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.

What would Freud have made of it? Notes on a “normal pathological organization” within contemporary psychoanalysis

“…The complexity is furthered in that the language of antisemitism and Jewish suffering-language that addresses systemic racism against the Jewish people-is a central means through which to code anti-Palestinian racism, and thereby suppress claims for redress. (Ayyash, 2022) Speaking what one regards as the truth about relations between the Israeli and Palestinian communities is regularly denounced as hostility and aggression toward Jews (Beinart, 2021).…”

“…Once it turns to the post‐war world, this is replaced by the unexamined reiteration of a rigid set of assumptions. Like the Brenner piece, these texts could be mined for examples of Islamophobic and anti‐Palestinian racism (Abu‐Laban & Bakan, 2022; Ayyash, 2022; Beinart, 2021; CJPME, 2022). The major intellectual source cited is Bernard Lewis, one of the originators of the “war of civilizations” narrative of post‐Cold War politics, who is referenced to repeat the view that since 1945 the Arab world has replaced Europe as the prime danger to world Jewry (Bass Wichelhaus, 2022 p137).…”