A reader’s review of Precarious Life by Judith Butler’s on Amazon:
I have admired and enjoyed earlier works by Judith Butler, but this one came at, for her and this book, a most unpropitious moment in my personal historical experience. I had been on a six month journey to Israel attempting to rescue and offer refuge to four Palestinian queers–three men and one woman–who were in fear for their life for very good reason. Their pleas for justice and protection had been thoroughly ignored by the PLA, who basically told them they deserved whatever was coming to them. The only organization willing to give them material support was Keshet, an Israeli LGBT activist group in Tel Aviv.
When I was reading Butler’s passages about the potential opportunities for cooperation between queers and Muslims (etc.) I could not help but look back on my experiences in Israel and, before that, my experiences in Iraq, where I had gone with a relief organization to assist gay men who had been victims of torture. I thought the book committed the error of the three friends in The Book of Job, who care more about their abstractions of the theory of retribution and G-d’s justice (universalism) than about the stark and stubborn actualities of real lives. This is a book that needed far more research and hands-on experience to achieve respect or credibility in my eyes. Geopolitical realities dictate that an alliance between queers and political Islam is an even more extreme pipe dream than an alliance between queers and the Christian Right. Arguing otherwise seemed, I believe, one of the aftereffects of this author’s clear anti-Zionist ideology. This is fine, but it led her into inaccurate, inappropriate, and mistimed political day dreams.
The Left really needs to “get real” and figure out who real allies and real adversaries are. Anti-Israeli rhetoric (a.k.a “Israel bashing”) of numerous leftist intellectuals is nothing more than sublimation of the good ol’ antisemitism, Alain Badiou’s protests notwithstanding.
