Israeli gay pride parade highlights progress, limitations

Michele Chabin | Special for USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Thousands attend Israeli gay pride parade Thousands of foreign tourists flooded into Israel this week to take part in a week of gay pride activities ranging from cultural events to all-night parties.

TEL AVIV — A half dozen babies sat or crawled on a soft blanket in a Tel Aviv park Friday as their fathers, gay men from around Israel, discussed juggling work and fatherhood, the introduction of solid foods and diaper rash.

A year and a half ago the men met in Thailand, where the surrogate mothers they had hired to have their babies were undergoing fertility treatments.

Friday's reunion, which took place in the heart of the city a couple of hours before the start of this year's massive gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, was a reminder of the extraordinary acceptance many LGBT Israelis enjoy, as well as the legal limitations.

Thousands of foreign tourists flooded into Israel this week to take part in a week of gay pride activities ranging from cultural events to all-night parties. Several LGBT publications and mainstream magazines have called Tel Aviv a top destination for LGBT travel thanks to its anything-goes atmosphere, great weather and white sandy beaches.

"If you put aside the geopolitical circumstances and look at only the circumstances affecting gay families in Israel, this is a pretty good place, especially Tel Aviv," said Liad Ortar, 40, who along with his husband, Ofer, is the father of 9-month-old twins conceived in Thailand.

Cradling his daughter Maya in his arms as his son, Ohad, played on the blanket, Ortar said there are some Tel Aviv neighborhoods with as many gay parents as straight ones.

But Israeli law — dictated by Orthodox norms when it comes to life events like marriage and divorce — doesn't recognize same-sex marriages performed in Israel and only allows heterosexual couples to enter into an Israel-based surrogacy arrangement to conceive a child.

"We hope our community will eventually be able to change the law, which also discriminates against single people, whether gay or straight. In the meantime we wanted to bring children into the world so we went overseas," Ortar said.

LGBT activists say Israel, which ended its ban on same-sex relations in 1988 and introduced laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in 1992, is by far the most progressive country in the Middle East and ahead of the U.S. in some instances.

Elisha Alexander, the transgender founder and director of Maavarim (Passages), an organization helping the community fight discrimination, said government-funded universal health insurance now covers almost all transgender surgeries and hormone treatments. A court ruling earlier this week means Israel's strong workplace discrimination laws related to gender and sexual orientation now cover transgender employees as well.

The Israeli military accepts openly gay and lesbian soldiers and — due to the large number of gay men who opt for fatherhood — recently introduced a mechanism to ensure that gay couples do not have to perform mandatory annual reserve duty at the same time.

Although the government doesn't recognize same-sex marriages performed in Israel, it provides the same socio-economic benefits to heterosexual and same-sex couples who register as partners. Same-sex couples can also jointly adopt a child.

Alexander said that marriage limitations "aren't only an LGBT issue. There is no civil marriage in Israel," a fact that prevents marriages of people from mixed faiths as well as the recognition of non-Orthodox Jewish marriages.

Some LGBT Israelis are angered when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials boast about the nation's relative open-mindedness.

In the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, Aeyal Gross, an associate law professor at Tel Aviv University and co-founder of the university's LGBT and Queer Studies Forum, accused Netanyahu of touting Israel's gay rights record to deflect from its treatment of the Palestinians.

In 2010, after a flotilla incident that left several activists dead aboard a Gaza-bound ship, Netanyahu urged peace activists to "go to the places where they oppress women. Go to the places where they hang homosexuals ... Go to Tehran. Go to Gaza ... Anyone for whom human rights are truly important needs to support liberal democratic Israel."

Such statements seek to "brand Israel as a liberal democracy" even though it violates human rights in some areas, Gross wrote.

Back in downtown Tel Aviv ahead of the gay pride parade Friday, residents put aside their differences for a few hours and celebrated their commonality as they shopped in the dozens of booths selling rainbow-colored flip-flops, hair bands, capes and yarmulkes.

Rona Honigsberg, 29, and her wife, Hadar Keshet, 28, bemoaned the fact that their wedding ceremony, held under a Jewish canopy a year ago, isn't recognized as a marriage by the state. "It's the principle that bothers me," Keshet said, noting that as soon as they file for common-law partner status they will be eligible for joint benefits.

Ami Pomerantz, 42, an Orthodox Jewish gay man who got divorced from his wife five years ago, said attitudes in Israeli society have come a long way since he felt compelled to marry a woman and start a family 15 years ago.

Sporting a yarmulke and a rainbow-colored cape, Pomeranz said that in the religious community in which he was raised, "the message was that there are no gays in our community and that if you thought you were gay, those feelings will disappear the moment you get married."

These days, Pomerantz, who sees his five children several times a week, said the situation is much improved.

"There is a constant conversation about gay people in the religious community, and religious teens can find info and people to talk to," he said. "Things are progressing."