Israel/Palestine and the Queer International

In this chronicle of political awakening and queer solidarity, the activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes her dawning consciousness of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Invited to Israel to give the keynote address at an LGBT studies conference at Tel Aviv University, Schulman declines, joining other artists and academics honoring the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Anti-occupation activists in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Palestine come together to help organize an alternative solidarity visit for the American activist. Schulman takes us to an anarchist, vegan café in Tel Aviv, where she meets anti-occupation queer Israelis, and through border checkpoints into the West Bank, where queer Palestinian activists welcome her into their spaces for conversations that will change the course of her life. She describes the dusty roads through the West Bank, where Palestinians are cut off from water and subjected to endless restrictions while Israeli settler neighborhoods have full freedoms and resources. As Schulman learns more, she questions the contradiction between Israel's investment in presenting itself as gay friendly—financially sponsoring gay film festivals and parades—and its denial of the rights of Palestinians. At the same time, she talks with straight Palestinian activists about their position in relation to homosexuality and gay rights in Palestine and internationally. Back in the United States, Schulman draws on her extensive activist experience to organize a speaking tour for some of the Palestinian queer leaders whom she had met and trusted. Dubbed "Al-Tour," it takes the activists to LGBT community centers, conferences, and universities throughout the United States. Its success solidifies her commitment to working to end Israel's occupation of Palestine, and it kindles her larger hope that a new "queer international" will emerge and join other movements demanding human rights across the globe.

"Al-Shulman has written an honest, warm, and moving book. This is a book about how the political heart expands to encompass the rights of queers and the rights of Palestinians, the rights of you and the rights of me, the rights of individuals and the rights of collectivities. This vision is neither stingy nor utopian, but deeply realistic. A must-read."—Vijay Prashad, author of Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, "This is a great book, brave, and compassionate. A journey of discovery, a coming of age, and more important, a search for justice. Our world is a better place for its existence. Read it, please."—Rabih Alameddine, author of The Hakawati, "This is an extraordinary, challenging, and moving book. It is both an honest account of the work Sarah Schulman had to do to allow the full reality of the occupation of Palestine to be registered in her consciousness, and a story—told firmly yet gently, with patience and care—of the shared labor of building activist worlds on occupied grounds. We embark on a journey with Sarah Schulman and many other activists, from Palestine, the U.S. and beyond, as they persist in the effort to make the liberation of Palestine essential to queer politics. We follow their footsteps, we trace the paths; we hear the conversations; we share the meals. If activism involves hard often painstaking work, if it involves mundane and ordinary tasks, we learn that it can also create connections that nourish and sustain. I hope this book becomes a teacher. I hope we join the invitation to become part of a new queer international where liberation for all is the common goal."—Sara Ahmed, author of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, “Solidarity, reciprocity, and recognition here reinforce each other, broadening the range of human rights that each movement affirms. The queer activist learns about colonialism and the anti-occupation activist learns about feminism. It is a remarkable testament to the value of the risk that Schulman ran in agreeing to deny her lesbian and gay constituency in Israel in favour of a broader human rights agenda in which their rights too might find validation and defence.”, “Written with verve and grace, Israel/ Palestine and the Queer International is eye-opening, courageous, investigative, an activists’ how-to manual, and a shining example of the best in contemporary gay liberation thinking of the sort we have come to expect from Sarah Schulman. The book is by turns hard-headed (in the best sense), clear-sighted, and tender and moving.”

Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the novels The Mere Future, Shimmer, Rat Bohemia, After Delores, and People in Trouble, as well as nonfiction works such as The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, which is also published by Duke University Press. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island.