THE INDEPENDENT: At 10.20pm on Saturday 1 August 2009, a man walked along Nachmani Street, a residential road in central Tel Aviv. He went into the apartment block at number 28 and down a flight of steps to the basement flat, where a song by Blur was playing on the stereo amid the sound of laughter and conversation. There, the man shot 13 people, killing 26-year-old Nir Katz and 16-year-old Liz Trobishi, before returning up the steps and disappearing into the promenading crowds. His identity remains unknown.
Understanding what happened that night is not easy. It might be tempting to assume that such an attack – unprovoked, apparently indiscriminate – was political, somehow connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it was not, for the basement flat at 28 Nachmani Street is the headquarters of the Aguda (Hebrew for "association"), otherwise known as Israel's National Association of LGBT, representing the country's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities.
As such, this appears to have been a hate crime directed against one of the city's minority groups – but if so, Tel Aviv offers plenty of simpler pickings. Two blocks away on Yavne Street, for instance, is Evita, the city's most prominent gay bar, very loud, very proud, with arty pornography playing on screens visible from the street and an open pavement terrace. By contrast, the Aguda is virtually anonymous. No signs are posted, no rainbow flags fly. A couple of small stickers, on the communal post-box and on the door of the flat itself, say "The Aguda" in Hebrew, with a rainbow flash.
To find it, you'd have to know it was there.
"One morning I stood in front of the mirror shaving, looked myself in the eyes, and told myself: 'Face it: you're gay.'" Mike Hamel, chair of the Aguda, half-smiles at the memory. We're sitting in the basement flat at 28 Nachmani Street. The place is done up like a student dive, with tinsel, dog-eared posters and a shop mannequin. Hamel, his plaid shirt open one button more than might be usual in Britain, talks slowly and carefully as he describes growing up in Tel Aviv in the 1960s. "When it came to building a family, automatically that happened with a woman. The possibility of a deep emotional relationship with a man never crossed my mind.” >>> Matthew Teller | Saturday, December 05, 2009
