1 University of London, UK *Corresponding Author: sa130@soas.co.uk Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 3(1-2), 20 ISSN: 2542-4920 Book Review A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel Sabiha Allouche 1 * Published: September 10, 2019 Book’s Author: Hila Amit Publication Date: 2018 Publisher: USA: SUNY Press Price: $21.95 Number of Pages: 252 pp. paperback ISBN: 978-1-4384-7010-8 † The book has been awarded The 2019 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) Book Award Despite its title, A Queer Way Out: The Politics of Queer Emigration from Israel, freelance researcher and fiction author Hila Amit’s latest work has less to do with emigration as a process than with the affective dimension of relocating. Amit explores what she terms ‘queer migration’ out of Israel; that is, the relocation of self-identified queer Israelis who choose to leave the Israeli Zionist project behind. Following Amit, their relocation allows them to ‘create a sense of self, belonging, and citizenship amid the exigencies of migration in the face of the ongoing violent conflict in their homeland’ (p. xx). It would be wrong, though, to assume that Amit’s interlocutors are driven by nihilistic aspirations or are politically passive. On the contrary, by opting out of the Israeli state’s chrono and homo- normative schedules, they exhume a particular agency – understood by Amit as an ‘unheroic resistance’ that undermines the Zionist project. In Chapter 1, Amit introduces the reader to what she terms ‘emigration anxiety’ and the paradox it poses to the Israeli state. On the one hand, the Israeli state cannot prevent yerida, or outbound migration from Israel at the risk of betraying its democratic appeal. Instead, we learn from Amit that the Israeli state counters such anxieties by exaggerating the virtues of aliyah, or inbound migration to Israel and by putting a ‘positive gloss’ on emigration through ‘new uses for the diaspora’ (p. 34). Amit relies on a myriad of registers in order to show the continuities between scholarly works, popular media, and the Israeli state’s discourse on emigration. Contrary to classic migration studies where economic motivations for migrating are distinguished from political ones, Amit, whilst basing her analysis on her interlocutors’ narratives, urges us to collapse the two. In her words: By promoting a discourse that frames emigration as an economic question, other political issues (and most visibly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the security consequences of it), are deemed irrelevant to the decision to leave. (p. 24) Amit’s aim is to relate the ‘standard’ emigration story where academic, political and popular texts converge in upholding the narrative of ‘emigration anxiety’ and to show the Zionist biases of academics themselves, whose approach readily undermines the violence(s) permeated by the Israeli state against some of its populations and the Palestinians. Chapter 2 constitutes, in many ways, the anti-thesis of the ‘standard’ emigration story. In order to bypass Israeli conventional attitudes towards emigration, Amit privileges her interlocutors’ personal accounts alongside an array