Racial Capitalism and Palestine – A Necessary Theoretical and Activist Intervention
Monday, October 21, 6pm EST/3pm PST
with Kieron Turner and Nahla Abdo
Moderated by Yulia Gilich
Register here.
This webinar is based on a special issue on racial capitalism and Palestine co-edited by Ronit Lentin and Kieron Turner in the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published this month, a year into the Gaza genocide. The system of racial segregation was established by the South African Nationalist Party in 1948, the same year in which the Zionist movement with UN support established the State of Israel, enabled by the Nakba in Palestine. The special issue both builds upon and notes the differences from the debates generated by the understanding of the centrality of racial capitalism to the socio-political structure of apartheid South Africa, and situates Palestine as the contemporary terrain in which to theorise racial capitalism in settler colonial settings.
Building on the seminal theorisations of racial capitalism by Cedric Robinson, this collection of articles seeks to both employ racial capitalism in theorising the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and to pinpoint Palestine as centrally relevant to the generation of global analyses of racial capitalism. Contributors include Kieron Turner, Sai Englert and Gargi Bhattacharyya, Nahla Abdo, Muhannad Ayyash, Ronit Lentin, Johnny Eric Williams, David Embrick, Yasmin Elgoharry and Manuel Ramirez, and Greg Burris.
In making sense of the constitutive elements and the social relations which reproduce the local and global structure of racial capitalism, Kieron Turner sets out our understanding of the links between racial capitalism and settler colonialism, reconstructs our analysis of Palestine through the framework of racial capitalism and the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle, opening space for understanding Palestine as a site of struggle in which to reconstruct the theoretical and methodological understandings of race, capitalism, settler colonialism, Imperialism and strategies of liberation.
Providing a historical context, Nahla Abdo, exploring the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project, argues that through policies and practices that sought to reproduce the logics of race and capital, the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialise in Palestine.
Nahla Abdo is an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist feminist activist, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Among her many books: An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (2018), Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System (2014), Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship (2011), Gender, Citizenship and the State: The Israeli Case (2010), Women and Poverty in the OPT: Some Conceptual and Methodological Notes (2007), Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges (2004), and Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (co edited with Ronit Lentin, 2002). She is currently working on research comparing Indigenous women’s conditions in Settler colonial Israel and Canada.
Kieron Turner is an independent researcher and public educator specialising in global social movement theory, Palestine and racial capitalism. He has published in the open access journal Interfere on direct action and Palestine (2022), and has chapters in the forthcoming Handbook of Decolonial Theory on racial capitalism as a theory of history (Sage 2025), and Race and the Question of Palestine (co edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin) on Palestine, racial capitalism and militarised accumulation (Stanford UP 2025).