While completing his law studies in Tel Aviv, Will Goldbloom took a bus to Ramallah and used Grindr to find gay people in Palestine that he could talk to. He sums up what he’d learned in a Huffington Post op-ed.

What is it like to be a gay Palestinian? An Economist article says you will become an agent for Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency, to avoid being outed to your family. The film Out in the Dark says that you will fall in love with an attractive Israeli lawyer who will help you seek refuge in Tel Aviv. A Jew will tell you that Palestinian homosexuals live a life of constant danger, whereas in Israel they would enjoy an open existence. Another Jew overhearing this may retort that Israel uses its promotion of gay rights to mask its human rights abuses against Palestinians. They will tell you to support gay Palestinians by boycotting Israeli products.

When I had the opportunity to go to Israel for a semester abroad, I thought I would try to answer this question myself. Since Palestine is governed by different regional legal traditions, homosexuality is illegal in Gaza but legal in the West Bank. However, LGBT-identified individuals throughout Palestine are not legally protected from discrimination.

As a diaspora Jew I feel implicated in the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a gay person, I seek out people like me. So I wanted to connect with the Palestinian gay community even though I had no idea what it looked like and whether it would accept me. I hoped that even as an outsider I would be able to see the broad contours of gay life in an occupied territory where the lights of the gay metropolis of Tel Aviv are visible but out of reach.

Two months before my final semester of law school, which I completed on exchange in Tel Aviv, I took the bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank. The “Security Wall” flew by me on one side, then the other. In one brief journey I traversed from a Jewish world to an Arab one. Then, I turned on Grindr. The grid of profile pictures perfectly mapped the geographical and religious boundaries of the region. Palestinian profiles were surrounded by Jewish settlers and interspersed with Israeli soldiers. In this virtual conflict zone, harmonious chants at protests are replaced by listing desirable qualities in a mate (“No Zionists!”/”Israelis only”). Territory is annexed or guarded by filtering out profiles by ethnic identity. Stones and rubber bullets are approximated by the “block” function.

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