WorldPride, take two: the WorldPride festival will arrive in Jerusalem this August after its sudden cancellation last year. What a difference a year has made.

The city of Tel Aviv has canceled its annual gay pride parade--the Middle East's largest, with over 100,000 participants--and shifted its support to Jerusalem's long-delayed WorldPride festival, a series of LGBT marches, rallies, parties, and cultural events held every half-decade, the first WorldPride having taken place in Rome in 2000. Tel Aviv will host an apres-WorldPride beach party and provide shuttle service to the Jerusalem events. "After what happened last year, we wanted to come together as a nation in Jerusalem," says Shai Deutsch, an official with the Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgendered in Israel. "Our theme this year was 'One Big Community,' and we could think of no better way to demonstrate this idea than to join with WorldPride."

Indeed, WorldPride 2006 will take place August 6-12 in a Jerusalem--and an Israel--far more prepared for its arrival than in August 2005, when the event was originally scheduled to occur. The shift of Israel's historic withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to the same period as WorldPride, not to mention fierce opposition from a chorus of conservative clerics and local government officials, had prompted organizers to postpone the event.

Last year the city's conservative mayor threatened to block the issuance of permits to use important parks and public squares--a move deemed illegal by the Jerusalem district court. Now organizers will have access to many key public spaces needed to host major WorldPride events. And they have established a strong partnership with Israel's national police force, who will protect participants with a squad of nearly 1,000 officers.

"Obviously, security is a major concern here," concedes Hagai El-Ad, executive director of Jerusalem Open House, a community center and LGBT rights group planning WorldPride. "But the police have made it clear they are committed to making WorldPride happen, and we are very pleased with their professionalism." Such sentiments also extend to the Jerusalem legal system, which in February handed down a 12-year jail sentence--the harshest possible--to an Orthodox Jewish Israeli who stabbed three marchers at Jerusalem's long-running annual pride parade last year.

While the strongest opposition to the event continues to come from religious leaders, some gay rights groups, including Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, have called for a boycott of WorldPride in protest of Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank. And the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission announced in March that it would not participate in WorldPride because of concerns that many Arab gays and lesbians may not be allowed to cross the border into Israel for the event. Although WorldPride organizers cannot directly control Israeli immigration procedures, they appear to be quietly pressuring Israeli authorities to ease entry restrictions for likely Arab attendees. "Palestinian participation has always been part of the Open House," insists El-Ad. "This is really the only pride event in the entire Arab world."

Kaufman works in Tel Aviv as the international travel editor of Departures magazine.