A Rose by Any Other Name

On the wretched who laugh at Israel… and a gender studies expert who affirms “terrorist corporealities”

Enlightened radicals have come out of the closet to flaunt their true colors this week. Free Palestine rallies once more flattened a geopolitical conundrum into a dualistic paradigm so simplistic one might forget the mountains of graduate degrees that went into constructing it. “From the river to the sea” signs the day after a thousand Israeli men, women and children of all ages were massacred couldn’t possibly mean anyone wants to eradicate Jews. By practicing their resistance on such a non-discriminatory range of civilians, just like Article 20 of the 1988 Hamas Covenant commanded, the “resistance fighters” were presumably being inclusive.

Some especially astute voices on X have proven that what we’re witnessing is the critical-theoretical utopia come true. In a world where intersectionalism won’t even save rape victims from being classified as oppressors, it’s a major “WTF” to think decolonialism would ever be “a fucking tea party”. Wrote one lover of Franz Fanon’s slaughter-hungry The Wretched of the Earth (1963), “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” Najma Sharif, a Virginia-born Minnesotan who identifies as Somali and who has written for InStyle, Dazed, NBC, Bitch Media, and Teen Vogue, wonders what people thought it would look like: “‘not like this’ then like what. show us LOL.” This is where academia’s great Marxist project has gotten us: the prolifically published posing as marginalized, LOLing at acts of terrorism.

That may be the nature of online reductionism. To meme the inconveniences of history into oblivion. To trump one another with nuance-averse clips. To masquerade as intellectually considerate when what one really believes is that there should be no Jews, sorry “Zionists”, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To distort language and morality so skillfully that one’s perverse inversions can proudly parade themselves as “queer”.

The publication of Rutgers University gender studies professor Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) was “concomitant” with Hamas dumping the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords. She is fond of employing this conjunctive to prove causal relationships between coterminous phenomena, so let’s assume, without checking the pub date versus the month Hamas took over Gaza, that the two determine one another. I’ve not managed to find much in what I’ve read of her work to suggest she disputes a word the Hamas leadership or any other jihadi says.

Puar favors the progressive discourse that fashions Israel as the crux of American-funded global oppression. In this view, no population in the global 8 billion is more actively genocidal or aggressively settler-colonialist than this nation of 9 million, whose neighbors have only ever wanted to get along. No, the Israeli Defense Forces haven’t been as magically blameless as all the other militaries on earth. But if Puar complains in “The ‘Right’ to Maim: Disablement and Inhumanist Biopolitics in Palestine” (2015) that their roof-knock procedures only give civilians sixty seconds to evacuate their homes before an air strike, is it because everyone else gives more notice when they retaliate? I don’t defend the use of flechette shells that send thousands of steel darts into densely populated areas or high-velocity bullets that shatter into the body like a snowstorm. But does Hamas bear no blame for poverty and depravation in Gaza? Suicide bombings lead to blockades and thousands of rockets lead to air raids, and yet they insist, with absolute fundamentalism, that terrorism, sorry “resistance”, is the only way.[1] Is it better to spend limited resources on munitions than on food, generators, and bomb shelters? Also, human shields. Might that fall under “inhumanist biopolitics”? Or perhaps I should get my theory straight and ask whether Puar is revealing her complicity in ableism when she claims that Israel is intentionally trying to disable the Palestinian population. Queer LOL luvs to twist normativities like that.

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Particularly crafty is Puar’s Foucauldian rebuff of liberalism and humanism, without which it seems difficult to establish the grounds on which to establish Palestinians should be treated as human. Her general strategy of conceptual wizardry avoids discussing the cause of the conflict or what the consequences would be if her “anti-Zionist hermeneutic” brought about an end to the “biopolitical governmentality”. Israel did not “transform Gaza into a laboratory” or impose “colonial rule” on the West Bank from a void. “Free Palestine” is not going to lead to two interlocked lands of milk and honey co-existing in benevolent fraternity. Though Puar and other progressives conspicuously ignore it, the up-and-leaving of occupying forces in the West Bank (formerly occupied by Jordanians, Brits, and Ottomans) would open the door to a host of “allies” who would render Israel “impotent” with their own “biopolitical tactics”.

Where queer fits into Puar’s program is indeed queer. “Terrorist corporealities” (a.k.a. bodies) somehow manifest queerness because of the mutualities of resistance, though I wonder what a Hezbollah recruit would make of the link. Oops, I just performed a feat of homonationalism by bringing up Islamic extremism in the same sentence as LGBT inclusion. “Homonationalism As Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities” (2013) warns against doing this, and the verbal play Puar employs can be as fraudulent as the “pinkwashing” she argues the Jewish state activates in order to deflect from its record of hostilities.

This convoluted indulgence, published in the Jindal Global Law Review, offers a classic confection of elusion, intimidation, and cocooning. The opening abstract situates “the rights-based subject [as] the most potent aphrodisiac of liberalism”. It finds that modernity and homonationalism are conditions we cannot escape and configures sexuality “not as an identity, but as assemblages of sensations, affects, and forces.” Straight out of the gate she thus evinces a cult warning: do not to trust the false remedies of the modern liberal project; you will find safety here in reconceiving sexuality as a friendly virus (a seductive assembly of sensations) that “destabilises humanist notions” and “resist[s] legal discourses that attempt to name and control [the] subjects of sexuality.” Stick with Puar. If you break free of the chains of humanism (and plain English) you can go viral, you can fly.

One aspect of her premise is fair enough: the State of Israel waves the rainbow flag to signal its embrace of LGBT rights at the same time it restricts the liberties of Palestinians. This is a difficult juxtaposition, though the world has yet to birth a people that lives on love alone. Puar’s faulty short-cut occurs when she establishes that this pinkwashing has a “concomitant” relationship to the suffering—that the only reason Israel passed gay rights was to allow surveillance, detention, and deportation to proceed under the radar. The rise in legal/consumer recognition and Tel Aviv’s 2011 status as “the world’s best gay city” are strictly performative enactments of a homonormative history that has criminalized and pathologized “racialised and sexualised others”. The emergence of gay rights in the country begins around the time of the first Intifada and therefore “parallels the concomitant increased segregation and decreased mobility of Palestinians.” The embrace of gay culture is “concomitant” with military aggression as the liberal “colonialist” diverts attention from the political conflict. So any time someone says, “I support Palestine” or any other Muslim country “but what about how they treat gays?” they are perpetuating homonationalist prejudice and merely parroting the calculated propaganda of the Israeli government. Spot the trap: if you question something, you betray your enslavement to corrupt ways of thinking.

To bolster her “concomitant” theory, Puar draws a parallel to “the insidious collusions between racism and liberalism” that arose in America after 9/11. During these years, the “progressive liberal instrumentalization of once-outlawed sexual identities… led to commonsensical liberal positions” that opposed the war on terror but also the hanging of gay men in Iran and the sexual assault of women in Egypt. Shame on them commonsensical types! The “increasing inclusion of homonormativity” signified by the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was also concomitant with the nixing of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) on the same day, December 18, 2010. The causality between xenophobia and gays and lesbians advancing their human rights is unmistakable.

Just the year before, the passing of the Mathew Shepard James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act was concomitant with a bill that would fund further operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thankfully the Audre Lorde Project, the organization currently fighting for youth sex workers not to be called exploited child prostitutes,[2] was on board to denounce the proposed legislation. As Puar reports, they were concerned that “the purportedly ‘historic’” hate crimes bill would result in greater surveillance and harassment of people of color, “especially youth of colour, a priori designated as more homophobic than their white counterparts”. Translation: black kids should be able to beat up gay white kids without consequence. I should add that two pages along Puar insists, “we must not only be critical of family homophobia but also of the model of family itself—even queer family.” Does that include the Palestinian family, Jasbir?

Puar claims she is merely putting forth the “concomitant” argument as “an incitement to generative and constructive debate”. She’s obviously not blaming anyone by pointing out these unqueer heresies. Forget about the fact that two things can occur simultaneously, even under the same federal spending bill, and not be mutually dependent. The radical academic creates a safe space where the blame is implicit and where entry to commonsensical liberals is prohibited. According to her, queer Palestinians don’t even care that their culture is homophobic, so forget about that too; they just want the Occupation to end (dot dot dot). Away with the “powerful manifestation of the regulation of identity” known as pinkwashing. Away with “nationhood” and “biopolitical state practices of population control and affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights.” It’s all just an assemblage “that creates the appearance of the activities of the Israeli state as legitimate and progressive.”

And there you have it: State of Israel, delegitimized. Welcome to the cocoon where truth is fluffy on the outside but more brutal than “brutal humanism” on the inside. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Whether in crass LOLs or highfalutin takedowns, “liberation” almost always translates as eradicating Israel completely, whatever it takes.

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My apologies to the reader who might still be wondering what this all has to do with so-called queerness. Again, it’s about disrupting every norm—from two-parent families and tried-and-true classifications of age, sex, and consent to the apparently oppressive notion that we should aspire to delusions like peace agreements and universal values. Why ask moral questions when you can LOL subvert them?

Observe therefore the “violence of militants” rather than a massacre by terrorists. Or the oxymoronic Queers for Palestine. Or trans influencers who blow their GoFundMe accounts on trips to Vegas and then educate their fans on the settler-colonialist apartheid white supremacist cis-patriarchal Jewish infidel state. And finally, the solidarity between the worldwide LGBTQIA2S+ conglomerate and all black, brown, and indigenous people everywhere.

The manipulation of language has proven itself Orwellian once more. “On both sides”, okay, in many ways, yes. But not the same—and never as simple as a hashtag or as nonsensical as an academic’s “concomitant” theories.

Cue the comments about illegal settlements. Cue the clip of the Israeli soldier who joked about rape. Cue the fact that so many Israelis and Jews around the globe hate Bibi. And please remember that it is disrespectful to their PR to call Hamas a terrorist organization. What happened on Saturday was a decolonial triumph. They may have consistently rejected a two-state solution and the loser concept of negotiation, but they had to express their resistance like that—and joyously stream the results. If you don’t think rape and murder are the only way left, you are a militant Nazi Zionist.

Considering the complex diversity of everyone suffering between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, we can indeed hope that the Palestinians in Gaza can be free. From Hamas. I pray for them and for the Israeli survivors, soldiers, hostages and families in the terrifying days to come. In the meantime I hope the academic elites, the self-described “savants”, and the activist attention-seekers can open their eyes about the last stop on the critical-theoretical death train. Narrowing human life to unflinching categories of oppressor and oppressed is intellectually desiccated. Drier than a desert, identity politics rob us of our humanity and allow nothing to bloom.

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[1] In 2012 (or was it 1984?), the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Information guide stipulated replacing “the Israeli and American dissemination of poisoned terms” to give us “resistance” for terror and “martyrdom-seeking operation” for suicide bombing. The use of “colonialism” and “the Israeli colonialist occupation” also originates in this document. See Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdick, “Official Terminology Guide: Instead of ‘Terror’ Say ‘Resistance’”, Palestinian Media Watch (19 June 2012); https://palwatch.org/page/3834.

[2] The BLM-funded Audrey Lorde Project wants minors “who trade sex to have their full agency in defining themselves… [so that] all of [their] experiences are a part of the conversation.” See their media guide, “Say What? How to Talk about Trans and Gender Non Conforming People, Youth, and People in the Sex Trade”, p. 7. Open access has been blocked by a request form but the download link is here: https://alp.org/news/say-what-media-guide.