Submission deadline for abstracts: August 31, 2026
Zionism is a political project that seeks the eradication of Palestinians as a prerequisite for its expansionist state project. As a localized, settler colonial process, Zionism’s impact is first and primarily on Palestinians—the people themselves, and everything they have come to represent in the struggles against colonialism and imperialism worldwide. But Zionism is also a global phenomenon with serious consequences for nearly everyone on the planet, not to mention its air, lands, and seas.
In the SWANA region, Zionism has facilitated over 100 years of violence, oppression, and exploitation, resulting in tremendous, irremediable suffering and destruction through systematic warfare against anything opposing it. It has fomented conflict between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims and among Ashkenazi and Arab, African, and Asian Jewish communities. It has worked to quash Indigenous sovereignties within the region, combat various resistance movements, and bolster armed insurgencies supportive of the Zionist project. Indeed, the Zionist entity and its violent, hegemonic apparatus have compelled all those in the region to contend with an expansive and destructive settler colonial force intent on realizing the project of “Greater Israel”—imagined as institutionalized, state-level Jewish supremacy stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.
As an explicitly anti-Indigenous project that too often masquerades as the opposite, Zionism has deliberately targeted Palestinians via land theft and massacres and the denial of sovereignty in any capacity. However, Zionism has facilitated destruction of peoples, lands, ecosystems, and livelihoods for Indigenous peoples across the globe, including, most recently, in Patagonia and Kenya. Historically, it has sundered East African Jews from their lands by incentivizing their migration to the Zionist entity, where they face anti-Black racist and genocidal policies in their own right. More recent claims about Zionist indigeneity to the land of Palestine are another ideological form this native eliminationism takes.
Zionism also functions as a form of imperialism. Well before the establishment of the Israeli state, Zionist organizations collaborated across national borders; indeed, it could not have come to exist without the support of first the British and then the U.S. empires. Today, as U.S. imperialism decays, Israel stands poised to transform its status in this “special relationship” from adjunct to US empire to its usurper. Financially, Zionism relies on and exploits transnational networks of capital to survive and expand its militarized imperialism and advance fascism and genocide around the world. For example, the Israeli government generates funds through its global sale of carceral and destructive technologies—surveillance, bombs, roadblocks. As a result, people facing fascist governments have similarly experienced Zionist violence, as was the case during Operation Condor in South America, and as we see today in Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, among others. Israeli military technology has also been implicated in the genocides of Bosnians, Rohingya, Rwandans, Somalians, South Sudanese, Ethiopian Tigrayans, and South Africans. Ironically, global media, following Israeli hasbara, positions the Zionist entity as rescuer rather than perpetrator in many of these instances, most recently in Nigeria.
Zionist imperialism must be understood, however, as what Aziz Rana calls “settler empire,”with Israel better described as an “empire-state,” in Moon-Kie Jung’s words. That is, settler colonial projects like Zionism are imperial from the start insofar as their ongoing conquest is, simultaneously, an imperial takeover of already-existing Indigenous sovereignties (a critique that challenges the very premises of conventional “international relations” theory). Moreover, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd notes, settler-empire expansionism renders Indigenous peoples “transits of empire,” whereby they become both the origin of and template for cyclical and structural state violences that deny Indigenous existence while weaponizing it as a legitimation of settler permanence, racial supremacy, and imperial expansionism. Thus, “external” conquests are rendered comprehensible and justifiable as frontier expansions, while “internal” movements for inclusion, assimilation, and rights continue the project of settlement via erasure of its founding violences.
With this issue, JCSZ seeks to generate a broader understanding of the impacts and effects of Zionist imperialism on peoples and lands throughout the world. We encourage contributions that address the above-mentioned topics as well as those listed below from scholars, activists, artists, and cultural workers (or other topics as relevant to the broader call). We are particularly interested in work from and/or centering the Global South.
Possible topics may include:
- Zionism and/as imperialism
- Zionism and transits of empire
- Global anti-Zionism or resistances to Zionism; global anti-Zionism and transnational solidarities
- Anti-Zionist action and resistance, by state and non-state actors, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, the Houthis, and Iran alongside groups such as the PFLP, DFLP, and their resistance brigades
- Impact of Zionism on regional politics, socioeconomic opportunities, state-building, and relationships among nations and communities within the SWANA region
- Zionist violence towards Palestinians beyond the SWANA region
- Zionist presence across the globe—in South & Central America, Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific islands, Europe—and its impact on their peoples, political structures, and resistance movements
- Zionist violence across the globe targeting, destroying, and expelling Indigenous peoples from their land
- Attempts to align Zionism with Indigenous politics and/or Zionists with Indigenous peoples
- Zionism and/in comparative settler colonial studies; Palestinian indigeneity and/in comparative settler colonial studies
- Zionism and/in postcolonial studies; Palestinian indigeneity and/in postcolonial studies
- Zionist environmental destruction
- Political lobbying in various states to support Israel at the level of global institutions (e.g., the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.)
- Global fundraising efforts in support of the Zionist entity
- The use of carceral and war-related technologies developed in Israel, and tested on Palestinians, anywhere across the globe
Special Forum: SWANA Foundations in Critical Zionism Studies
Additionally, we invite submissions to a special section of the issue dedicated to foundational texts in Critical Zionism Studies. We seek contributions that locate the genealogy of Critical Zionism Studies in Palestine and the broader SWANA region, tracing the intellectual, political, and institutional traditions that have produced sustained critiques of Zionism as a global and colonial project. We especially welcome short (1,000–2,000 words) critical engagements with foundational scholarship and institutions, including, e.g., the work of Walid Khalidi, Sabri Jiryis, the PLO Research Center, and the Institute for Palestine Studies, among others.
Please submit 400-500-word proposals/abstracts to journal@criticalzionismstudies.org by August 31, 2026. For full consideration, please include author/participant name(s), affiliation(s) (where appropriate), contact information, and a 100-word (maximum) biographical statement. Full manuscripts will be due by January 15, 2027.
If you have questions about whether a topic would be relevant for submission to this call, please email us at: journal@criticalzionismstudies.org