After Pride celebrations, the LGBTQ struggle is pushed back into the background

After it briefly seemed another Pride march might be canceled for the third time because of the war, the event went ahead. Rainbow flags lined the Tel Aviv promenade and filled the city, thousands celebrated at Charles Clore Park, and marches were also held in Jerusalem and other cities. But once the municipalities put the flags away for next year, the question raised is what comes next.

The article argues that the debate over the march’s value or character is no longer the main issue, because the larger problem is public indifference. In the writer’s view, the march has become an annual marker of how little has changed, while the same arguments, posters, interviews and social media posts are repeated year after year without moving the issue forward.

The piece says the LGBTQ struggle now needs to reinvent itself, because the current form of the march, whether as a demonstration of presence or as a celebration, is reduced to public-relations images that are occasionally pulled from the archives. It adds that anti-LGBTQ opponents have effectively succeeded by making the issue dull rather than overtly hostile, since indifference is harder to fight than open hatred.

The article cites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark to Orna Peretz, originally said in another context, “You just are not interesting. You bore us,” as a phrase that captures the current atmosphere. It concludes that, despite the march, the community is expected to return to the closet for the other 364 days of the year, unless the movement finds a new way to force the issue back into public debate.