Editorial Preface

Editorial Collective

It is both an inescapable truth and mantra of Palestinian resistance that “the Nakba is ongoing” and did not end with the Zionist onslaught of 1947–49. 

This assertion has multiple consequences, among them that, as long as there has been Zionist imposition in Palestine, there has been Palestinian resistance to it. In the current moment, “the Nakba is ongoing” is a gut-wrenching reminder that the Gaza genocide begun in 2023 is nothing new, even as many people have variously identified the viciousness, voraciousness, intensity, duration, or libidinous character of its violence to be worse than that of the Nakba. Rather than a novel development, this genocide is better understood as the latest installment, the most noteworthy recent episode of a genocide and ethnic cleansing that are continuous processes of disposession. These practices typify settler colonialism and have been systematically adopted and implemented by the Zionist project in Palestine since at least the 19th century. 

Another consequence of the assertion that “the Nakba is ongoing” is that there can be no “after” genocide so long as Zionism persists. Or, as Palestinian poet Fady Joudah has put, “After the genocide, the genocide.”¹ Despite the numerous so-called ceasefire(s) or cessations of military actions, the genocide of Palestinians has not come to an end. This is true both because, as of this writing, Israel has violated the October 10, 2025 ceasefire almost 900 times² but, also, because as long as there is Zionism, there will be Nakba. While some writers advance their careers and status as public intellectuals by writing presumptuously-titled texts asserting an “after” “Gaza”—as if the genocide were over and “Gaza” simply another name for it³—there is no “after” Gaza for Palestinians, for whom Gaza is land and life.⁴ There is no “after” the Nakba if “after” means Nakba denial. Gaza survives, Palestine still stands, and the Palestinian people endure, even as genocide continues to encroach upon their lives and determine their ubiquitous experience.

The real rupture, the real “after” from which there is no going back, is the Al-Aqsa Flood military operation of October 7, 2023. As Tareq Baconi argues, this act of resistance has made it impossible for the Israeli regime to continue to disappear the Nakba, Palestinians, or the genocidal character of Zionism.⁵ Widely condemned by Western and imperial powers, Al-Aqsa Flood is legally justified even within the terms of the liberal international order established by those same powers in the mid-20th century in the form of the United Nations, the origins of which are inextricably tied to the colonization of Palestine and, as such, to empire and colonialism per se.⁶ 

Among the UN’s first acts was Resolution 181, the 1947 partition of Palestine that created the Israeli state. Disregarding the Palestinian people as stewards and original peoples of the land, the resolution carved Palestine into pieces, expropriating and reallocating 55% of its most fertile and arable land from Palestinians to Zionists who, at the time, represented approximately only one-third of the population and owned less than 7% of the land. Moreover, the United Nations witnessed and failed to stop the Nakba that began even before the partition was promulgated. Indeed, the Nakba was implemented by Zionist militias and has continued, scolded but unimpeded by the United Nations and its accompanying restitutional apparatuses (i.e. the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ). The UN Security Council, which has, since its inception, been dominated by the United States, has vetoed most if not all possible movement toward justice for Palestinians. 

Baconi argues that Al-Aqsa Flood has revealed all of this, and irrevocably so. Exposure of these truths has laid bare the ugly realities of the nation-state, international law, the United Nations—indeed, the very post-WWII liberal global order itself—in such a way that there is no going back to a naive “before” moment. Indeed, regarding Western powers’ “rush to restore the old order” post-Al-Aqsa Flood, Baconi writes:

In other words, there is no going back to a world before Al-Aqsa Flood; rather, Al-Aqsa Flood identifies that prior world as the primary source of anti-Palestinian violence. But this rupture has also inspired a real and potentially actualized “after,” one that is not “after” “Gaza” but, rather, after the UN, the capitalist nation-state, and the racial and colonial agendas these institutions function to perpetuate and enforce. This is an “after” founded upon the emancipation of hopes and aspirations distorted and squelched by such epochal structures, an “after” that takes seriously the question of what might have been otherwise, an “after” that problematizes our implicatedness in the conditions that have prevented any such political-historical difference—both epistemological and ontological—from being realized.⁸ 

This issue of JCSZ considers another “after”: fifty years after the passage of UN Resolution 3379, which stated unabashedly that Zionism is a form of racism. As with so many attempts to advance anticolonial agendas via the United Nations, the resolution failed to produce substantial material change for Palestinians, either in the sixteen years following its passage, or after its subsequent overturning in 1991 by UN Resolution 46/86. After both this landmark declaration and its subsequent revocation, what remains? What comes after the declaration, then rejection, of Zionism as a form of racism? 

The JCSZ Editorial Collective invites readers of this issue to consider what a world order organized outside a Western-led United Nations might look like—indeed, perhaps against and beyond nation-state forms—that would center the experiences of those peoples acting in opposition to the current order. As Sophia Azeb reminds us, “For what is the ongoing Nakba but a catastrophe borne of another catastrophized people who would dream no further than making freedom in the form of a nation-state?”⁹ We ask, how might the liberation of Palestine—with or without United Nations support—reconfigure, if not obliterate, existing global hegemonies?¹⁰

Contributions to this issue highlight the numerous manifestations of Zionism as a form of racism and a means of death-manufacture, as well as describe and exemplify modes of resistance to it. These contributions highlight not only the death-making that defines Zionist political rule—or, as Saree Makdisi calls it, “thanatocracy”¹¹—but also the recalcitrant, defiant, and undying resistance to its abiding commitment to eliminate Palestinian life and land. As Noura Erakat argues, international law is but one tool amongst many to achieve justice, and it cannot be used alone:¹² the onus is on the world to stand in solidarity with Palestine, to resist the imperial strictures embedded within international legal bodies and extending into local governments, and to actualize a form of justice that ensures, in Palestine and beyond, abolition, decolonization, and total liberation. South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice is a material example of this resistance through international law. The contents of this issue invite readers to consider the overlapping and intersecting axes of both oppression and opportunity presented by UN Resolution 3379 and its admittedly uneven legacy, and in the spirit of liberating Gaza and all of Palestine, with or without the United Nations. 

The contributions to this issue unequivocally name, analyze, and critically indict the Zionist project for its historical foundations in eliminatory logics and its stranglehold on politics, policy, and society, a hegemony that extends well beyond “Israel’s” ostensible “borders.” We begin with an archival section on the resolution, reprinting the full text of UN Resolution 3379, the single-sentence UN resolution revoking it, and a bibliography of critical historical and political analyses of these documents, including resources that explore the colonial and imperial undergirdings of the United Nations. In addition, we republish in full the foundational 1976 essay “Zionism and Racism” by movement attorney and activist Abdeen Jabara. Although excerpts from this piece have been published in various venues over the years, it is difficult to find it anywhere in its entirety. We consider this essay one of the few and most influential legal analyses of the UN resolution from a critical perspective, and are honored to archive it within the pages of JCSZ.

We also share a roundtable panel discussion held at the 2025 Annual Conference of the American Studies Association, “Zionism Is Racism at 50: Transnational Resistance to Axes of anti-Blackness and anti-Palestinian Racism,” featuring Nadine Naber, John Harfouch, Xavier Livermon, Omar Zahzah, Sean L. Malloy, and Emmaia Gelman. This roundtable discusses the multiple and interconnected dynamics of racism comprising anti-Palestinian racism, including anti-Black racism, that lie at the center of international efforts to resist the resultant destruction of Palestinian life. It draws attention to the many historical and contemporary solidarities that attempt to erode and excise these racisms from the United States, Palestine, and across the globe. 

Three original articles critically analyze the racial categories and hierarchies that Zionism creates, reifies, and cements in order to ensure ongoing imperialist expansion, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, and silencing of resistance. Amira Jarmakani’s “Accumulate and Destroy: Inclusion as Conquest” explores how the collection of data, facilitated by the IHRA definition of antisemitism, operates as a technology of conquest. Posing the question of who is counted and how, Jaramakani reveals the Zionist reification of colonial relationality that counts anti-genocide solidarity only and always as antisemitic, regardless of how many Palestinian deaths are accounted for and even registered as deaths at all under such conditions. Matt Seriff-Cullick’s “How White Folks Became ‘Jews’: The ‘War on Black Antisemitism’ and the Recalibration of Racial Regimes” reveals the complex linkage of anti-Black racism and Zionism, particularly via neoconservative tropes of U.S. Black people’s “betrayal” of U.S. Jews in advancing anti-Zionist views. Tracing this trope’s long discursive life from the 1970s to the current moment, Seriff-Cullick argues that we are currently undergoing a racial regime realignment that is indebted to this trope, whereby white supremacy has acquired and maintains an aggrieved status by identifying itself with the struggle against antisemitism, to the point that all white people, whatever their background, are interpellable as “Jews.” Finally, “Green Technologies, White Colonies: Zionism and the Colonial Uses of ‘Indigeneity’ and ‘Environmentalism,’” by Grey Weinstein and Angel White, examines the longstanding deployment of these terms in service of Indigenous annihilation, including ecosystemic destruction (i.e., ecocide), and their use by Zionist actors to silence critiques of colonial Palestinian oppression and dispossession. 

Three further interventions investigate art as a site of critique and praxis. Christine Hong’s interview with Juan Fuentes, a Chicano artist whose work is featured on this issue’s cover, offers a visual aesthetic for considering the profound similarities between local and global activism and the utility of art in that context. This wide-ranging interview reveals entry points for international solidarity and the interconnectedness of anti-imperial struggles, from Palestine to the agricultural fields of Monterey County, California and beyond. From the other side, Ken Ehrlich’s “Dissident Forms: Images of Anti-Zionism in the Archive of Matzpen” presents a critical engagement with the archives of the titular Israeli socialist organization founded by former members of the Israeli Communist Party. In his ordering and re-ordering, cutting and pasting of both text and images from the archive, Ehrlich raises interconnected questions about representation, racialization, and the role of documentation in each of these processes. This critical artistic undertaking, in line with Ariella Azoulay’s suggestion that we attempt to construct “potential histories,”¹³ is harmonious with the Editorial Collective’s suggestion of a new keyword for Critical Zionism Studies, “Zionism = Death.” This keyword and image trace an alternative genealogy of “after” the 1975 resolution by tracking an artistic and political legacy of, first, its sloganization as “Zionism = Racism,” through to ACT UP’s iconic and movement-defining graphic “Silence = Death,” to our particular proposal of a slogan befitting the current “after,” “Zionism = Death.” 

Finally, we offer reviews of two important new books on Zionism and racism. Robin Gabriel reviews Omar Zahzah’s Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, and Yulia Gilich reviews Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin’s edited collection, Race & the Question of Palestine. Not only do these books call us to (re)conceptualize the racism that is Zionism, but also to recognize racism and racialization as technologies of oppression, contemporary tools of Zionist dispossession but, also, potential means for theorizing justice and liberation.