Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Saʾed Atshan (review)

At the heart of Saʾed Atshan's book Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is the question of how the queer Palestinian solidarity movement that had garnered so much transnational support early in the 2000s ultimately lost momentum and plateaued around 2012. Animated by this inquiry, the study investigates the movement from 2001 to 2018 through ethnography, autoethnography, and interviews. Atshan ultimately attributes much of this loss of momentum to a faction in the movement that he terms "radical purists." Radical purists, he argues, had several effects on the movement. The most visible transformation radical purism produced was shifting political focus from an intersectional understanding of the fights against homophobia and Zionism as intertwined matters to simply prioritizing anti-imperialism over the struggle against heteronormativity.

In Palestine/Israel "Palestinian homophobia" has been evoked by the Israeli government to position Palestinians as backward and barbaric. This strategy has become especially salient with the LGBTQ dimension of the Brand Israel campaign, the campaign to brand Tel Aviv as a gay destination. Queer Palestinians and solidarity activists term the move of using Israel's alleged stellar "gay rights" record to cover up its human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territories "pinkwashing." Part of what pinkwashing accomplishes is to veil actually existing homophobia in Israel—queer Israeli activists themselves have criticized the Israeli government's preference for looking homofriendly to international gay tourists over allocating resources to its own LGBTQ citizens, as Atshan documents. But more important for queer Palestinians, pinkwashing strategies use "gay rights" as a civilizational criteria according to which Israel has described itself as the only democracy in the Middle East—a political order Jasbir Puar has famously termed "homonationalism." While the global solidarity movement's attention to pinkwashing and homonationalism has been important, it also ended up prioritizing the fight against Zionism and occupation over the fight against homophobia precisely because the very naming of Palestinian homophobia has been reduced to pinkwashing. No longer able to name their own oppression, many queer Palestinians find themselves discursively disenfranchised and alienated from the movement.

Second, Atshan maintains, among radical purists critique is no longer a means but an end in and of itself, and the most palpable form of political engagement. While their narrow definition of appropriate political engagement homogenizes the movement, radical purists' employment of critique alienates those queer Palestinians and allies who do not fit the bill and are constant targets of such critique. For instance, radical purists criticize queer Palestinians' attendance of Palestinian/Israeli mixed queer events as "normalizing" the occupation. This ultimately results in queer Palestinian voices missing from venues where they could have made important interventions. It also silences those queer Palestinians who might see value in such engagements. Atshan recounts a moment where he, as a queer Palestinian, was asked to cancel a screening of the documentary Oriented, which features queer Palestinians. Considering that the request came from a non-Palestinian solidarity activist who claimed that the film constituted pinkwashing, Atshan writes: "The empire of critique has reached a point at which activists feel entitled to serve as arbiters of which Palestinian voices should be considered the most authoritative and archetypical" (176). In brief, the radical purists in the movement (whether they are Palestinians or not) increasingly police who can and cannot speak as a queer Palestinian, flattening the movement's politics and alienating many who are deemed inappropriate political subjects.

Atshan also points out that much of the radical purist critique of the queer Palestinian movement, especially academic criticism targeting it, eerily resonates with right-wing or Israeli criticisms of the movement. For instance, criticisms targeting queer Palestinian groups that are registered in Israel and not with the Palestinian Authority resonate with Israel's claims that Palestinian "culture" is deeply homophobic and that it is not possible for queer Palestinians to survive, let alone flourish, in Palestine. This allegedly radical anti-imperialist claim also reproduces what many queer Palestinians find to be a...