THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK)
A Hasbara Symphony Orchestra fan favorite, often played during encores, is the funereal sonata, “Hamas Throws Gays from Buildings”. Although it has recently been overtaken by the more upbeat waltz, “No Roofs Left Because We Flattened All the Buildings”, the two are often played in succession.
A Hasbara Symphony Orchestra fan favorite, often played during encores, is the funereal sonata, “Hamas Throws Gays from Buildings”. Although it has recently been overtaken by the more upbeat waltz, “No Roofs Left Because We Flattened All the Buildings”, the two are often played in succession.
To bolster their claims, Israel flunkies have published videos and provided other evidence of this horrific practice, but never provided the name or any other identifying information of a single gay Palestinian man who was thrown to his death by Hamas from the rooftop of one of the Gaza Strip’s former buildings.
The reason they have not done so is quite simple. It is pure fiction, plain and simple, and never happened. The continued and regular insistence by Israel flunkies that this is the certain fate allotted to gay men in the Gaza Strip has as firm a connection to reality as the non-existent pictures Joe Biden repeatedly claimed to have seen of Israeli infants beheaded by Palestinians during the 7 October 2023 attacks.
The line of attack has been used not only to further defame Palestinians as savage barbarians, but is more specifically directed at members of the queer community in Europe and North America who have had a visible presence in the Palestinian solidarity and anti-genocide campaigns these past two years. “If you love the Palestinians so much go to Gaza, where your hosts will gladly organize a rooftop party for you”, is the typical comment, typically followed by an aspiring comedian remarking “maybe not, we’ve flattened all the buildings”.
There are indeed videos of gay men being thrown from rooftops, and one clip particularly beloved by the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra shows four such souls being methodically despatched to their deaths in this manner in quick succession. While routinely passed off as proof positive of not only Hamas but more generally Palestinian barbarism, a Reuters fact check dated 14 December 2023 determined that the images “were shared by IS [Islamic State] to show the execution of four gay men in Fallujah, Iraq”, and that it had been reported as such by multiple media in June 2015.
Similar videos and photos ascribed to Hamas were also confirmed as ISIS killings conducted not in Palestine but rather in Syria and Iraq. In other words, the refrain that Hamas has a policy of killing gay men by throwing them from rooftops, or that it has ever engaged in the practice, is a politically-motivated hoax.
Judging by the comments directed at queer supporters of Palestine, it is a fantasy as well. As always determined to have it both ways, Israel flunkies want to condemn Hamas for throwing gay men from rooftops, but also want Hamas to engage in this practice against gay men (and lesbians) who support Palestine.
Availing themselves of the panoply of tropes and stereotypes they along with their far-right allies have manufactured about Arabs and Muslims, Israel apologists continue to claim that homosexuality in the Gaza Strip is a deadly affair, contrasting it with the utopia that is Israel – the only country in the world that has ever recognized gay rights, though not same-sex marriage.
It is certainly true that Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip has become more conservative as well as more religiously observant in recent decades. The dominance of Hamas is as much a product as cause of this trend, which reflects a combination of regional and local dynamics. These include the concerted efforts by pro-Western governments in the region to promote Islamisation to fend off the growth of nationalist and leftist challenges, the regional repercussions of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Afghan jihad of the 1980s, and the growth of both Islamic social welfare institutions and Islamic political movements challenging state power after secular alternatives were largely crushed – typically with US and European support.
Within the Gaza Strip the increasing population density of the territoryand particularly its refugee camps, which is among the very highest in the world, combined with the ubiquitous presence of instinctively vulgar and violent foreign soldiers, as in similar circumstances elsewhere further encourages conservatism.
This mix, as might be expected, was not particularly conducive to an environment that openly accepted homosexuality. Regardless of how one chooses to interpret Muslim or Christian theology, and whether one chooses to believe popular attitudes are formed or only influenced to greater or lesser degrees by faith, most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whether Muslim and Christian, religious or secular, hold attitudes towards homosexuality broadly similar to those predominant in Europe and North America before its cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. They either oppose it, disapprove of it, accept it if kept discreet, or engage in unobtrusive same-sex relationships. Those who believe public policy should be as accepting as in many European countries, or who believe the security forces should raid every bedroom in the Gaza Strip to eradicate it, are few and far between.
It is often forgotten that before the West determined that Arabs and Muslims were engaged in a global jihad against sexual expression, it condemned them for their purported libidinous licentiousness, including and often particularly homosexuality. During the British Mandate period in Palestine, the criminal code adopted by the British authorities in 1936 promulgated Ordinance No. 74, which criminalized “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” with imprisonment for up to ten years. It was a reflection of British attitudes rather than a local demand.
After 1948 Palestine was governed by multiple penal codes: Israeli in Israel, Jordanian in the West Bank, and an amended version of British Mandatory law in the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip. The Jordanians, who annexed the West Bank, in 1951 replaced the British Mandatory Criminal Code with their own Penal Code. It did not include provisions prohibiting consensual, non-commercial same-sex acts between adults, effectively repealing Ordinance No. 74. Israel annulled Ordinance No. 74 only in 1988, although its attorney-general instructed the police to stop enforcing it in 1953. Egypt, which unlike Jordan in the West Bank did not replace the Gaza Strip’s laws with its own because it did not annex the territory, left Ordinance No. 74 in place.
After the Israeli occupation commenced in 1967, the West Bank and Gaza Strip continued to operate under distinct legal regimes rather than a consolidated one. Each was ruled by an Israeli military government, in which all executive, legislative, and judicial powers were vested in the person of the military governor. These textbook dictators ruled by decree, and have since 1967 promulgated nearly 2,000 military orders affecting every facet of life. None of these repealed Ordinance No. 74 in the Gaza Strip.
The legal landscape was further fragmented after the 1993 Oslo Accords, with almost all of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank now falling under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which began the process of consolidating the legal regime of the territories it administered, but had not completed it by 2007 when Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip. In response to this development, PA President Mahmoud Abbas shut down the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the PA parliament in which Hamas had achieved a majority during the 2006 elections, and began ruling by decree. In the Gaza Strip Hamas maintained the pretense of parliamentary rule, and laws were generally adopted by the rump PLC that convened in Gaza City.
Given that Hamas was the hegemonic power in the Gaza Strip after 2007, it could pass any laws it wanted. In other words, there was nothing to prevent it from imposing the death penalty for any offense it deemed eligible, or from specifying the method of execution. It maintained the death penalty for only two crimes: pre-meditated murder, and collaboration with Israel (treason) – a list similar to, if not more restrictive than that of other states that still maintain the death penalty. It does not include homosexuality.
The Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip have retained but not expanded upon Ordinance No. 74. This means that homosexuality remains a criminal offense, punishable by prison for up to ten years. According to Equaldex, an online resource on LGBTQ rights, “enforcement is difficult, so arrests are believed to be rare”.
Initially, the Hamas government refrained from implementing death sentences passed by its courts, because formally these must be approved by the PA presidency, and Hamas elected to respect this authority in the context of efforts to achieve reconciliation with its West Bank rivals. But approximately a decade ago it abandoned this policy and has since then carried out a number of executions. Separately, the Martyr Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, has carried out a number of executions and summary executions, particularly during or immediately after the various Israeli onslaughts on the Gaza Strip. These are typically carried out for the charge of treason, though there are suspicions that in some cases other motives were in play.
The total number of executions carried out by the government in the Gaza Strip and the Hamas military wing (including summary executions by the latter) prior to October 2023 is estimated to be in the range of 80-100. In only one case was sexual orientation an issue, under decidedly murky circumstances.
Mahmoud Ishtiwi was the commander of the Hamas military wing in the Zaitun district of Gaza City, and thus a senior officer in its ranks. In 2016, approximately a year after his arrest, Hamas announced that he had been executed by firing squad, although there were suspicions he was in fact tortured to death and then shot to make it appear to be an execution. The reason provided for his killing was “Misconduct and moral turpitude, to which he confessed”.
Ishtiwi was initially arrested for embezzlement, after it was discovered he had stolen money provided to him by Hamas to fund his unit. A man whose identity has not been revealed, and who provided details of his sexual relationship with Ishtiwi to Hamas, was found to be the recipient of the stolen funds, either for sex or to ensure his silence. Ishtiwi was then accused by Hamas of having passed intelligence to Israel during its 2014 Operation Protective Edge attack on the Gaza Strip, which led to a massive bombing raid intended to kill Hamas’s overall military commander, Muhammad Deif, but which instead killed Deif’s wife, his infant son Ali, and three-year old daughter Sara.
Prior to Ishtiwi’s execution, Hamas issued a statement that no evidence was discovered implicating Ishtiwi in the attempted assassination of Deif. Whether this was indeed the case, or whether Hamas put out the statement to deny that Israel had successfully infiltrated its senior ranks, remains unclear. For its part, Ishtiwi’s family claimed all the charges were manufactured and that he was the victim of internal conflicts and a settling of accounts within Hamas.
The charge of internal conflict pointed to Yayha Sinwar, who was rapidly rising through the movement’s ranks after his release from Israel’s prison system in the 2011 exchange of prisoners with Hamas. Speculatively, it would appear that Sinwar took a much harsher view of what were considered illicit sexual relationships, because he viewed them as a vulnerability that could be exploited by Israeli intelligence to infiltrate the movement.
Sinwar was far from alone in holding such views. Israeli intelligence is legendary for exploiting activities and relationships Palestinians seek to keep hidden, such as adultery, same-sex relationships, premarital sex, or drug and alcohol use and abuse, to blackmail Palestinians into collaborating with the occupation. It’s the flip side of extorting Palestinians desperate to treat their severely ill child to collaborate in exchange for an exit permit to Jordan.
Several years ago, in fact, several former members of Israel’s Unit 8200, its signals intelligence agency, detailed their work in this respect. As reported by Richard Silverstein, citing the Israeli press:
[Begin Quote] “In the training course they study and learn by heart various words for gay in Arabic,” N. said. The goal is to trace in wiretapping the slightest hint of a random person’s sexuality and use it against them. Then the most moral army in the world will ruin that person’s life, only because he’s gay. This practice also makes every LGBTQ person in the territories seen as a potential collaborator. [End Quote]
The life of gay men in the Gaza Strip is not an easy one, and includes forms of harassment that are not enshrined in law, and lacks legal protections against discrimination. But nor is it the hell on earth, or death at the bottom of a building so gleefully recounted by Israel flunkies at every opportunity.
That said, there does exist incontrovertible evidence that Palestinians have been dropped to their deaths from rooftops in the Gaza Strip. In 2007, during battles in Gaza City between Hamas and Fatah that ended with Hamas seizing the Gaza Strip, several such incidents were recorded. It was initially assumed that the perpetrators were Hamas militants because they sported bushy beards, but it later emerged that in at least some cases it was in fact their Fatah counterparts who were responsible. And more recently video evidence has emerged of Israeli soldiers throwing Palestinians off rooftops during the ongoing Gaza Genocide.
If Israel flunkies genuinely cared about the rights of gay Palestinians, addressing Israel’s exploitation of their sexuality to perpetuate an illegal occupation would be a better place to start than posting ISIS propaganda videos. As for the queer Europeans and North Americans who are the primary target of the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra, the response provided by Maya Mikdashi, the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon, seems particularly apt: “No Pride in Genocide”. END
@mayamikdashi
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