Zionism from the Standpoint of Arab America

• In Event: Encountering Zionism: From Academia to Queer Activism and BDS

Abstract

Arab American scholarship and activism related to anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation offers a rich archive for conceptualizing the contours of Zionism and U.S. imperialism within the U.S. and the interconnections between Zionism and the racial and colonial structures of the United States. Beginning with the early 1900s, this paper traces Arab American engagements with Zionism focusing on the field of Arab American Studies and Arab American activist movements. By illustrating the distinct ways that Zionist efforts to quell critiques of Israeli state violence coincide with anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia when directed at Arab Americans, these engagements expand conceptualizations of the ways Israeli settler-colonialism and the U.S.-Israeli alliance reverberate transnationally. Indeed, pro-Israeli attacks against Arab American scholars and activists in the U.S. are fundamental to the Zionist project in Palestine. This paper also takes up the ways Zionism manifests in the processes by which Palestinian and Arab diasporas committed to Palestinian liberation become exceptionally vulnerable to the racist criminalization of immigrants in the U.S. By positioning Arab and Arab American scholarship and activism at the center of American Studies’ critiques of U.S. empire, this paper illustrates that U.S. “foreign policy” in the Middle East exists in the same spatial-temporal location as the “domestic United States.” Therefore, I argue that Arab and Arab American studies of Zionism and Israeli settler-colonialism are crucial not only to Palestine Studies and Middle East Studies, but also to the ways we think about American Studies and U.S. Ethnic Studies.

Author

• Nadine Naber, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL)