Che Gossett The Electronic Intifada 4 December 2014
Palestine solidarity
In our current neoliberal moment of pinkwashing, Israel is figured as a site of queer modernity and the Middle East and North Africa, in typical Orientalizing and anti-black fashion, is figured as backwards, uncivilized and outside the temporal and spatial coordinates of Western modernity. Meanwhile, students at historically Black colleges and universities in the US are being courted by the Israel lobby giant AIPAC.
Leslie’s critiques of settler colonialism are therefore all the more relevant. Leslie understood that the Palestinian struggle was not singular but rather attached to a wide history of anti-colonial resistance that continues today across the globe: “The Palestinian liberation movement is an anticolonial movement.” In Transgender Warriors Leslie showed the continuities of settler colonialism across space and time and offered historical comparisons between the occupation of Palestine and occupation of Native lands which was contingent upon the genocidal project of the formation of the settler colonial United States.
Leslie’s critiques were critiques in the sense that Edward Said conceptualized the anti-authoritarian role of critique. Said saw the liberatory potential in and of critique: “Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.” Leslie’s work was life-enhancing, always working to radically reconstruct the world into one that we can all inhabit.
Leslie Feinberg (Leslie Feinberg/Flickr)
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 
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