In Malmo, Sweden’s June 10, 2018 Gay Pride parade, for the third consecutive year, the Jewish contingent marched with Israeli and rainbow flags bearing the Magen David (and Israeli music on a large trolley speaker a Christian supporter of Israel “schlepped all the way from Stockholm”) despite being
...targeted with insults and threats, including by cyclists who shouted “f*** Zionists” at them and one man who ran a finger across his throat. But they also found their ranks joined by an Arab [teenager] waving a Palestinian flg, a refugee from Syria and another from Libya [and] several non-Jewish Swedes who marched with them to show support.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center published a “travel warning” on Malmo in 2010 for safety reasons that continue — anti-semitic incidents number in the dozens annually, a “vastly outsize share” of the national and continental tally relative to the tiny Jewsh population here, currently about 1,000 (out of roughly 20,000 nationally): physical assault, threats against individuals and property, vandalism of the synagogue, the cemetery fire-bombed, harassment, riots, calls to “kill the Jews”,,,
For this year’s Gay Pride march, Israeli-born teacher and contingent organizer Ilana Edner,
...a Sephardic Jew who speaks Arabic, made a point of reaching out to non-Jews and Muslims. Logal Bet Kako, a gay refugee who belongs to Syria’s Assyrian minority, sang along to the songs of Dana International, the transgender Israeli woman who won the 1999 Eurovision song contest.
“I have many Jewish friends, and I didn’t see any Assyrian group at the gay pride parade, so why not?” Kako told JTA JTA about his decision to join the Jewish contingent.
But the “highlight of the event” for Edner began when she noticed a 15-year-old Malmo-born Palestinian girl named Iman defiantly waving a Palestinian flag near the Jewish group.
“I asked her to join us,” Edner said of the moment she saw the girl. “There was a moment of hesitation and we were off, waving an Israeli flag and a Palestinian one, showing Malmo that we can get along.”
Edner’s invitation moved Iman to tears.
“I was just so touched by it, I was not expecting it at all,” Iman, who did not give her last name, told JTA. “It was so welcoming and so beautiful, I feel fortunate to have been part of this beautiful moment.”
Some onlookers applauded the unusual scene, which was featured prominently in local news articles about the parade.
But Iman’s presence, waving a Palestinian flag alongside Israeli ones, also triggered hostility. Other onlookers shouted at the girl to go away, yelled “Shame on you” and made gestures at her head suggesting that she was crazy. To protect Iman’s identity, Edner gave her a mask borrowed from another marcher who came dressed in a Pharaoh costume...
What seems most probably true to conclude is that it takes society’s “outsider’s” to show the rest the way.