["Dismantling Anti-Palestinian Racism: Disrupt Dehumanization, Center Palestinian Life, Imagine Liberation for All" was published as a set of educational resources on March 17, 2026, by a group of faculty, staff, and students at UC Berkeley. It is hosted on the website of the university's Department of Ethnic Studies.]
In December 2023, the UC Office of the President (UCOP) provided one-time resources to UC campuses to address and combat antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bias, bigotry, and discrimination at the university In Spring 2024, under the auspices of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Muslim and Palestinian Student Life and Campus Experience, a group of faculty, staff, and students – including affiliates of the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies – received funding from this initiative to develop educational materials that address anti-Palestinian racism. These materials were developed over the course of 2024 and 2025. They draw on robust theories, concepts, and approaches germane to the field of Ethnic Studies, even as they are broadly applicable across fields and disciplines.
Additional Resources
There is no shortage of rigorous research on Palestine, Palestinians, and the histories, structures, and systems animating anti-Palestinian racism. Below, the videos' creators offer an exemplary selection of scholarly materials that inform the claims laid out in “Dismantling Anti-Palestinian Racism,” and provide viewers with additional resources to deepen their study. Click here for an extensive version of the materials below.
1. Race and Racism
What is the history, development, and social impact of the race concept as it relates to Palestine and Palestinians? These scholarly readings draw on the fields of sociology, political science, anthropology, law, and cultural studies to provide salient frameworks for illuminating the work that race and racism do to figure Palestinians as a threat to the public order, one that legitimates the differential distribution and access to safety and flourishing.
Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Abigail B. Bakan. “Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting.” The Political Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2022): 508–16.
Abu-laban, Yasmeen and Abigail B. Bakan, “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Analyzing the Unnamed and Suppressed Reality,” Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Volume 44, September 2021.
Ayyash, M. Muhannad. “The Toxic Other: The Palestinian Critique and Debates About Race and Racism.” Critical Sociology Volume 49 Issue 7 (2022)
Feldman, Keith P. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Lentin, Ronit. Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Majid, Dania. Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations. Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, 2022.
Makdisi, Saree. Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial. University of California Press, 2022.
Tatour, Lana and Ronit Lentin, eds. Race and the Question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2025.
2. The Nakba and Colonial Domination
Anti-Palestinian racism arises out of, and has been produced and sustained by, a history of colonial domination, dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide. The following scholarly resources trace the origins and impacts of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that commenced in 1948.
Eghbariah, Rabea. “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (2024): 887–992.
El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Knopf, 2025.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Khalidi, Walid. Before Their Diaspora : A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948. Washington, D.C. : Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991.
Masalha, Nur. The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. Zed Books, 2012.
Said, Edward W. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text, no. 1 (January 1979): 7–58.
Seikaly, Sherene. “Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe.” Jadaliyya - جدلية. Accessed July 4, 2023.
3. History of United States - Israel Relations
Significant American foreign aid to Israel began in the early 1960s, and, since the 1980s has far exceeded U.S. support for any other nation-state, the vast majority of which comes in the form of military grants. This so-called “special relationship” is an historically constructed one, built from and maintained by contingent geopolitical interests, diplomatic and financial commitments, and cultural narratives.
Anziska, Seth. Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo. Princeton University Press, 2018
Freedman, Robert O., ed. Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israeli Relations. Routledge, 2019.
Levin, Geoffrey. Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978. Yale University Press, 2023.
Kaplan, Amy. Our American Israel : The Story of an Entangled Alliance. Harvard University Press, 2018.
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000. University of California Press, 2001.
Mitelpunkt, Shaul. Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958-1988. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
4. Human Rights Reports
Numerous leading human rights organizations have found that the Palestinian people have been subjected to treatment that meets the international definitions of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide – all of which are crimes under international law. The following are an illustrative sampling of such reports.
Amnesty International. ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. 2024.
Amnesty International. Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity. MDE 15/5141/2022. 2022.
B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. 2021.
B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Our Genocide. 2025.
Human Rights Watch. Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water. Human Rights Watch, 2024.
UN Human Rights Council. Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A/HRC/60/CRP.3. United Nations, 2025.
5. Universities
How have research and teaching institutions supported and sustained anti-Palestinian racism? Scholarly works in this section detail the historical development of knowledge production in the service of imperial interests in Palestine, as well as the contemporary contestations around the meanings and limits of academic freedom–particularly when Palestinian universities are targeted for destruction, and US and European universities seek to constrain what can and cannot be said and studies regarding Palestine.
Hajir, Basma, and Mezna Qato. “Academia in a Time of Genocide: Scholasticidal Tendencies and Continuities.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 23, no. 5 (2025): 1163–71.
Khalil, Osamah F. America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Makdisi, Ussama. “Beyond the Palestine Exception.” Critical Times 8, no. 1 (2025): 1–32.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.
Wind, Maya. Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso, 2024.
6. Media Representations of Palestine and Palestinians
How are Palestine and Palestinians made visible, on whose terms, and to what effect? Scholarly resources in this section consider how anti-Palestinian racism is bolstered by a long history of popular media representations that, when representing Palestine and Palestinians at all, objectify Palestinians as figures either to be feared or to be pitied. Works herein also take up Palestinian media interventions that challenge or disrupt the prevailing frameworks.
Aranguren, Teresa, and Sandra Barrilaro, eds. Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba. Haymarket Books, 2024.
Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Duke University Press, 2015.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7. Pluto Press, 2025.
Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, 2015.
7. Contemporary Palestinian Cultural Production
Centering Palestinian life means, in part, reading and thinking with Palestinian cultural production–of which there is no shortage, including movies, TV shows, music, novels, and poetry. This section offers a small sampling of contemporary Arabic- and English-language poetry – some of which was written in Palestine, some written in the diaspora, and all of which attune us to the complex lifeworlds Palestinians have built and sustained with steadfastness and creativity.
Abraham, George, and Noor Hindi, eds. Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. Haymarket Books, 2025.
Alareer, Refaat. If I Must Die. OR Books, 2025.
Alyan, Hala. Salt Houses. New York: Harper Collins, 2017.
5 Broken Cameras, dir Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 2011.
Salt of this Sea, dir Annemarie Jacir, 2008.
The Time That Remains, dir Elia Suleiman, 2009.
Tuffaha, Lena Khalaf. Something about Living. University of Akron Press, 2024.
8. Futures
Dismantling anti-Palestinian racism has never been simply a project of negation; it has long required imagining and building the social and political infrastructure necessary for sustaining a universal commitment to equality and dignity, and for practicing relations of care and kinship within and beyond borders of identity, background, and nationality. The readings in this section offer some resources for narrating and working towards futures beyond Palestine’s dystopian here and now.
Cable, Umayyah. Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and Solidarity Politics in the United States. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
Erakat, Noura, and Marc Lamont Hill. “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: Renewals, Returns, and Practice.” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 7–16.
Estefan, Kareem, Carin Kuoni, and Laura Raicovich. Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production. OR Books, 2017.
Kelley, Robin DG. “From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking.” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 69–91
Maira, Sunaina. Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. University of California Press, 2018.
Pennock, Pamela E. Rethinking Arab American Activism. Routledge, 2025.