The Toxic Other: The Palestinian Critique and Debates About Race and Racism

Abstract

This article explores an important feature of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) that is salient in the North American and European academic landscape: the expulsion of the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel from rational and even anti-racist discourse. This expulsion takes place through the toxification of the Palestinian other whereby Palestinian epistemology is to be mistrusted and shunned because it is allegedly rooted in an antisemitic disposition. This amounts to a racialization of the Palestinian critique in the name of anti-racism, which can be seen in recent definitions of antisemitism, the debate over the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and harassment campaigns against Palestinian scholars. I argue that we must name this expulsion as a form of racialization that is part and parcel of colonial modernity. The article concludes that without a centralization of the Palestinian critique, decolonial and anti-racist efforts will not live up to their professed ideals.

Introduction

There has been a discursive shift on the question of Palestine in conversations across North America about race, racism and racial violence. This shift stems from the latest upsurge in Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing and settler colonization in the spring of 2021. Using digital and traditional media platforms, the incisive analyses, reports, videos and actions emerging from Palestinians have gripped the world’s attention and seemingly melted into thin air all the usual and superficial talking points that obfuscate, justify and propagate Israeli settler colonial violence against the Palestinians (e.g. Israel acts in self-defence, Palestinians are terrorists, Israeli Jews are the real indigenous people of the land). Numerous viral videos show Israeli Jewish settlers and occupation forces dehumanizing Palestinians, taking Palestinian lives, homes and lands without any hindrance or consequence, and celebrating the death and destruction of Palestinians and Palestine (e.g. Eye on Palestine). These videos show a clear picture of the assertion and practice of Israeli Jewish racial supremacy over Palestinians, making it increasingly clear for North American audiences that the question of Palestine is a racial justice issue.

In addition to the courage and voices of Palestinians, some analysts have also pointed to the widespread attention to racialized state violence that was fought for and established by the Movement for Black Lives as a factor that enabled this discursive shift (e.g. El-Sherif, 2021). The landscape created by Black communities was conducive to the activism of Palestinian communities in their attempts to break through the ideological curtain and communicate their stories of racialized colonial state violence. This was especially aided by the Movement for Black Lives’ long-standing and explicit solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle against racialized state violence (Erakat and Hill, 2019).

That a discursive shift occurred during the spring of 2021 is apparent, but questions remain (as they do for the Movement for Black Lives): is that shift deep and permanent? And can/will the discursive shift lead to substantive and transformative policy, cultural and structural changes? This article cannot answer these open questions, but the questions themselves orient the analysis. In delineating certain aspects of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) that feature in academic institutions across Europe and North America, this article seeks to name and elucidate a dynamic of expulsion that must be overcome to deepen the discursive shift.

In the following analysis, then, the article first explains how the expulsion of the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel occurs through a toxification of the Palestinian as a racialized being who can only bring toxicity to the struggles of other racialized minorities. Exemplary of this toxification is the effort to institutionalize definitions of antisemitism that equate the Palestinian critique with racism and hatred. Second, the article highlights a feature of APR within academic institutions where the Palestinian critique is expelled from the realm of valid, rational and respectable knowledge. In the debate over the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign (BDS), we find a racialization of the subject matter of Palestine, where in the name of anti-racism and rationality, Palestinian voices and experiences are erased. Finally, the article argues that a deeper discursive shift on Palestine cannot take place without a centralization of the subject matter of Palestine as Palestinian critique, and properly situating this critique as a decolonial alternative to colonial modernity.

Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what I mean by the Palestinian critique. I do not refer here to critiques made by Palestinians only. Certainly, Palestinians (scholars, artists, activists, communities, civil society organizations, resistance movements, political leaders, etc.) initiated, developed and are at the vanguard of advancing the Palestinian critique. But many others, including Jewish and Israeli scholars and activists, have drawn on and contributed to the Palestinian critique. As a body of knowledge and practice, this critique reveals the foundations and institutions of Israeli state and society as primarily racialized and settler colonial. Developed and advanced from the lived experiences of Palestinians for the purpose of liberating Palestinians, the Palestinian critique enables us to see, understand, study, analyse, oppose and transform Israeli settler colonialism and racism, properly situating the Zionist project within the larger project of colonial modernity. In a nutshell, the Palestinian critique foregrounds decolonial liberation from the racism and the racialized state violences of Israeli settler colonialism.

Toxification of the Palestinian Other

The Palestinian critique generally occupies an isolated and estranged space in the hierarchy of knowledge within the academy. The order of epistemological spaces in the academy is organized around racial logics established in and through colonial modernity, which have been theorized and studied for many years, powerfully articulated for example in the work of Aimé Césaire ([1955] 2000). At the top of the hierarchy is white colonizer epistemology, supposedly governed by reason, instrumental rationality, the scientific method, objectivity and neutrality. At the bottom of the hierarchy are Arab, Black, Indigenous and other colonized epistemologies, supposedly marked by passion, exaggeration, irrationality, impulsiveness, bias and violence. Like all racially marginalized epistemologies, the Palestinian critique is marked for doubt and suspicion – its veracity is deemed so dubious that it deserves hostility from any form of rational thinking.

In addition, the Palestinian critique is marked for a vigilance against its alleged racism and bigotry towards Jews, which marks it out for further hostility even from within anti-racist marginalized spaces. Since at least the 1970s, antisemitism has become associated with scholars and students who have adopted, contributed to and advanced the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israeli state and society (White, 2020). This concerted effort, supported by the Israeli state (White, 2020: 69–71), has effectively conjoined the Palestinian critique with antisemitism such that it is first and foremost interrogated for allegedly antisemitic content and/or intention. It is this association that toxifies the Palestinian critique.

Although it may be jarring for some readers, I believe that the term ‘toxic’ is necessary to describe the manner of expulsion of the Palestinian critique. It is not just unworthy of the lofty standards of scholarly reason and rationality, but like all toxic features of social and political life (toxic masculinity, toxic work culture, etc.), it is also posited as a generator of negative, oppressive, and destructive feelings, environments, and cultures. Thus, the sense I want to communicate through the notion of the toxic other is that the Palestinian is to be mistrusted, avoided and shunned, especially when they reach out to join others in the struggle against racism. Succinctly put, the Palestinian is constituted as the manifestation of an epistemology that is inherently bigoted and racist towards Jews.

Certainly, the charge of racism against racialized epistemologies is not entirely unique to Palestinians. Black scholars who are situated within Black studies, for example, are constantly attacked for an alleged anti-White racism. But what is perhaps unique in the case of the Palestinian critique is that its alleged racism is directed not towards the powerful White majority but against a minority in the North American landscape that faces real threats from the system of White supremacy, even while this minority claims a kind of belonging to that system because of their support for the Zionist project. A brief discussion of this complex situation is necessary.

Jewish life within Israel is marked by Israeli Jewish supremacy over Palestinians (Abu-Laban and Bakan, 2008; Bashir and Farsakh, 2020; Massad, 2006; Tatour, 2019; Wolfe, 2016), but in the North American landscape, Jewish life is still operating as a minority within a state and society that is foundationally White supremacist. The picture is further complicated by Israel’s belonging to Euro-American imperial hegemony, which is rooted in Euro-American colonial and global White supremacy. Israel’s role in the global order cannot be divorced from the changing dynamics of Jewish life within North America. Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan (2008) explain, ‘the forced removal, punishment, and occupation of an indigenous Palestinian population in the aftermath of World War Two . . . has coincided with the “whitening” of the Jewish population in the west’ (p. 644). This ‘whitening’ is neither straightforward nor even.

On one hand, Jewish life on the local scale within Euro-American spaces is subjected to White supremacy historically and to the present. Simultaneously, Jewish life is complicated by Israel’s settler colonial project since this project emerges from and is a manifestation of colonial modernity’s production of race and racialization as ‘a project of colonial distinction and discriminatory practices’ (Lentin, 2020: 7) that serve White supremacy on a global scale. In its participation in the colonial project, the taming of the orient, the advancement of ‘Western values’, securing ‘Western interests’, Israel, precisely because it is a settler colonial project, comes to belong to the ‘Western’ sphere of ‘civilization’ and the ‘properly human’. Alana Lentin (2020) explains, ‘White Jews . . . have been pulled by both a western Christian establishment and the outstretched arm of the Zionist state into the Eurocentric and exclusionary borders of the human’ (pp. 132–133). In its long and well documented efforts to become an equal to the European Master, Zionism has always sought to mirror Euro-American colonial and settler colonial power. In this endeavour, Zionism casts itself in much the same way as Euro-American settler colonial and colonial power has cast itself and justified its violences towards the racialized people that it colonized and destroyed. As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014) captures it,

The Jewish state not only casts Palestinian subjects as a dangerous threat to the sovereignty of the white/Jewish citizens belonging to the Global North, but this racialized logic also justifies the necessity of their suffering, while serving as the (often implicit and unspoken) analytical lens in which to understand its continuity. (p. 282)

In a sense, Theodor Herzl’s dream of gaining acceptance from White Christian Europe – not acceptance of his existence within Europe (i.e. as belonging to and being of Europe as a Jew), but acceptance of his Jewish self as that which is indeed outside of Europe, as a sovereign coming from elsewhere, standing as equal in status to the sovereign European self that he wants to emulate (Piterberg, 2008) – that dream is realized not by transforming racial logics of colonialism but by joining them. The status of Jewish life is transformed within the racial logics and hierarchies that operate within localized Euro-American spaces, by placing Jewish life in alliance with Euro-American White supremacy on the global scale.

This deal comes at a great price, which is largely and primarily paid by the Palestinians who are racialized as the orient against which the occidental European produces its imagined superiority (Said, 1979, 1995, 2003 [1979]). It is paid by Arab, Black and other racialized Jews in Israel and beyond who must assimilate to White Ashkenazi supremacy (Shohat, 2020). It is also paid by all Jewish people (though unevenly) in Euro-American spaces since

the political antisemitism that is finding new levels of acceptability in the West is evidence of the tenuousness of the top-down humanization and exceptionalization of European Jews . . . Jews’ participation in the whitening of Jewry weakens the line of defence against the coloniality that produced the notion of Jewish, and other, racial difference. (Lentin, 2020: 133–134)

For example, instead of joining forces with Muslims and Islam, the external enemy who along with the internal enemy of Europe, Jews and Judaism, constitute the identity of Europe (Anidjar, 2003), the alignment of Zionism with Euro-American imperial hegemony associates Jewish life with power. Aligned with the state and whiteness, Jews in Euro-America are positioned in a way that ‘equates “the Jews” with power, leaving them open to antisemitic attack’ (Lentin, 2020: 166). The top-down humanization does not de-racialize Jews, but rather appears as a philosemitism that further racializes and essentializes Jews (Lentin, 2020: 139–170): ‘The philosemitic defence of Jews and Israel relies on the tacit acceptance of the idea of Jews as perennial foreigners’ (Lentin, 2020: 165).

From this complex positionality of Jewish life across geographical spaces emerges both a potentiality for decolonial liberation (a path taken by scholars like Judith Butler, Alana Lentin, Ilan Pappé and many others) and the dominant trend of weaponizing antisemitism for the purposes of empire and settler colonialism, which uses the real threat to Jewish life in Euro-America to cement, strengthen and expand Israel’s positionality within Euro-American imperial hegemony. It is in this latter trend that we find the positing of the Palestinian as the toxic other. Exemplary of the dominant trend over the last few years is the latest campaign to expel the Palestinian critique: the push to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism across social and political institutions.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is an effort to cast as antisemitic the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel through the illustrative examples in the IHRA working definition (Ayyash, 2020). The IHRA working definition is so vague and useless in protecting Jews from White supremacy; it deserves little attention in a serious academic journal. The purpose of the IHRA is found in its examples of antisemitism, 7 out of 11 of which deal with critiques of Israel, which are designed to formally institutionalize the already functional expulsion of the Palestinian critique.

For instance, the IHRA suggests that to include Palestinians within the academic literature on race, racism and racialization is deemed in and of itself a racist act. The underlying allegation being that such an inclusion makes of Zionism and Israel a racist project and is thus antisemitic, as one of the IHRA examples of antisemitism makes clear: ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’ (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2016).

While proponents of the IHRA use crude rhetorical gymnastics to suggest that the examples do not censor speech, are not legally binding and so on (for a critique of those points, see Gould, 2018), I want to briefly underline how proponents of the IHRA attempt to couch their approach in anti-racism since this couching operates beyond the IHRA and plays a critical role in toxifying the Palestinian critique.

We often hear from proponents of the IHRA that only Jews can determine what qualifies as antisemitism, and any attempt to critique the IHRA constitutes an antisemitic and racist attempt to tell a racialized minority the reality of their lived experiences. On a general level, this trope sounds sensible, but there are two serious flaws in this case. First, arguments from proponents of the IHRA de-contextualize the aforementioned complexity of Jewish life and conceal the actual target of the IHRA. Instead of delving into the complexities and subtleties of anti-racist thought and praxis, they are drawing on the enunciatory effect of anti-racism in the service of racializing Palestinians as toxic. The anti-racism of the IHRA is indeed a form of racialization. As Justin Podur (2021) puts it, ‘It is a racism that cloaks itself in anti-racism’.

Second, the IHRA’s overwhelming focus is on Israel and the Palestinian critique, not localized Jewish experiences and suffering from White supremacy. Therefore, colonized Palestinians and their allies have every right to intervene in this debate and against an effort to discursively expel the Palestinian. Succinctly put, the Palestinian critique of the IHRA, far from breaking ranks with anti-racist praxis as is alleged by the shallow ‘anti-racism’ of the IHRA proponents, is defending itself from a form of racialization that seeks to cement and advance the toxification of Palestinian epistemologies.

But regardless of substantial arguments, the mere fact that the debate is shifted onto the grounds of anti-racism is a critical part of the IHRA’s efforts to toxify Palestine and Palestinians within anti-racist spaces. When we understand this effect of the IHRA, we begin to observe that the success of the IHRA should not only be judged by its adoption, but in its ability to determine the contours of the conversation over Palestine and Israel. The opposition to the IHRA in the mainstream of academia reveals that the IHRA has achieved some success in determining these contours.

Allegedly coming to the rescue of Palestinians and others who want to promote BDS, openly research and teach serious critiques of Zionism and Israel, and so on, is the liberal Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), crafted and promoted mainly by world renowned Jewish and Israeli liberal and progressive scholars. Many non-Jewish and non-Israeli scholars and activists are also currently using the JDA to oppose the IHRA. But underneath the genuine claim of the strategic necessity of the JDA is lost an important dynamic: the JDA is merely the latest example of Jewish voices and scholars coming to the foreground of the conversation over Palestine and Israel.

Much like the IHRA, the JDA considers Jewish and Israeli scholars as the authority on defining antisemitism. This would be completely valid and reasonable if it was not directly targeting the colonized Palestinians, but like the IHRA, the JDA is largely dedicated to the question of Palestine and Israel. Thus, the JDA contributes, regardless of its stated intention, to the toxification of Palestine by unilaterally deciding on what may and may not constitute antisemitism in discussions over Palestine and Israel (Ayyash, 2021b). The very discursive act of situating the Palestinian critique within the larger problem of antisemitism, even if it is to defend the Palestinian critique (albeit weakly and meagrely, Ayyash, 2021b), cements the connection between Palestinian epistemologies and antisemitism.

In its stated objective to establish the contours of legitimate and valid debate over Palestine and Israel, the JDA positions itself as representative of rational and reasonable thinking, casting out the uncontrollable passions that it claims can, in some cases, come along with the Palestinian critique. Because the JDA considers itself the great expiator of the Palestinian critique, assuring its intended White European and North American audiences that it will vouch for the acceptable and valid parts of the Palestinian critique, the JDA keeps intact the racialized epistemological order, where respectable knowledge must always remain vigilant against the Palestinian critique because it is prone to exaggeration, irrationality, hatred and the violence of antisemitism (Ayyash, 2021b).

Accentuated in these conversations is the Palestinian’s alleged toxic politicization of an otherwise healthy and robust environment of academic debate and discussion. This even occurs in spaces that do not deny the salience of structural racism (and there’s a range here from the shallow ‘anti-racism’ of IHRA proponents, to the widespread silence on the IHRA that is present among scholars who proclaim a deeper anti-racist praxis and politics, to liberal oppositions of the IHRA). The Palestinian body is racialized as that which oozes a toxic politicization that endangers the unity and the success of the fight against racism.

In the welding of antisemitism with the Palestinian critique, particularly in the IHRA and other Israeli state efforts to institutionalize such a fusing, the Palestinian is rendered a danger to the advancement of the liberation projects of the racialized and colonized. The predominant message from pro-Israeli proponents is rather simple: if you are, for example, a Black scholar struggling for Black liberation, then do not conjoin with the Palestinian other, the toxic other, because the success of your liberation is predicated on your abandonment of the Palestinian.

The denial of Palestine and the Palestinian experience as racialized in the name of antisemitism is not part of an honest, deep, rigorous and critical debate about race, racism and racialization in Palestine/Israel, but is indeed part of the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine as Palestinian critique. That is, it is racism and racialization that renders the subject matter of Palestine as so toxic that we cannot even name the racialization of Palestinians as racialization, not even within discursive spaces that accept the salience of structural racism. Thus, I am not referring to the denial of race and racism that is prevalent in public discourse (Lentin, 2020: 52–92), but rather to the specific denial of Palestinian racialization: the idea that only racism against Palestinians is not really racism, and the absurd and misdirecting allegation that the notion of Palestinian racialization is a clever ploy hatched by Palestinians to destroy the Jewish state and therefore Jews everywhere. This form of racialization of the subject matter of Palestine is widespread in the Euro-American academy.

Racialization of the Subject Matter of Palestine: A Feature of APR

The ‘Palestine Exception’ is so pervasive on campuses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and other places that many commentaries, articles and books have been written about it (e.g. Capdepón and Moses, 2021; Drummond, 2014; Hill and Plitnick, 2021; Landy et al., 2020; Palumbo-Liu, 2017; Shwaikh and Gould, 2019; Thompson, 2011). In hushed tones around university campuses, academics know well that talking openly and honestly about Palestine and Palestinian liberation is dangerous. Communicated among faculty members and students as one of the trade secrets of the profession is the knowledge that researching and teaching about Palestinian rights and liberation can lead to intimidation and harassment campaigns, a failed application for tenure, promotion, and/or grants, loss of status and prestige, securing a tenure-track position, and so on.

Many scholars, especially racialized ones, have experienced these kinds of Zionist attacks: Edward Said, Rabab Abdulhadi, Joseph Massad, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Steven Salaita, Nahla Abdo, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Angela Y. Davis, Marc Lamont Hill, Jasbir K. Puar, David Palumbo-Liu, Nick Estes, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Cornell West, Achille Mbembe and many others. The blacklisting website, Canary Mission, is full of names of scholars who are cast as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers for supporting BDS, opposing the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and/or for simply speaking up for Palestinian liberation. These are the names and stories of scholars who have had to face varying intensity and durability of attacks and have had different degrees of success and failure in surviving the attack on their reputations and livelihoods.

Underneath the publicized stories is a deeply entrenched structure of harassment, censorship and intimidation, which targets students, activists and scholars who dare to speak up for Palestinian rights and liberation (Palestine Legal, 2015). In this state of affairs, some Palestinian, Jewish and other scholars and activists believe that a concept of APR must enter public discourse in order to counter and remedy the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians (e.g. Abu-Laban and Bakan, 2021; Beinart, 2021; Karmi, 2021; Majid, 2022; Podur, 2021). While APR is relatively new as a term in public discourse, academic analyses have been theorizing and studying racism against Palestinians for decades.

The phenomenon, while not explicitly named APR, was and is still presented under the banner of anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, colonial racism and/or orientalism. In the English-speaking academy, such analysis can be traced back to at least the 1960s in Fayez Sayegh’s ([1965] 2012) work, but the presence of racialized and anti-colonial analysis of the Palestinian struggle has had a continuous presence in Palestinian political and academic discourses since at least the 1910s (for overviews and analyses, see, for example, Abdo, 2011; Khalidi, 2020; Sayigh, [1979] 2007; Takriti, 2019). While it is necessary to distinguish between APR and these other concepts, it is important to acknowledge that intellectually speaking, it is not only possible but accurate to focus on the specificity of APR within larger structures of racism, orientalism and colonialism (Abu-Laban and Bakan, 2021). This avoids the inaccurate suggestion that APR is exceptional and properly situates it within the larger struggle against racism, racialized colonialism and colonial global capitalism (Abdo, 2011; Davis, 2016; Erakat and Hill, 2019: 14).

Scholars and activists utilizing the concept of APR, then, have a rich tradition of academic and political analysis to draw on in order to theorize and study its current configurations, manifestations, effects, affects and so on. This article does not attempt a comprehensive accounting of APR’s genealogy or an elucidation of all of its features, but rather focuses on one aspect of contemporary APR that I believe to be the most salient (though not new) in academia: the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine, where in the name of anti-racism and rationality, Palestinians face the expulsion and erasure of their voices and experiences as Palestinians who represent an alternative to Zionism and Israel.

In addition to the push for academic institutions to adopt the IHRA and the IHRA versus JDA debate, APR can also be observed in the institutional reaction towards efforts to boycott Israeli universities. It is critical to first emphasize Steven Salaita’s point that boycotts in academia are not controversial and indeed regularly take place, including the structural expulsion of the Palestinian critique from academia, which is a kind of boycott (Salaita, 2016: 42–56). The controversy around BDS stems from the fact that the Palestinian critique of Israel is considered taboo in North America, both within and outside of academic institutions (Salaita, 2016: 42).

Because BDS is a Palestinian response to Zionist and Israeli settler colonial aggression, and because BDS is a form of action that points towards an alternative future, it engenders the expulsion of Palestinian voices and experiences from academic institutions. And while this expulsion of Palestine and Palestinians is specifically APR, it is critical to also underscore how this is situated within the larger context of colonial racialization, which can be observed in the reaction to the adoption of BDS.

When BDS was adopted by the American Studies Association (ASA), a firestorm erupted with accusations of antisemitism, politicization, uncivility, unprofessionalism and the rest. The content of these debates is superficial, and it is not worth rehashing here what has already been convincingly refuted (e.g. Bakan and Abu-Laban, 2009; Barghouti, 2011; Butler, 2006; Lim, 2012; Salaita, 2016). What is more telling is that the firestorm over the ASA’s adoption of BDS was much bigger than any generated when the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) adopted BDS. Salaita (2016) explains, ‘Whereas the AAAS and NAISA adoptions of academic boycott can be dismissed as the rumblings of fields that are inherently politicized, and thus unimportant, American studies is supposed to be a venerable discipline with respectable origins’ (p. 50).

The point I want to underline concerns the disparity in the level of attack, which depends in large part on how far the Palestinian critique is allowed to enter academic spaces. So long as the Palestinian critique remains marginalized within already marginalized spaces – that is, if it remains isolated and estranged, it is more or less, left alone. If it ventures beyond those estranged boundaries and enters spheres like the ASA, then a full-frontal attack is launched. Moreover, if it moves beyond its confined estrangement within a marginalized academic field or association like NAISA, then that association and field risk even further marginalization.

This can be observed in the case of Salaita’s firing in 2014 two weeks before commencing his position as an associate professor in American Indian Studies (AIS). Salaita (2016: 137–140) properly situates his termination from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) within the structural precarity of AIS across American universities. In the colonial and racist worldview of university management, AIS exists to deal with a ‘Fourth world’ that is believed to pose a manageable threat to the settler colonial project on Turtle Island. It is rendered a safe endeavour for the university in so far as it flavours the liberal tolerance and respect for diversity self-image of universities, so long as it does not radically or seriously challenge the settler colonial foundation of the United States and Canada.

But of course, decolonial resistance to settler colonization has never ceased, and the field and praxis of Indigenous Studies moves in accordance with its own trajectory of resistance and decolonial liberation. This is why, for instance, Indigenous scholars reach out to Palestine and operate within a fruitful path of Palestine solidarity. When such inter/national solidarities and engagements take place, and Palestine is brought into a space that is already deemed too radical in its critique and in need of careful management and containment, the attack on these departments and fields is always already positioned within the larger context of colonial erasure of the colonized.

Most telling in the case of Salaita is how the attack unfolded against a domain where the Palestinian critique is platformed and finds a natural home (Salaita, 2016: 143). While questioning hiring practices appears in other similar pro-Israel and Zionist attacks, Salaita highlights how in this case, AIS at UIUC was attacked through a questioning of its knowledge base and the ability to make rational decisions on its own (Salaita, 2016: 136–143). In other words, it was attacked through an already existing and constantly circulating colonial and racialized order of epistemologies that position Indigenous epistemologies in need of the patronage and civilization of White epistemology.

Indeed, we find similar dynamics operative in the recent attacks on critical race theory that frame their attempt at racialized erasures of Black epistemologies as a defence of rationality. Much like the attack on the Palestinian critique and AIS, we find in this case an attempt to equate racialized epistemologies as prejudiced, violent and irrational hatreds of what are in fact supremacist, colonizing and imperial forces. While there is a difference between White supremacist accusations of anti-White racism against Black scholars and Zionist accusations of antisemitism against Palestinian scholars as I earlier pointed out, the driving logic and the effect are the same in so far as they cast against scientific knowledge the supposedly irrational passions that mark Black and Palestinian critiques.

The toxification of Palestinians is therefore best conceptualized as a weapon that positions Palestinians for expulsion (i.e. the distinctive feature of APR), while simultaneously we remain attentive to how the marginalization and isolation of the Palestinian critique follows racist and racializing techniques that have been developed and mastered, tried and tested, within the logics and structures of colonial modernity. We find these colonial and White supremacist efforts everywhere directed towards colonized and racialized epistemologies. This is critical because it means that the effort to racialize the Palestinian as toxic reveals Zionist proponents (from the left to the right) as ones that are aligned with the project of colonial modernity.

Centralizing the Palestinian Critique

In response to the ‘Palestine Exception’, critical scholars have argued that Palestine and the Palestinian struggle must come to be included in progressive politics and critical scholarship where progressives apply to Palestinians the same ideals of freedom, justice, equality, and human and political rights, which are regularly applied to other racialized and marginalized groups (Hill and Plitnick, 2021). But the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine is deeper than that because how and by whom Palestine is included is critical to underscore.

Often, the Palestinian critique is marginally or partially included into mainstream spaces through Jewish and other voices, but rarely as an expression of the Palestinian critique from Palestinian lived experiences and voices. For example, Palestinian scholars have for decades analysed, explained and revealed the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their lands in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), but these accounts were/are ignored, devalued, erased and concealed. It was not until Jewish and Israeli scholars wrote about it that the Nakba partially and inadequately entered the mainstream of academia. As I have articulated the matter (Ayyash, 2021a) elsewhere, ‘Only after Israeli historians recognized the Nakba some 30-40 years after the event, did the academic world come to the following, whispered conclusion: “Oh my goodness, those Palestinian academics knew that they were expelled!” What a ground-breaking discovery!’

Where Palestine as Palestinian critique, beyond the marginalized though still influential field of Palestine Studies, increasingly appears without the need for a chaperon is in anti-racist and decolonial literatures. This has led to a backlash against those literatures and a renewed attack on the Palestinian critique through the IHRA, whereby Palestine as a subject matter is posited as one that does not belong to racialization or decolonial literatures. Precursing the IHRA, since at least the ‘Zionism is racism’ campaign, we find a concerted effort to posit Palestine and Palestinians as outside of race and racism, as raceless – in other words, the racialization of Palestinians is undertaken ‘in the name of racelessness’ (Goldberg, 2009: 130). As Bakan and Abu-Laban (2021) summarize in their overview,

In the Western academy there is a growing literature on the ways in which criticizing Israel’s policies are suppressed, which might account in part for why approaching Israel/Palestine in relation to race, racism and racialization is not a popular or common approach. (p. 2173)

This suppression is itself part of the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine: it is the establishment and cementation of an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (a la Charles Mills’ notion of a ‘racial contract’) that ‘renders racism directed at Palestinians unknowable’ (Bakan and Abu-Laban, 2021: 2170). In denying the racialization of Palestine, this discursive racialization follows ‘a racial logic of elimination and dispossession’ that marks the Zionist settler colonial conquest of Palestine (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2014: 278). That is, the racialization of Palestinians as outside of reason is rooted in the settler colonial elimination and replacement of the indigenous Palestinians from the land that is to become Israel (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2014: 285–286). As it belongs to this settler colonial project, the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine is part of the effort to secure the elimination of the indigenous through a discursive expulsion of the Palestinian critique.

This discursive expulsion is therefore predicated on the Israeli settler colonial project’s ‘purification’ of the land from the toxic Palestinian body, ‘making the desert bloom’, and the rest of it. Mirroring this elimination and replacement, the racialization of the subject matter of Palestine discursively constitutes the Palestinian as the other whose presence makes toxic the academic environment for all others, including racialized others. It is as if the mere presence of the Palestinian body, as an embodiment of the Palestinian critique, introduces a toxic politicization of an academic environment that was otherwise relatively objective, neutral and harmonious. The Palestinian critique is thus expelled in the name of ‘purifying’ the academic environment, making it safe for rationality and reason to ‘bloom’, replacing the desert of irrationality, ignorance and so on.

We should not oppose here the idea that the study of Palestine is political and politicized. Rather, we should oppose the idea that it introduces a toxic politicization. We should properly situate Palestine’s politicization as part of a larger decolonial project, and name the fact that all academic knowledge is always political and politicized. The choice we have as academics, illuminated and explained in feminist and decolonial theory for decades (e.g. Mohanty, 1991; Said, 2003 [1979]), is between acknowledging politicization and taking a stance on the inevitable and unavoidable knowledge/power complex, or denying this politicization, which ends up reenforcing the status quo. Feminist, anti-racist and decolonial scholarship understands the claim of academic objectivity to be a shallow one, and the separation between political and academic knowledge to be a chimera that hides intimate connections between knowledge/power. For a guide on this matter, we need not look further than Dorothy Smith’s (1992) response to those who accused her and other feminist scholars of introducing politics into the supposedly objective and neutral space of academia: ‘Universities and colleges already are political; teaching in the social sciences and the humanities is a practical politics. Teaching the canon is patriarchal activism’ (p. 96; emphasis added).

As it is born and developed within and alongside feminist, anti-racist and decolonial bodies of thought and praxis, the Palestinian critique fearlessly asserts its political positionality as geared towards decolonial liberation (Salaita, 2016: 134–136). It is not introducing politics into an otherwise apolitical academic environment. Rather, it is simply naming its politics in an always already politico-academic environment. And this politics is and should be unabashedly decolonial, anti-racist and anti-oppressive demanding the naming and platforming of the Palestinian critique as Palestinian.

Here, we arrive at a final but critical point: it is important to insist on centralizing the Palestinian and not the anti-Zionist critique, and that is so for two reasons. First, in much of public discourse within Europe and North America, Jewish voices are often foregrounded in critiques of Zionism and Israeli policies. This is usually done in the name of strategic necessity – as a more effective strategy to deal with the inevitable charge of antisemitism. But we can no longer hide from the fact that this is yet another way in which Palestinians are hidden from public view with the effect being, regardless of good intentions, further toxification. Scholars of racialization have long argued that strategic expediency often comes at a price, and in this case, it is the maintenance of the toxified Palestinian. As Butler (2014) asserts, Jewish oppositions to Zionism are certainly critical and needed, but we should not participate in ‘making even the resistance to Zionism into a “Jewish” value’ (p. 2). Butler instead emphasizes the ‘encounter with the non-Jewish’ (p. 26) as crucial to properly situating opposition to Zionist ideology and settler colonialism (pp. 114–122). Going a step further, I assert that this encounter is what the Palestinian critique is indispensable in revealing and articulating. The Palestinian critique is not Palestinian because of nationality or culture (and is thus open to Jews and Israelis), but because it points us towards the Palestinian experience of the encounter with Zionism. It foregrounds Zionism from the perspective and standpoint of its victims as Edward Said (1979) convincingly argued as necessary long ago.

Second, the resistance to Zionism is not a negating one in its foundation. It was always and still is an alternative: a potential world that was/is actively suppressed, destroyed and erased by the Zionist project, but one that still survives in the very existence of the Palestinian as a Palestinian; as a mode of being, doing and knowing that remains, survives and even thrives despite all attempts of expulsion and erasure. In this Palestinian positionality is found the alternative to Zionist settler colonialism and colonial modernity writ large. While some scholars and activists believe the ‘anti’ in anti-Zionism is capable of housing not just the negation of Zionism but the potentiality of an alternative world, it is more fruitful to commence such a journey within the Palestinian critique because it foregrounds, as no other critique could or is capable of, the experience of the colonized. This experience can indeed release the decolonial potential from within the rich tapestry of Jewish history, thought, life and praxis, which has itself been suppressed by Zionism and the Zionist project (Raz-Krakotzkin, [1993–1994] 2017).

Far from opposing an exclusivist Jewish and Israeli perspective with an exclusivist Palestinian one, the Palestinian critique is the encounter that Butler and before her, Said, brought to the fore of critical analysis. In rightly situating the Palestinian struggle within the context of colonial modernity even before the 1948 mass settler colonial conquest of Palestine (Salaita, 2016: 135–136), the primary and main referential point to the Palestinian critique is the simple fact that it was the Palestinian experience of Zionism (colonial racialization, expulsion, dispossession, occupation, besiegement, political estrangement, dehumanization) that revealed the Zionist project for what it was and still is: a settler colonial project that is the embodiment and continuation of the larger project of colonial modernity in the land of historic Palestine. The Palestinian critique’s decolonial positionality within colonial modernity situates it within and alongside decolonial and anti-racist critiques of racialization and colonization elsewhere, and that includes the Euro-American racialization of Jews. As it foregrounds the experience of the colonized, the Palestinian critique represents the most fruitful and substantive anti-racist and decolonial path forward.

Conclusion

Angela Y. Davis (2016) writes,

In more ways that we realize, G4S [a British multinational private security company] has insinuated itself into our lives . . . from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. (pp. 55–56)

Moving effortlessly between and across the settler colonialization of Palestine, apartheid in South Africa, the global prison-industrial complex, and anti-Black racism and segregation in the United States, Davis reveals and elucidates the necessity of solidarity in shared struggles against racism, racialization, oppression, imprisonment and empire. Her work and activism fall within a larger history of ‘Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity’ that centres the shared yet still specific and different experiences of Black and Palestinian lives in a world of ‘imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy’ (Erakat and Hill, 2019: 8). Exemplified in her writings is the idea that the struggle for decolonial liberation can only mean the transformation of a colonial global system of White supremacy and Euro-American imperial hegemony. In that story of decolonial liberation, the Palestinian critique plays a critical and, in certain moments, a vanguard role. Precisely because it has been toxified even within anti-racist and decolonial spaces, the Palestinian critique is well placed to reveal the workings of colonial modernity in keeping separated the racialized and the colonized.

So long as the Palestinian critique of Israel and Zionism remains equated with antisemitism, then any prospects of decolonial peace, justice and liberation will remain out of reach. Against the shallow and purely strategic equation between antisemitism and the Palestinian critique, scholars must bring to the foreground the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel because it is part and parcel of all critiques against colonial modernity. In this intersectional and shared struggle, exemplified in the works of Said, Butler, Davis, Kauanui and others, we must be attentive to both similarities and differences, confluences of interests as well as the ways in which different critiques might be repeating logics of colonial modernity against other racialized and colonized peoples. Just as crucially, we must be attentive to the ever-haunting spectre of abandonment and estrangement from each other. We need to accentuate, against toxification and expulsion, our shared journeys, the inexorable connectedness of our journeys. When it comes to the goal of decolonial liberation, which involves the foundational transformation of a world built in and through colonial modernity: ‘We either all get there together, or no one goes’ (Ayyash, 2021c).