Call for Papers: Zionism and/as Racism

a special issue to be published in November 2025

Fifty years ago, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. The UNGA had recently recognized apartheid as a crime and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had achieved non-member observer status at the United Nations (UN). Despite the current global consensus that racism and apartheid are relevant frameworks for understanding the Zionist colonization of Palestine, the trajectory of this idea in the international arena has been neither consistent nor smooth. Historically, framing Zionism as racism was not central to the Palestinian national struggle, particularly with regard to the first UN resolution (1975). Scholars have argued that the ongoing recurrence of this formulation at the UN was advanced strategically, in solidarity with, and paralleling, longstanding battles to defeat South African apartheid, in the 20th century, and to secure reparations for slavery, in the 21st. Of course, the characterization of Zionism as racism has been consistently provocative to Western powers—the United States in particular—which have gone to great lengths to silence or eliminate that claim. Indeed, one of Israel’s preconditions for entering into the Oslo peace negotiations was the retraction of UN Resolution 3379, which the PLO agreed to in 1991. The three subsequent UN World Conferences Against Racism (in 2001, 2009, and 2021) were similarly plagued by US and Israeli pressure to silence any consideration of Zionism as racism, including walkouts by their countries’ delegations (in 2001) and outright boycott of the conference altogether by these states (in 2009 and 2021).

We know well that the earliest Zionist texts, analyses, and political appeals were steeped in racialist ideas. We recognize that this 50-year anniversary of the original UN resolution coincides with an at least temporary cessation (“ceasefire”) of the worst violence inflicted on the Palestinian people in the history of their existence, a genocide that was openly couched and justified by Israeli leaders and the Israeli public in racist terms. Harking back to 19th-century European imperialism, Zionists mobilized notions of savagery, barbarism, “terrorism,” and backwardness to explain, defend, and justify the Gaza genocide as a practice of civilizational preservation, innocence protection, and moral uplift. 

With this special issue, the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism invites submissions of scholarly, activist, and artistic work that help clarify the historical legacies of the “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution as well as its contemporary political relevance. We welcome work that is historical, empirical, and/or theoretical in its broad consideration of Zionism as racism and the consequences and meanings of that claim – for the Palestinian liberation struggle and broader liberatory struggle – in our contemporary moment.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Epistemologies of Zionism as racism
  • “Zionism is racism” as a knowledge claim about racism and/or about Zionism
  • “Zionism is racism” as a taboo claim or forbidden knowledge
  • Zionist criticism of the claim “Zionism is racism” as a form of knowledge production
  • “Zionism is racism” as situated within a larger history of ideas; e.g., racial knowledges, colonial knowledges, canonical thought traditions of all sorts, etc.
  • anti-Zionism as anti-racist knowledge; antiracist knowledges and knowledge production
  • Indigenous (within and beyond Palestine) epistemologies of Zionism as racism
• Genealogies of antiracism and “Zionism is racism”
  • in the Palestinian national struggle 
  • in the broader Palestinian liberation struggle
  • in Palestine itself, ‘48, ‘67,  and/or the Diaspora
  • as an articulable knowledge claim in broader/global movements for justice and/or decolonization
  • Palestinians’ theorizations of “Zionism is racism” 
• Genealogies of Resolution 3379
  • within the Palestinian national struggle
  • within broader global movements for justice and liberation and/or global regimes of (settler) colonial consolidation and repression (such as the Bandung conference and the Non-Aligned Movement)
  • considerations of contemporary notions of anti-Palestinian racism and their relationship (or not) to Resolution 3379
• Zionism as racism and international law
  • legacies of pre- and post-WWII international legal orders (e.g., the UN, League of Nations)
  • international law, Zionism as racism, and genocide
• Historical or contemporary examples of Zionism as racism
  • in legal practice
  • in political discourses and policy
  • in socioeconomic or cultural realms
• Interconnections, overlaps, and/or disconnects between and among different iterations of racisms proximate to Zionism, both locally and globally
  • anti-Arab racism
  • anti-Palestinian racism
  • Islamophobia 
  • orientalism
  • anti-Blackness
• Critical geographies of race/racialization
  • the “Middle East” as imaginary (urban and social development and landscapes, visual cultural modalities and iterations, border formations)
  • the Middle East, SWANA, and the Global South
  • Third Worldism and antiracism
  • the geography of Zionism, colonialism, apartheid, and/or racial capitalism
• Zionist and/or Jewish as an ethnic/national/racial identity
  • Zionist projects of redefining racism away from systemic and structural analysis (e.g., notions of “hate” or “Jew-hatred”)
  • the emergence of “Judeo-Christian” as racial/civilizational marker 
  • white liberalism and Zionism; liberal or “soft” Zionism
  • Zionist criticism of discussions of racism as a form of counterinsurgency 

Please submit 400-500-word proposals/abstracts to journal@criticalzionismstudies.org by April 1, 2025. For full consideration, please include author/participant name(s), affiliation(s) (where appropriate), contact information, and a 100-word (maximum) biographical statement.

We invite proposals/abstracts from scholars, activists, and cultural workers and are particularly interested in submissions of alternative forms of publications such as roundtable discussions, activist strategies for challenging and resisting Zionism, and artistic contributions.