Zionism is Racism at 50: Transnational resistance to axes of anti-Blackness and anti-Palestinian racism

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution and debates around it articulated Third Worldist visions of a liberated planet, while negotiating the realities of Cold War imperial power. In response, the U.S. state and Zionist institutions opposed the resolution and set out to gather Black and labor organizations to join their opposition. Their arguments showcased the ways that settler colonial forces construct and leverage “thin knowledge” and disruptive logics of race, decolonization, and rights. The resolution’s history traces the continued importance of these contentions, as it was rescinded in 1991 under U.S. and Israeli pressure, and again became a site of attack and resistance at the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism.

Drawing on American Studies, Black Studies, Palestine Studies, and Critical Zionism Studies, presenters offer short grounding talks followed by a structured discussion of key questions to examine the ongoing relationship between Zionism, racial capitalism, global imperialism, and the collapse of U.S. liberal logics, before and after the struggle over UN Resolution 3379. Panelists will explore the role of surveillance and securitization in linking Palestine to other sites of racialized policing, and the cultural and intellectual histories that sustain solidarities. The roundtable engages the implications of contemporary organizing around Palestine, academic repression, and legal efforts to redefine anti-Zionism as antisemitism. This session seeks to provoke new discussions on the responsibilities of American Studies in confronting the legacies of imperial violence and genocide today.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago

Panelists

• Omar Zahzah, San Francisco State University

• Sean L Malloy, University of California-Merced

• Xavier Livermon, University of California-Santa Cruz

• John Harfouch

• Emmaia Gelman, Inst. For the Critical Study of Zionism

Biographical Information

Dr. Nadine Naber is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and the Global Asian Studies at UIC. At UIC, she is the Co-PI of the Middle East and Muslim Societies Cluster and faculty founder of the Arab American Cultural Center. She is author/co-editor of five books, including Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (NYU Press, 2012 and Arab and Arab American Feminisms.. She is the recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Prize from the American Studies Association; the 2002 YWCA’s Y-Women’s Leadership Award; and the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Freedom Scholar Award. She serves on the boards of the Journal of Palestine studies; the National Council for Arab Americans, and the Feminist Peace Initiative. Her forthcoming book is entitled, “Pedagogies of the Radical Mother” (Haymarket Press).

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, and Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies in the historic College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. A scholar-organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Omar is the author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, published by The Censored Press in partnership with Seven Stories Press in Summer 2025.

Sean L. Malloy is a Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at the University of California, Merced. He received his Ph.D. and MA in History from Stanford University and a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Cornell University Press, 2008) and Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017). His current research project examines the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity efforts at U.S. universities.

John Harfouch is associate professor of philosophy at the university of Alabama in Huntsville. He is currently studying the Fayez Sayegh archive in Utah.

Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines Zionism as a transnational political and ideological structure. Her research investigates the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, “anti-terror”, and war. Her forthcoming book is a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism.