After spending an afternoon last week protesting Donald Trump’s second inauguration in a wind chill of zero degrees Fahrenheit, I find myself thinking back to Pride last summer.

Why I needed this book
I was able to go to one Pride event with friends I hadn’t seen since college. (Yes, I did make lifelong friends at Grove City, of all places!) Pride was colorful and wonderful, but I wished that there had been more pro-Palestine sentiment among the many flags, t-shirts, stickers, and endless other freebies. In fact, I was disappointed (while not surprised) that so many pro-LGBT groups completely ignored the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine. At least one of them even partnered with Northrup Grumman at the time.
Thus, I decided to buy Sarah Schulman’s Israel/Palestine and the Queer International as my June read. It should shock no one that I just finished it this month.
This was the first, and it remains one of the only, nonfiction books I have found about queerness and Palestinians. There is so much that needs to be written about this topic—its histories, its stories, its culture—and I had high hopes for Schulman’s book. To my disappointment, to quote one Goodreads review, “Maybe my problem is that this book is not really about [Israel/Palestine] and queer politics. It is a book about Sarah Schulman.”
To boycott or not to boycott
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International came about after Schulman received an invitation in November 2009 to deliver the keynote address at the Israeli Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She initially says yes, not understanding why the Israeli professor that invites her seems surprised. We then follow Schulman as she asks various colleagues to weigh in on whether or not she should abide by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign recommended by Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as a means of nonviolent protest against Israel’s occupation and apartheid of Palestine.
Only when an anti-occupation Israeli lesbian tells Schulman to decline the invitation does she give up on speaking at Tel Aviv University. In their message, this friend suggests that Schulman arrange a “solidarity visit,” and they mention that she could host events in “grassroots or Palestinian venues.” Their reasoning is that, while they’re the one to tell Schulman to boycott, they find it “odd that of all the rich conferences in Tel Aviv University, it would be our little queer studies conference that would suffer the loss.”
Schulman was uncomfortable with the idea of “[turning her] back on queer people.” A solidarity visit, then, in which she could “still meet the same folks and talk to them, just in a different building, under different auspices” in Israel and Palestine feels “reasonable.”
Omar Barghouti: Part 1
Since Schulman’s friend had told her to decline the conference’s invitation publicly, she shares her unwavering yet very apologetic and queer-affirming email to the conference organizers with a number of allies, including Omar Barghouti, a PACBI founding member. Thus begins my greatest trouble with this book: Schulman’s treatment of Omar Barghouti.
Shulman shares her story of growing in her awareness with total honesty about what her views were before she knew better. So when we see Barghouti’s response to Sarah’s email, in which he celebrates her abiding by the boycott, we get her gut reaction.
I was surprised to discover that I was still so accultured to a visceral Jewish identification that being praised by PACBI made me uncomfortable. It was disturbing to face, but even though Omar and I agreed about the responsibilities of human beings to each other, I discovered that I still experienced him as “other.” And I felt, in some deep way, that I was being treacherous. There was no logical reason for these feelings since I had no illusions about Israel and had zero religious feeling. And I knew that Omar was doing something positive, essential, and courageous and that he deserved my support. Yet there it was, my racism.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 31
Her self-awareness as she looks back to this time implies that she knows better now than to see Arabs as backwards and homophobic, but there is no evidence in the book that she has really changed.
You may disagree with me, but I don’t think that her analysis in the next paragraph is much better than her initial gut reaction.
I had to learn, right then, what fears to sit with and which ones to face and deal with. For there was something nagging at me that was real and important to engage. And it had nothing to do with Jew versus Palestinian. In my letter, I had been so clear about the queer aspect of my decision and the conflict of turning my back on an LGBT event. But in Omar’s letter this had not been acknowledged. I wasn’t sure why.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 32
Tit for tat
One of the biggest Zionist talking points is that queer people should not support Palestine because Palestinians do not support queer people. This is especially infuriating since gay sex was criminalized in Palestine under the British Mandate—a story that dozens of other countries can relate to. And even when Schulman wrote this around 2011, she was quite uncomfortable supporting Palestinian activists if they did not explicitly support her efforts in return. She gets more blunt about her feelings as she goes on.
My concern was thus: if [fellow queer activist John Greyson] and I were turning our backs on gay events and organizations for the larger principle of solidarity, we had to be careful that it was not a one-way street. The people we work with, whether straight North American intellectuals or representatives of PACBI, had to—in some way—reciprocate.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 35-36
The first principle of solidarity is that it is not transactional. You don’t support people who are more oppressed than you on the condition that they will support you back. All of the queer pro-Palestine folks (mostly young people!) that I have seen on the streets and on my feed for the past 15 months have made it clear that their solidarity is unconditional and that not supporting queer people is not grounds for living under occupation or genocide. Sarah Schulman, with her decades of activism, does not seem to understand this.
Schulman expresses her self-awareness of this exact truth:
. . . in my lifetime of political commitments, I had never worked in solidarity. I had asked for solidarity: asked for straight people to support queers and people with AIDS, asked men to stand up for women. I had always worked directly with oppressed constituencies. That is to say, when I was in the abortion rights, gay liberation, and AIDS activist movements, “we” were the people “we” were fighting for.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 27
A solidarity visit
Schulman knows that she has only ever fought for people who were like her, at least from my understanding. But I can’t tell from the way she describes solidarity whether that’s something she wishes she had done more, if it’s something she would like to begin doing, or neither. Regardless, it quickly becomes clear that what Schulman calls a solidarity visit is actually about showing solidarity with queer Israelis, while asking Palestinians to support her.
The meeting with PACBI was emerging as the centerpiece of the trip as far as I could understand the itinerary from my still-in-NYC vantage point. I didn’t know if this would just be Omar, or others as well. I knew nothing about Palestinian cultural mores: how people communicate, what is appropriate. I only knew that my task was to ask them to openly acknowledge queer support for the boycott.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 62
I know I keep interrupting myself with quotes from the book. I don’t know how to tell this story without them. Schulman doesn’t beat around the bush as she proudly makes everything about herself, sometimes self-aware, usually blissfully not. Don’t believe me? Take a look at her first in-person impression of Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the organization behind the global anti-imperialist Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
Omar Barghouti: Part 2
Omar is a fierce, confident, kind of terse man, married with kids, who has a slightly annoyed snap in his voice when he wants to. I wasn’t sure if this articulated condescension was because I was a Jew and an American and therefore too powerful and someone to be deflated appropriately, or because he knew I had credibility only with queers, that straight people do not recognize me, and that therefore my usefulness was limited so I didn’t deserve his full respect. But Jew, lesbian, or whatever the problem was, he conveyed his distaste with clarity. . . . I started out with a report on my activities, thereby creating him as the authority, which sometimes is what straight men need to relax.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 86
I imagine that the truth could be that Barghouti didn’t know much about Schulman at all. She certainly hadn’t heard of him until Judith Butler mentioned him to her months earlier when urging her to boycott. No, Barghouti likely wasn’t upset because Schulman was too lesbian, too Jewish, or too American. Well, maybe that last one.
Put yourself in his shoes. You are one of the most known figures in one of the globe’s biggest and most successful movements to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine. A white American woman abides by the boycott, only to come to your turf and ask you to support her. She wants you to join in on her movement, because, she claims, that is the only way that people from her movement will care that you are under military occupation. Then when you are appropriately short with her when she shares all her bright new ideas on how to run your movement, she thinks you just don’t like her because she’s a Jewish lesbian and that you’re insecure.
A white woman’s guide to whiteness
This is why I made the title “Queer Palestine’s white savior”: Schulman’s whiteness is taking center stage here, and never does she acknowledge this (even in hindsight), because she does not seem to know. This is exactly how whiteness works.
How to Center Whiteness
Step 1: See brown cultures and countries as regressive.
Step 2: Try to save them from themselves.
Step 3: Be offended that they don’t want your help.
Step 4: Blame it on anything except the actual reason that they don’t want your help, which is that they didn’t ask for help and that you have no idea what they actually need.
Here’s how Schulman’s Big Question played out.
“Well, Omar, here’s the reason I wanted to meet with you today.”
I explained to Omar that LGBT people were increasingly being asked to boycott queer events and were doing so. . . . So was there some way that PACBI could acknowledge queer participation of the boycott?
His first response was “No, there can be no general statement.” But then he started to rethink. In fact, he recalled that when John Greyson had started his involvement, PACBI had issued some statements of praise.
“Did those statements have the words gay or LGBT or queer in them?”
He didn’t remember.
Okay. Next.
Well, what about some kind of statement of support for Palestinian queers?
“No. These are two separate issues. There is no overlap.”
Okay, that was clear.
I started panicking. I didn’t want to come away with nothing.
“Well, is there a queer Palestinian spokesperson on boycott who could come to the States?”
“No,” he said. “There is no such person. The organizations have not signed onto the boycott.”
Right then, I saw on Omar’s face an expression I had seen on straight people’s (and closeted people’s) faces all of my life. The “no queers” unequivocal response.
I failed. I failed. I failed.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, pp. 89-90
Schulman’s tense relationship with Omar Barghouti is only one part of this book, but it’s what really stands out to me. After all, this book is more of a travel diary than anything else. Schulman’s own ignorance may not have been as problematic if she had not decided that she needed to write a whole book about it and about her trip. This book may have been better as a short documentary, or a series of travel vlogs or blog posts. Of course, it is not just a travel diary; we learn as Schulman’s views towards “Israel/Palestine” progress (?) as she meets more people and goes where she has never been before.
Except, as I’ve said, I don’t think her views ever really progress. Sometimes she makes it clear that her feelings at a certain moment were objectively wrong—”Yet there it was, my racism”—but most of the time when she describes things in very Western-centric ways, there is no indication that this is no longer her view.
I’ll give an example.
Those patriarchal Palestinians
After talking with queer anti-occupation Israelis at an “anarchist, vegan cafe in Tel Aviv” as they somberly reflect on the “trauma” of serving in the Israeli Occupation Forces, Schulman visits the West Bank. (She never visits Gaza.) While at a queer “safe house,” she observes that “It had gone well until neighbors noticed that men and women were gathering together at the house, and they complained. How ironic! The neighbors were upset that men and women were socializing with each other. If only they knew!”
Later, a queer Iraqi Jew named Ezra living in West Jerusalem shows Schulman around the West Bank. They travel from clean, modern (illegal) Israeli settlements to dirty, impoverished Palestinian villages, weaving between opposite worlds. But as she describes the squalor in which the Palestinians are forced to live, Schulman never neglects to point out just how patriarchal and primitive their culture is.
“The villages were poor, neglected, crumbling, filled with men of all ages with nothing to do and the women serving them.” p. 96
“As we drove in, a young man came running out of his shack to greet Ezra. He was laughing and smiling, and he shook my hand. Everyone we met seemed used to Ezra appearing with women and have long ago learned to treat us like men.” p. 97
“As we drove out about an hour later, we passed some guys working in the fields. They were gathering wild grass to feed their goats. They also knew Ezra. He pulled over, and they offered us a piece of their bread. The bread, made with olive oil, was delicious. I realized then that this was a very male-dominated world, and Ezra received a lot of male attention. He loved it, and they loved him.” p. 98
“He took me then to the town of Karmel. A large Arab village, the streets are full, dusty, smelly. We visited another friend, an Arab man and wife with three developmentally disabled children; two are deaf and have no sign language and no access to treatment. They were poor, and their clothes were filthy. They offered us oranges to celebrate a new grandson’s birth. Again I was treated like a man-human while the wife sat to the side.” p. 99
I don’t think that Schulman is capable of doing activism that doesn’t revolve around her identity (in this case, women) belonging to the marginalized group. I’m sure it is frustrating for these Palestinian women to always be serving their husbands and sitting to the side, but perhaps it is more frustrating to live in crumbling, filthy towns with no way of providing the care that her children need. Or maybe they like their household roles. Maybe it brings a sense of normalcy and order in a chaotic landscape. Either way, we don’t know how these women feel about any of it, because Schulman only focuses on how she as a woman is treated, and she never speaks to them.
The Schulman effect
Part Two of Israel/Palestine and the Queer International is all about Schulman’s U.S. tour with some new queer Palestinian allies. She calls it “Al-Tour” and is very proud that her allies refer to her as “Al-Schulman.” After pages of painstaking detail about the planning and logistics of the tour, this part is essentially a humble brag about how Schulman’s U.S. Tour is really positively affecting the movement, bringing together queer activism and pro-Palestine activism.
I know I sound annoyed, but I am not exaggerating. This is how Schulman describes the end of one of the lectures:
And I had my own personal moment of completion when Ghadir said from the podium that the success of Al-Tour was owed to “Al-Schulman” and what she called “the Schulman Effect”—the synchronicity and chain of events caused by organization bringing together the right combination of different people propelling above the usual operation of things. This, of course, is exactly what I had wanted to achieve and had worked so painstakingly for so long to do: bring together disparate but absolutely vital people in the national queer community who, by working in their own ways at the same time, would create a third force more powerful than any one tendency working independently. In that moment I felt that my more than thirty years as a political organizer—from the abortion rights movement, to ACT UP, to the Lesbian Avengers, to the MIX Festival, to the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, to the ACT UP Oral History Project—had finally clicked in a kind of instinctual knowledge of how to make this work, and it had worked. I had a very special feeling, one that I had never had before in my life.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 154
The tone at the end of the book is very self-congratulatory, and we are made to feel as if Schulman has done it, she’s united her lifelong focus of domestic queer justice with her new hyper-fixation on Israel and Palestine. Predictably, we end with another dialogue with Omar Barghouti, since Schulman could not have achieved victory without single-handedly changing his mind about queer people.
Omar Barghouti: Part 3
Live on television, Omar tells Schulman and the show’s white American host,
“BDS is not just about ending the occupation and apartheid, it’s about building a better society. A better society by definition must be inclusive and must recognize people’s rights, individual rights and people’s identity, be it gender, sexual identity, any other form of identity should not prevent them from getting equal rights. . . . I’m against those who say let’s delay women’s rights. Especially if it comes with women’s rights debates. Let’s delay women’s rights till after liberation. Nothing comes after liberation; either we start now in parallel or nothing will come after we end apartheid and occupation.”
Omar Barghouti on GRIT-TV, quoted in Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, pp. 173-174
Schulman writes her commentary between paragraphs of dialogue: “There it was. . . . Omar had changed. And I had changed. . . . I stumbled home in kind of a shock. We had succeeded. . . . Omar and I had changed each other for the better.”
Except Schulman was not the one to change Barghouti. In fact, I don’t know if she had much of an impact at all.
Recall that Omar’s reason for not working in coalition with queer groups is that they had not signed onto the boycott. Schulman hadn’t specified at the time, but according to her, she and Barghouti had been specifically discussing Palestinian queer groups rather than American or global groups. Palestinian queers and the campaign behind BDS supporting each other at least makes more sense.
Well, about halfway between Schulman’s and Barghouti’s two conversations, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (PQBDS) formed. Of this, Schulman writes, “Omar’s excuse for not aligning PACBI with the Palestinian queer movement, because it was not publicly pro-boycott, was now moot.”
PQBDS
It seems that PQBDS, a group of queer Palestinians (!) has the effect on the movement that Schulman wishes, and seems to believe, she herself has.
The formation of PQBDS and the meaning of this letter entirely transformed the landscape from the period of a year and a half before, when I had been invited to Tel Aviv University. Now there were queer Palestinians publicly and strategically organized to ask the rest of their global LGBT community to work with them to help them win basic human rights as queers and as Palestinians. They made themselves available for dialogue, conversation, engagement, and relationship. And the decisions to either boycott or violate the boycott were now more deliberate and informed for our community.
Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, p. 157
So while Schulman believes that she has “changed” Barghouti, it seems far more likely that a new queer Palestinian group’s endorsement of BDS is what made him join in this alliance with his own people.
Disappointment
If I haven’t made it clear by now, Sarah Schulman’s Israel/Palestine and the Queer International thoroughly disappointed me. I’m glad she’s pro-Palestine. At least she has not ignored the occupation. And there were even a few lines that I underlined, finding them thoughtful or even profound. But the title makes one think this book will perhaps be a history of queerness in Israel and Palestine, or how queerness and the occupation intersect. Instead, it’s more of a memoir of Schulman, a story of her personal journey, literally and figuratively, to “Israel/Palestine.” I had hoped that this book would fill a gap in literature about Palestine and queerness, but ultimately, I was disappointed.
As I realized that this book was not what I had hoped, I got Palestinian anthropologist Sa’ed Atshan’s 2020 book Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. Other than Schulman’s book, his is the only nonfiction book about the Palestinian pro-LGBTQ movement I can find that is not a memoir. I only hope that Atshan’s book is what this movement needs.