On Zionism, Sexual Coercion, and Biologically Essential Judaism

Every day I wake up and think about the Palestinian children who are being murdered in Gaza, and about how Israel claims that these murders are necessary to protect me, a white trans Jew living in Pittsburgh, from a world which desires my death. This thought feels like dying because it is. The world Israel is seeking, a world without Palestinians, is one in which I am already dead, even if I continue breathing, sleeping, pumping blood. In the last two months and nineteen days since Israel began its current and acute campaign of annihilation on Gaza and now the West Bank as well, all these simple unconscious activities have become more difficult, scarcer. Nearly six thousand miles away from Gaza, my body knows that Israel’s cruelty, enormous at a scale I cannot actually apprehend, summons my death too.

In a recent newsletter, Fariha Róisín, whose writing on Palestine and Israel has been an anchor for me since October 7, reminded me that the reason white Christians in the US back Israel so strongly is not because they love Jews (harm is not an expression of love, love is deep care for the autonomy of another), but because they hope to bring on Armageddon, the Christian messiah which depends upon the gathering of all the world’s Jews into Israel, and upon their subsequent elimination. What an endless grief to find that in the wake of Robert Bowers’ attack on the Tree of Life synagogue five years ago, Jewish institutions in the US have deepened their belief in the power of the state to protect them, deepened their own commitment to white supremacy, instead of deepening their understanding of how antisemitism and white supremacy animate each other, instead of refusing to support the domination and murder of Palestinians.

Driving through rural Allegheny and Westmoreland counties after October 7, I have been startled to see Israeli flags flying from the porches of houses in the small, mostly white and Christian towns of Western Pennsylvania. I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to say that the people living in those houses do not love Jews, or possibly even know any; Pittsburgh’s Jews didn’t participate in white flight to the suburbs to the same extent as Jews in other cities. Instead, many Pittsburgh Jews settled in city neighborhoods like Squirrel Hill, Oakland, and Highland Park, and in immediately surrounding boroughs while Jews living in small towns across Western Pennsylvania left for cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland when mills, factories, and river ports closed as the Rust Belt began rusting. Most of the Jews flying Israeli flags in Squirrel Hill have no sense of themselves as white supremacists, instead regarding themselves as victims beset by the world and protected by Israel and its alliance with the United States. In this ignorance is a loud and terrible silence about the cost of soothed Jewish nerves; that cost is Palestinian life. 

I could go on. Instead I’ll take a moment to note that this is likely not what you expected from a newsletter about gay sex. But fascism lives in intimacy–and dies there too. Desirability politics are always about eugenics, and about who deserves care, who deserves to live at all. Zionism and white supremacy have a great deal to say about all this, and what they have to say suffuses the ways many American Jews think about and experience sexuality and desire, while tricking themselves into believing that they are acting out of reparative care for history and our own genocide. Lately this fact is where all my thinking lies, when I find thought possible at all within my grieving. Since I have some firsthand knowledge of how Zionism and sexuality work together among American Jews, I thought I might share what I've observed.

Jasbir Puar has written extensively about the Israeli military’s pointed efforts to disable Palestinians en masse while painting Israel as a safe haven for queer and trans people. As if there are no queer or trans people who are Palestinian, or Arab, or Muslim, or disabled, or otherwise less than desirable (fuckable) citizens of an extraordinarily militarized state founded on the (one might say self-hating! And certainly homophobic) notion that the weak, nervous, scholarly Jews of Europe (many of whom were killed in the Nazi genocide, and who, especially the Bundists, were among the most vocally anti-Zionist Jews at that time) needed to “muscle up” and become real men by dominating the land of Palestine. For more counter narratives to Israel's story of masculinity I recommend Joseph Massad's wonderful book Desiring Arabs, about how Arabs represented and made sense of their own desires and sexualities in the modern era, refusing and sometimes navigating Orientalist narratives in which colonial powers used Arabs as foils for their own sexual shame. Especially before Israel was pinkwashed, and before the Nakba, British colonial forces represented Arab men as effeminate and homosexual, and associated them derisively with anal sex. I hope some time to look more closely into the relationship between Zionism's homophobic depictions of both Arab and Ashkenazi men, and into the process by which Ashkenazi men were, because of their Jewishness, absorbed into the masculinity of Zionism, while Zionism came to depict Arab masculinity as animalistic and brutish, in a racist trope which will be familiar to anyone who knows how America talks about Black men, and which is echoed in Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha's recounting of the horrific and humiliating tortures to which he and other Palestinian men were subjected by Israeli soldiers after they were kidnapped from the Rafah checkpoint on Gaza's southern border with Egypt last month.

Despite the presence of non-Jewish Arabs in Palestine and across the Levant, in early Zionist writings, Palestine was falsely described classic colonial terms: empty, virginal, and waiting to be filled, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” In the late nineteenth century, this phrase became associated with the British Jewish Zionist thinker Israel Zangwill, though it originated in the early-nineteenth-century writings of Reverend Alexander Keith, a British pastor who argued for the necessity of Jewish return to Palestine in order to bring about the messiah. As if the land did not already have people who “belonged to it,” as a Palestinian speaker who chose to go unnamed remarked at a rally I attended a few weeks ago, referring to a relationship of care and interdependence, rather than domination, between Palestinians and the land that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Despite being one of the closest associates of Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, Israel Zangwill renounced Zionism in the wake of the 1904 Kishinev Pogrom, in which "49 Jews were killed, an untold number of Jewish women were raped, and 1,500 Jewish homes were damaged," giving lie to the hope that Jews might live safely within the Christian countries of Europe. Because he came to feel that Jewish safety, rather than the colonization of Palestine, was urgent and important, the disillusioned Zangwill soon joined the Territorialist movement. Territorialists were on the lookout for any place where a Jewish homeland might be established, understanding that the British colonization of Palestine might not actually make Jews safer, and that any safety won would take a long time and come at great cost. That said, Territorialism still had colonial aims; the movement first lobbied for a Jewish colony in East Africa and Uganda, though without success. Still, I find Territorialism interesting because it shows that, decades prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, even committed political Zionists were already coming to understand that Israel would not make Jews safe.

The Jewish Labor Bund, however, did not believe in any form of Zionism or Jewish Territorialism. Rather, Bundists, most of whom lived in Poland, Lithuania, and the Russian Pale of Settlement, promoted doikayt, or “being-here-ness,” the idea that a Jewish life could be had wherever Jew live, and that the important thing was for Jews to create a Jewish life specific to wherever they were living, on the land where they lived. On Instagram, the anti-Zionist Jewish writer and artist Molly Crabapple recently posted excerpts from her translation of a 1925 Yiddish pamphlet by Bund leader Viktor Alter opposing the Jewish colonization of Palestine: “From the standpoint of historical rights, one must admit that the Arabs are in the right […] Jews in Poland have every right to feel at home. If they don’t it’s because of antisemitic agitation that tries in the name of ‘historic rights’ to divide the population into Masters of the Land and foreign strangers. Zionism is one of the greatest beneficiaries of this antisemitism.” The Christian Zionism which put words in Israel Zangwill’s mouth was antisemitic; strains of this same thinking are still what motivate Jews to seek false safety over solidarity, or a refusal of empires, today.

More intimately, colonialism is rape culture. Israel loves to imagine itself as a strong, muscular, impenetrable country–and it is for this reason that Israel kept, and keeps, the image of scholarly Ashkenazic men who died in the Holocaust at a remove, while denying its own responsibility for the sexual abuse and reproductive violation of Palestinians as well as Ethiopian and Yemeni Jews and migrant workers from Southeast Asia. Is there anything more fragile than requiring the annihilation of a whole people in order to feel safe? Whiteness and Zionism and colonialism all teach that the best pleasure is pleasure taken. This attitude is reflected in how American Judaism treats its own children.

When I was twelve and thirteen, I was a member of United Synagogue Youth (USY), the Jewish Conservative Movement’s youth organization. I wasn’t especially keen on Conservative Judaism, a theologically and legally moderate denomination of Judaism formed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the wake of the Enlightenment, but I the conservative synagogue was closest one to my house, and was attached to the Jewish day school which I attended during the week. Many of my friends from school also belonged to the synagogue, and on the Saturday mornings I saw them at services. Later in the weekend, USY would sponsor a havdalah, or a movie, or some service activity. I loved being Jewish, and I wanted to spend time with my friends. 

But once a season or so, on a Saturday night, somebody’s parents–never mine–would volunteer their minivans and drive us to a big synagogue social hall in the fancy suburbs near Boston for a regional USY event with other Jewish tweens from southern New England. This event always consisted of a DJ, a dance floor, and a long folding table covered in two-liter bottles of soda. I don’t even really remember there being chairs. I just remember that it was dark, and that some middle-aged DJ was playing early-2000s hits by Nelly, R. Kelly, Destiny’s Child, and Britney Spears. I loved sneaking away from the loud dance floor with my friends, giggling down the long dark hallways of someone else’s synagogue whose familiar sixties architecture made it navigable even in the low light which was meant to deter us from wandering. What a pleasure to find the faraway bathroom intended for a bride on her wedding day and to gossip illicitly on that imagined bride’s plush white couch!

Eventually, of course, the responsible adult would come looking for us, and I wasn’t too put out about being found and herded back to the dance floor. I loved to dance, and the floor was always crowded, sweaty, full of real energy, not like a school dance. But I dreaded the moment when the DJ would take the mic and cut the music, commanding boys and girls to separate and to circle up. The DJ would ask for one couple (it was 2003, the couple was always straight, and the overwhelming majority of Jewish tweens were white) to come to the center of the dance floor, and begin the slow dance. Every few bars, the DJ would pause the song and yell SNOWBALL! and everyone dancing had to split and find a new partner of the “other” gender before the song started playing again. It was excruciating, standing on the sidelines, waiting to be chosen and knowing also that I didn’t want to be chosen, that I didn’t desire desire like this, foisted upon me by adults. That the longer I wasn’t chosen the more visible I would be, that the way to avoid this visibility was to accept the visibility of going first. I didn’t feel ready to experience desire by touching somebody like that, certainly not in public. I hated how the boys talked about the girls they’d already fingered at camp like those girls weren’t even people, how the girls from other towns had straighter hair and more expensive dresses. I remember thinking it was gross, this performance, and sometimes I tried to leave but often an adult or a more senior USY member stopped me. I remember one older teen telling me about a USY points system: you gained points by making out with USY leadership, and earned more points the higher up in the organization they were.

I’m afraid none of this sounds so serious now, but it was pervasive, this sense that, unlike other Saturday nights when the goal was to spend time with my friends, the purpose of this dance was for a bunch of twelve-year-olds to make out and grind to R. Kelly and to slide their hands up each other’s shirts, not only out of curiosity but also out of a strange sense of duty or obligation which I now understand to be a racial/sexual nationalism. The adults seemed very invested in facilitating these makeouts, they seemed to think it was interesting, and fun, and important for young people to be engaging with one another, and with Judaism, in this way. Despite how much I liked moving to the music, I experienced the dances as humiliating, forcible, a social ritual I was supposed to enjoy at the expense of myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss or touch anybody–I did, desperately–but I wasn’t sure I was ready yet, and I was sure that I didn’t want to experience desire like this, as an instrument for some force I couldn’t quite see and didn’t yet understand. I quit USY soon after.

American Jews, especially in the mainstream Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements, are often raised with the expectation that they will marry a Jewish person or at the very least have Jewish children, and that the future of the Jewish people depends on it. This emphasis on procreation as a method of Jewish continuity teaches young Jews that Judaism and Jewish history are not, actually, something to be studied or learned, but rather something natural, essential, and inherited without any effort, which undermines a far more robust and multifaceted approach to Judaism and replaces it with biological essentialism. (In researching this essay, I encountered Jacklyn Weier’s very interesting research on the connections between naturalism and settler colonialism in transmisogynist organizing at Michfest, which is quite relevant to this essay, though not directly so, and likely of interest to many readers of this newsletter.)

This attitude dissuades young Jews from curiosity about Judaism, and denies them the experience of pleasure from building a relationship with Judaism, or of desiring a cultural inheritance. In this roundabout way, Judaism becomes not relational or historical (Jewish conceptions of time suggest that everything that has ever happened is always happening, that all Jews have been and will be in attendance at all significant events in Jewish history), but directional, a vector not for the enrichment of Jewish life, but simply toward the identification and propagation of more Jews. This concern communicates to young people the message that their sexuality is an adult utility, already belonging, in the post-puberty future, to the Jewish adults in their lives, and not to themselves. Bodies are not for pleasure or curiosity, or if they must be, that pleasure and curiosity must be directed toward the biological reproduction of more Jews. I don’t believe most adults who communicated this idea had any understanding of what they were doing, and would have been utterly baffled to hear it called grooming.

But I, like so many American children, Jewish and otherwise, was groomed. I think of all the grownups throughout my childhood–preschool and public school teachers, the parents of friends, big kids when I was a little kid–who ever asked me if I had a boyfriend, who called me pretty, who separated classrooms, locker rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams by sex-disguised-as-gender, a logic which insinuated the threat of sex, and of sexual violence, if children of different sexes or genders came in proximity to one another, who didn’t give us enough information to use our bodies as though they were our own. The phenomenon of grooming is far more robust, and robustly documented, among Christians–promise rings, daddy-daughter dances, priestly sex scandals–but American Jews do it too. In American Jewish life, this sexual-social system of values is routed through Israel: youth groups like USY, BBYO, and NFTY raise money for ambulances in Israel and host Israeli emissaries who attend community events, live in the houses of community members for an entire year, and then create a sense of loss and longing for Israel when these post-army Israelis return home from whatever American Jewish community was hosting them. Jewish high schools send students on semester-long trips to Israel, and programs like Birthright make sure nearly any young Jewish adult who hasn’t yet visited Israel has the opportunity to experience a ten-day tour of parties and ancient historical sites accompanied by several age peer Israeli soldiers who are notorious for having sex with Birthright attendees. All these programs work to manufacture a sense that Israel is the erotic engine of Jewish life, not only sexually but in terms of vitality, curiosity, a future. (Rachel Gross has described how American Jews collude in their own erasure by routing their trauma from the Holocaust into a “religion of nostalgia,” creating an American Judaism predicated on grieving a loss of [European] Jewish life, and not on any futurity.)

In October, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoam Gallant called Hamas “human animals”; Israeli and Western news reports often describe Palestinians in animalistic terms. Yet Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Defense, has been handing out firearms to Israeli citizens, encouraging them to hunt down Palestinians as if they are animals. As if animals are worth less than people. As if there’s any life worth living when it depends on someone else’s death. In these last weeks, in order to look clearly at these systems of murder which recruit me even as they herald my own death, I find myself returning to the work of Kim Tallbear, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar of science and racial politics who speaks here about nonmonogamy and settler sexualities:

Established hierarchies between  humans and other-­than-­humans, for example, the human versus animal divide are co­-constituted with hierarchies established between humans. Animal is a term that commonly denigrates particular humans as savage or less evolved. In North America, settler categorization and management of land and water, as common or privately owned, as conserved or open for exploitation and development has been entangled with state management of women, children, slaves, indigenous people and  other-­than-­human bodies.

Tallbear is describing the settler logics of Canada, where she lives, and of the US, which provides 80 percent of Israel's military aid. As I read I think again of all the Palestinian children who have been murdered since the bombings began, and of the ways Christian white supremacy purports to protect innocence and childhood–by banning abortions, banning books about queer and trans people in schools, preventing trans children from accessing healthcare, taking Black and brown children from their families and putting them in the charge of the state, sweeping homeless encampments–while actually protecting whiteness and the nuclear family, consolidating economic and political power among people willing to live at the expense of those whom they deem animal. During the swaps of hostages between Israel and Hamas, newspapers described how “Israeli children” and “Palestinian men under eighteen” were being returned home. On Instagram (I cannot find the link to this story, please send if you have), Hanif Abdurraqib highlighted this cruel discrepancy in language, the denial of childhood as a point of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians, whose children never get to be kids. They are not permitted to desire, or to make mistakes. They are often not permitted to live to grow up, though the state also does not permit them to be children; rather, the state calls them suspects and treats them as such. 

In Europe, before Ashkenazi Jews were understood to be white we were believed to steal the innocence of white Christian children by murdering them and using their blood to make matzah; this is known as the “blood libel,” a reanimation of the blame Jews were given for the murder of Jesus, and was used as an excuse by antisemites to displace, terrorize, and murder Jews across Europe for most of the second millennium. In the same period, white Christian texts depicted Jewish men menstruating–not because they were trans, but because of an essential un-manliness (read: effeminacy, homosexuality) that white Christian society assigned them. These woman-men, the texts implied, are out to harm your children. 

Which is to say that Jews in medieval and Renaissance Europe were portrayed, more or less, as groomers, badly gendered and socially suspect dangers to white children whose history is echoed in the way drag queens leading library story hours are now regarded in the US. Myths about the insidious Jewish undermining of white nuclear families persist in the present too: in 2021 Bill Black reported that a significant portion of the alt-right internet believes, or at least claims to believe, that Jews control the porn industry, and are conspiring to distract white men from their families, then drain them of their sperm in order to undermine straight white Christian reproductive sex and the propagation of the white race. If only.

As white Jews have become white, many of us have become concerned with “Jewish continuity,” or the perpetuation of Jewish life, through the lens of biological reproduction. The state of Israel, for instance, offers citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, as long as they can prove it. (Interestingly, this is the same metric by which the Nazis assessed whether a person was too Jewish to remain in Germany during the Holocaust.) On social media I see white Jewish feminists eager to discuss Hamas' alleged rapes of Israeli women, as Fariha Róisín has discussed, and to demonize Arab men for them, in a terrible echo of the Emmett Till case.

The contemporary Zionist focus on Jewish genetics racializes and nationalizes a diverse and historically diasporic people, and elides the cultural, linguistic, communal, material, and spiritual elements of Judaism which are passed down through education and tradition, and by which people converting to Judaism are able to take up Judaism for themselves and join a people to whom they may have no direct genetic relation. Judaism is not something essential, but something learned, shared, inherited, chosen. I find the attempt to naturalize and thus racialize Judaism humiliating; I was born Jewish but I also chose it, as I did not choose the biological family who raised me in it. I was so relieved when I learned that centuries of Jewish thinkers have argued that the homeland of the People of the Book is no state but rather the text itself. I have found my home in books many times over, and this is also how people convert to Judaism. Traditional Jewish law forbids any Jew from embarrassing a person who has converted to Judaism by questioning their legitimacy or by making them feel unwelcome in any way (in a notable and significant departure, the Birthright Israel program requires documentation of their legal conversion from Jews by choice), arguing that anyone who is Jewish is all the way Jewish, however their Jewishness came to be. The rabbis of the Talmud liken embarrassing someone in public to spilling blood.

My dad wasn’t Jewish, so when Jewish educators in my life, and the parents of my Jewish friends, expressed horror at the notion of their children marrying non-Jews, I knew firsthand that I could have a rich Jewish life without two Jewish parents. I didn’t yet understand how unusual a position that was. In her work on American Jewish notions of biology, Dory Fox writes “The notion of Jewish genetic potency resembles other historical concepts of biological Jewishness or non-white racial potency generally, such as the Nuremberg Laws or America's "one drop rule." And yet, the social status of white Ashkenazi Jews as white (and racially un-marked) in the United States could be seen to facilitate expressions about Jewish genetic potency…” Reading Fox’s article unlocked some clarity for me: white American Jews have come to use the racial tools once used against us as a point of pride and as an indicator of belonging that relies on an instrumentalization of children’s sexuality. Blood libel becomes blood purity. 

At this point I feel obligated to tell you that the first time I had gay sex was with a girl I met on Birthright when I was twenty-one. Lizzy came to visit me in New York some weeks after the trip ended, soon after I had broken up with my first boyfriend. As we undressed in my apartment, which was infested with bedbugs and had just been fumigated, meaning that my roommates weren’t home and that we were willingly exposing ourselves to toxic chemicals in order to fuck, Lizzy looked up and said to me, My parents wanted me to go on Birthright to meet a nice Jewish boy. We both laughed: she had in fact met a nice Jew, but I wasn’t a boy–yet? It didn’t matter, because liberal Zionism doesn’t need heterosexuality to propagate itself. Lizzy’s parents, as well as the Birthright Israel program itself, would have been overjoyed that Lizzy came home with me; Israel subsidizes two pregnancies by in-vitro fertilization for Israelis up to forty-five years old, and it has spent the last two months and nineteen days bombing Gazans without end, depriving them of life, of food and water, medical care, shelter, sanitation, and communication. The loss is endless and enormous. Who would want to build a life on that? And yet we have seen photos of Israeli soldiers raising rainbow flags in Gaza. This is where Jewish continuity leads.

Even at the time, I was ashamed of what I had done. I was excited to have finally had queer sex, and to release the insecure idea that I wasn’t gay enough for the life I wanted, but I didn’t know how to tell people about Lizzy because, by having sex with her, I had acted as Zionism wanted me to. How could I be honest about this without telling a story about queer triumphalism reliant on Israel?  I was ashamed that I had gone on Birthright; by the time of my trip in 2013 I already knew the term “pinkwashing,” and I was already convinced against the idea of a Jewish state, furious about the Occupation of Palestinian lands, but I wanted to see the Jewish state that existed, to understand what about Israel mattered so much to the Jews I knew, what kind of stories Israel was telling about itself and about me, and I didn’t have another way to get there. This is what is brilliant about Zionism: people need and desire to feel close and connected. They need stories to understand themselves, and they will do anything not to feel alone. 

Birthright Israel is funded by Sheldon Adelson, a white American Jewish businessman who is a major donor to the Republican Party, and it operates on the premise that Jews deserve Israel, deserve visits there, and deserve the opportunity to claim a citizenship which is waiting for them. Birthright harnesses the sexualities of young Jews–including the sexualities of young, Jewish queer and trans people–in order to empower and extend the Israeli colonial project and the genocide of Palestinians. Israel's refusal of Jewish emasculation is, unfortunately, trans inclusive.

In another life Lizzy and I could have stayed together, undergone free IVF, had Jewish children. I know many American Jews who met their partners on trips to Israel, or who joined the Israeli military and never came home. In 2016, 15 percent of Israeli settlers in the West Bank were American, and as recently as 2021 American immigrants to Israel moved into settlements at a rate three times higher than other immigrants to Israel. This is the story of Israel as a sexually recuperative project for emasculated Jews of any gender or sexuality, and it is this sexual recuperation, which imagines virility and domination and biological, not cultural or social or historical or religious or linguistic, reproduction of Jews as the highest good, and worth any cost. I care so much about living a Jewish life among other Jews, because I love the rituals and history and culture and food and gestures and speech. Because I love wrestling with Gd, the first definition of Yisrael. But I don't love Judaism because of what is or is not in my blood. No part of my Jewish life is worth the death or suffering or displacement or humiliation or abuse of any Palestinian, or Arab, or Muslim.

Since October 7, any time I have tried to sit down and write anything for this newsletter I have felt ridiculous. 20,000 Palestinians murdered by Israel in the name of Jewish safety and I'm supposed to care about the history of gay sex? But the history of gay sex, I am remembering, is also the history of Palestinians, and of the Jews who enable Israel's murder of them. Not all gay history is radical, and not every fuck is a win. For years I have been thinking about Greta LaFleur's essay "Heterosexuality without Women," in which she discusses the portrait of Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten Glezman that ran on the cover of TIME in 2019: "It’s offering us the promise that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one." Israel is offering us the promise that all Jewish life is a triumph over domination, but Zionism is domination masquerading as Jewish life, when it's Palestinian freedom that means freedom for everyone.

Here's LaFleur again:

[F]or conservatives of all stripes, the family was the antidote to the homosexual. The flip side of that effect is, of course, the distinct but twinned use of “family” in queer communities, first to name ties to other queer people that exceed socially-approbated forms of kinship, and, second, the reproduction of the hothouse family by queer people used to shore up the recognizability and respectability of queer love, connection, parenting, and marriage."

It's easy for Jews and queers and trans people, whose safety Israel has claimed as part of its legitimacy, to find ourselves on the side of genocide, unless we refuse it at every turn. Israel's recuperation of homosexuality is conditional, and partial; it does not extend, for instance, to Arab men, or to Israeli men who refuse military service. At the very end of Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad writes "[I]t is at these rarer moments when the imposition and seduction of Western norms fail that the possibility of different conceptions of desires, politics, and subjectivities emerges." Massad is writing specifically of Arabs whose sexualities are forced, in Western literature, into a "repressed/licentious binary," but his point is broadly applicable to the work of resisting imperial and colonial control of intimacy and interiority. Fascism lives and dies in desire.

As Nora Samaran writes, the couple, the cult, and the nation-state all have something essential in common: each can be a coercive, secret world in which harm goes unaddressed, and often unspoken, out of fear of abandonment and a need for protection which, ultimately, neither the state, nor silence, can provide. In his essay "My Palestinian Poem that 'The New Yorker' Wouldn't Publish," Palestinian poet Fady Joudah quotes another Palestinian poet, Zaina Alsous: "I tried / confessing the number / of days I have / wanted love more // than history." "And what is love," Joudah adds, if not an insistence on telling the truth. What is love, Joudah continues, "if not an echo."