Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin, eds., Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you co-edit this volume?
Lana Tatour (LT): The idea for the edited book came out of conversations that Ronit and I had in 2018. It was when Ronit’s book, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism, was published, and I had just finished my PhD. While I was working on my doctoral research on Palestinians in Israel, I noticed that the literature on ‘48 Palestinians, and in some cases also on Palestine more generally, tended to emphasize ethnicity and ethno-nationalism as an interpretative framework. At the same time, I was reading also scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s including that of Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Elia Zureik, and others, and it became clear that race, along with settler colonialism, has always been a central analytic in Palestine studies and part of the theorization of the question of Palestine. In the 1980s onward, however, we see a shift to ethnicity-based paradigms. Only a handful of scholars, including Zureik, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Joseph Massad, sustained a focus on race. That said, in the past few years, the wave of reports by international, Palestinian, and Israeli human rights organizations that focused on Israeli Apartheid raised again the question of race. There has also been a growing body of work on Palestine that uses the lens of race, including by Andy Clarno, Yasmin Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan, Sarah Ihmoud, Noura Erakat, and others.
Ronit and I talked about the need to further foreground race as an analytic in the study of Palestine. We wanted to build on this renewed interest by bringing together work that speaks to the constitutive role of race in shaping the Zionist movement, the architecture of the Israeli state, and the colonization of Palestine. We wanted the book to move away from the dominant view of race as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism, suggesting instead that race should be understood in terms of its political work. As John Reynolds writes in his chapter, “it is important to insist on the importance of race qua race.” And so, the chapters highlight different aspects of how race functions as a colonial project, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory technology, building on critical theorization of race.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the volume address?
LT: Race analysis by Palestinians has recognized that settler colonialism, including Zionism and Israel, is always also racial. A central goal of this book is to highlight Palestinian intellectual and political legacy, and to argue that race analysis must build on this legacy, as well as stressing the importance of engaging critical race theory and locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Palestine has much to contribute to, and not just benefit from, the study of race. As Sherene Seikaly notes, Palestine is “a site to make, learn from, and dismantle racial logics.” This book aims to contribute to this endeavor.
The book takes up several themes that speak to the racialization of Palestine and of Palestinians and it draws on a range of literatures and fields. We were lucky to work with wonderful contributors: historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists. Chapters in the book focus on race and Zionism; race and international law; the racialization of Palestinian refugees, of Palestinian Bedouin, and of Mizrahi Jews; gender and racialized sexual politics; antiracism and antisemitism; race, land, and labor; racial capitalism and militarized accumulation; and Black-Palestinian solidarity. Unfortunately, and despite our efforts, the book has no chapters on blackness and anti-blackness in Palestine and among Palestinians. I tried to mitigate this through addressing this theme in the Introduction to the book.
J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from other scholarship in this field(s)?
LT: This book is part of the turn/return in Palestine studies to settler colonialism. Our intervention is that settler colonialism and race cannot be separated. After all, colonization does not exist outside the grammar of race and the making of racial hierarchies and racial classifications. The genocide in Gaza further highlights the how constitutive race is to Israeli settler colonialism. In the past twenty months, we have seen the prevalence of anti-Palestinian racism and the extent to which Palestinians are racialized; Palestinians are not only racialized as less-than-human, but also as nonhuman. The book also departs from understandings of the Palestinian struggle merely in terms of national liberation and anticolonialism, inviting to consider the Palestinian struggle in both anticolonial and antiracist terms. Importantly, the book does not only establish the usefulness of race as analytic but also deals with the question of how to read and understand race. Our approach to race cautions against liberal readings of racism and antiracism, and the chapters in the book are driven by anticolonial, anti-imperial, anticapitalist, and antiracist commitments.
J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LT: We edited this volume because we wanted to further the conversation, in both scholarly and activist circles, on the relevance of race as an analytic. I hope this volume will be read students of Palestine and the Middle East, as well as by specialists interested in race and ethnic studies, critical and Third World approaches to law, settler colonialism, and Indigenous studies. I also hope that the book will be of interest to the wider community, including journalists and members of the public who are interested in Palestine. In her endorsement of the book, Nadia Abu El-Haj wrote that “The claim that the Zionist project always was and remains a racial regime has long been politically fraught, the heuristic of 'race' dismissed as a political polemic rather than a much-needed analytic category. This book puts such arguments to bed once and for all.” I hope the book will have this impact.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
LT: These days, I am finishing my monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian Resistance (working title), which focuses on ‘48 Palestinians who are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. It investigates the relationship between liberalism and settler colonialism and explores the politics of citizenship and indigeneity among ‘48 Palestinians. I am interested in how Israel’s colonial rule of ‘48 Palestinians takes predominantly liberal forms and how, in turn, ‘48ers operate within, negotiate, transcend, and refuse their dual positionality as citizens and colonized Indigenous subjects. I am also working on another project with Maya Wind, tentatively titled “Settler Narcissism in Times of Genocide.” It examines Israeli settler narcissist demands, since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, to be recognized as victims and to be the centre of care, solidarity, compassion, and empathy. We mainly focus on Israelis who consider themselves to be part of the so-called left, and even the radical left. We are interested in how settler narcissism is tied to the question of victimhood and who can claim to be victims, and how settler claims of victimhood are imbued in historical amnesia that diminish, minimize, and erase colonization and its eliminatory and genocidal violence. We ask what Israeli settler narcissism can teach us about the possibility, or more precisely the impossibility, for the existence of anticolonial Israeli left.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)
Race and the Question of Palestine centers race in the study of Palestine. The question, I maintain, is not merely whether race is a productive lens, but rather what kinds of theories and conceptualizations of race are relevant. The book is concerned with how to understand and analyze race in Palestine—not as a prescriptive question, but as an analytical and political one. I argue for an analysis of race that situates Palestine within the global histories, legacies, and present politics of imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, and that centers the racialization of Palestine and Palestinians. Through such analysis, the book demonstrates that the study of Palestine not only benefits from the integration of race critical theory but also contributes more generally to an understanding of how race works. I further argue for an analysis of race that considers the specificities of the Palestinian case and that recognizes and builds on long-standing Palestinian theorizations of race that critique Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial racial project. Engagement with Palestinian critique and critical theorizations of race that account for the colonial genealogy of race can help challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case and the conceptualizations of race in terms of skin color, identity, ethnicity, and culture, and of race as a fixed category. Such engagement, I propose, helps explicate the political work of race in facilitating, sustaining, and justifying the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine and enriches our understanding of the global history of race and settler colonialism.
I follow Rana Barakat’s important call for “a reading of settler colonialism within a Palestinian narrative.” Like Barakat, I stress the need for a reading of race within a Palestinian narrative. This entails a reading of race, racialization, anti-Palestinian racism, and antiracism from within Palestinian experiences and knowledges. It requires a consideration of the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and the multiple racialization regimes to which different Palestinian groups are subjected and their resistance to them, both within historic Palestine and in the diaspora, as well as the intersectionality of race with ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, age, and dis/ability. Likewise, the recognition that race and racism are core to Zionism and the architecture of the Israeli state also invites thinking about how the Palestinian struggle for liberation is both “anticolonialist and antiracist,” and how Palestine activism involves the ongoing rearticulation of the relationship between anticolonialism and antiracism. That said, and although this book focuses on race and settler colonialism, I also caution against limiting the study of race in relation to Zionist colonization. This means attending to race formations and race regimes in Palestine prior to Zionist colonization and in relation to the global histories of race and race politics in the Middle East—concerns that are overlooked in Palestine studies and yet are critical to understanding racism, anti-Blackness, and class relations in Palestinian society.
Speaking of race in the context of Palestine, readers may ask why use “race” instead of “ethnicity,” “people,” or “nation,” and what analytical and explanatory work “race” does that “ethnicity” or “nationality” does not. This also raises the question of how to theorize and understand the concept of race itself. Although categories such as “ethnicity” and “nation” intersect with “race” and operate as markers of race—Stuart Hall referred to the three of them as the “Fateful Triangle”—their use alone without race analysis, I suggest, not only fails to capture the work of race, racialization, and racism as constitutive of colonial projects, but also conceals it. The apartheid reports, mentioned above, provide an example—one of many—of such concealment through their failure to recognize settler colonialism and race as the defining features of Israeli apartheid or to account for Zionism as the racial ideology that drives Israeli-Zionist colonization.
Privileging ethnicity allows speaking about the hierarchy in Zionism and the Israeli state between Jews and Palestinians without acknowledging race and the practices of racialization that allow racial distinction to occur in the first place. Ethnicity, in this respect, functions as a category that is “race-free” and “raceless,” a nonracial neutral and descriptive category of difference (although, in practice, one that is deeply racialized)—and a category that also treats Jews and Palestinians as homogenous groups, overlooking their ethnic heterogeneity. The favoring of ethnic-centered paradigms, Nahla Abdo argues, is less because of their theoretical validity and more because they “provide softer, less politically charged concepts to describe what are basically racist policies and practices embedded in the Zionist ideology on which Israel has been—and continues to be—founded.”
The colonization of Palestine—like other imperial, colonial, and settler-colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Concepts such as ethnicity and nationality do not capture the history or the political work of race as a project of colonial distinction that rationalizes dispossession and domination, nor are they capable of accounting for racialization and dehumanization as central to the colonial project. The colonial quest to eliminate, contain, assimilate, exploit, and replace Indigenous peoples depends on the hierarchical classification of peoples and nations according to a civilizational value, as deemed by the European colonists. As Patrick Wolfe writes, race is “colonialism speaking.” Likewise, race itself needs to be understood in relation to its “colonial constitution,” argues Barnor Hesse. Race, he points out, “is an inherited western, modern-colonial practice of violence, assemblage, superordination, exploitation and segregation.” The modern history of racial classification systems emerged in relation to colonialism and in the encounter between European settlers and Indigenous peoples in what was called the “New World” (a racial term in its own right). In the nineteenth century, race became “the organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity, the civilizing mission and the ‘measure of man’ were framed.” Zionism, as the next section elaborates, emerged as part of this imperial, colonial, and racial history, speaking to imperial order and aspirations and building on nineteenth-century European conceptions of race.
The question of the human is central to the operation of race and settler colonialism. As Alexander Weheliye argues, “race and racism shape the modern idea of the human” through practices of differentiation that arrange “Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.” The regulation of humanness, its attribution and denial, Samera Esmeir argues, is a “technology of colonial rule.” The arrangement of the human across a spectrum, Hortense Spillers reminds us, cannot be separated from colonialism and settler colonialism, from enslavement, and from the creation of the “New World” and its sociopolitical, economic, and legal order—an order that “represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile.” Addressing societal orders, Sylvia Wynter suggests, requires attending to the sociogenic principle—a concept she borrows and develops from the work of Frantz Fanon, who insisted that the human is to be understood not only through phylogeny and ontogeny, but also, and primarily, through sociogeny and the centering of Black and colonized people’s experiences of racism, hierarchization, and dehumanization. Society, Fanon notes, “cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being.” Importantly, while both Wynter’s and Fanon’s analyses speak to processes and practices of dehumanization, their centering of the colonized and the racialized also leads them to assert that their humanity is always there, and for Wynter this acknowledgment asks that we think about being “human” not as a noun but as a praxis.
In Palestine, the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their land; the refusal to allow refugees to return to their homeland; the ongoing Nakba (the catastrophe); the occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza in 1967; the siege of Gaza since 2006 and the 2023 genocide; the oppression of, and discrimination against, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, who comprise one-fifth of Israel’s citizenry; the routine killing of Palestinians; settler violence; land dispossession and house demolition; the entrenched system of checkpoints and segregated roads; the exploitation of Palestinian labor; the use of Palestinians for the testing of new weapons and security technologies; and the mass incarceration of Palestinians all rely on the racialization of Palestinians as less than human and nonhuman, rather than on “ethnic” or “national” difference.
A proper engagement with race requires us to move beyond the inquiry into whether Jews and Palestinians are “races.” Race critical scholars have emphasized time and again that race is not an identity; it is, in the words of Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, “a social system” that shapes “the structural relationships of certain social groups to power . . . something one is subject to rather than something one possesses.” Put differently, race is “a process, not an ontology.” Stuart Hall regards race as a “sliding signifier,” alluding to its dynamic and ever-changing nature, rather than a stable category with a fixed meaning. Its power lies in its function as a meaning-making discourse that establishes itself as a “regime of truth.” Recognizing that it is not fixed, Alana Lentin proposes that race is better understood in terms of what it does rather than what it is, and as a technology of power and “a technology for the management of human difference.”