The writers of
Eretz Nehederet would like to have a word with you. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, the Israeli sketch television show, which is often likened to
Saturday Night Live, has started uploading English-language videos to its YouTube channel in the hope of reaching an international audience.
The show’s writers see themselves as a faction in Israel’s “existential” battle against Hamas, one that “
brandishes satire as weapon” and aims “
razor-sharp satiric arrows” at progressives abroad whom it deems hypocritical and antisemitic. But while
Eretz Nehederet is considered a liberal program in Israel, its recent viral sketches have chosen to heap scorn on targets usually favored by the far right. Take the November sketch “
Welcome to Columbia Untisemity,” in which two college students sporting facial piercings and dyed hair helpfully explain that the “H” in “LGBTQH” stands for Hamas. They interview a Hamas militant, who effuses that they “can come to Gaza anytime, and we will throw you from the roof, you homosexual dirt.” One student, majoring in “queer postcolonial astrology,” responds with dopey excitement: “They want to throw me a rooftop party!” He then waves a version of a rainbow pride flag that bears the Palestinian flag in its center.
The sketch is emblematic of prevailing rhetoric since Israel’s all-out assault on Gaza began over six months ago. Zionists and their allies have painted queer solidarity with Palestinians as contradictory and naive. Israel, they argue, is the sole champion of LGBTQ rights in the Middle East, a progressive bastion of tolerance amid a sea of homophobia. But
Eretz Nehederet’s videos lay bare a sentiment that has otherwise simmered right below the surface of Zionist discourse: a disdain for queerness.
Rather than reserve its contempt for the political leaders engineering mass slaughter, the most popular television program in Israel has opted to scapegoat queer leftists, conflating them with Hamas’s leaders in their battle for the nation’s survival. Invoking the sneering trope of dimwitted, queer theory–addled college liberals, the Columbia University sketch and other propaganda from Israel’s supporters are ideologically indistinguishable from the hatred that flows from the American right. Taken together, this shared vocabulary—rooted in transphobia and extinction panic—reveals the heart of Israel’s ethnonationalist project.