From the Jerusalem Post
 

J'lem court approves gay parade
 

By ETGAR LEFKOVITZ

Overturning a city veto, Jerusalem District Court ruled Sunday that the municipality must allow the city's annual gay parade to take place on Thursday as scheduled.

Judge Mussia Arad ordered Mayor Lupoliansky to personally pay NIS 30,000 to the city's Gay and Lesbian center to cover its legal costs and to underwrite the event, and the Jerusalem municipality was ordered to pay an additional NIS 30,000.

Arad ruled that is was not within the city's jurisdiction to prohibit the parade, arguing that the mayor could not act with prejudice against group of people because he disagreed with their worldview.

Arad also ordered the city line the parade route with banners representing the group in advance of the event, as she said the city customarily did for other parades and cultural events.

Earlier Sunday, Jerusalem police chief Ilan Franco said that he would allow the parade to take place on Thursday as scheduled.

The city police chief announced his decision to allow the event, along with four demonstrations against it, during a morning hearing at the Jerusalem district court.

Interior Minister Ophir Paz-Pines had said that he would obligate the city to allow the event to go ahead as planned, with legal experts opining that the court would force the municipality to allow the parade to take place.

The legal action came after the municipality unexpectedly informed event organizers in writing Thursday that the city would not allow the yearly parade to go ahead on June 30 as planned, saying the march would offend many of the holy city's residents, and set off unrest.

The city's eleventh-hour decision, made public just one week before the scheduled event, stunned event organizers who said Thursday that they would fight all the way up to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to overturn a decision which, they said, violated the homosexual community's right of expression.

"The actions of the mayor, and those carrying out his policies, are injurious to the values of freedom of expression... and are a serious and intentional violation of good faith...and violate the principle of equality," said Hagai El-Ad, director of Jerusalem's Gay and Lesbian Center.

The event, which draws several thousand participants, has been the source of repeated debate each year, with many religious city councilors and a not insignificant number of city residents considering such an event inappropriate for a "holy" city.

Over the last three years, however, the municipality never said they would ban the parade from taking place, even after Mayor Uri Lupolianski, an opponent of the event, became the city's first haredi mayor two years ago.

The prerogative for issuing permits for marches and other public events in the country rests with the police, although the municipality can ban marchers from public parks.

Indeed, the city's surprise decision to block the parade, which was widely expected to be overturned by the Jerusalem court from the start, was seen as a largely symbolic move by the haredi-run municipality of Mayor Lupolianski, who has come under increasingly harsh criticism from his constituency for failing to take a more vocal position against the planned international gay pride parade which was slated to be held in Jerusalem this summer.

"We would like to see Mayor Lupolianski as well as religious city and state officials lead masses of people to protest the event, and if necessary be arrested in an attempt to block the parade from happening," said New York Rabbi Yehuda Levin of the Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance of America, who has been actively campaigning against such events in Israel.

The city's decision came just a month after organizers, facing a looming police veto, postponed the international gay pride parade slated to take place in Jerusalem until next year due to the concomitant pullout from Gaza.

The summer withdrawal, and the mass protests planned to go along with it, are expected to vastly overburden police around the country, leaving police with no manpower to safeguard such a highly controversial event.

In a conservative city with a strong religious and traditional makeup, both Jewish and Arab, the idea of holding such an international parade is seen by many - even outside of religious circles - as out of touch with both the spiritual character of the city as well as the sensitivities of its observant residents.

A public opinion poll released earlier this year found that three-quarters of Jerusalem's 700,000 residents were opposed to holding the international gay event, and only a quarter supported it.

When the first local parade was held in the capital in 2002, former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert withheld city funding for the event, after failing to convince organizers and participants to join Tel Aviv's parade, where a gay pride procession has been held for years with a much larger turnout.

The Jerusalem Municipality was later ordered by the Supreme Court to pay the organizers NIS 40,000 for the annual event, in keeping with the amount the municipality contributed toward previous city marches.

(©) The Jerusalem Post