The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.
Judith ButlerSurely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.
Judith ButlerLet me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.
Judith ButlerWe are more often than not asked, for instance, to regard Israel and Palestine as in a conflict of this kind, a framing that sets each of them on equal footing, and implicitly analogies the political situation to a fist fight, a soccer match, or a domestic quarrel. So if, then, the only two intelligible political positions are "pro-Palestinian" or "pro-Israeli," the presumption is that one's position is determined by a sentiment that wants one side to win over the other.
Judith Butler