Organizers of this year's Chicago Dyke March have announced their "solidarity with Palestine" ahead of their event this Saturday, while some Jewish members of the city's LGBTQ community have said they are afraid to attend.
The Dyke March is a self-described alternative to the "corporate, white, male-dominated Chicago Pride Parade."
Last year's June 24 event made headlines after three Jewish marchers bearing rainbow flags emblazoned with the Star of David were kicked out of the march. Palestinian flags were brandished freely at the event.
The expelled women, as well as Jewish organizations, have accused the Dyke March of anti-Semitism.
One of the Jewish women booted from the event, Laurel Grauer, told the Chicago Reader that she does not plan on attending Saturday's march.
"I don't want to go if there's only going to be agitation," she said. "I feel like I'm a well-documented Jewish lesbian Zionist at this point so I don't need to be in a parade for it for people to know."
After last year's event, the Dyke March Collective (the core group of organizers) explicitly declared itself anti-Zionist as a core tenet. The collective defined Zionism as "an inherently white-supremacist ideology … based on the premise that Jewish people have a God-given entitlement to the lands of historic Palestine and the surrounding areas."
The Anti-Defamation League voiced support for Grauer and her companions. ADL regional director Lonnie Nasatir told the Chicago Reader: "We hope that there are no recriminations for those who choose to express their identity at this year's march."
This time, however, the collective is making its stance on Palestine even more categorical, after collective member Sarah Youssef said it would be held in solidarity with Palestine.
"We are marching in La Villita, Little Village, again this year, to highlight and align ourselves with the struggles of brown and black and indigenous people here in the U.S. and in Chicago: undocumented folks, folks who deal with surveillance, incarceration, over-policing," Youssef told the Chicago Reader. "And really think about what that looks like here, what that looks like in Palestine, even though it's unfortunately all too similar. I really hope [our] community is there to celebrate and to show our resilience and strength."
Several weeks after last year's march, amid the swirling controversy over the treatment of pro-Israel marchers, the Dyke March tweeted: "Zio tears replenish my electrolytes."
White supremacists, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, have used the term "Zio," derived from Zionist, as a slur for Jews.
The next day the group deleted the tweet and apologized, saying it "didn't know the violent history of the term."
"Sorry y'all! Definitely didn't know the violent history of the term. We meant Zionist/white tears replenish our electrolytes," the Dyke March tweeted.
