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“struggle of their nation,” this notion resonates pinkwashing. Moreover, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International presents some disturbing essentializing and ...
BOOK REVIEW

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International Sarah Schulman Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012 193 pages. ISBN 978-0-8223-5358-4

Reviewed by RUTH PRESER and CHEN MISGAV

One may expect an account that opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma in a Jewish context to conclude with Zionism or “Jewish and democratic” as the circumventing script that counters past and prevents future violence. Accordingly, one may also expect diaspora and violence to be used interchangeably. That Sarah Schulman’s book opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma but arrives at totally different conclusions is one of the significant contributions of her political journey and memoir. Schulman constructs a chronological account of her emergence as a supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is enriched by the unresolved entanglement of contested identities, sites of accountability, and political struggles. Structured around two events and the moments that precede and follow them, the book opens with “Before” (introd.)—that is, before “Awareness” (chap. 1)—and thereafter leads to “Understanding” (chap. 11). “Before” delineates Schulman’s early biography and family history of persecution and migration, shedding light on the powers that shaped her Jewish-diasporic identity and ethics. Part 1, “Solidarity Visit,” then gestures toward her decision not to give the keynote address at the Tenth Annual LGBT Studies and Queer Theory Conference at Tel Aviv University in 2010 but instead to embark on a trip to Israel/Palestine to meet with Jewish and Palestinian queer activists. Her encounters with them expand her own knowledge of the conflict and of the queer antioccupation scene, shaping her position and potential contribution through negotiation and tension. Part 2, “Al-U.S. Tour,” describes Schulman’s efforts to foster a US-based queer engagement with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and with Palestinian queers by organizing a US tour for Palestinian queer activists, informing the American (queer) public about the Israeli occupation, and promoting the BDS movement as a nonviolent protest. More than a compelling story of transformation

JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:1 • March 2015 DOI 10.1215/15525864-2832394 • © 2015 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 111

and an alternative narrative for diaspora and persecution, this chronicle may serve as a reference for activists, for Schulman not only contributes invaluable experiential knowledge of social movements and social change but (unlike many who have undertaken political actions and activist journeys) carefully documents her strategies and tools. One of the book’s most intriguing aspects is its treatment of normative scripts, such as the one connecting Holocaust trauma with Jewish nationalism. Instead of naturalizing the conjugation of genealogy and territorialism, Schulman’s narrative suggests a critical conceptualization of diaspora that is driven by a counterdiscourse of generation, place, and identity (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993). Her account unpacks the tensions and ethical dilemmas, some still unresolved, that accompany her coming to awareness. For example, she describes how supporting the BDS movement means withdrawing support from LGBTactivities promoted by Israeli institutions. As a long-standing queer activist who has JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:1 March 2015

never failed to support LGBT causes, Schulman is forced to revisit her unquestioning stance once she adopts PACBI’s guidelines. She learns to engage queers in the struggle for Palestine by constructing what she calls “the queer international” and by soliciting public acknowledgment of this solidarity from PACBI. Yet Schulman’s articulation of reciprocity through a rhetoric of recognition—a public “coming out”—is problematic. Such an approach both values and imposes a Western language of gay liberation that identifies LGBT struggle with particular forms of publicness. Thus, while Schulman criticizes the valuation of societies according to the visibility they grant gays and LGBT organizations, and criticizes the notion of coming out as a Western greed of comprehensibility, she occasionally employs similar rhetoric. She also makes the dubious assertion that Israeli antioccupation queers are marginalized as “freaks” in their society for transgressing both sexual and national norms, while Palestinian queers “are deeply integrated into the struggle of their nation and their families” (81). Such statements point to Schulman’s identification with national struggle as the trajectory for incorporating and indeed accepting LGBT people into their communities. Echoing a claim to exceptional citizenship (Puar 2007) based on the engagement of LGBT people in the “struggle of their nation,” this notion resonates pinkwashing. Moreover, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International presents some disturbing essentializing and universalizing statements. Schulman writes that she “consider[s] religious men to be very dangerous” (77); she asserts that “I live in a country that regularly murders people in Iraq and Afghanistan under the orders of a president I voted for. If anyone should have practice understanding what it is like to be an Israeli, it would be an American” (58), but then she asks an Israeli antioccupation lesbian whether it is “possi112

ble . . . for lesbians to have a healthy relationship in Israel today” (71), as if such a possibility existed anywhere, as if “healthy relationship” were not a contested category, as if such “health” were accessible to queers in New York, as if there were such a position or such an identity in the global North, that is, a position or identity uncontaminated by state colonialism and its promise of inclusions. As Jasbir Puar (2013) claims, homonationalism can be resisted and resignified, but it cannot be opted out of; we are all conditioned by it and

through it. Schulman tries to propose an alternative identity politics of “queer international” while at times reproducing identities—of the (New York) Jew, the Israeli, and the Palestinian, to name just a few. Despite some factual mistakes, Schulman’s book is rich and accessible; her powerful account of passing through the Qalandia checkpoint is a highlight (94). In a compelling narrative Schulman provides an alternative script of exile and home and suggests complex,

RUTH PRESER is a feminist and a postdoctoral fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She combines queer theory, cultural studies, and empirically informed inquiry in her work, which lies at the intersection of narrative and performative theory, public cultures, and politics of belonging. Her most recent article, “A Methodology of Damage,” appeared in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (2014). Currently she is working on a monograph on queer Israeli diaspora in Berlin. Contact: [email protected]. CHEN MISGAV engages in and writes about activism, planning, and gender, sexual, and other identities. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Human Environment and the PECLAB at Tel Aviv University; his dissertation is titled “Spatial Activism: Perspectives of Body, Identity, and Memory,” under the supervision of Tovi Fenster. Misgav has published articles and book chapters on activism, identity, gender, and sexuality in Hebrew and English and has coedited a themed issue on gender and geography for HAGAR: Studies in Culture, Politics, and Identities. Contact: [email protected].

References Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. 1993. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4: 693–725. www.jstor.org/stable/1343903. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2:

PRESER AND MISGAV • Israel/Palestine and the Queer International • Book Review

less dichotomous ways of imagining oneself as a queer, a Jew, and an activist for Palestine.

336–39. DOI:10.1017/S002074381300007X.

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