Zionism Is Racism at 50: Transnational Resistance to Axes of Anti-Blackness and Anti-Palestinian Racism (Roundtable)

John Harfouch, Xavier Livermon, Omar Zahzah, Emmaia Gelman, Sean L. Malloy, & Nadine Naber

Introduction

In 1975, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution and its advocates articulated Third Worldist visions of a liberated planet while negotiating the realities of Cold War imperial power. The United States and Zionist institutions vociferously opposed the resolution. Their arguments showcased the ways that settler colonial forces construct and leverage narrow, dehistoricized knowledge of race and antiracism, decolonization, and rights to disrupt liberatory processes. These contestations have continued long after the resolution’s adoption: It was rescinded in 1991 under U.S. and Israeli pressure, and again became a site of attacks and resistance at the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism. In subsequent decades, liberatory movements have continued to struggle against the Zionist logics structuring anti-Palestinian, anti-Jewish, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant racism.

This fiftieth anniversary roundtable, at the 2025 American Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting in Puerto Rico, took up the ongoing relationship between Zionism, racial capitalism, global imperialism, and the collapse of U.S. liberal logics, before and after the struggle over UN Resolution 3379. Drawing on American Studies, Black Studies, Palestine Studies, and Critical Zionism Studies, the roundtable invited discussion on the interconnections between Palestine and other sites of racialized policing, the cultural and intellectual histories that sustain transnational solidarities, and contemporary organizing to oppose Zionism and/as racism.

The roundtable featured short commentaries by John Harfouch, Xavier Livermon, Omar Zahzah, Emmaia Gelman, Sean L. Malloy, and Nadine Naber. We reprint lightly edited transcripts of these commentaries with the permission of the speakers.

John Harfouch¹

In 1974 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) denounced the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic efforts at the United Nations, calling it “the locomotive of retreat.”² With that said, I’d like to say a few words about how Fayez Sayegh, who argued the Palestinian case leading to Resolution 3379, understood “racism” and where it fit within the question of Palestine more generally. I don’t think that Resolution 3379 should be read outside this broader context, and most importantly, it must be interpreted through the lens of de-development, armed resistance, non-alignment, and anti-imperialism broadly construed. 

Sayegh spoke four times in the Fall of 1975 before the United Nations General Assembly, arguing that Zionism is racism. In his first speech on the matter, he began by distinguishing the question of racism from the question of Palestine more generally. We might ask what the Palestine Question is, if it is not identical to the problem of racism?

Start with Sayegh’s rendition of the Palestine Question. In in a pamphlet titled “A Palestinian View,” Sayegh lays it out this way: If, as Weizmann once declared, Palestine “is to be made as Jewish as England is English,” and the continuous flow of settlers requires an expanding land base to support them, and if that land cannot be purchased at a satisfactory rate and must then be acquired by force, then Israel is, in effect, a state of war.³ Sayegh describes this dynamic of Israeli aggrandizement by wars of encroachment when he summarizes the whole situation on an American talk show in 1967: “Every Israeli who is in Israel today is there because an Arab has been made not to be. The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine.”⁴ Zionism is a movement or force whereby Israeli development—Israeli being—stands in a dialectical relationship with Palestinian non-being. So when David Ben-Gurion told Israeli Parliament in 1963 that the Zionist mission of “ingathering the exiles” is tantamount to “the fructification and population of the wasteland,” he articulated what from Sayegh’s point of view is the Problem of Palestine, which is precisely the production of that wasteland.⁵

As I interpret Sayegh’s writings, Zionist racism manifests itself as the ideological justification for and the practical administration of de-developmental policies implemented on the basis of a racial distinction between who will be fructified and who will be wasted. What I would like to emphasize is that when we consider Zionist racism in the context of the Palestine Problem—which is the problem of imperial extraction, accumulation, and dispossession—then what Sayegh identified as racism has to be understood in terms of the practical policies of de-development. The policies Sayegh cites—the denial of educational training, the confiscation of property and land, the marginalization of labor, and the purposeful destruction of infrastructure—are all articulated along hereditary lines, and all aim at preventing the Palestinian Arab population from modernizing and developing technologies and industries.

Where the imperial subjugation of Palestine is brought about through de-developmental policies at least partially aimed at monopolizing raw material inputs, Sayegh and his colleagues understood that the liberation of Palestine would come about through technical modernization and open access to global supply chains outside the controls of the imperial powers. This was the agenda of non-alignment. No one was better prepared to understand this perspective than the fedayeen, since their work depended on access to raw materials and modern technology. Sayegh’s colleague George Jabbour commented on this in a 1970 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center publication: 

In other words, Jabbour believes the act of armed struggle necessarily drags Palestinian society into a future of modernized technological industry, since there are simply no arms without an openness to global production chains and modern industry. Where Zionist racism is the imposition of de-developmental policies attempting to keep the Palestinian in a primitive state, armed resistance—the gun itself before it is even fired—embraces a technologically developed and modernized future. 

In sum, the very being of Israel is rooted in territorial expansion, an expansion that occurs through encroachment wars. The development of the Zionist movement is then the de-development of Palestinian society. And this de-development is instantiated and perpetuated through bombing and genocide, but also, in part, through racist legal, educational, and labor policies, the net effect of which is the excision of Arab society from modern industry and technology. When Jabbour says armed struggle widens the horizon of the freedom fighter, he is referring to the very practical recognition of the fact that the resistance stands or falls with the degree to which the Indigenous society develops its industrial and technical abilities. The “armed” part of “armed resistance” refers precisely to that capacity, just as the “de”-prefix in “de-development” takes aim at it. And the fedayeen understands this above all simply because the tools of his or her trade emerge at the intersection of internal productive capacities and global political alliances on the one hand and national sovereignty on the other, with the former being a necessary condition for the latter.

Sayegh and his colleagues understood that diplomatic efforts, including sanctions, condemnations, and boycotts, had to function dialectically with armed resistance. Diplomacy alone amounted to demilitarization, which they saw as the first step to occupation. For us today, there is no point in discussing Zionist racism without a complimentary discussion around Palestinian militancy and the imperial monopoly over raw materials at the top of the weapons supply chain.

Xavier Livermon

South Africa was not present for the 1975 vote on Resolution 3379—because, despite being a founding member of the UN, their delegation had been expelled on November 12, 1974, and was not readmitted until the formal end of apartheid in 1994. It is obvious that if South Africa had been allowed to vote, it would have been on the side of Israel in this resolution. And it’s important to note that many of the architects and enablers of apartheid (as well as their descendants) are alive and well, and have a strong nostalgia for the return of apartheid and colonial rule not only in South Africa, but also around the world. The same South Africans that supported Israel (as Israel supported apartheid South Africa) are those that support Israel today. We should always understand the UN as a limited institution that in many ways upholds the Western colonial order; the inclusion of two explicitly apartheid states at its founding lets us know all we need to know about the institution and its frameworks. That being said, for this conversation I am interested in thinking about what Israel’s support of apartheid South Africa might mean for the current post-apartheid state and the solidarity that it shares with Palestine. Here, I offer some keywords.

South Africa remembers that Israel was a strong supporter of the apartheid South African state as much as it remembers Palestinian support for anti-apartheid activists. This is one of the many reasons why South African anti-apartheid campaigners were invested in Palestine as one of the most prescient causes for thinking about global liberation and their own liberation. If we think about South Africa’s International Criminal Court (ICC)/International Court of Justice (ICJ) case [charging Israel with genocide in Gaza], we can see the conflict of a state that pursues a valiant and worthy cause (even if it is one that is ultimately unable to stop the genocide), and yet won’t take the necessary steps to actually hurt Israel with trade or breaking diplomatic relations. We know why: Because the South African polity is not fully sovereign, and like any good neoliberal state, it is beholden to local and global capital that doesn’t have the best interest of its citizens in mind as it functions. South African capitalists love Israel and the South African state post-apartheid has been stripped, ideologically and capacity-wise, of its ability to contain capital and its function. These forces work not just against any real material consequences when it comes to Israel-South Africa foreign relations, but also against any real transformation of the South African political economy so that it benefits the Black majority. What this means is that South Africa can open an ICC/ICJ case, and yet still suffer economic threats and constant attacks on its sovereignty by the United States as a result. 

So what is resistance in this moment, what is solidarity, and what are the limits of these concepts as we’ve imagined them? What does it mean when armed resistance, completely legitimate on the part of the Palestinians, cannot even be mentioned in any mainstream discourse because of capitalistic control of the media on the one hand and, I’d argue, the governmentality and fetishism of non-violence on the other hand? How then do we begin to have conversations about what resistance can look like? And what does South Africa’s solidarity really mean as the government still trades and has diplomatic relations with Israel? 

Another key  concept is legitimacy. The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in many ways hopes to follow the South African example of increasing isolation and loss of worldwide legitimacy for Israel. Once again,by the time the resolution vote was taken in 1975, the apartheid South African state had already been declared illegitimate by the UN. This is one of the reasons that Israel goes so hard against processes like suspension from the UN, or suspension from global sport: because they are a proven strategy of resistance, slowly but surely eroding the legitimacy of the state.

When we talk about “Zionism is Racism” also, we need to think not only in relation to Israel but more broadly, about the well-documented ways that Zionism thrives on anti-Blackness within Israeli society and on the global scale. We have to contend with the harms that Israel creates across the Black world, particularly the African continent, and do more than lip service to shed light on equally perverse forms of colonialism and capital functioning in Congo and Sudan. 

Lastly, post-apartheid South Africa is often mentioned as a possible imagination of a post-Zionist Palestine. I think our imagining should look like something more than that. 

Omar Zahzah

When I was asked to take part in this roundtable in early 2025, I was completing an article on the poetic exchanges between Aja Monet and Mohammed el-Kurd, Palestinian poet and journalist. I was looking at that in conjunction with another famous example of poetic exchange, which is the inspiration that the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad felt from reading the lines of June Jordan. I had begun this project before October 2023. It was about conditions that configure possibilities of solidarity. I was thinking about Black-Palestinian solidarity, in many ways building off of the framework that was advanced in the 2019 special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies in which Noura Erakat and Mark Lamont Hill had talked about the concept of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity. They were looking at how contemporary configurations and expressions of Black-Palestinian solidarity between the United States and Palestine were not novel formulations that came out of nowhere; instead, they built on ongoing legacies of internationalism and anti-imperialism, particularly operating from the Black Radical Tradition. Looking at both sets of poetic exchanges—that between Aja Monet and Mohammed el-Kurd and Suheir Hammad and June Jordan—I wanted to think about what is the same and what is distinct in these two moments. What does that tell us about possibilities of solidarity, and how we think about solidarity? The question of solidarity is what connects this project to Resolution 3379. 

Resolution was an international form of action that was made possible by particular iterations of anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggle, using the logics and grammars of Third Worldism, that were very conducive to the language of liberation movements in that particular moment in time. It’s a useful exercise to think about Resolution 3379 in those terms, so that we don’t exceptionalize the present moment. Of course, so much has changed materially, but the material conjunctures that we find ourselves in do not emerge from a vacuum. There is a utility in looking back as we continue to make sense of what’s happening in the present. So let me remind you of the year 2014, seen as the launching point for the reemergence of forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity, marked by the Ferguson uprising and the simultaneous Israel’s assault on Gaza. From that moment until now, we see the refinement of the architectures of disciplinary violence and policing. We see the shrinking disparity between Israeli Occupation Forces and U.S. police forces, both acting in similar ways and with increasingly familiar tactics. The comparison between policing and colonization has become very literal. 

Solidarity poetics is a concept that I elaborate upon when looking at the work of Mohammed el-Kurd and Aja Monet. These are poetic exchanges fomented by solidarity, connected by an understanding of the need for collective liberation, and realized through a critique of contemporary material configurations of the consolidation of empire. What interests me is moments in poems where both poets speak about this sense of familiarity, recognizing a particular condition even when navigating a different space. For example, Aja Monet talks about coming into the el-Kurd’s family home and sitting at their table and feeling a sense of familiarity in seeing the violence of the settlers or the violence of Occupation Forces soldiers. And Mohammed el-Kurd talks about navigating Atlanta and seeing the police, or recognizing how these different forms of injustice and oppression wear people down.

These gestures of alien familiarity, when you’re in a new place and something makes you think of something you’ve known before… I look at those as creative exchanges rooted in the broader anti-imperialist context of solidarity. It’s not to say that these are one-to-one comparable conditions, but what these poets achieve with transmitting such a sense of familiarity is critiquing forms of oppression that shape their material reality.

Emmaia Gelman 

I’d like to take us back to Resolution 3379 as a sort of cipher for the present. Resolution 3379 existed from 1975 until 1991, when it was rescinded. I want to think about the time it existed as a period when anticolonialism, antiracism, Third Worldism, internationalism—whatever name we want to call that resistance to the restoration of Western global, imperial power—was in a real contest with the ideas of neoconservatism. Scholars and organizers working on Palestine don’t necessarily think of Resolution 3379’s passage as a neoconservative moment; that’s not really part of our lexicon for articulating that Zionism is racism. We don’t discuss Resolution 3379 much at all. But I want to pull out three characters from the story of the resolution’s passage to identify resistance to it—refusal of the understanding of Zionism as racism—as a neoconservative project.

Why is it important to do that right now? With the present fascist regime in the United States, which is so tied to the fascist regime in Occupied Palestine, racism is at its center, and so are the core ideas of neoconservatism. The racism is obvious: We clearly see the white nationalism and white supremacy of the present regime. But we don’t necessarily comprehend the currents of white nationalism that are so dramatically shaping our lives, and that overlap so much with Zionism, as a neoconservative force. We don’t make the connection partly because the two don’t perfectly line up. For instance, neoconservative foreign policy, “democracy promotion,” is about pushing a U.S. presence into global spaces, conducting imperialism through soft power, “winning hearts and minds” for capitalism and U.S. authority, and the Trump regime is not currently doing that.

Present-day white nationalism and neoconservatism do line up in essential ways, though. A crucial thread of neoconservatism is a Western supremacism, and the idea that the values and culture called “Western” are the basis of democracy. It’s the claim that white nationalist moves—like attacks that portray antiracist organizing as “extremist,” or portray immigrants as the source of disorder, or rationalize withdrawing public resources from “woke” educational institutions—are actually bids to preserve liberal democracy. That key component of neoconservatism is fully alive and active. And currently-ascendant white nationalism is working through historic neoconservative channels. For instance, September 2025 the National Endowment for the Humanities gave a $10.4 million K-12 education grant to the Tikvah Fund, which promulgates neoconservative “the West is under attack” discourse through a mix of Greek, biblical Christian, and Zionist thought. It’s run by Elliot Abrams, who notoriously facilitated illegal U.S. aid to the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-1980s.

In this conversation about the ongoing significance of articulating that Zionism is racism, I want to set up a lens on neoconservatism that also clarifies its significance as a line from U.S. and Zionist imperial history to the present. 

First, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL campaigned hard against Resolution 3379, asserting that not only was Zionism not racism, but that it was racist to say that Zionism was racism. The meaning of the resolution—especially its assertion that Black freedom and Zionism were diametrically opposed—was especially damaging to the ADL’s work in the United States, because the ADL used the civil rights movement as its framing to sell Israel. Its effort to frame Zionism as a civil rights effort, akin to Black civil rights demands, had become especially important after the 1967 war, or the Six Day War. Before the war, advocates for U.S. aid to Israel made the case that Israel was weak and needed support. In the wake of the war, the burgeoning Israel lobby had turned to pitching that Israel was a strategic asset to the United States. It was the ADL’s job to keep the moral claim going, that the United States owed support to Israel because it was a racial liberation project.

The ADL pitched the idea that Israel was a place of equality for Arabs, for Black people, for women, on the model that the United States claimed for itself. In 1968 it created an Urban Affairs department, which was code for Black affairs. The ADL hired a staffer from the National Urban League to run it. One project that he undertook was to bring Black journalists to Israel, so that they could come back and spread the word to mass audiences that Zionism and the project of Israel were in line with the aims and values of Black communities. The ADL combined that civil rights framing with its denunciations of the left, its effort to shame Black radicals as “totalitarian,” its construction of “scary Arabs,” and its framing of Palestinians as agents and allies of the Soviet Union, as all of a piece. And in 1974 the ADL reconstituted its definition of antisemitism, in a move that similarly claimed the terms of “marginality” for Zionism and obscured its power, as Sean Malloy will discuss.

The second character is Senator Daniel “Pat” Moynihan, who was the United States’ UN ambassador at the time. Moynihan is more recognizable as a neoconservative figure. His famed speech in opposition to Resolution 3379 reflected the contestation between leftist, anticolonial antiracism and neoconservative claims to be pro-civil rights. Moynihan argued that Zionism could not be called racism because, as he claimed, racism meant supposing biological differences between people. That was reprehensible, Nazi stuff. But Zionism, he said, didn’t do that: Rather, he claimed that the exclusion and dispossession of Palestinians was actually just political. In order to assert that Zionism wasn’t racism, Moynihan moved to discredit the idea that racism is political: He moved to disconnect the idea of racism from systems of political power. 

The final character in this trio is Bayard Rustin. Rustin was also a key neoconservative figure, although much less well understood in that context. He was a Zionist, a supporter of Israel, and a central player in efforts by the ADL and others to connect the Black civil rights lexicon to Zionism. His motivation and reasoning mixed commitment to Black freedom with vehement anti-communism. Rustin was opposed to the anti-capitalist notions inherent in Black liberation politics, opposed to an analysis of what we would now call racial capitalism. Rustin’s embrace of Israel and Zionism was closely connected with his pushing against Black radicalism. In November 1975, two weeks after the UN passed Resolution 3379, Rustin established the Black Americans Supporting Israel Committee (BASIC), a project conceived with leaders of the ADL and American Jewish Committee. BASIC was a limited organization, but it was a base for continuing to organize Black centrists and conservatives to call on African nations at the UN to support West-serving policies. Notably, Rustin also worked in South Africa as part of neoconservative “democracy promotion,” working to seed capitalist unions that would work with corporations and gradualize the anti-apartheid demands of the leftist labor movement. 

This is not new history, but by revisiting these opponents of Resolution 3379, I’m inviting us to think about the stakes, for U.S. imperial policy, of preventing the definition of Zionism as racism, and indeed preventing the definition of racism as political.

There’s one last bonus character. When the resolution was rescinded in 1991, Bush’s UN Ambassador John Bolton, also often viewed as a neoconservative, articulated two things that made rescission of the resolution so significant. First, Bolton argued that to name a state as racist was to discredit it, and in fact eliminated its right to exist. For that reason he argued that it was really important to not call them racist—because naming racism was, in fact, destabilizing to the powers that managed the world. Second, Bolton argued that rescinding the resolution reflected the fall of the Eastern bloc that had removed the left from the global stage. Now that it was gone and the UN and world governments were not hamstrung by having to account for racism, the “grownups in the room” could get to the real work of governing the world. Rescinding Resolution 3379 indicated the triumph of the global right, in ideas and in actual power.

These stakes continue to make “Zionism is racism” an important claim now. We’re still engaged in battles over the content and significance of racism as a conceptualization of power. Those battles reflect the continuation of the Manichaean struggles between imperialism and its supremacist worldview on the one hand, and resistance and the opening of freer possible futures on the other.

Sean L. Malloy

This semester, I offered a new class on “Palestine, Race, and Resistance” for my undergraduate students at the University of California, Merced. As part of the class, I scheduled an entire session on Resolution 3379 and the question of Zionism and racism. I asked the students to read the resolution itself, as well as the series of speeches given in support by Palestinian intellectual and activist Fayez Sayegh, and the speech in opposition by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan.⁷ The class had generally been engaged and active, but when the time came for discussion of Resolution 3379, the normally talkative students went quiet. When I gently pushed them as to why they did not seem particularly engaged with the question of whether Zionism was racism, the response, roughly paraphrased, was as follows: “You had us read Herzl and Jabotinsky! Also it’s 2025 and we have eyes, ears, and telephones! It’s pretty obvious that Zionism is racism and always has been, and we aren’t sure why we are even talking about this as if it’s an open question.” 

My first response as an (occasionally) conscientious instructor was to push back against the students’ certainty on the relationship between Zionism and racism. Did this question not hinge on how we define both racism and Zionism? Are there not important nuances to race and racism over chronological and geographic divides that affect how we understand it in relation to Zionism? Are there not relevant differences between Zionism in theory and practice, as well as between its various advocates over time, that might complicate this question? Ultimately, though, I had to concede that for all the hypothetical nuance I could summon, the simple answer offered by my students was correct: Zionism is racism and always has been. This, in turn, posed another and potentially more relevant question: How did something so clear and obvious as the link between Zionism and racism become so mystified and controversial for so many people?

There is a political and diplomatic story to be told about the specifics surrounding the 1991 repeal of Resolution 3379 at the United Nations, but for the purposes of this venue I am more interested in the ideological and political work done by Zionist organizations to contest the obvious links between Zionism and racism, and in some cases coopt discourse on racism. Specifically, there were a few developments in the 1970s that made it possible to mystify what should be the common sense observation that Zionism is racism. 

The first was the emergence in the United States of neoconservativism, a movement that not coincidentally had strong connections to Zionism, and which mounted an aggressive challenge to the very notion of racism as a structural force. I will not dwell at length on this aspect of Zionist countermobilization as Keith Feldman and Emmaia Gelman, among others, have done important work on this subject.⁸ I would also suggest, however, that the evolution of certain forms of institutionalized Ethnic Studies in later 1970s also played a role in obscuring the links between Zionism and racism, to the extent that they embraced notions of identity-based multiculturalism focusing on representation and the domestic sphere rather than on the more pointed anti-imperialist and internationalist vision that had animated the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) and other groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁹ The combined result of the neoconservative assault on any notions of structural racism from the political Right, combined with a nominally Left form of institutionalized ethnic studies that retreated from anti-imperialism, helped to obscure the structural links between Zionism and racism that had been made so stark in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war only a few years earlier. 

A second and related development is that, starting in the 1970s, Zionists took advantage of the changing political and intellectual environment around race and racism to promote Zionism itself as a protected category. From Jean Améry’s 1969 declaration that “today’s anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism and the antisemitism of yesteryear find themselves in absolute agreement” through the advent of the so-called “new anti-Semitism” as promoted by ADL figures (including David A. Rose, Benjamin R. Epstein, and Arnold Forster) as well as by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Zionists sought to reposition Israel as the so-called “Jew among nations” while identifying Zionism as both liberatory and an inherent aspect of Jewish identity that warranted state protection.¹⁰ The promulgation of the the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in 2016 (in which seven of the eleven examples provided involve the state of Israel) and the avalanche of Title VI complaints against American universities which conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism after October 7, 2023 are the logical result of a campaign begun in the 1970s to mystify and coopt the links Zionism and racism.¹¹

To this extent, the battle over Resolution 3379 and its afterlife goes far beyond the United Nations to encompass a broader debate over how we understand the relationship between race, power, imperialism and settler colonialism. And it is not surprising that today we see that battle playing out in struggles over the teaching of ethnic studies at both the university and K-12 level. I teach in a department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) that centers the study of power in an anti-imperialist context, which partly explains why the link between Zionism and racism was so obvious to my students. CRES’ study of power is also why Zionists, including the Democratic supermajority in the state legislature, have fought so hard to censor, suppress, or co-opt the teaching of ethnic studies in my home state of California, and why individual ethnic studies teachers and professors have been repeatedly targeted by Zionist lawfare and harassment campaigns. 

The recent passage of AB 715 in California, a bill sponsored by the Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) that seeks to discipline K-12 teachers who teach about Palestine while creating a special state-level position of “antisemitism coordinator,” is in many ways the logical culmination of the long-running battle by Zionists to obscure the relationship between racism and Zionism by ideologically policing the classroom.¹² Winning this battle – and affirming the simple and obvious truth that Zionism is racism – will require not simply defeating Zionist organizations and their enablers in Washington and Sacramento, but also reclaiming ethnic studies from a careerist and liberal multicultural formation and returning to the fiercely internationalist and anti-imperialist vision that animated for formation of the field in the midst of another time of genocide. 

Nadine Naber

At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in South Africa, I was part of a U.S. Women of Color Delegation. It was a coalitional delegation addressing multiple intersecting issues, including prisons, neoliberal economy, poverty, Palestine, Indigenous struggles, and environmental injustices. The conference itself was elitist and racist. When we got there, we learned that it was also inaccessible to many South African organizations and movements. At the same time, the United States boycotted the conference because of planned discussions of Zionism as a form of racism and slavery as a crime against humanity. 

COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, had organized a two day strike around the conference. Outside the barricades, about one million workers and thousands of participants from the conference protested not only against the conference, but on behalf of all of our conjoined struggles. Palestine was a common ground among many of them. From protesting on the streets, one iteration of the international movement for divestment from Israel was launched. Activists on the streets conjoined resistance to anti-black exploitation in South Africa under apartheid, resistance to capitalism, and global anti-colonial workers struggles. It was a movement of many movements focusing on the connected realities of Black and Palestinian workers living under military occupation, land dispossession, segregation of labor and mobility restrictions, and aggressive policing and militarism.

What is the relevance of this history to those of us committed to Palestinian liberation within the American Studies Association? What would it look like if more Palestine-related activism within ASA applied a conjoined struggle approach, as the streets of Durban called for at the WCAR in 2001? We can look to some strands of U.S. organizing for models—the Palestinian Youth Movement, Dissenters, INCITE!-Palestine Force—that have maintained a focus on on how abolishing racial capitalism in the U.S. depends on dismantling U.S. empire and decolonizing Palestine, or how organizing for Palestinian liberation necessitates ending U.S. police violence (given the sharing of resources and technology across the prison and military industrial complexes, for instance.) 

We are  already well-resourced within the ASA, especially since the Empire Studies framework, a core commitment of ASA, has established coalitional, transnational, anti-imperialist analytics. Empire Studies begins from the historical realities that the United States was founded on settler colonialism, that settler colonialism and racial capitalism are mutually related, and so on. Why, then, does organizing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation so often continue to be framed as if Palestine were an island, a distant site of solidarity far away? What would it look like to commit to expanding practices of relationship building between Native Studies, Black Studies, and Palestine Studies, for example, and to frame organizing around Palestine within the ASA more centrally through the joint struggle frameworks articulated by scholars like Keith Feldman, Alex Lubin, Angela Davis, Robyn Kelly, Jodi Byrd, Ruthi Gilmore, Noura Erekat, Dylan Rodríguez, Nick Estes, Erica Edwards, and Laila Sharif, and in my co-authored work with Clarissa Rojas? 

We have learned from the history of COINTELPRO [the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) program of surveillance and sabotage of the U.S. Left] that the FBI, with the Anti-Defamation League, was targeting Black liberation and Palestine liberation simultaneously. The “counter-terrorism” projects of the Clinton administration, which initially moved to name Palestinian organizations “foreign terrorist organizations,” were subsequently expanded to criminalize and punish Black movements and communities by framing them as “domestic terrorism.” As these efforts are used to de-legitimize movements in different ways and to different degrees, they reinforce and sustain U.S. empire including, most centrally, the colonization of Indigenous land here. And then, of course, the militarization of police at Palestine solidarity encampments on college campuses, too, demands an anti-imperialist approach to abolishing the police and prisons.

Now let me turn to another key site of struggle at the World Conference against Racism in 2001. There, a communiqué issued by about three thousand NGOs accused Israel of systematic perpetration of racist crimes, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The Palestinian contingent stressed the importance of comprehending the Zionist state as a white supremacist, racist project, referencing its foundational structures as an essential component of Zionist settler colonial genocide.

This is a second key analysis from the WCAR moment. While a great deal of academic activism focuses on Israeli settler colonialism in the West Bank and Gaza, we don’t talk enough about what settler colonialism looks like for the Palestinians who remained in the Zionist state   (referred to as ‘48 Palestinians within a decolonial framework.) As much as we critique and challenge Israeli settler colonialism, we should also be engaging in a related analysis of the significance of the white supremacy underlying the Israeli state to sustaining genocide overall. For instance, the attempted erasure of Palestinians living within the Zionist state through racist forced assimilation projects is central to Israeli settler colonialism overall. 

Confronting the settler-colonial foundations of the Israeli state necessitates taking seriously not only the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but also the nature of the state of Israel itself. For example, it requires addressing land expropriation inside the Green Line, and opposing the fragmentation of Palestinian people (i.e. ’48 Palestinians.) It requires standing against the racial discrimination and apartheid endured by Palestinians inside the Israeli state, including the settler-colonial project of assimilation into Israeli society. As this look backward at the WCAR reminds us, the struggles of 1948 Palestinians are not separate— not merely struggles around racial exclusion—but part of the continuous Palestinian struggle against displacement, dispossession and erasure. 

What would refusing the settler-colonial strategy of fragmenting Palestinian people look like in ASA’s political organizing work? What would it look like to expand our relationships with Palestinians of 1948? As the WCAR of 2001 reminds us: Conjoined struggle, or a movement of many movements, as well as the comprehensive decolonization of all of Palestine, must remain at the center of our work as we continue to oppose the ongoing genocide in Palestine from the belly of the beast.