Palestine, Good Faith, and Queer Nonprofits

When a call for a ceasefire results in attempts to pull an organization’s funding, we need to rethink where we are as a movement.

Back in 2015, I launched TurnOut with the goal of mobilizing communities to support queer and trans nonprofits. Today we provide volunteer support to over 170 different queer and trans organizations, and we send out their volunteer opportunities in our weekly newsletter to our community, which currently has just over 6,000 members.?

On Tuesday, we included an opportunity from an organization named Indivisible to connect volunteers with their representatives and call for a ceasefire in Palestine. Our newsletter is designed to offer subscribers a variety of options to take action on issues that are meaningful to them, and we have included many opportunities to call legislators in the past. We have never received a response like we did to this. Within just a few hours, I received several phone calls from people accusing me of anti-semitism and threatening to contact our funders and donors to get our funding pulled.?

Why Speak Up as a Queer Organization

The attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7th was horrifying, murdering over 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 civilians. As the Israeli government launched its response and scaled up its counterattacks, the impact on civilians in Palestine has become an issue of grave concern to human rights activists, including many of us fighting for the rights of queer and trans people. As of this week, over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 5,000 of whom were children, and nearly two million people have been displaced.?

As queer and trans people began to speak up, a common response to these calls has been an accusation of hypocrisy: How could a queer organization possibly support Palestine given its history of LGBTQ+ oppression??

Put simply, queer and trans people exist everywhere, including Palestine, and it is hard to understand how bombing and displacement supports their welfare or human rights. Somehow, the fact that queer and trans people suffer due to homophobia in Palestine is being used as an excuse for violence against them from a far-right Israeli administration.???

Social justice is intersectional, and this is a human rights crisis that demands immediate action.? Queer organizations spoke up during Black Lives Matter because queer and trans people of color suffer under police violence just like straight and cis people of color do, and because, in the words of Martin Luther King, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The same argument applies here.?

But organizations that attempt to engage in dialogue on this current conflict are consistently met with bad faith attacks. Organizations calling for a ceasefire are accused of being anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. On the other side, organizations that attempt to hold town halls on the conflict are accused of being Zionist sympathizers and neo-colonialists. Both sides have been accused of promoting genocide for making statements that call for nothing of the sort, and they are being attacked as such.?

The Cost of Bad Faith

People are being asked to pick a side between Israel and Palestine. Queer and trans people are on the same side, and we should be fighting for the safety and security of LGBTQ+ people in Israel AND Palestine. This bad-faith framing is turning us against each other, diverting our focus from the real source of destruction - those who do not respect life, whether LGBTQ+ or otherwise. By distracting ourselves, fighting with each other, damaging our own organizational support structures - we are doing their work for them. We are handing power to the forces who DO explicitly call for violence against minorities and take action to make it happen.?

I don’t know if the people who called us will actually follow through on their threats to try to get our funding pulled. But I do know that these kinds of threats are a major reason why so many queer and trans community leaders have stayed silent on this issue.?

These bad faith threats have frozen many leaders in our community. As queer and trans leaders, we know that threats are a potential part of this work. But this time the call is coming from inside the house. These threats are coming from people we know, that we have built relationships with, built trust with, worked with side by side. They are people we need as partners if we are going to advance our shared work.?

I know leaders feel frozen because I have spoken to them. There is an overwhelming recognition that a ceasefire is needed, but the risk of speaking up feels too great so they stay silent. And this decision to sit on the sidelines is weighing on them. These leaders are social justice activists who are stuck between their concerns for human life and putting their organization at risk, as every day they watch the death toll continue to rise. As one leader told me, “I am a coward. We are all cowards.”

I cannot criticize these leaders for struggling to make the right choice for their organizations. Instead, I believe the right place to focus is at the individual level, making a conscious effort to strive for good faith engagement - whether we are volunteers, donors, staff members, board members, Executive Directors, or subscribers to a newsletter.?

We have so much work to do, and we need to work together to do it. I am deeply concerned about our readiness to assume the absolute worst of each other, attacking and threatening organizations that are trying to find their way through an incredibly complicated situation, and tearing down vital hard-won queer and trans infrastructure in the process.?

The nonprofit space is filled with high-stakes urgency, and this situation is no different. Sadly, in our attempts to move quickly and decisively, our history is dotted with incidents of hasty action doing more harm than good. I am reminded of the “Jamaican Rum Dump” in 2009 where American LGBTQ+ activists boycotted Red Stripe beer to protest rampant homophobia in Jamaica, only to learn later that Red Stripe was one of the Jamaican LGBTQ+ community’s most valuable supporters. In our rush to identify a villain and hold them accountable, we had viciously attacked a valuable ally. Red Stripe was low-hanging fruit, presenting an easily accessible target in a conflict where those who were actually responsible - Jamaican officials? - felt out of reach.

We have enough stacked against us as we try to provide for our communities: paltry funding, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, the ongoing effects of trauma on the people who show up to do this work every day. We do not have the luxury of targeting members of our own communities in this conflict just because they are more easily accessible than Hamas or Netanyahu’s far-right regime.

Hope

My hope is that as a movement we choose to engage with each other in good faith. Instead of assuming the worst, we recognize that we have all stepped up to support our communities in an effort to do what is right. Where we disagree, we can create room for discussion without wild accusations and campaigns to destroy each other. And where we agree, we can work together to take action.?

I am deeply worried about events to come. The FBI has warned that anti-semitism is reaching historic levels following the attack by Hamas on October 7th, including harassment, vandalism, assault, and bomb threats against synagogues. I am scared for my Jewish friends and family. History teaches us that those who target the Jewish community often move on to queer and trans people and other minorities, and I am concerned for what the rise in anti-semitism means for all of us.?

I am also scared for my Muslim friends. While calls to address anti-semitism in this moment are urgent, there is an urgent need to address Islamophobia as well. Appalling events like the murder of 6 year-old Palestinian American boy Wadea Al-Fayoume, stabbed 26 times in Illinois, and the shooting of three Palestinian American students Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani in Vermont, demand immediate attention and should be central to national discussions of the safety and wellbeing of Muslim Americans.?

We cannot resign ourselves to this false framing of Jewish vs Muslim, Israel vs Palestine. We have to realign ourselves with those who respect human rights and against those who do not.

We have no shortage of challenges to come - the rising tide of fascism at home and abroad, the possibility of a second Trump term and the havoc that would bring. We need to be strengthening our ties, not burning them down. If we work together, we have a chance of meeting these challenges head on and succeeding. If we can’t find a way to do that, God help us all.