Although anthropologists have, for the most part, been silent on questions of same-sex sexualities -- and sexuality more generally -- among Arabs, in this paper, I argue that the discipline would do well to break that silence, if not for its unique perspective on the quotidian realities of everyday life, then because of the disturbing ease with which anthropological "knowledge" has been taken up in efforts to make sweeping claims about the presumed "homophobia" of "Arab culture," with sometimes violent consequences. Drawing on ethnographic research, I focus on the particular experiences of queer Palestinians in Israel, a space in which they are simultaneously appealed to, as victims of the (Israeli) nation’s most threatening other (the Arab/Palestinian "terrorist"), and abjected, as themselves potential threats to the nation. Situated at the intersection of the neoliberal incorporation of (some) queers and the increasing abjection of racialized Arabs, queer Palestinians are an object of considerable ambivalence in the Israeli (and "Western") imagination. As victimized queers who deserve to live and potential terrorists who deserve to die, queer Palestinians are relegated to a borderzone between citizen and non-citizen, between belonging and not-belonging -- in short, between life and death. Although that space is structured by the violence of the Israeli state and its efforts to regulate populations on the basis of rigidly defined categories, it also inadvertently creates possibilities for challenges to the categorical logic that undergirds it. I explore in this paper how queer Palestinians engage with structures and processes that relegate them to the margins in ways that, with all their limitations, hint at a potential for radical critique in the slippages and failures of regimes of control. I suggest, moreover, that attention to their experiences offers a unique opportunity, not just to correct the racist/Orientalist assumptions in stories of queer Arab "suffering," but to interrogate some of the key terms -- liberalism and democracy, tolerance and tradition -- around which knowledge (anthropological and otherwise) about the Middle East is organized.