Homophilosemitism and Berlin Pride

In May 2019 the German parliament declared the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement anti-Semitic. BDS is a Palestinian-led non-violent movement to pressure Israel through economic means to adhere to international law and stop human rights violations. In light of the resolution, the queer community in Berlin has divided itself in two side which met on the streets of Berlin during Cristopher Street Day in July the same year. In the Queer Radical March (QRM), that was organized to protest the commodification and gentrification of the main event under the motto “let’s get critical - Pride is political”, some participants were prohibited from supporting BDS publicly by forbidding anti-Semitism at the march. This had led to a conflict that occurred initially on Facebook but ultimately manifested in a self-organized coalition to have a BDS supporting presence at the march. The context of this conflict is the “New Anti-Semitism” (and the “Israel-centered anti-Semitism”) discourse, which is deployed to target LGBTIQA+ bodies of color, especially migrant and Muslim, and some Jewish bodies as agents of anti-Semitism in the framework of a transnational racial governance. In this epistemic regime and State-Philosemitism some bodies are seen as “at home” while others are thought to have imported anti-Semitism from an “elsewhere” into a post-racial Germany and Europe. Through a discursive analysis of materials from The QRM Berlin 2019 which I collected through patchwork ethnography, I am showing that within State-Philosemitism and settler coloniality emerges what I call Homophilosemitism. I argue that Homophilosemitism reflects homotransnationalism and homocolonialism, within which a transnational ‘civilized’ vs. ‘uncivilized’ binarity emerges. This gives certain bodies access into a perceived ‘civilized and proper’ sexual and homo citizenship through adoption of policing mechanisms of the state that also changed the face of pride events in Berlin since 2019. This had also allowed space for dissidence in the form of the “Internationalist Pride for Liberation” and the epistemic infrastructures that it offers to people of the global majority in Berlin.