We Spoke Up For Palestine and Got Kicked Out of the White House Pride Party

This month, I (Abby Stein) was invited for the second time to attend the White House Pride Month Celebration. I was surprised to be invited, given that so many queer and Jewish activists I know who have been outspoken in their call for an immediate permanent ceasefire in Gaza and hostage exchange have not been invited back to White House events they were previously invited to.

I considered declining the invite in protest of this administration’s funding and green-lighting the massacre, displacement, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinains in Gaza and the West Bank. Queer Palestinians deserve the right to live and celebrate — but cannot while under siege and bombing by Israel with US weapons. As a queer, trans, Israeli-American rabbi, whose closest openly queer family members live in Israel, I wanted to bring this message to the White House.

I’ve known Lily Greenberg Call since she invited me to speak at UC Berkeley Hillel in 2016. At the time, she was part of the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) student group on campus. I have since watched over the years as she moved away from AIPAC and pro-Israel lobbying to getting involved in anti-occupation organizing and the Palestinian rights movement. She had worked on several political campaigns in her career so far, and was appointed to serve in the Biden administration in January 2023. I was inspired by her resignation from her job as a political appointee in the Biden Administration, becoming the first and only Jewish appointee to publicly resign in protest of the Administration’s policy on Gaza. I invited her to come as my plus one to the White House, a place where her voice as a queer, Jewish person who spoke up against US funding and support for Israel’s occupation and apartheid was silenced.

The Pride Celebration was held on the South Lawn of the White House on a beautiful, if slightly humid evening (but not bad by DC standards). We arrived, went through several security checks, and were granted entrance to the South Lawn. The energy was celebratory and light-hearted. A DJ was mixing sets from the White House balcony, people were drinking, parents with little kids were running around chasing after them. There were stages, several different food and concession stands, and rainbow themed photo areas.

But both of us felt uncomfortable: Lily, returning to the White House campus for the first time since resigning, seeing former coworkers and friends, and Abby, also returning but without so many of her queer friends and fellow leaders who had been at previous White House events but not invited to this one since being outspoken in support of a ceasefire. To be at an event celebrating queer liberation, taking place in the epicenter of power while knowing that this Administration has contributed to the abject suffering of the Palestinian people, was extremely unsettling.

When Dr. Jill Biden spoke about Pride as a celebration and how LGTBQ rights in the US are under attack, we spoke up. We addressed Dr. Biden and our fellow attendees respectfully, introduced ourselves as queer Jews, and chanted our support for a permanent ceasefire, an end to arming Israel, and asserted that there can be no pride in genocide. Almost immediately, Abby was grabbed aggressively by a uniformed Secret Service officer. A White House staffer ran over and angrily informed us that we’d been formally disinvited from the event. We were escorted out and forbidden from returning to White House property that day. Our fellow attendees similarly displayed a surreal and dystopian shift in attitude towards us. As the officer held on to Abby’s arm and back and pushed us both out, some of the attendees started clacking their rainbow fans in our faces and booing us, chanting “four more years”.

After we were unceremoniously dumped outside the White House gates, we went on Instagram Live to share what had just happened. It was surreal to know that the party was continuing inside, business as usual, now that the disruptors had been dealt with. As we were recording, some attendees approached us, saying they’d left in disgust after seeing the reaction to our disruption.

Our identities as queer people and as Jews are constantly exploited by people in power to justify the massacre of Palestinians. Israel’s tolerance towards its LGBTQ community is often used to justify its policies of occupation and discrimination against all Palestinans. And as queer Jews with close LGBTQ family and friends in Israel, we know how precarious their rights are, too. There is no civil marriage, trans rights are consistently attacked and undermined by high-ranking government officials, and Israeli ministers actively spew hate against pride parades, leading to physical violence. LGBTQ Palestinians aren’t being “saved” by Israel. Their identities and their personal lives are exploited by Israeli security services to force them into being informants on their families and communities, putting them at risk.

We believe in queer liberation for all people, Palestinians and Israelis alike. That cannot happen while queer Palestinians are being murdered by Israel’s relentless bombing, starved to death by the deliberate withholding of food, water, and aid, and tortured in Israeli prisons. It is on all of us, especially as queer people, to speak for our queer siblings in Palestine.

This week marked the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. The floodgates of queer liberation in the United States were opened because of a riot – a brick thrown in protest. Pride was not given to us. It came because of a struggle and a fight. Throwing a pride celebration at the White House with the implicit agreement that there would be no discussion of the administration’s complicity in the suffering of Palestinians is counter to queer liberation. There can be no queer liberation under occupation.

What is lost when queer people turn away from the history of pride’s roots in protest and collective liberation for a pinkwashed, corporate “love is love” celebration at the White House amidst a genocide? Queer people in Palestine are being killed every day with American-made bombs in a war supported by American policymakers.

We are American and Israeli-American, white and white-passing, queer Jews. This intersection of identity and privilege that led us to even being invited into the White House in the first place. All systems of oppression are connected and any system that requires subjugation of one people for another is not safe for anyone. As queer Jews we demand a permanent ceasefire, hostage exchange, and for President Biden to listen to the majority of Americans, American Jews, Palestinian-Americans, and the families of Israeli hostages who demand the US to stop the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel. If we want to honor queer history and value queer lives today, we cannot continue to be complicit in the pinkwashing of Israeli war crimes and the dehumanization of Palestinian people.