Nothing to Be Proud of: Madrid’s Gay Pride Parade Bans Israel
Israeli secular society is not just Tel Aviv where gays enjoy a sea of tolerance and freedom on SF levels. And seculars are a minority in the country. Only 42% of Jews identify as seculars according to the last polls. The rest are haredim (the ultra-orthodox), religious -zionists, and traditionalists. They are the majority and will be even more so as they have a higher birth rate than secular Jews (and than Arabs by the way).
Now you also need to understand that non-Americans, Israelis, Europeans etc… don’t react always according to US way of behaving. Let’s take the abortion issue. This is a political and social issue in the US. Not in Israel. Many many people oppose abortion in Israel. But most of them do not see it as a political or important issue worth fighting for it. Same with Nizan Horowicz, the gay Knesset member – first he was a more or less famous and popular, nice-guy journalist before becoming a MK and everybody knew he was gay ; and Meretz is a far left party with a “liberal” (in the US meaning) agenda so you would expect that they have a gay member. By the way, you see, the liberal oriented party just got 2% of the votes.
