UN Resolution 3379:
Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination: Zionism as racism
Throughout 2025, ICSZ presents events, research, and discussion around the fiftieth anniversary of UN Resolution 3379. The 1975 resolution declaring “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”, organized by African and Asian states, tied the demand for Palestinian liberation from Israeli colonization to the fight against apartheid in South Africa. The U.S.- and Israeli-led campaign against the resolution catalyzed decades of efforts by both governments to renarrate Zionism as not-racist and not-colonial — and to repress Third World thought and solidarity. ICSZ spends this year considering the resonances of the ideas and tactics put forward by the resolution, including the demand to center liberation conversations in decolonizing spaces, how they’ve changed as Zionism and other systems of globalized power have unfolded. We engage with the ways that racism is both an essential framework for studying Zionism, and also incomplete.
Upcoming Events
More info/Registration
Join Dr. Michel DeGraff (MIT, “Faculty at Large,” MIT School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences) in conversation with Dr. Emmaia Gelman (ICSZ) on the ways that language encodes power — whether for domination or resistance. Using Haitian history and Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) as a case study in resistance to multifaceted empire, this conversation explores how language around Palestine and its liberation movement shapes our willingness to engage with historical knowledge, our sense of possible futures, and our understanding of ourselves as participants in decolonization struggles. Register to attend.
CFP: JCSZ Special Issue
More info
With this special issue, the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism invites submissions of scholarly, activist, and artistic work that help clarify the historical legacies of the “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution as well as its contemporary political relevance. We welcome work that is historical, empirical, and/or theoretical in its broad consideration of Zionism as racism and the consequences and meanings of that claim – for the Palestinian liberation struggle and broader liberatory struggle – in our contemporary moment. Read the full CFP.
Call for Events!
ICSZ invites your proposals for public events throughout the year that consider interconnections of Zionism and racism, their relevance for understanding Zionism, and/or UN Reso 3379 itself. Events might be talks, readings, discussions, art presentations, or something else. They can be academic or non-academic, in-person or online. Please make sure proposals/presenters align with ICSZ’s Points of Unity.
To propose an event, drop us an email with a few sentences about your idea at info@criticalzionismstudies.org.
Header image citations:
1. General Union of Palestinian Students poster, Circa 1980. The Palestine Poster Project Archive (PPPA)
2. Matzpen: Anti-Zionists in Israel by Eran Torbiner. Source: Instagram, @jewishvoiceforpeace 8/2/24
3. PFLP poster, Circa 1988. Artist: Marc Rudin/Jihad Mansour. The Palestine Poster Project Archive (PPPA)
4. Twitter.com, defunct user @599bt