israel. Many times the founding of a second organization has been discussed among the nonradicals of the community; however, such an organization is yet to have taken form. Despite the political division, however, Panorama has nonetheless succeeded in creating and maintaining a friendly community for most anyone interested in joining it. People who strongly oppose Panoramas radical political stances nonetheless attend many of our events and reportedly enjoy them. In addition, the communitys mixed population, along with the core activists radical activism, methods and views, leads to a state where new people who join the community are able to learn more about radical queer, feminist and left-wing politics, thus locating the community as a center of information and education for new activists.
INTERLUDE (2010): PROGRESSION AND ACHIEVEMENTS

2010 was the year of parades for the Israeli LGBTQ community. The pain and rage for and around the shooting had accumulated and were translated into an explosion of activist energy and action. The increasing divisions between the radical queers and the assimilationist GGGGs also joined in the picture and created a multitude of energy among us, which we diverted into radical queer activism and the creation of alternatives within the community. Pride and protest marches bloomed in many cities in Israel, most of them as a result of grassroots efforts. The activist rise around the shooting, as well as the Jerusalem action, had dramatically increased bisexual visibility and awareness, and the bisexual
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community was represented by speakers on almost every pride march that year in many parts of the country. For the rst time in the history of the community, organizers of marches approached us to ensure a speaker ahead of time in their attempts to be inclusiveor to create tokens. All throughout the year, the community grew. With the increased exposure bisexual politics had received, more and more people found their way to join the community. Our activities had by then become regular and the community became anchored around three central platforms: the online mailing list, the various social activities and political activism. In this, too, our community took after the transgender community, which is anchored around similar platforms. Our mailing list grew and still keeps growing, allowing political discussions and debates, as well as advertising of social events and community news. The social events (the B-Movies, the MESS-e-BI, the social evening Coffee Bi, as well as other regular and irregular activities) had become and continue to be a space in which to socialize, meet people and create friendships and other relationships, thus providing a social base to the community. The political activism enables us to be creative, to work together, contribute to the community, raise bisexual awareness and create social change. Two thousand and ten was also the year in which the rst academic panel on bisexuality was featured, at the 10th annual queer studies convention in Israel, An Other Sex. The panel included three speakers: Esther Rapoport spoke about bisexuality and the colonial discourse on primitivism, a second speaker spoke about compulsory monogamy and polyamorous existence (following Adrienne Rich48), and I spoke about repressed bisexuality in lm. The panel itself was a direct result of contact Ive made the previous year with the organizers at Tel Aviv University (and in particular with Prof. Aeyal Gross), and conversations about the topic throughout the year. On my part, I took the effort to encourage people from the community to submit proposals about bisexuality. On their part, it was good to see a willingness to feature a panel on this topic for the rst time in the history of the convention. In the summer of 2010, three pride marches were held in Tel Aviv: one by the municipality, and two alternative. The rst was named the radical march and was organized by transgender activist Elisha (Shuki) Alexander, a march mainly focusing on queer resistance to the occupation. This was only a little over a week after the Gaza otilla slaughter: an incident in which the IOF attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a peace activist initiative meant to break the naval siege on Gaza and transfer humanitarian aid supplies and construction materials into besieged Gaza. Before reaching occupied Israeli territorial water, the otilla was attacked by the Israeli commando unit Shayetet 13, who then killed nine activists, injured dozens and subsequently arrested and deported everyone on board. Similar to any Israeli military attack on civilians (or anyone at all), this too was immediately and automatically justied by the Israeli government, parliament, media and public, and this
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too, was followed by a week full of left-wing demonstrations in protest of the slaughter and the continuing siege. The day of the Tel Aviv pride was too soon after the incident for us to forget, and indeed many felt the need to commemorate the incident in the radical pride march. The second was named the community pride march, attempting a different message of protest against the municipalitys control of the pride parade and its contents, against the silencing of marginalized LGBTQ communities (including the Palestinian LGBTQ community), and against social LGBT-phobia, particularly in response to the shooting. This march was organized by a group called Marching for Change, of which bisexuals formed a prominent partnamely, Lilach Ben-David, Eran Cohen-Geva and myself. The motivation for me to take part in organizing such a parade was strong and inevitable, derived from the previous years events and my realization that I had nothing to look for within the mainstream GGGG community of assimilationists. I wanted to put my energy where I could receive something back rather than being trampled and drained. In addition, and as always, I sought to contribute to the creation of something new within the community, to attempt once more to create a queer home for myself and change both the community and society as a whole. After long months of work, our community march took place on the same day and at the same time as the municipalitys ofcial parade (though in different locations). Our march started out from south Tel Aviv, marching into the city center. By starting out in the south of the city we sought to remember Tel Avivs population of Mizrahis, migrant workers and refugees residing in those neighborhoods. Our march passed through Rothschild Avenue, stopping for a minute of silence and remembrance at the site of the shooting. By nishing at the city center, at Meir Garden and the LGBT center, we sought to emphasize that we, too, were a part of society, as well as the community, and deserved recognition. We ended the march with a stage which included speeches and performances. We invited a wide array of speakers on various topics, as well as political drag performers, enabling a wide representation of diverse voices in the community. Its also worth noting that the march included a huge bisexual block, consisting of more than one third of the participants. This prominent bisexual participation had later also won our march the title of the bisexual march. Whereas the two alternative marches were not massively attended, they were nevertheless successful in creating a new kind of activism and a new kind of community discourseradical inner community politics, focusing on the creation of radical queer spaces of resistance, and criticism against the GGGG mainstream, as well as the communitys unequal power distribution. In addition, the community pride march exhibited another new direction: putting its focus for the rst time, not only on queer resistance to the occupation, but also on a radical queer standpoint about LGBTQ issues, allowing ourselves the solidarity that we deserve, and putting ourselves at the center.
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The reason why this move was particularly innovative is that, in Israel, the occupation tends to take up the great majority of social and political attention (in all corners of the political spectrum), thus diverting much needed attention from other, no less important issues such as sexism, inner-Israeli racism, capitalism, classism, ableism, speciesism and of course LGBT-phobia. Speaking about the occupation is important, addressing Israeli war crimes, ethnic cleansing and mass murder is central in raising awareness to the horrors being done in our names. However, when it comes to inner-Israeli politics, focusing our attention on queer issueswithout abandoning the Palestinian solidarity strugglemeans acknowledging our own oppression, ghting for ourselves and refusing hegemonic ideology claiming that our issues are marginal, unimportant and not worth speaking for (this, of course, goes in particular to bisexual people and the bisexual struggle). The 2010 Jerusalem pride march, though certainly better than the previous years, was nonetheless strained. Following the previous years events, the JOH had decided to cover up for its politics of erasure by setting up a tiny stage at the beginning of the march and letting people, who registered in advance, come up and speak about whichever topic they so chose. Of course, the big important stage at the end (with all the press, photographers, volume, crowd and ethos) remained closed, and speakers from the bisexual community were not invited to speak on it. The cover-up stage at the beginning included no fewer than ve bisexual delegates: the bi community representative (myself), the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity49 representative, the BDSM community representative, and the two Rishon LeZion50 pride march representatives. The big important stage included (the wonderful) Dutch parliament member Anja Meulebelt as a bisexual token (whose speech was unrelated to bisexuality). Still, I remark the value of tokenism as a sign of relative progressat least now we became important enough to warrant some lip service. The 2010 Jerusalem pride march also included the largest and most beautiful bisexual block that had taken place to date. At least 30 people came to march, there were many bisexual ags and many Panorama T-shirts to be seen. My friend Aylam (remembered from the 2009 action) brought along his guitar, so we also had music to accompany our block. We shouted slogans and sang at the music. Within the tense atmosphere of the march, that was a moment of pride and joy.
TENTH STORY (2011): CONSENSUAL MESS-e-BI

In January 2011, my MESS-e-BI co-organizer and bisexual activist Cameron Kotlovsky threw a birthday MESS-e-BI to celebrate his, Aylams and my birthdays. However, this party didnt go as well as we had plannedseveral
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drag numbers depicted unchecked sexual harassment and violence against women. In addition, one of the performers had sexually harassed several people at the party and had to be asked to leave. Though the party had otherwise been a success, many of us left feeling uncomfortable with the things that took place, looking for a way in which to counter the sexist content. It was Lilachs idea that the next party should be themed around consent. Consent is the idea that we need to create safe spaces for ourselves to choose to be (or not be) sexual and to fully enjoy our sexuality (should we choose to) without hurting anyone or getting hurt ourselves. The word consent , in this context, not only refers to verbal agreement given to a certain act, but also to the entire process and method used to gain verbal consent based on trust, safety and mutual enjoyment. This kind of consent must be given freely, in a sane and safe manner, without pressure, manipulation or various mind games. It can also always be withdrawn, at any time, and consenting to one act does not mean youve consented to another. The method and process of consent include communication, negotiation, mutual respect and awareness of ones boundaries as well as those of ones partners. It also means attentiveness to your partners enjoyment and emotional wellbeing, making sure that theyre as interested as you in the things that youre doing. In the context of a party, consent means responsibility when it comes to making moves on peoplenever touching them without consent, never making intrusive remarks, never imposing ones sexuality on others, and generally creating a safe atmosphere for people to choose to be sexualor not to be sexualwithin. The idea of consent is used as direct subversion for what is often referred to as Western societys rape culture, a culture encouraging rape and violence against women, queers, and other people of all genders51; thus, consent is also about creating a culture that is safe and empowering for everyone. The Consensual MESS-e-BI took place in April 28, 2011, organized by me with help from Cameron.52 The invitation designed for the event included a picture of an anarchafeminist grafti declaring: Feminist sex is fun. The subtitle of the evening, written on the invitation, was: Because yes means yes! The stage included performances themed around such topics as consent, sexual assault, violence against women, feminism and BDSM, and these included drag, poetry reading, live improvisation and live singing. The party, and its content, was also video-documented by Baroch Oren of the LGBT Community Television, an ongoing online and broadcast project by LGBT organization Six Colors. Wrecking Ball and Slut Machine (Sarah Grumet and Itay Kaplan) performed a drag interpretation of Little Mary Sunshine of Reefer Madness, a humorist song wherein Little Mary Sunshine, after being pushed by Ralph Wiley to smoke weed so as to make her susceptible to sexual assault, is
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more inuenced by the weed than expected and ends up assaulting Ralph herself. Thus the number raised questions regarding consent and boundaries in an entertaining way. Aisling (Cameron) performed a song about domestic violence against women, emphasizing our need to defend ourselves even in the most intimate of settings. XEmma GoldieloX (Lilach) and Baruch in the Closet (Tal[y]-Nativa-Baruch-Drama Wozner-Shalom-Nevo) performed a BDSM scene to the sound of Sweet Dreams by Israeli band The Witches, wherein a cowgirl is fantasizing of being raped and slaughtered by a bullthus exposing the connection between feminist issues of rape and issues of animal rights.53 Hormonal Ilil (Ilil Faran) read poetry on stage, touching on the complexity of partial consent, as well as the topic of sexual openness. After the break (with much dancing and socializing in between the two sets), Rose Butch (Aylam) and Tal(y) got up on stage with a WhoseLine-style comic relief, asking the audience to write annoying sentences about sexual harassment and biphobia around the topic of consent, and then improvising with help from the notes. I (under the alias of Alanis) read out a short text about my experiences in an abusive relationship, and then as a reply, sang Not the Doctor by Alanis Morrisette, mentioning that I saw the song not as describing an extreme case of an abnormal or sick relationship, but rather the oppression that all women experience in our culture, as well as in relationships with men. REN gave us the nale for the evening, with a drag performance of Sing by My Chemical Romance, emphasizing the need for womenand people of any genderto speak out about violence, rape, sexual assault and issues of consent. All in all, the party was very powerful, and I consider it an historical night and a huge success. Much like many of our actions, this too was the rst of its kindto the best of my knowledge, there had never before been an event dedicated to consent in Israel. For our message to take even deeper root and create echoes throughout the community, we also published an ofcial Panorama ier about consent titled Yes means yes! The ier contained questions about consent such as, How do you dene consent? Do you think its possible to mistake silence for consent? Do you communicate your expectations clearly? and Do you think only men can assault? The back of the ier gave a few attempts at trying to explain consent, with such descriptions as Consent means communicating, Consent means stopping in the middle of whatever youre doing if they ask you to, and Consent means hearing Yes! Yes! Yessssss! This was then followed by various example sentences, suggesting how to keep track of ones partners feelings and to communicate consent, such as Do you like this? What would you like for us to do? What do you look like when you dissociate? and I think its really sexy when people me.54 We didnt only hand out copies at the party, but also left some in the Rogatka (which was, as usual, our venue), the neighboring Salon Mazal (same one from 2006, but relocated), and in many other community
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hangouts such as the LGBT center, the Koala (the Coalition of Women for Peace55 space), the JOH and Isha-LeIsha feminist center in Haifa.56 The ier soon became very popular and created much community awareness and discussion, beyond and above expectations. In fact, we ran out of copies so soon that we now (June) need to print out a new edition.
LAST STORY (2011): TEL AVIV RADICAL PRIDE

In May 2011, we started organizing a second radical pride march. Although last year I was a part of the community pride march, I felt that this year I wanted for us to try and unite the two alternative marches and their perspectives, working together instead of splitting into two separate groups. Thus, this years radical march was organized by a new group of people, comprising organizers from the community march together with those from the radical march, and with considerable addition of many new people who joined for the rst time. This year, we decided to rest the focus of the radical march on LGBTQ issues, and in particular those taking place in Tel Aviv and in our communities. We sought to oppose the message promoted by the Tel Aviv municipal pride parade, that Tel Aviv was an LGBT-phobia free haven, that everything was simply peachy and that now its time to party. Instead, we sought to address the oppression experienced by many people and groups within our community, and our shared need to struggle for liberation. Our invitation read:
Oppression of different identities stems from a common root. The Radical March offers a struggle based on solidarity between these identities. The radical parade invites you to march under your identity, without having to process it or tone it down. We, LGBTQ activists and allies, see a shared base between different identities and their personal experiences of oppression. We believe in the power created when our own hands are joined together against all oppression. Why is it different from the municipal parade? The municipal parade marches for equality between identities and not for the diversity between them. Marching in the municipal parade means marching for the struggle to assimilate into the mainstream; So, if you prefer liberation over equalityjoin us for the radical parade. If youre unwilling to march along for another Absolut and Durex for the right to marryyoure welcome to join us.
Seeing as last year, the radical march and the community march were held separately from the municipal parade, this year we wanted to do something new and different: we decided to break away from the municipal pride paradeinstead of taking the right turn at a certain junction along the
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way with the municipal parade and its commercialism, noise, erasure and pinkwashing, we decided that we would take a leftphysically as well as symbolically. We encouraged diverse groups to join us in marching and also planned to have an open stage for speeches. Another thing we did was a countercampaign to the municipality. This year, the municipal parades theme was Its worth being gay, thus yet again erasing oppression against many groups in the community and pinkwashing Tel Avivs image to attract rich White gay male tourists. The municipalitys campaign included many portrait photos of White gay cis male celebrities and public gures, with a few token lesbians, and only two bisexuals and two transgenderswhom no one could identify as such anyway due to the title of gay, and who were subsequently all presumed to be gay and lesbian by anyone who didnt know them personally. We named our countercampaign Whose worth? and sought to question the notion that being LGBTQ in our societyand in Tel Avivwas an unproblematized existence of privilege and worth. We reached out to various activists in the community and asked them for pictures and short texts about their experience as LGBTQs, thus forming a complex mosaic of identities, experiences, oppression and empowerment. This campaign ran on Facebook and was an enormous success, receiving much positive feedback and drawing even more people to our march (even beyond our natural target audience of the radical queer community). The campaign and our march had one more important effect on the community: for the rst time ever, the municipality functionaries approached us for a bisexual community representative, a refreshing change as wed gotten used to having to approach and pressure them about it each year. The way this was done, though, was less than pleasant: merely 5 days before the parade, Yaniv Waizman issued a wide call-out to his entire mailing list, claiming that due to lack of cooperation from the bisexual and transgender communities, the municipality had encountered great difculty in securing speakers for both, and requesting recommendations for speakers. Needless to say, this was the rst time that the organizers of the municipal parade had bothered approaching either of our communities. Regardless of this, a bisexual speaker was quickly found and we were proudly represented by Alon Zivony. The municipality had also found a speaker who happened to be transgender but requested to speak as an education activist. Regardless of her request, however, she was tagged by the municipality as the transgender community representative. Luckily enough, she eventually did speak about transgender issues on stage. However, the municipalitys behavior meant that if she had indeed only have spoken as an educator, the transgender voice would have been virtually silenced as no one else would have been there to represent it. Our radical march was only 2 days away when the police decided to notify us that they refused to approve it. Their excuses for denying us our
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right of free speech were several: they claimed that the municipal parade was inclusive of all groups of gays and lesbians (that sounds about right . . .); they claimed that securing our march would take up too much police force (though the previous year they seemed to have no problem securing three different marches all at the same time); they claimed that we might create transportation disruptions (the streets we asked to march on were closed for the municipal parade anyway); and nally, they offered us the grace of walking 10 minutes behind the municipal paradean action we needed no ofcial permit to do anyway. We knew that the real reason had more to do with hegemony and money than it did about any of their excuses: because the municipal parade is dened as a cultural event rather than a demonstration, the municipality is responsible for paying the cost of security. However, because the radical march was dened as a demonstration, the police would have had to bear the nancial cost itself. Simply speaking, the municipal parade had gained the police a nancial prot, the radical marcha loss. The priorities were obvious. We announced that due to the polices refusal, we will hold a protest vigil in the junction where the march was supposed to begin. When the day of the march came, we gathered at the junction for our planned protest vigil. There were many people there, carrying various signs and ags, and for a while it seemed that we were indeed to have the vigil we had planned. However, in one successful last-minute change of plan, we decided to move the march anywayand we marched. Although we had no police approval, no one came to stop us. Without violence or arrests, we continued marching together along the street, and through our entire planned route, surprising passers-by and residents as we went along. I remember the moment of turning around and seeing hundreds of people marching behind me, amazed at the mass and the success of our action. The march included many people and groups: the Kasamba anarchist drumming band supplied us with noise and visibility; the Clown Army group, walking on crutches and bearing signs against the occupation, added a humorist political element; the anarchist block helped us with their megaphone and slogans; bisexual ags were to be seen all over the march, creating a prominent bisexual visibility, and likewise for transgender ags; BDSM ags were also to be seen; and without a doubt, the biggest block on our march was the Mizrahi block, bearing signs about queer Mizrahi identities and raising awareness about Mizrahi issues. Seeing all of these people, the various blocks and this immense diversity was incredibly empowering and heartening for me. We arrived at Meir Garden, where the municipal parade had started, and immediately took over the empty stage they left behind. Lilach and I jumped over the stage and hung it with bisexual and transgender ags. Very soon more ags were added, and in addition to the bi and trans ags, our stage also bore ags of BDSM, anarchism, Palestine, prideand even a pink
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umbrella. Very soon we started the open stage for speeches, which included such topics as bisexuality, transgender issues, Mizrahiness, religiousness, disability, animal rights, feminism, rape and sexual assault (inside and outside of the community), BDSM, allies and solidarity, and even criticism about our decision to march separately from the municipality rather than as a radical block inside the municipal parade. We also had two performancesone drag king improvisation and one live song. Out of 13 speakers on stage, six were bisexual, six transgender or genderqueer and about as many Mizrahi (with several intersections, of course)this was all the diversity I could ever have hoped for, right there and happening organically. For those who wanted to rest from the march and the speeches, a free vegan food stand was waiting to feed us. A volunteer from the (neighboring) LGBT center also brought us bottles of water, which was a true blessing in the afternoon heat. The radical pride march was a huge successabove and beyond our expectationsand was denitely one of the best actions that I have had the privilege to organize and participate in. The march may not have been perfect, and indeed there is much for us to improve next yearbut I returned home feeling happy, energetic and accomplished. This was exactly the kind of event that I had been hoping to create!
WHAT NOW? CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS

By telling my story as an activist, I hope I succeeded in challenging, subverting and creating alternatives to the ways in which many of us are taught to think about activism, politics, history and our lives. Whereas we are taught to separate and divide, my story strove to connect and to make whole. The personal, the political, the global, the local, the general, the particular; bisexuality, war, conict, solidarity, transgender, feminism; emotion, pain, solidarity, friendship, isolation, struggle, connection, joy and many many more: our lives and our experiences are interwoven with a multiplicity which cannot and should not be fragmented. I believe that my position as a bisexual person and a bisexual activist has also been central to this vantage point. Its been said that bisexuality allows for different perspectives and different temporalities: ones capable of containing difculties, contradictions and complexity. It is this epistemologicallybisexual vantage point which allows my story to contain these multiplicities and complexities as one whole.57 By telling my story, I hope I have also told the story of a communityor of two, or three; a fragment of a country and of local history; and a personal story that might resonate with other peoples experience. I also hope that I gave way to new perspectives, different ideologies and activist methods, and that Ive managed to make some readers curious to read more about all these things that I couldnt include within this work.
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The bisexual community in Israel keeps growing and going through processes and changes. Within the time Ive worked on this piece, a rstever bisexual zine in Israel has been published by Panorama, after 2 years of work. The zine contains texts by members of the local community reecting about bisexuality, bisexual identity, bisexual desire, biphobia and many more issues.58 In the week thats gone by since its publication, weve sold a signicant amount of copies and received many positive responses. Our next two signicant actions are planned to be the opening of a bisexual consciousness raising group, and the curating of a bisexual art exhibition together with Six Colors organization. The consciousness-raising group will be organized by Lilach Ben-David and myself, and patterned on techniques and understandings adapted from the feminist movement. We hope that the group would help bring community members together, create more awareness and serve as a seed for further action. The art exhibition will be the rst of its kind in Israel, focusing on bisexuality and bisexual-related topics, after rst having been contemplated in Panoramas rst meeting and nally now taking to esh. In addition, an organization committee for an Israeli bisexual convention is currently being started within Panorama, hoping to organize a convention in time for the next international Bi Visibility Day. These three things are planned to happen within the next few months and will certainly be important and exciting. For the long term, what I hope to see for the bisexual movement is no less than a revolution. By this I mean to say that I see the bisexual struggle not as anecdotal or ad-hoc, but as aiming for a wide-scale change in society and culture. I hope to see more visibility for bisexuality in any and all public sphereswithin and without the LGBTQ community; I hope to see not only actions but also long-term campaigns arising from Panorama; I want to see an expansion of the movement and a fulllment of its full potential. I want to see more bisexual groups and more organizations. I want to see more people active, more people initiating and creating. I want to see sharing of knowledge, skills and history. I want to see bisexual culture, bisexual art, bisexual literature, bisexual poetry, bisexual lm, bisexual research and academia. I want to see a radicalization of bisexuality, the bisexual community and bisexual social meaningsnot only in Israel, but worldwide. I want to place bisexuality right there in the forefront along with feminism, anarchism, lesbianism and transgenderism. To create a truly strong and subversive movement. To work in solidarity with other groups, to never lose sight of others oppression and of the intricate realities of all of our lives, to continue with our struggle, shoulder-to-shoulder, until each and every one of us is free. The road there might not be short, or indeed easy, but the today the groundwork is being laid. I hope that in my lifetime, I would be able to see the changes that I strive to be part of creating. The BDS movement is also expanding and is witnessing great success and popularity among many countries and groups worldwide. I wish to see
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the success of the movement against the occupation. I wish to see a society that is based on liberation, freedom and solidarity rather than on war, racism and apartheid. I want to see the fall of the government. I want to see the fall of the state. I want to see the fall of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and LGBT-phobia. I see all of these as inseparable parts of my struggle against the state, against the government and against the occupation. I want to see the revolution, and I want to breathe the air of the day after and to work on creating the society that we all want to live in. In this article, I tried to describe some of the beginnings of these processes that Im proud to be a part of. The rest of this story remains to be written, and it will be us who design the changes that well see. I intend to keep walking this path, to keep pushing for change and to keep believing in transformation. I hope you join this struggle with me.
NOTES
1. The term LGBT rights is in quotations because I dispute both terms. Oftentimes I nd that what is commonly called the LGBT movement usually stands only for the interests of White cisgender gay males, creating the impression of what I like to call the GGGG movement. As to rights, the word points to a liberal discourse focusing on legislation and government sanction, such that is accepting of current social order as basis for its claims. I prefer the stance of liberation in lieu of rightsa radical change of social order, such that we are all liberated from current power structures (including government, White heteropatriarchy and capitalism). 2. A parliament bill was recently approved by the Israeli Knesset, threatening various sanctions upon anyone promoting any type of boycott against Israel, its institutions or any particular place within it. Under this law, by writing this article, I might be subject to such sanctions. This is all the more reason to proceed with the boycott, with its promotion and with the struggle against Israeli occupation and fascist policies. For more on Israeli government sanctions on the freedom of speech, see Coalition of Women for Peace (2010). 3. For more about the queer BDS, see Palestinian Queers for BDS (http://pqbds.wordpress.com) and Israeli Queers for Palestine (http://israeliqueersforpalestine.wordpress.com). 4. As this is a personal narrative, I realize that there may be some theoretical gaps for readers who are unfamiliar with the material. I endeavor to ll these gaps somewhat using small interludes throughout the text, however the scope of this work is insufcient to ll all. Therefore, for those who feel in want of more in-depth theoretical explanations, I strongly advise following the references in the footnotes. 5. For an excellent example on police and inner-LGBT brutality against radical queer groups, see Bernstein Sycamore (2004). (A summarized version of this text may be found online at: http://www. gayshamesf.org/slingshotgayshame.html.) 6. I have decided not to include much background information about the occupation and the history of the antioccupation movement (for political and other reasons). For more information on this issue, see Ben-David (2010). 7. Terrorist is in quotations because I dispute the single-target use of the word terrorism in reference only to nongovernment and non-Western military violence. 8. Even Gvirol is one of the main streets of central Tel Aviv. 9. The Minister of Defense during the Second Lebanon War. 10. The largest LGBT organization in Jerusalem. 11. Jerusalem is divided in half by the Israeli separation wall, forbidding entrance to Palestinians, including Palestinian LGBTQ people. 12. A huge inuence in forming this opinion was Wolfson (2006). (For an English translation, feel free to contact me.) 13. This article mentions the JOH several times in negative context. I would like to mention that despite the difculties that I experience(d) with them, I bear the utmost respect towards the dedicated
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activists that work for and run the organization. The JOH is an important organization, vital to the LGBT community in Jerusalem, and its importance should not be dismissed. 14. Here it should be reminded that Israel is an entirely occupied territory, having either killed or driven away its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants before, during and after the ofcial founding of the Israeli state in 1948 (Al Nakba). 15. Arabic Jews. 16. Marzels latest project is south Tel Avivs Neighbourhood Guard, a quasi-KKK group whose self-described goal is keeping the streets safe of the threat and illegal invasion of African migrant workers and refugees. For more on refugees in Israel, see footnote 44. 17. The Jewish holy day of the week is Saturday, and all public transportation stops working as the Sabbath startson Friday afternoon. 18. I realize that in some U.S. communities, the terms FTM and MTF are considered unacceptable and othering. However, in the Israeli transgender community they are both commonly and widely used. I refer to people as FTM or MTF as this is the way they identify and out of respect for their identities and for our local terminologies. 19. At the time, Tel Avivs biggest LGBT organization. 20. Then, Tel Avivs gay and lesbian magazine (later bought by a large newsgroup and had its name changed to Tel Aviv in Pink). 21. An activist in Bisexuals in Israel and the administrator of the GoGay.co.il bisexual forum. 22. Robyn has since been one of the greatest inuences and inspirations to my bisexual activism. Her passion, strength, wisdom and unrelenting dedication for the struggles of bisexuality, feminism and LGBTQ rights have given me more than I can say in a footnote. Thanks, Robyn! 23. See Ochs and Rowley (2005). I had read other books before, but they were relatively few and far in between. 24. For more on bisexuality and binarism, see my blog post, Eisner (2011b). 25. For more on bisexualitys subversive potential, see my blog post, Eisner (2010). 26. Racialized means: people generally perceived as having a race or to be of color. The term is critical toward the Eurocentrist normalization of Western Whiteness as a nonrace and noncolor default. 27. Cisgender is a person who feels comfortable with the gender she or he was assigned at birth; that is, nontransgender. 28. This is all highly underresearched, thanks to the same system of biphobia that perpetuates these horrors. However, for data on some of these issues, please see Ulrich (2011) and Miller, Andre, Ebin, and Bessonova (2007). 29. Monosexism is the social assumption that everyone is or should be monosexual (attracted to members of only one gender), and the punishment system working against those who deviate. 30. The bisexual spectrum refers to a wide range of identities, whose shared characteristic is attraction to people of more than one sex and/or gender, including: bisexuality, pansexuality, omnisexuality, polysexuality, bi-curiousity, questioning, unlabeled, queer sexuality, uid sexuality, homoexibility, heteroexibility and many more. 31. I now realize that the immense majority of bisexual erasure is in fact performed by dominant heteropatriarchal structures and nd the near-exclusive focus on bisexual erasure by LGBTQs to be highly problematic and misdirected. 32. For more on bisexualitys disruptive potential to this system, see Callis (2009). 33. For more on radical transgender perspectives about sex and gender, see Bauer (2010). 34. BDSM stands for a wide array of sexual/erotic preferences and practices, centered around Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism and Masochism. For more about BDSM and the politics thereof, see Calia (2000). 35. I now realize that we neglected to mention asexuals, in an exclusion typical of LGBT discourse and similar in nature to that of bisexuals. For more about the connections between asexuality and the queer movement, see Miller (2010). 36. I write LGBT-phobia rather than the more popular homophobia since I dispute the assumption that the term homophobia covers biphobia, lesbophobia and transphobia. I feel that the very presumption that it does constitutes an erasure of the specic characteristics of oppression experienced by each of these groups. 37. This is an expression in use by the radical queer community in Israel as a method of exposing the material and symbolic distribution of power and resources amidst the LGBTQ community.
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38. European/white Jews. 39. For more on interdependentness and sustainability, see Padamsee (2011). 40. The Israel Occupation Forces (also known as the IDF or Israel Defense Forces, again in Orwellian tradition). 41. In Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions (cited earlier), Naomi Tucker dedicates the book to David Lourea and others, with the words: With pride, rage, sisterhood and love. 42. Invoking Fritz Klein. 43. In Hebrew, Inside and In the face are spelled identically. 44. Despite being a signeeand indeed an initiatorof the Geneva Convention, the Israeli government practices an illegal, immoral and racist policy of zero tolerance toward refugees and illegal migrant workers. Sudanese, Artithrean and other refugees seeking sanctuary in Israel are shot at in the south border of Israel, are imprisoned and deported back to the countries from which they sought refuge. The ones succeeding in entering Israel are subject to manhunt by the Israeli police and subsequently face the same fate as the ones caught at the border. There are currently hundreds of refugees and migrant workers imprisoned in Israel, dozens of them are children between the ages of 1317. Recently the Israeli government has approved a bill allowing the state to imprison refugees for three years without trial upon crossing the Israeli border. For this purpose, they have also built a large prison on the Southern border of Israel. 45. This is, of course, a hundredfold relevant to such countries as the United States, whose violent, nationalist, sexist and LGBT-phobic cultures produce hundreds of assaults and murders of LGBTQ (and other) people each year. 46. RC is an organization based on a particular method of group support, and encouraging awareness of identity-based oppression. 47. For more information on this topic, see Gross (2010) and Grinberg (2009). 48. If you havent read it yet, dont waste a second and go read it now! See Rich (1980). 49. Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood, currently undergoing forced and violent gentrication and occupation by Jewish settlers, supported by the government, the Jerusalem municipality, the police and the military. The inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrah are methodically and systematically cast away from their indigenous family homes in the neighborhood to nd themselves living on the street and facing constant harassment and violence by the settlers, the police and the military. Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity is a grassroots activists group supporting the Palestinian inhabitants. For more information, see Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity (http://www.en.justjlm.org). 50. Rishon LeZion is a city in Israel, located south of Tel Aviv. 51. For more on the term rape culture, see McEwan (2009). 52. Cameron and I generally take turns in organizing the parties. 53. For more on the connections between feminism and animal rights, see Adams (1999). 54. If any of this sounds familiar to you, this is because much of the ier was based on anarchafeminist materials from the wonderful zine Learning Good Consent (unknown author, n.d.), as well as other written materials from Philadelphian group Phillys Pissed. 55. Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) is a radical left feminist organization, in which many queer women are members. Their space hosts workshops, lectures, groups and other community activities. 56. Similar to Tel Aviv, in Haifa much of the radical left feminist community is also comprised of queer women. 57. For more about bisexual temporalities, see Ku (2010). Note that this is not to say that such perspectives are only possible to bisexual people or that all bisexual people naturally hold this perspective. 58. See Eisner (2011a). For a digital copy (in Hebrew), e-mail me.
REFERENCES
Adams, C. J. (1999). The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory. London, UK: Continuum. Bauer, A. (2010, November 26). Not your moms trans 101 [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://tranarchism.com/2010/11/26/not-your-moms-trans-101
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Ben-David, L. (2010, November 23). Boy//cut Israel: Challenging male hegemony through queer & feminist identication [Video le]. Retrieved from http://makore.6tzvaim.com/node/523 Bernstein Sycamore, M. (2004). Gay shame: From queer autonomous space to direct action extravaganza. In M. Bernstein Sycamore (Ed.), Thats revolting (pp. 268 295). New York, NY: Soft Skull Press. Butler, J. (1991). Imitation and gender insubordination. In D. Fuss (Ed.), Inside/out: Lesbian theories, gay theories (pp. 1331). New York, NY: Routledge. Calia, P. (2000). Public Sex: The culture of radical sex (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press. Callis, A. S. (2009). Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and queer theory. Journal of Bisexuality, 9 (34), 213233. Coalition of Women for Peace. (2010). All-out war: Israel against democracy. Retrieved from http://coalition.s482.sureserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/ 12/AllOutWar-internet-ENG.pdf Eisner, S. (2008, November 19). Stop Biphobia! GoGay. Retrieved from http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=7631 Eisner, S. (2010, December 12). The myth of myth-busting: Normalcy discourse and bisexual politics [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://radicalbi.wordpress.com/ 2010/12/12/the-myth-of-myth-busting-normalcy-discourse-and-bisexual-politics Eisner, S. (Ed.). (2011a). Breaking the rules, 2011. Tel Aviv, Israel: PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community. Eisner, S. (2011b, February 22). Words, binary and biphobia, or: Why bi is binary but FTM is not [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://radicalbi.wordpress. com/2011/02/22/words-binary-and-biphobia-or-why-bi-is-binary-but-ftm-is-not Eitan, T. (2009, June 26). Separation needed 2009. GoGay. Retrieved from http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8355 Grinberg, N. (2009, August 9). The right of difference. GoTrans. Retrieved from http://www.gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8541 Gross, A. (2010, July 3). Israeli GLBT politics between queerness and homonationalism [Web log post]. Bully Bloggers. Retrieved from http://bullybloggers.word press.com/2010/07/03/israeli-glbt-politics-between-queerness-and-homonation alism Hoffman, D. (2009, July 19). A letter to Fritz. GoGay. Retrieved from http://www. gogay.co.il/content/article.asp?id=8429 Juang, R. M. (2009). [Untitled]. In R. Ochs & S. Rowley (Eds.), Getting bi: Voices of bisexuals around the world (2nd ed.; pp. 9496). Boston, MA: Bisexual Resource Center. Katz, N. (2005). No such thing as bisexuality! Our Colors. Retrieved from http://www.a-v.co.il/tzvaim/article.asp?CID=18. Ku, C. H. (2010). The kid is all the rage: (Bi) sexuality, temporality and triangular desire in Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead. Journal of Bisexuality, 10(3), 309349. McEwan, M. (2009, October 9). Rape culture 101 [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html Miller. (2010, September 24). Asexuality is queer [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2010/09/asexuality-is-queer.html
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Miller, M., Andre, A., Ebin, J., & Bessonova, L. (2007). Bisexual health report: An introduction and model practices for HIV/STI prevention programming. Retrieved from http://www.thetaskforce.org/downloads/reports/reports/bi health 5 07 b.pdf Ochs, R., & Rowley, S. (Eds.). (2005). Getting bi: Voices of bisexuals around the world. Boston, MA: Bisexual Resource Center. Padamsee, Y. M. (2011, June 19). Communities of care, organizations for liberation [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://nayamaya.wordpress.com/2011/06/ 19/communities-of-care-organizations-for-liberation Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. (2010, June 28). Palestinian Queers for BDS call upon all Queer groups, organizations and individuals around the world to Boycott the Apartheid state of Israel [Web log entry]. Retrieved from http://www.pqbds.com/archives/22 Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs, 5(4), 631660. Retrieved from http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0908N0582/ adrienne%20rich.pdf Tucker, N. (Ed.). (1995). Bisexual politics: Theories, queries, and visions. New York, NY: Routledge. Ulrich, L. (2011). Bisexual invisibility report. Retrieved from http://www. birequest.org/docstore/2011-SF HRC-Bi Iinvisibility Report.pdf Unknown author. (n.d.). Learning good consent. [Self-published]. Retrieved from http://www.phillyspissed.net/sites/default/les/learning%20good%20consent2. pdf Wolfson, Y. (2006). Call me gay. In QueeruptionProtest (pp. 1012). [Self published]. Retrieved from Queer Zine Archive, http://www.qzap.org/v6/ index.php?option=com g2bridge&view=gallery&Itemid=41&g2 itemId=1391 Shiri Eisner is a feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist, writer and researcher. She resides in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she runs the bisexual organization PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community and where she is involved with many other activist pursuits. Shes in the midst of writing a book called Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, which she hopes would revolutionize bisexual politics everywhere. In the meantime, she also blogs at http://radicalbi.wordpress.com.

Love Rage and The Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

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Love Rage and The Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

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This article was downloaded by: [Tel Aviv University] On: 17 February 2012, At: 03:47 Publisher: Routledge

Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

PanoramaBi and Pansexual Feminist Community, Tel Aviv, Israel

Available online: 16 Feb 2012

Love, Rage and the Occupation: Bisexual Politics in Israel/Palestine

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INTRODUCTION: WHO I AM AND WHY IM WRITING

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FIRST STORY (2006): QUEERUPTION

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SECOND STORY (2006): THE JOH PROTEST VIGIL

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THIRD STORY (2006): THE MARCH THAT DIDNT MARCH

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INTERLUDE (20062008): INTERSECTIONS AND IN-BETWEENS

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FOURTH STORY (2008): FIRST STEPS AND BEGINNINGS

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FIFTH STORY (20082011): THE B-MOVIES

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SIXTH STORY (2009): TEL AVIV PRIDE MONTH

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SEVENTH STORY (2009): JERUSALEM PRIDE

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EIGHTH STORY (2009): FROM BAD TO WORSETHE BAR-NOAR SHOOTING

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NINTH STORY (20092010): PROCESS, CONFLICT AND (PARTIAL) RESOLUTIONS

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INTERLUDE (2010): PROGRESSION AND ACHIEVEMENTS

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TENTH STORY (2011): CONSENSUAL MESS-e-BI

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