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It is no exaggeration to say that Israel is more isolated today than ever before. If its genocide in Gaza drew millions into the streets in moral outrage, then the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has had a direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of many more — and the Democratic landslide in the U.S. midterms is a clear reflection of the resulting discontent.
When the next Congress is seated in January, a record number of elected officials will be calling to end U.S. military aid to Israel and to impose sanctions. But while many public figures have condemned Israel’s crimes, fewer have been willing to reckon with the ideology that underlies them. A new book aims to help change that.
“Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew,” co-authored by legal scholars Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, was published by Haymarket Books earlier this month. A frequent commentator in television, print, and radio media, Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya, and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
On this episode of The +972 Podcast, Erakat traces the history of the Zionist project to make the case that it has always been a racist and colonial endeavor — an analysis, as she and Reynolds note in the book, that Palestinian themselves have long articulated. Although the framing of Zionism as racism was cemented in a 1975 UN General Assembly resolution, Erakat explains how it was largely abandoned during the Oslo peace process — what she describes as a “sovereignty trap” — and how Palestinian activists and intellectuals have fought to resurrect it ever since.
This process culminated in the 2021 “Unity Intifada,” in which Palestinians across the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea rose up, in Erakat’s words, as “a singular people fighting a singular struggle against Zionist settler colonization.” This was the same year that several international and Israeli human rights groups issued landmark reports accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid. But while this signalled an important paradigm shift, Erakat argues, these organizations also avoided any discussion of Zionism or colonialism.
Erakat and Reynolds began writing “Confronting Zionism” to respond to the shortcomings of the apartheid reports and explore the limits of international human rights law in the Palestinian struggle. They finished the project in the middle of a genocide — and if the critique of Zionism is now much more self-evident, it is also all the more urgent. For Erakat, the book is an attempt to mainstream this critique, to show what decolonization actually requires, and to insist “that there is no future that just relies on a return to the status quo.”
