Points of Departure: The National Timeline and Queer Israeli Migration

This article investigates temporality in the context of Israel and Zionism. Using queer theory, the author follows the Zionist trajectory, suggesting that Israel’s collective is associated with a heteronormative national timeline. Emigration from Israel is at the center of this article, which is based on two years of qualitative research among 42 queer Israeli emigrants in New York, London and Berlin. The article explores the political dimension of Israeli emigration – that is, emigration as a practice of alienation and destabilization of the Zionist ideology and the national and gender performance that life in Israel constitutes. The concept of temporality in queer theory makes it possible to investigate topics other than emigration – such as army service, marriage and reproduction – as undermining the Israeli heteronormative timeline. At the heart of the article lies the concept of the future in Zionist ideology, and how the future is structured and maintained by the Israeli collective. The article also discusses the notion of parenting and reproduction as markers of futurity. In light of Zionist ideology, it explores the ways in which emigration makes it possible to undo the ties between the citizens and the future of the homeland, and as a consequence, to subvert the national future and the Israeli collective.