Tatour, Lana and Ronit Lentin, eds. Race and the Question of Palestine (review)

Yulia Gilich

Published in the midst of the Zionist entity’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Race and the Question of Palestine compels us to take the question of race in the study of Palestine seriously. In the preface to the collection, Lana Tatour articulates that “what we are witnessing in Gaza is race at work.”¹ Her assertion clarifies that the stakes of attending to race in the context of Palestine could not be higher. Co-edited by Tatour and Ronit Lentin, this collection of essays demonstrates that race is not an isolated category but is instead intertwined with and produced by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. For the editors and their contributors, this means that Palestinian liberation requires the “dismantling of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy;”² it is the only remedy to Zionism’s racial and colonial rule in historic Palestine.

Echoing Edward Said’s provocation, Race and the Question of Palestine refracts “the question of Palestine” through the lens of race to insist that the question is not “whether race is a productive lens, but rather what kinds of theories and conceptualizations of race are relevant”³ to the study of Palestine and the anti-Zionist struggle. Refusing a singular definitive answer, the collection provides eleven chapters that vary in focus, scope, method, disciplinary background, and conceptualization of race. The chapters are united by the examination of race as a category that is not natural but instead “politically mobilized and engineered in the service of colonial domination.”⁴ Further connecting most of the chapters is a recognition that race and racism lie at the core of Zionist colonialism. Together, these interrelated foci make the collection a valuable contribution to Critical Zionism Studies. In this general context, however, the editors believe it necessary to caution against confining the study of race to its relationship with Zionism, urging attention to racial formations within Palestine that predate Zionist colonization. 

In the “Introduction,” Tatour locates Race and the Question of Palestine in the extant scholarship on race in Palestine. She lays out key concepts and themes and proposes potential directions for future research. Her wide-ranging overview of the book is both illustrative of its intellectual breadth and symptomatic of its shortcomings. First, in situating the book and its significance, Tatour puts forth a critique of the sort of scholarship on Palestine and Zionism that ignores or underplays race and instead is centered around ethnicity, religion, and nation. While such categories intersect with race, Tatour insists, their singular engagement in the absence of race analysis “not only fails to capture the work of race, racialization, and racism as constitutive of colonial projects, but also conceals it.”⁵ This conceptual clarity lays the groundwork for several chapters that continue and deepen the critique.

Another noteworthy strength of the collection is its sustained attention to, and investment in, the Palestinian intellectual history and tradition of race analysis. Both the “Introduction” and several chapters, including those by John Reynolds and Noura Erakat, are rooted in and build upon Palestinian scholarship that positions Zionism as a form of racism. In particular, the collection highlights the fact that Palestinian thinkers such as Fayez Sayegh, Hasan Sa’b, Sabri Jiryis, Elia Zureik, and Ghassan Kanafani, among others, have, since at least the 1960s, consistently identified, criticized, and fought against Zionism as a colonial and racial project.

The collection’s strongest and most original contribution builds on the understanding of racial capitalism and settler colonialism as mutually imbricated transnational processes. Within this framework, the Palestinian liberation struggle and the Palestine solidarity movement globally emerge as struggles against Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine and, simultaneously, against global racial capitalism. Keiron Turner’s “Racial Capitalism and Militarized Accumulation” illustrates this phenomenon. Turner’s chapter demonstrates how Elbit Systems, an Israeli private arms and drone manufacturer, is directly involved in the colonization of Palestine and benefits financially from it by exporting military technologies tested on Palestinians to other militarized states around the world. Drawing on guerilla activist research, Turner argues that the work of Palestine Action, a direct action network committed to the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation, to disrupt and shut down Elbit Systems manufacturing plants in the United Kingdom “charts new pathways for the Palestinian Boycott, divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement by articulating the struggle against settler colonialism in Palestine as also a struggle against global racial capitalism, a system that facilitates and sustains settler colonization.”⁶ Turner tracks Palestine Action’s campaigns against Elbit from 2020, when the group became active, until January 2025, shortly before Race and the Question of Palestine’s publication. In the period following the collection’s publication, the British Government, on July 5, 2025, proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. This led to the formal dissolution of the group while nonetheless activating transnational networks of solidarity that Palestine Action had built through its sustained decolonial praxis. Supporters of Palestine Action quickly launched a mass civil disobedience campaign across the United Kingdom, which resulted in more than 2,350 people getting arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding signs indicating their support for Palestine Action. These draconian measures did not deter the Palestine solidarity movement in the United Kingdom. On the contrary, a new direct action group, “Yvette Cooper,” named after the British home secretary responsible for the proscription, emerged in response to the targeting of Palestine Action. As I am writing this review, in December 2025, Palestine solidarity activists conducting a historic hunger strike in British prisons are calling for the de-proscription of Palestine Action and for an end to the UK operations of Elbit Systems. While not captured in Turner’s chapter, the response of the Palestine solidarity movement both within and outside of the United Kingdom to the proscription of Palestine Action is further evidence of his argument that transnational anticolonial resistance targeting local sites of reproduction of racial capitalism can generate “decolonial praxis and global solidarities that disrupt both settler colonization in Palestine and the systemic relations of racial capitalism that sustain it.”⁷

Here, the volume’s ambitions are also the source of some of its most persistent weaknesses. While the collection undeniably makes novel and significant contributions to Palestine Studies, it misreads the contours of the field and, as a result, overstates its particular intervention. The “Introduction” positions the collection as recuperating “race” within Palestine Studies, identifying a purported decline in racial analysis since the 1980s. Drawing on Loubna Qutami’s claim that “popular political discourses on Palestine suffer from an anemic racial lexicon,”⁸ Tatour attributes that deficit to a lack of scholarly engagement with race and to a liberal turn toward rights-based frameworks focused on occupation, state-building, and peace. While her analysis has some purchase, it largely sidesteps the political and institutional conditions that have shaped this scholarly “turn” and thus overlooks the persistence of radical and liberatory strands of scholarship on Palestine that have continuously theorized occupation and apartheid as racial and colonial formations. This lopsided framing of the field inflates the collection’s claims to novelty; many chapters, while compelling and well-argued, ultimately rehearse arguments that are already familiar within critical Palestine scholarship. 

Furthermore, while some chapters are loosely clustered by theme or method, contributions are not organized into discrete categories. That said, the collection does arguably explore three distinct but overlapping themes. First, it attends to regimes of race and practices of racialization in Palestine. “Race and Space in Israel/Palestine,” by Neve Gordon and Yinon Cohen, offers a clear and comprehensive account of the Zionist state’s co-constitutive practices of racializing people and racializing land in service of colonizing and expropriating them. By tracing a historical continuity of Zionist expropriation of Palestinian land from 1948 until today, this chapter rejects the scholarly treatment of the Israeli entity’s post-1967 land-grab strategies as novel or somehow a “deviation from the pre-1967 ‘good Israel.’”⁹ Three chapters, Seraj Assi’s “The Invention of the ‘Bedouin Race,’” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite’s “Proletarianization of the Mizrahim,” and Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban’s “The Racial Hierarchy of Refugees,” offer case studies in the racialization of subjugated social groupings: the Palestinian Bedouin, the Mizrahim (Yemeni Jews specifically), and Palestinian refugees. To their credit, these case studies collectively avoid flattening out the distinctions between the three groups or the quality of their subjugation. On the contrary, they provide context-specific accounts of differing but overlapping practices of racialization. Ronit Lentin’s chapter, “Zionist Racialized Sexual Politics and Palestinian Refusal,” focuses on the Zionist deployment of gender and sexual politics as a racializing strategy.

Another of the collection’s themes involves a Palestinian intellectual history of race analysis. This theme unites John Reynolds’ “Apartheid without Race” and Noura Erakat’s “Zionism as a Form of Racism”—the only two chapters that trace how Palestinians have articulated, debated, and theorized race, and how Palestinian conceptions of race have played out in the arena of international law. Reynolds demonstrates that the reports by Israeli and international human rights organizations on the Zionist entity’s apartheid policies delink “apartheid from its own structural underpinnings of settler colonialism and its racial structures”¹⁰ and produce a reading of apartheid without race. Accordingly, this reactionary and ultimately counterinsurgent conception reconfigures apartheid from “colonialism of a special type” into “racial discrimination of a special type,”¹¹ thus placing it into stark contradiction with the Palestinian and Third Worldist intellectual understandings of apartheid in both racial and colonial terms.

Noura Erakat’s “Zionism as a Form of Racism” speaks to the history of United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 3379, the 50th anniversary of which is the inspiration for the current issue of JCSZ. Erakat’s account reveals that the 1975 resolution, which enshrined international recognition of Zionism as a form of racism, was a “last-minute–and suboptimal”¹² tactic that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) deployed on the heels of its unsuccessful effort to have the Israeli state expelled from the UN. Erakat demonstrates that the framing of Zionism as racism was not central to the Palestinian national struggle, particularly in relation to the 1975 UN resolution. Rather, this framing was advanced strategically, in solidarity with—and in parallel to—longstanding struggles against South African apartheid. Erakat concludes that the history of the resolution raises questions regarding the PLO’s racial analysis and whether the Palestinian liberation movement “considered racism as a structure, or saw it as a derivative manifestation of, and secondary to, the colonial structure.”¹³ 

What Erakat’s chapter makes clear is that the United Nations is a fraught site for liberatory struggles because of the disproportionate power therein of the reactionary Western states. In the case of Resolution 3379, votes for and against, even among Third World supporters of Palestine, represented not only political commitments and solidarities but also strategic considerations and disagreements about the definition of race and racism. 

Both Reynolds’s and Erakat’s chapters are invested in engaging with a certain Palestinian intellectual tradition of conducting race analysis in its categorical intersectionality. Reynolds reminds us that the very idea that the Palestinian liberation struggle is “anticolonial and antiracist, linked to global struggles while standing on its own merits and specificities,” is the legacy of the work started by the Palestine Research Center in the 1960s.¹⁴ Erakat further suggests looking at historical continuities and reemergences of Black–Palestinian solidarity that provoke an “analytical return to understanding of racism and colonialism as co-constitutive structures of domination.”¹⁵ Focus on this solidarity illuminates “the antiracist nature of the Palestinian liberation struggle and, inversely, the anticolonial nature of the Black liberation struggle.”¹⁶

This transnational, capacious, and solidaristic view of the Palestinian liberation struggle overlaps with the third and final theme of the collection: transnational connections that shape racial categories, colonial practices, material investments, as well as anticolonial solidarities, antiracist alliances, and decolonial practices. In “Black–Palestinian Solidarity and the Global Color Line,” Michael R. Fischbach traces the origins and developments of te Black Power Movement’s support for Palestine in the wake of the 1967 war. Kieron Turner’s “Racial Capitalism and Militarized Accumulation” analyzes the activist practices of the Palestine Action group as forms of decolonial praxis that disrupt both Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine and the global regime of racial capitalism that sustains it. Finally, Alana Lentin’s “Antisemitism and the Proxification of Antiracism” unravels the Zionist claim that antisemitism is exceptional racism, while David Palumbo-Liu’s “Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Palestinian Rights” addresses the contested issue of Martin Luther King’s stance on Israel and Palestine. Palumbo-Liu concludes that while King offered no definitive statement on the issue, if we take his legacy seriously we should neither twist, decontextualize, nor appropriate his words but instead follow his commitment to global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Doing so would mean witnessing and struggling for and in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

Race and the Question of Palestine is a timely, incisive, and rigorous contribution to scholarship on Palestine, settler colonialism, Critical Race Studies, and Critical Zionist Studies. By centering race as the primary analytic for understanding Zionist settler colonialism and Palestinian dispossession, the editors have assembled a collection that is intellectually ambitious and politically assertive. The implications of its main argument, that race is central to the question of Palestine, are profound: the co-constitutive nature of race and colonialism means that any antiracist and decolonial struggle must be anti-Zionist and, conversely, that any anti-Zionist struggle must be anticolonial and antiracist.