Palestine and the fight for the soul of anti-racism politics and ethics
Sid Shniad
Palestine and the fight for the soul of anti-racism
How the redefinition of racism is a cardinal threat to all racially subordinated and dehumanized groups the world over
A student carries a Palestinian flag. Photo courtesy University of Windsor Palestinian Solidarity Group/Facebook.
In October 2023, as Israel began its genocidal bombing and starvation campaign in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Minister of Education Yoav Kisch said of Palestinians: “[t]hose are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating the way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated.” This was but one of the hundreds of documented genocidal statements made by Israeli officials and politicians about Palestinians over the past nine months. Since that time, their dehumanizing rhetoric has proved prophetic: the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published an article which conservatively estimates the number of direct and indirect deaths in the Gaza Strip at 186,000, a significantly higher toll than what is shown in official figures. The targeted mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, the deliberate infliction of conditions of group destruction, and repeated statements of genocidal intent have been described by scholar Raz Segal as “a textbook case of genocide.”
Yet if one followed the media reporting and political rhetoric in Canada and other Western countries, one might be forgiven if they thought the crisis was not about racism against Palestinians under occupation and siege, but rather a crisis of hateful bigots unfairly criticizing the occupying state, Israel. As a result, advocates for Palestinian human rights opposing genocide, occupation, and apartheid have been subjected to McCarthyist campaigns of doxxing, harassment, threats, academic and employment discipline, character assassinations, and even raids, arrests, and criminal charges.
These attacks have also reached my home institution, the University of Windsor. On July 10, the university finalized a milestone agreement with anti-genocide student activists, building off other agreements at institutions such as UQAM and Ontario Tech. The UWindsor agreement contains provisions on, inter alia, anti-racism policies including anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism, support for Palestinian students and scholars in the context of scholasticide, commitments to strengthen responsible investment policies, recognition of serious Israeli violations of international law and occupation, and an agreement “not [to] pursue any institutional academic agreements with Israeli universities until the right of Palestinian self-determination has been realized,” which explicitly does not prevent collaboration with individual Israeli academics.
Since the finalization of the agreement, the university has faced feverish and coordinated backlash from Zionist organizations, some of whom called the agreement antisemitic and slandered the students as pushing for “Sharia Law at the university.” The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) demanded the university reverse the agreement, labelling the encampment students as “hateful,” “extremist,” and “pro-Hamas,” without pointing to any specific evidence and in spite of judicial consideration of other student encampments which have consistently concluded otherwise. The same CIJA played a key role in the dehiring of Dr. Valentina Azarova at the University of Toronto for her academic work critical of Israel’s human rights abuses. B’nai Brith Canada threatened to sue the university for discrimination. Meanwhile, Zionist politicians jumped on the opportunity to try and interfere with university autonomy, with Liberal MP Anthony Housefather stating that he reached out to Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism, and MPP Jill Dunlop, Ontario Minister of Colleges and Universities, presumably to pressure the university to rescind the agreement.
How does this happen? How does activism and policy that opposes some of the most severe and brutal forms of systemic racism, namely apartheid and genocide, get redefined as its exact opposite—namely antisemitism or anti-Jewish racism? How does the language of anti-racism get deployed in defense of the actions of an apartheid ethnostate?
Two opposing ideas of racism
At issue are two competing and entirely oppositional ideas of racism: the ‘subordination and dehumanization’ doctrine of racism and the ‘ethnostate’ doctrine of racism.
The subordination and dehumanization doctrine of racism is likely the one that most people are familiar with and the one that is most espoused by critical race and anti-colonial scholarship. At the heart of this doctrine is the idea that racism is primarily about power. Racism is a set of ideas and beliefs that are socially constructed but have real life material impacts which structure and justify inequality, subordination, and dehumanization. As an analytic, it is used to better understand and make sense of the transatlantic slave trade, settler colonialism in the Americas, imperialism in Asia and Africa, and the Third Reich’s racist policies of antisemitic dehumanization and disenfranchisement which ultimately led to the Shoah. The subordination and dehumanization doctrine thus provides a throughline by which to understand racism as an ever-changing process of domination and hierarchy building.
In contrast, the ethnostate doctrine of racism posits that racism is not primarily about processes and structures of subordination, but rather about irrational biases, in this case against ethnostates and their underlying ethnonationalist ideologies. The most well-known (though far from the only) example of the ethnostate doctrine of racism at work is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the illustrative examples of which function to move antisemitism away from the subordination and dehumanization doctrine towards conflating it with anti-Zionism and critiques of Israel. As critical race scholar Joshua Sealy-Harrington argues, “one must collapse Israel with Judaism to characterize anti-Israel speech as anti-Jewish.”
But what does accepting the ethnostate doctrine of racism in the context of Israel-Palestine do?
One, it almost completely “occlude[s] the material, demonstrable, and documented harm” of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism. Instead, those opposing the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinian people are smeared as hateful terrorists—which has staying power because of Orientalist tropes which characterize all Palestinians as being inherently extremist, prone to terrorism, barbarous, violent, oppressive to women, and uncivilized. The idea of racism as primarily bias against an occupying ethnostate thus entirely distracts from, and gives license to, the anti-Palestinian racism which animates the conditions of siege, apartheid, and genocide which Palestinians experience at the hands of the Israeli state on a daily basis.
Second, and perhaps less intuitively, it perpetuates anti-Jewish racism (or put another way, antisemitism under the subordination and dehumanization framework). By insisting that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, it discredits and erases a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism, which to the dismay of pro-Israel organizations, is increasingly visible and organized in its goal of wresting the politics of anti-racism away from unconditional loyalty to Israel and towards solidarity with other oppressed groups. As a result, anti-Zionist Jews are disproportionately targeted by police, reprisal campaigns, and harassment through allegations that they are not really Jewish or that they are “kapos”—akin to those complicit with Nazis in brutalizing other Jews in concentration camps. In addition, collapsing Judaism into Zionism encourages racist collective punishment of Jewish people for political Zionism’s century-long crimes against Palestinians.
Yet the IHRA campaign conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism didn’t come out of nowhere. Rather, it is the latest development in a decades-long campaign to redefine the language (and law) of anti-racism to serve colonial Zionist ends.
Early discourse around colonial Zionism
Many fathers of the Zionist movement were clear-eyed about the settler colonial and racist nature of the Zionist political project in Palestine. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, wrote to British Imperialist Cecil Rhodes that the Zionist plan was “something colonial.” Indeed, settler colonialism might have been deemed inevitable when, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration declared British support in Palestine for Jewish national rights, but refused national rights to the non-Jewish Arab population, despite the Arab population outnumbering the Jewish population over nine-to-one at the time. Imposing an exclusive Jewish national sovereignty as a minority group in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious land that many diverse peoples have long and deep connections to, was predicted to meet heavy native resistance. In his influential 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote:
The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.
This is equally true of the Arabs. Our peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs.
Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.
This “power” to force through demographic change and claim Palestine as the exclusive national home of Jewish people over its non-Jewish Arab majority would ultimately manifest in the 1947-1948 Nakba—marking the creation of Israel and the permanent displacement and violent ethnic cleansing of more than half of the entire Palestinian population. Soon after, the new Zionist state would codify a variety of racially discriminatory laws in respect to, inter alia, property, land ownership, right to work, freedom of movement, and right to nationality, with the effect of privileging Jewish Israelis over non-Jewish natives. These racially discriminatory laws and policies then and now have commonly been understood as a system of apartheid. This obvious structural racism is only legible under the subordination doctrine but made intentionally illegible under the ethnostate doctrine.
Palestinian flags and other signs are carried by students and activists at the UWindsor encampment to honour the more than 270 civilians who were killed in an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp, June 9, 2024. Photo courtesy Windsor4Palestine/Facebook.
A long history of definitional battle over racism
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, anti-colonial national liberation struggles raged, and a wave of formerly colonized nations won their independence. Many of them formed the Third World (non-aligned) movement, which refused to formally take sides with either the capitalist United States-led bloc or the Communist Soviet Union-led bloc. As a result, the United Nations membership began to change significantly in demographic and the scourge of colonial racism was brought to the forefront of international politics, culminating in the passing of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1965.
Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War where Israel began occupying the rest of former Mandatory Palestine, as well as the unthawing of relations between Israel and the increasingly isolated South African apartheid regime, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 was passed in 1975. This resolution condemned Zionism as a “racist and imperialist ideology” which imposed “legislative, administrative or other measures” to further “racial differentiation or superiority.” It was also comparative, arguing that the “racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin.”
Israel and the United States were in vehement protest of the resolution, with the US representative drawing upon the ethnostate doctrine of racism, stating that the resolution “labelled as racist the national aspirations of one people more victimized by racism than any other.” Under this doctrine, it was the nation-state of Israel which was the real victim of racism, rather than those ethnically cleansed, killed, and subordinated by the Israeli state—the non-Jewish Palestinian population. Similar language to Resolution 3379 was passed at the 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year and at the Organization of African Unity. In protest, Israel and the United States boycotted the 1978 World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination in Geneva. UN Resolution 3379 was eventually repealed, not through a debate on its substance, but as a quid pro quo after Israel made its participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference conditional upon the Resolution’s repeal.
But another showdown between these two competing definitions was about to take place at the 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa. Despite initial participation, the United States and Israel again withdrew to protest an amendment (which was never passed) that referred to the suffering of the Palestinian people and foreign occupation as a source of racism, again criticizing these amendments as antisemitic under the ethnostate doctrine of racism.
Despite this, WCAR Durban was distinct from previous World Conferences against Racism due to the robust participation of civil society groups dedicated to racial justice. Palestinian activists had a chance to meet with other global racial justice activists, including South African anti-apartheid groups with experience in boycott movements. These intellectual seeds would eventually grow into the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid in 2005.
Simultaneously, the robust anti-apartheid organizing, particularly among racial justice NGOs, was a stark reminder to Israel and the United States that, despite UN Resolution 3379’s repeal, papering over the racist and colonial impacts of Zionist policies on the Palestinian people would not easily be achieved in the international arena. Coming out of the Durban experience, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the European Union Monitoring Center of Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) began working on a campaign in 2004-2005 to redefine antisemitism so that it would include criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism. It was not enough to repeal the “Zionism as racism” resolution, but to codify in law its exact opposite: “anti-Zionism as racism.”
Though the redefinition campaign would run into starts and stops, it received a huge boost in 2016 when the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition in which the majority of its illustrative examples would use the ethnostate doctrine of racism and collapse anti-Zionism into antisemitism, including characterizing as antisemitic the notion that the Israeli state itself is “a racist endeavor.” In 2019, the IHRA definition was passed into law by President Trump through an executive order that directed government agencies to consider criticism of Israel as potentially antisemitic when investigating civil rights complaints. In 2020, Trump would pass a similar executive order to investigate and sanction the teaching of critical race theory under “divisive concepts” which could attract civil rights sanctions. Included under these banned concepts is the notion that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.” In doing so, the order targeted, smeared, and punished actual anti-racist educators and policymakers. The campaign to redefine racism under the ethnostate doctrine now had its legal blueprint.
The impact in Canada
WCAR Durban was also important for anti-racism efforts in Canada, as domestic civil society organizations would leverage it as a platform to push Canada to adopt its first national anti-racism strategy: Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism (CAPAR) in 2005. Though CAPAR was scrapped in 2010 under the Harper administration, after domestic and international pressure, it was brought back in 2019 under the auspices of Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy.
This strategy has come back into the news as anti-racism advocates lobby the federal government to recognize and address anti-Palestinian racism in its updated version. Aligning with the subordination and dehumanization doctrine of anti-racism, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) has defined anti-Palestinian racism as “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” Yet Zionist supporters of the ethnostate doctrine of racism have vehemently rejected recognizing anti-Palestinian racism, with some arguing that it is redundant with Islamophobia (even though not all Palestinians are Muslim) and that it would “incite discrimination against Israelis, Jews, and Zionists.” These arguments highlight the moral bankruptcy of the ethnostate doctrine of racism with other anti-racist struggles. Rather than a collective struggle towards racial justice for all, the doctrine reframes recognizing racial subordination and dehumanization against Palestinians as competition and indeed racism against Jewish people.
Meanwhile, the dominance of the ethnostate concept of racism in the Canadian mainstream alongside a continued erasure of anti-Palestinian racism has resulted in a flood of actual racist harm. While describing the oppression of Palestinians and the annexation of their lands as apartheid or colonialism has become disallowed, using dehumanizing and Orientalist slurs associating Palestinians (and relatedly, Arabs and Muslims) as hateful and savage proto-terrorists who are inherently security threats, remains fair game.
Individuals opposing the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and expressing sympathy for the long-standing Palestinian plight have been subject to organized slander, death threats, doxing, and academic and professional discipline—frequently under allegations of being terrorist sympathizers. In perhaps the most stark example of anti-Palestinian dehumanization in policy, the keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian culture, was banned in the Ontario Legislature in March. Soon afterwards, a Palestinian student was denied entry to St. Clair College in Windsor for wearing the scarf on Nakba Day, in violation of Human Rights Code discrimination protections.
The ethnostate doctrine of racism has also deeply infiltrated and weaponized hate crime policing and prosecutions to target activists fighting against racist occupation, apartheid, and genocide—labelling them as presumptively hateful. In October 2023, the Hate Crimes Unit within the Toronto Police Services was increased from six officers to 32, and the unit took charge of “demonstrations related to the Middle East conflict.” Over the next several months, the unit would engage in heavy-handed tactics including surveillance, night-time raids and seizures, recruitment of informants, and trumped-up charges to strategically incapacitate the growing Palestine solidarity movement. This anti-Palestinian policing unit has in turn collaborated with a secretive committee within the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, the Hate Crime Working Group, which has weaponized hate crime charges and pushed for heavier prosecution of solidarity activists.
This pervasive repression, underlined by the logic of the ethnostate doctrine of racism, is effective because it distracts from (and facilitates justification for) actual mass racial violence in Gaza—the wholescale and targeted destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, government services, UN buildings—alongside imposed conditions of genocidal famine, dehydration, illness, and death. Even at the time of this writing, Israeli forces bombed eight Gazan schools (six of them UN schools) over a period of ten days, massacring Palestinian families sheltering there.
But while the pro-Israel effort to redefine antisemitism as anti-Zionism is the most well-known example of the ethnostate doctrine of racism, other countries are taking note and learning from its value in reframing demands for racial justice as “racism” against dominant groups within ethnonationalist projects. As such, the redefinition of racism is a cardinal threat to all racially subordinated and dehumanized groups the world over.
For instance, some conservative US campaigners have made use of reverse racism arguments when claiming that critical race theory and its interrogations of the history and contemporary manifestations of racial injustice are “anti-white”—a view advanced by anti-CRT campaigner Christopher Rufo as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Chinese ethnonationalists have been hard at work reframing support for Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims’ rights in the context of accelerating colonial and Islamophobic repression as manifestations of anti-Chinese racism. In a high-profile example, in May 2021, state media outlet Xinhua published an interview with former UN mandate holder Alfred-Maurice de Zayas where he claims that legal arguments of genocide in Xinjiang constitute “fake news,” “vulgar Sinophobia,” and a “geopolitical weapon” against China.
The ethnostate doctrine of racism has been so successful that it has since been imitated to varying degrees of success by the far-right government of Narendra Modi in India, as well as the Putin administration after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the forms of “Hinduphobia” and “Russophobia,” respectively. Perversely, the ethnostate doctrine has also obscured the ways in which the Shoah itself was justified by far-right German ethnonationalism.
The endgame of the ethnostate doctrine of racism thus goes well beyond Palestine. It is a fight for the very soul and future of anti-racism as a politics and ethics. The final goal is a set of political, legal, and ideological structures where one can no longer talk about, learn about, name, or fight against racism as subordination and dehumanization. The aim is to rip the tongues out of our mouths and gaslight us into believing that fighting racial oppression is in fact racism against its perpetrators. But this fraudulent doctrine and its logical incoherence can be dispelled easily, beginning with fighting against the genocide in Gaza and the anti-Palestinian racial subordination and dehumanization which animates it. In this sense, a free Palestine will indeed free us all.
Vincent Wong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.