About five years ago, I saw an article on the Daily Caller, titled "Wiccan Community Expresses Outrage at Ilhan Omar's Comments: 'Anti-Semitic and Unacceptable.'" OK, this article is from an unreliable right-wing source, but at minimum Janine Nelson of the Covenant of the Goddess was being irresponsible by making a statement for them, and I think the obtuseness of Nelson's quoted statements still deserves discussion, even if the article itself is really unreliable. It also gives me a convenient excuse to talk about my position on this on a Pagan website (not that I ever really needed an excuse to say "genocide is bad").
First of all: Ilhan Omar's comments were correct. It is seriously ridiculous that Americans--including citizens and the people we elect to govern us--are being expected to uncritically support a foreign country halfway around the world without ever criticizing its many documented human rights abuses. While it's really important to be conscious of the language you use and to be receptive to criticism of it, the reality is that accusing Omar's statements of being "based on an anti-Semitic trope" was entirely disingenuous. If you want more context, here is a rundown of why they were calling this anti-Semitic (I do not agree with all of it as I feel it treats people's criticism as less disingenuous than it really was, but it's nonetheless a good article with a lot of background and I can agree to disagree on the rest.). The reason it is disingenous to accuse Omar of "anti-Semitic tropes" is because, very unfortunately, Jewish people have been oppressed and skapegoated for so long that literally any criticism you could possibly make has been portrayed as a uniquely Jewish character flaw at some point in history.
Anyway, ultimately what happened here is that people with pro-Israel interests disingenuously criticized Ilhan Omar's comments as anti-Semitic, and because mainstream Democrats have traditionally been against every genocide except whatever the current one is, they decided to pass a resolution condemning her comments in particular. But because the optics of "fuck this Muslim legislator in particular" are pretty bad, more progressive Democrats pressured them to make it a broader resolution condemning bigotry in general instead, which Nelson (Remember Nelson? The Pagan we're talking about here?) applauded in her statement as some excellent general anti-bigotry push forward, even though her religion wasn't even fucking mentioned. I know I'm being coarse here, but Gods, it pisses me off to this day that she had the gall (and yes, I wrote a pretty irritated letter to the Covenant of the Goddess when this happened).
Anyway, this happened years ago, but you know what? The genocide against Palestine is still happening, and people are still being disingenuous about it, so let's talk about that.
I have understood what Israel was doing to Palestinians to be a genocide ever since I first learned about it decades ago. The debate over whether it's legally a genocide or not is a complete moot point... the definition of "genocide" is narrow by design for political reasons. A good article on that is "Why Israel has been accused of genocide" on Vox. There are a lot of references in this to the essay A Textbook Case of Genocide on Jewish Currents, which very much takes the position "this is absolutely a genocide," which is also the position I take. But even if it is not legally a genocide, the systematic displacement of Palestinians, confiscation of their land, destruction of their homes, indiscriminate military assaults on their communities, extreme human rights abuses, and even the ongoing cultural appropriation are not OK. You should not be supporting that, and therefore should not be supporting Israel, because that is what they are doing.
What does this have to do with being Pagan? I mean, OK, I'm under no obligation for my website to be 100% Pagan content, but the answer is, nonetheless, "more than you'd think." There is a pervasive PR campaign to convince marginalized people in the West that Israel is a shining beacon of progressive tolerance, with impeccable religious freedom in a region dominated by sharia law, that it is a queer-friendly wonderland. By contrast, people really like telling me that Palestinians all want me dead, that they would stone me to death for being queer or trans, that they would consider me a horrible infidel... when I attempted to discuss this with my grandma, she went on a long lecture about how if I went there they would "force me into a burqa" (that's not even the right Middle Eastern culture, but whatever).
Essentially, people are arguing that I should support Israel committing a literal genocide against Palestinians because, in the incredibly unlikely scenario in which I visit Palestine, hypothetically, somebody might want to hate crime me.
First of all, if this is your metric of acceptability for Israel's actions, you need to take a long, hard look at your moral integrity. Being a member of a statistically homophobic community doesn't somehow mean you forfeit your basic human right to exist, and it's disgusting that anybody would try suggesting that laying waste to entire communities of human beings could ever be a gay rights win. There are plenty of places in the United States where I feel deeply unsafe being openly queer, trans, or Pagan, and even in my generally-more-progressive college city I have experienced a fair amount of oppression for these things, including in some cases active threats against my physical safety. Would I want these communities blown sky high because of these experiences? Absolutely not.
So why would Israel's attacks on Gaza be OK because there are homophobic people there? Israel hasn't mastered straight-seeking missile technology; those attacks kill queer Palestinians just as readily, and yes, queer Palestinians do exist. Yes, Palestinians have their own bigotries to reckon with, as all populations do... attempted genocide does not help that, and I find it personally offensive to even suggest that these attacks benefit me in any way.
But what's particularly wild to me is that as a queer Pagan, it makes no intuitive sense at all for me to support any explicitly religious state, let alone one with a far-right government like Israel.
And this is like... the big elephant in the room when it comes to marginalized people. Yeah, you can argue all day about how Israel "has religious freedom" and how Tel Aviv has a great gay nightclub scene, but this changes nothing about the fact that the whole government structure is built in such a way that if I did live there, I would be systematically disadvantaged by their legal system, because it is all explicitly based on a religion I do not follow and was not raised into. It does not make sense to expect a member of a marginalized religion to support a religious state, regardless of how marginalized that state's religion might be elsewhere.
It's also important to remember that, especially in the United States, support for Zionism is, by and large, a Christian thing. Certain varieties of Christianity believe that Israelis talking Palestinian land is what will kickstart the End Times, which is exactly what they want because they want to live out their fantasies of bloodlust against people who aren't like them (warning that this is a Christian site, but this is the sort of thing they believe). The majority of support for Israel in the United States is based on this, not support for Jewish people... hell, they believe a significant part of this fantasy involves the end of Judaism (as all Jews will realize Jesus is their savior).
But to close this, I want to circle back to those COG comments that started this. Because I think on one level, this actually has nothing to do with Israel, but with the extreme naïvete of tiny religious minorities such as our own, in that many of us have the expectation that, when people use the phrase "religious tolerance," we are intrinsically included, even if we aren't named. This is not the case. A charitable reading of Nelson's commentary is that she saw this stupidly generic "anti-religious-intolerance" resolution, thought "hell yeah religious tolerance," and then immediately threw her support behind it without giving two seconds to why that resolution was written and what it truly stands for. But it's dangerous to assume that, even if this weren't completely disingenuous legislature, any of it actually applies to us anyway. When mainstream Christians (and believe me, virtually any politically-viable Christian politician is going to be mainstream) talk about "religious tolerance," they mean different forms of Christianity first and foremost, then often Judaism, often Islam, maybe Asian religions most Americans would be familiar with like Hinduism and Buddhism, and that's essentially it. It is extremely naïve to assume any of these people would have similarly freaked out and condemned a politician who said negative things about a Pagan religion, especially a Witchcraft-associated one.
Anyway, all that said, let's summarize: There is no Pagan consensus on Israel, there is no reason Pagans would be obligated to support Israel, and it's disingenuous to think any of this had to do with religious tolerance to begin with. But most importantly, there is no number of gay bars, rainbow tanks, or token "religious tolerance" measures that will make me support a genocide.
Happy Trails,
Wolfpeach