Introduction

Political Economy and Permanent War

Identifying the conjuncture in this way highlights how transformed relations of rule in Israel and Palestine after 1967 played a signal role in mediating the shifting contours of U.S.-led racial capitalism. Briefly elaborated, following the widespread growth of U.S. hegemony in the global economy after World War II, by the latter part of the 1960s the rate of profit had generally slowed. The first years of the 1970s saw the slowdown reaching crisis proportions, with the U.S. and other economies stuck in a cycle of stagnant profit margins and inflated currencies. To shock the U.S. economy out of the crisis, in August 1971 the Nixon administration shifted the U.S. monetary system from the gold standard adopted after World War II to a dollar standard, forcing many other state-run economies to do the same. Soon after floating American currency in this way, the Nixon administration began lobbying Arab oil-producing states to raise the price of gasoline, a move Nixon expected to be beneficial for the United States and detrimental to potential global economic rivals like Japan and Western Europe. This aim was inadvertently achieved by the oil embargo initiated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) during the October 1973 War involving Israel and its neighbors. The embargo flooded OPEC nations with a glut of petrodollars, many of which were then invested in private banks in the United States, while the spike in gas prices and fuel rationing brought home for many Americans the detrimental effects of the enmeshment of the United States, Israel, and the Arab world. Many of OPEC’s investments were siphoned into the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and redistributed as part of structural adjustment programs to developing nations in Latin America and the decolonizing nations in Africa and South Asia.11

This rapid transformation in political economy has been understood as calibrating the material and symbolic shifts from the modern to the postmodern era, from the hegemony maintained by Fordist models of production to post-Fordist models of flexible accumulation, from Keynesian welfare state policies to post-Keynesian privatization and enhanced militarization policies. As the political theorist Timothy Mitchell puts it, “The shift in US relations with oil-producing states . . . allowed political forces on the right, opposed to the management of ‘the economy’ as a democratic mode of governing collective life, to reintroduce and expand the laws of ‘the market’ as an alternative technology of rule, providing a more effective means of placing parts of the common world beyond the reach of democratic contestation.”12 Israel and Palestine provided a storehouse of symbolic and material “experiments” in what Fredric Jameson once called this “strange new landscape,” revealing the dawn of a racialized neoliberal project grounded in a neoconservative moral economy.13

In reconstructing this entangled history of the United States, Israel, and Palestine, I investigate how intensified state-sanctioned practices of coercion were rationalized through the multivalent figure of permanent war. Israel since its inception in 1948 had been in a permanent state of war, without either a formal constitution or internationally agreed-on territorial borders. It governed Arabs both prior to and after 1967 through military rule underwritten by legal regimes predicated on the routine enactment of emergency measures. In the United States, popular and political culture highlighted massive military actions in Southeast Asia, a growing practice of racialized law and order policing, revolutionary liberation movements sweeping across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, and the extensive effects of the declared 1967 and 1973 wars between Arab states and Israel. At the same time, anticolonial writers and activists increasingly framed the violence of racism in American life as animated by a seemingly permanent war-making structure. To grasp and make critical the systemic contours of racism was to understand the long-standing racialized practices of threat-production adhering in the enduring violence of white supremacy and settler sovereignty. The analytic of permanent war made visible how durable, persistent, and intensified forms of state and state-sanctioned violence exceeded the juridical horizon of the civil rights consensus.14

The analytic of permanent war revealed contestations over historical knowledge. It exhibited what the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls “an appreciation of historiography as a political force, of history writing as a political act, of historical narrative as a tool of the state and as a subversive weapon against it.”15 In an epistemic context unmoored from simple truths, indisputable facts, and shared grand narratives, culture work waged protracted battles over the writing and meaning of history, with war providing what Foucault describes as a “valid analysis of power relations.”16 I theorize how culture work that contended with Israeli rule as a permanently militarized modality of power in a post–civil rights age exemplifies this complex engagement with war as object and war as method.

Representations of Israel and Palestine, replete with thick affective and political resonances, thus saturated the broad terrain of U.S. imperial culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. From one vantage point, the Israeli national project’s symbolic storehouse was primed for such representations. It reflected narratives and images recognizable to an American nation in upheaval. In the first few decades after World War II, argues the historian Michelle Mart, “the Israel of the American imagination . . . embodied the hopes, ideals, and values of Cold War America.”17 Israel epitomized a rational vision of modernity that could mirror for Americans both the hardworking pioneers mastering a natural environment particularly reticent to human cultivation and the glass and steel architecture of late capitalist planning and urban development. Israel’s symbolic storehouse echoed U.S. national commitments to civilian safety with deep and lasting investments in the militarization of everyday life. For many on the American Left, Israel figured as the expression of a successful Jewish national liberation, one that manifested in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and Labor-dominated governments as a resonant socialist experiment in communal life and work. Israel was sacralized by the trauma of modern genocide, both through being framed as a morally righteous response to the failures of Western intervention during World War II and, perhaps more deeply, as a recompense for racial genocide as a quintessentially Euro-American phenomenon. Israel both named democratic inclusion as political necessity and served as a successful test case for liberal internationalist institutions like the United Nations to contour an enduring peace. There was, in short, a lot that Americans could love about Israel.18

Yet, from another vantage point, Israel’s permanent exclusions also revealed the failures of multiracial democracy as a post–civil rights political horizon.19 From this perspective (as Baldwin saw), Israel’s ideological and material infrastructure was articulated through Euro-American paradigms of self-determination, ones predicated on settler colonial orders that differentially valued land and labor.20 This vantage point revealed the 1947–49 dispossession of more than 760,000 indigenous Palestinian Arabs and the quasi-legal regime that garnished the land and resources of these newly “present absentees”; the threadbare citizenship status afforded to Arab Israelis and the unequal access to state resources offered to Mizrahi Jews compared with their privileged Ashkenazi counterparts; the post-1967 pervasive regime of military and civil occupation of Palestinian territories alongside the widespread growth of illegal Jewish settlements; Israel’s deepening military and economic partnerships with South Africa’s apartheid regime; and Israel’s brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon meant to eliminate any organized political form of Palestinian national liberation. From the “standpoint of its victims,” as Edward Said lucidly put it in 1979, there was much about Israel to resist.21

On U.S. Imperial Culture

Critically analyzing these competing grids of intelligibility has meant diving into the overlapping interdisciplinary scholarship on the “Arab-Israeli conflict” and its many aspects and permutations. It has also run the risk of epistemic drowning, for work on Israel and Palestine has been extensive. Recent scholars have investigated histories and critiques of Zionism, post-Zionism, and anti-Zionism in the fields of geography, labor, archaeology and anthropology, comparative literature and comparative religions, state and society formations, gender and nationalism.22 A substantial critical enterprise has centered U.S. statecraft and its historical and contemporary relation to Israel, focusing on presidential administrations, civil society groups, and nonprofit organizations.23 The Holocaust has its own immense scholarly literature, from European, Jewish, and U.S. histories to comparative studies of genocide, trauma, and memory, to the intellectual histories of post-Enlightenment critical thought, to critical elaborations of Holocaust memory in the United States, Israel, and the decolonizing world.24 Lastly, research by and about Palestinians has grown substantially in the last several decades, and critical (albeit smaller and, in some places, highly restricted) analytical spaces have begun to emerge for thick scholarly engagements with Palestinian histories, cultures, and politics beyond the frail (if also astoundingly durable) orientalist frameworks that derived their assumptions from research and scholarship in the Cold War era.25

I draw from these overlapping bodies of knowledge to fashion an analytic that engages comparative U.S. ethnic studies and transnational American studies. While critical keywords animating scholarship in these fields—diaspora, genocide, national belonging, imperial violence, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, to say nothing of race and ethnicity—offer a rich conceptual tapestry for engaging Israel and Palestine, inquiries into the form, function, and effects raised by the vexing questions of Israel and Palestine were for a long time fairly limited. It is only in the last fifteen years or so that this lacuna has begun to be addressed, with a growing and influential body of scholarship in transnational American studies investigating the cultural and historical ligatures linking the United States and Middle East.26

In drawing from and contributing to this work, I contend that the competing meanings given the “special relationships” between the United States, Israel, and Palestine are compellingly clarified by the analytical concept U.S. imperial culture. U.S. imperial culture names the crucible within which an enduring U.S. national ideology of territorial expansion and its attendant regimes of racial domination and war-making have been codified, reified, naturalized, and contested. The dominion of U.S. imperial culture produces and circulates knowledge to secure a purportedly stable opposition between the foreign and domestic that provides a symbolic architecture to secure consent for extraterritorial violence as essential for protecting the national home, even as the categories of foreign and domestic are persistently blurred and enfolded one into the other.27 At the same time, U.S. imperial culture’s strongly normative epistemological frames aim to regulate what counts as proper knowledge, casting some forms of knowledge as truth and others as aberrational, subjective, or fictitious.

U.S. imperial culture forges space as a key site of racial, national, and imperial fashioning. Multiscalar analyses of race’s spatialization clarify where and how lifeworlds materialize and become known.28 In this book, I show how shifting spatial imaginaries shaped both dominant and countervailing modes of understanding the geopolitical cartography linking the United States, Israel, and Palestine. Intranationally, this cartography took shape through simultaneous investment in and divestment from racial desegregation that produced a suburban infrastructure as a site of normative domesticity and urban spaces as sites of deindustrialization, capitalist renewal, and intensified militarization and incarceration.29 Internationally, Cold War cartographies coded where and how markets amenable to U.S. capital investment and exploitation were to be located and understood, alongside and in conjunction with imperial warfare in Southeast Asia and Latin America.30 The fluctuation of U.S. spatial imaginaries (segregation, the fluid linkages between ghettos and prisons, etc.) and the ethos of colonial rule to provide a rubric of “national security” were often routed precisely through the “case” of Israel and Palestine. In the chapters to come, I demonstrate how such relations were thought and figured, how they circulated and intervened in the cultural logics of their milieu.

Israel’s management, administration, and contestation of fluid and shifting national geographies offered the United States blueprints, lessons, and a storehouse of symbolic meaning.31 At once identified as “an outpost of the free world” in a “particularly dangerous neighborhood,” and as the battlefield for a revolutionary anticolonialism in the name of national liberation, the competing spatial imaginaries were intense indeed, with their own rich genealogies. Israel as a place of meaning making has long been a crucial reference for U.S. imperial culture. As holy land, it has served as an overdetermined reference point of sacred identification for European settlement in America since at least John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century “God’s new Israel” jeremiad.32 In the age of secular nationalisms, it figured as a sovereign spatial “fix” to the enduring problem of European anti-Semitism. And in the age of decolonization, it was a microcosm through which the production and management of militarized borders could be blessed by what Steven Salaita identifies as national “covenantal” discourses transiting between two settler societies.33 The history of modern Israel’s multivalent spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion organized around racial and religious distinction offered a laboratory for how a self-avowed liberal democracy could manage difference. At the same time, the archipelago of Palestinian refugee camps in the region founded in the aftermath of the 1947–49 Nakba (or “catastrophe”) and expanded after the 1967 Naksa (“setback”) signaled the nonnormative spatial rubrics within which belonging could be enacted while serving as paradigmatic sites for cultures of resistance to be organized and imagined.34 After 1967 and the ensuing military occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian Territories, such spatial questions gained even more complexity.

On Racial Relationality

Foregrounding Israel and Palestine in the ambit of U.S. imperial culture makes available a genealogy of race as central to its articulation. As numerous scholars in ethnic studies have shown, histories of Euro-American modernity have been marked by a dialectic of assimilation and elimination wherein race comes to serve as the protean site through which human difference is both perceived and hierarchically valued. Race is where orders of exploitation and elimination are codified, where domains of subjectivity and consciousness are fashioned and refashioned. Even as it is routinely encountered and addressed through national rubrics—indeed, even as it shapes the affective, geopolitical, and legal contours of the national—race’s freighted transnational legacies and wrenching spatial transformations reveal the porosity of the domestic and the foreign. Investigations of race open up those historical and social fields saturated by differential regimes of value, wherein, as Lisa Cacho incisively argues, “the production and ascription of human value are both violent and relational.”35 In this sense, processes of racialization are always already relational insofar as they convert difference into relational hierarchies of domination and value.36 Centering race also clarifies processes of subject constitution and deconstitution in their uneven, discrepant, and incommensurable circuits of translation and exchange.37 Following David Theo Goldberg, who persuasively argues that “a comparativist account contrasts and compares; a relational account connects,” I employ a relational approach to race in order to analyze the dense weave of historical connections between race-making processes circulating beyond and beneath the scale of the nation-state.38

The aftermath of the Holocaust, third world decolonization struggles, and freedom struggles in the United States collectively instantiated a historic rupture, producing what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat call a “seismic shift”39 and Howard Winant calls the “racial break.”40 In the United States, in the decades following World War II, overt white supremacy was formally delegitimized, while in Europe the paradigm of governing subject populations in distant territories was formally interceded. And, in the face of the Holocaust, a mammoth organizational, bureaucratic, and legal apparatus was built to encode liberal norms through which to practice international human rights.41 After the better part of four centuries, a global racial order built on and stabilized by a sovereign right to kill was decisively breached. The aftermath connected the racialization of Blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity—categories whose ascribed value have been blueprinted across the longue durée of Euro-American genocidal conquest and capitalist enslavement—to the racialization of Muslims, Jews, and Arabs. Other categories—such as terrorist, dictator, and criminal—garnered new meanings, even as their explicit relation to historical categories of race were muted but nevertheless functioned as legitimating frames for the violence of racism.42

My approach offers a substantial corrective to how race has been deployed to understand the relations between the United States, Israel, and Palestine. First, much of the earlier scholarship has “domesticated” racial concepts by converting them into liberal nationalist notions of ethnicity or static notions of comparative ethno-racial groupings. These studies, typically addressing “Black–Jewish relations” as a subset of a larger “ethnic-relations” paradigm, often suggest that the linkages between the United States, Israel, and Palestine were primarily external or epiphenomenal to the ways that Jewish people were incorporated into American national life, emphasizing instead a national “domestic” drama of Black–Jewish cooperation and confrontation. This framework reduces a heterogeneous historical field of affiliations to Israel and Palestine to expressions of Black anti-Semitism or Jewish racism, which then become the linchpin in a narrative of the tragedy of Black radicalism’s dissolution of the civil rights promise. This declensionist tale has been told and retold since at least the late 1960s, exemplified in Nat Hentoff and Baldwin’s popular edited collection, Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (1969). It is a tale the present book aims both to historicize and to upend.

Further, while scholars have used variations on the “ethnic relations” paradigm to describe much about a national scene of civil rights struggles,43 the paradigm often reifies an ahistorical notion of racism as individual prejudice and social discrimination and limits a critical analysis of race and racism. It naturalizes the nation as a liberal pluralist container of preconstituted ethno-racial groups by bracketing the durability of whiteness as a privileged category of national existence. It delimits transnational circuits of racialization, migration, and cultural exchange, and, in so doing, it externalizes the question of Israel and Palestine as something epiphenomenal to—as opposed to constitutive of—the meaning and function of race in the United States.

The narrative of decline in “Black–Jewish relations” obfuscates the central place of Arabs and Palestinians as part of this historical milieu. It reproduces the absence of Arabs and Palestinians as agents with history, culture, and political will, and is unable to reckon with the crucial processes of racialization of Arabs and Palestinians in the post–civil rights period. To address this absence, A Shadow over Palestine draws on and contributes to the field of Arab American studies, which, since at least 1967, has investigated the rich and heterogeneous transnational participation of Arabs and Palestinians in U.S. national life. Such work analyzes the relationship of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to Euro-American foreign policy, military intervention, and regimes of violence that have operated both within and outside the United States. While some studies have drawn on the liberal pluralist ethnic-relations paradigm to narrate processes of Arab American assimilation and exclusion, much of this scholarship has taken up the more worldly and historical understanding of racism offered above.44 A Shadow over Palestine contributes to this scholarship by historicizing the processes that subjected Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians to hierarchically defined categories of racial difference via rubrics of national security, linguistic difference, religious distinction, and political ideology. The book also centralizes the sustained labor of Arab intellectuals, poets, and organizations to diagnose, oppose, and transform the circuits of knowledge production underwriting such processes.

On Comparativity

Importantly, my analysis of the culture work that entangles the United States, Israel, and Palestine emerges immanently from within the archives of the conjuncture I identify. I draw from Stoler and Carole McGranahan’s signal insight to investigate how “the shifting references for what constitutes comparison are at once historical and political issues.” Comparison, they aver, is an “active political verb,” one that does work in and for imperial formations.45 In this sense comparison predicates imperial culture. It makes visible race’s relational texture, how racial meanings circulate through empire’s material and discursive networks.

The culture work of this key period (1960–85) draws on a wide array of related if incommensurable narrative frameworks. These include a structure of settler invasion whose blueprint was drawn as much from a Jewish theological imaginary as it was from Anglophone concepts of sovereign violence;46 the emergence of an ideological common sense that premises modern emancipation on the essential construction of coherent peoplehood;47 a liberal civil rights regime built on nominal forms of minority incorporability that obscures and intensifies U.S. capitalism’s racialized forms of exploitation;48 and the event of Nazi Genocide as crystallizing Euro-American modernity’s technologies of violence and the genocidal forms of reason that gave them legitimacy. The Nazi Genocide bequeathed a seemingly infinite storehouse of conceptual categories through which to articulate everything from international human rights regimes and the normative rubrics of genocide to the moral and ethical formulation of proper subjectivity, to the analytical lexicon of traumatic memory, sovereign violence, and political consciousness.

One major effect of these frames is that U.S. representations of Israel and Palestine have been produced in large measure through figures of comparison that, when clustered together, disclose a veritable archive of incommensurability. In the pages to come, I contend with statements like the following: Zionism is akin to movements for national liberation, or like diasporic political movements like Pan-Africanism, or an extension of Western civilization, or a special kind of colonialism, or a form of racism. The Israeli state is the last righteous response to Nazism, or Nazism’s tragic doppelgänger, or part of the third world, or an extension of the first. Nazism embodies a transhistorical anti-Semitism, or it shares totalitarian traits with communism, or it dramatizes the genocidal logic of European imperialism on European soil. Threats to Israeli national security are extensions of the Nazi project or are a threat to U.S. interests. American ghettoes are like Warsaw’s, or like Palestinian refugee camps, or like prisons, or like occupied territory. The topographical landscape of Israel and Palestine is like California’s, or vice versa, and cities like Los Angeles are like Tel Aviv, or like the battle-scarred West Bank or West Beirut. Israeli “sabras” are like Western Europeans or American pioneers, while Palestinians are like African Americans, or Native Americans, or Jews; Jews are like white people or African Americans; and African Americans are like Jews.

Is it any wonder, then, that the rhetoric, grammar, and syntax structuring the conjuncture of the United States, Israel, and Palestine are built around “special” relationships? In its formation as the dominant rhetorical figure to describe the connections between the United States and Israel, President Kennedy’s statement is shorthand for an expansive constellation of diffuse political stakes, historical arguments, and modes of identification, the incommensurability of which is obscured when the diplomatic language is taken as natural, a given, or simply a fact. That there are such stark discrepancies and contradictions between these figures is evidence enough that these all cannot be “true.” None of these figures is reducible to a relationship of identity or equivalence. As forms of comparison, they provide a translational bridge from one context to another, a “link through a resemblance,” in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, across “a frontier which is not thereby abolished.”49 These and many other figures circulating in U.S. culture produced these relationships, and produced them as special, unique, sui generis, or exceptional.

Exceptional Relations

A Shadow over Palestine does not reconstruct the “true” linkage between the cataclysm of Nazi genocide, the Palestinian Nakba, and the manifold contestations around the contours of the post–World War II U.S. racial formation. Rather, it charts how a wide range of linkages were made, felt, and thought, and how they were mobilized and contested not only in culture work but also at the level of knowledge production and circulation.50 My approach illuminates the specter of the Holocaust and its incommensurable relationships to the Palestinian Nakba in the very theoretical architecture that takes up this relationship. An evocative case in point is how political theories of the sovereign exception have proliferated in recent years alongside the expression and critique of American and Israeli national exceptionalisms.

In his oft-cited essay “Necropolitics,” the postcolonial political philosopher Achille Mbembe names the continuing colonial occupation in Palestine as the “most accomplished form” of terror expressed through the violence of the state of exception.51 Mbembe evinces links between Palestinian subjectivation predicated on the exposure to premature death, the political philosophy of the U.S. slave plantation, the Nazi extermination camp, and the broader interarticulation of what Paul Gilroy calls “modernity and infrahumanity.”52 While Mbembe moves dexterously between these sites, we misread his argument if we see a single invariant articulation of race, empire, and modernity culminating in a convergence of plantation, death camp, and occupied territory. To argue, as Giorgio Agamben does, that homo sacer, the life that can be killed with impunity, is an abstract paradigm through which to glimpse the violence of sovereign power, is to obfuscate the discrepant, nuanced, and contradictory historical processes that Mbembe’s analysis invites. Abstracting homo sacer, rather than locating its production in the historical weave of race in the modern world, short-circuits the productive complexity of relational analysis. It obscures, as the cultural theorist Alexander Weheliye notes, how “because black suffering figures in the domain of the mundane, it refuses the idiom of exception.”53 Rather, to dwell genealogically in the historical vicissitudes and contingencies made available through a relational analysis is, as Lisa Lowe argues, to “both situate ‘difference’ within the modern apparatus of comparison and attempt to retrieve the fragments of mixture and convergence that are ‘lost’ through modern comparative procedures.”54 In a different idiom, Said might have called such analytical work contrapuntal.55

The early twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” drew on the expression of sovereignty under colonial modernity as its operative blueprint.56 A “state of exception” in which the rights and protections granted by the state are indefinitely suspended during national emergencies authorized the rule of law’s very existence. For Schmitt, the state of exception demanded that the sovereign “decide between its elements” through the “elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” Subjects for whom the sovereign’s law did not apply—“let them be called barbarians, uncivilized, atheists, aristocrats, even slaves”—occupy spaces both within and outside the borders of the nation-state.57 Nazi jurists used Schmitt’s political theology to legitimate National Socialism’s legal apparatus by drawing on Euro-America’s recognizable lexicon of colonial racism, or what the Italian historian Enzo Traverso identifies as Nazism’s “roots in a theory and practice of extermination of ‘inferior races’ to which all the imperial Western powers subscribed.”58 The origins of Nazi violence were “the unique synthesis of a vast range of modes of domination and extermination already tried out separately in the course of modern Western history.”59 The Nazi regime turned to the racialized rhetoric of colonial difference, citing examples from Anglophone empires. Deploying colonial racism’s brutal relationality, Hitler famously claimed, “What India was for England, the eastern territories will be for us. . . . Our role in the East will be analogous to that of the English in India.” Elsewhere he writes, “The natives will have to be shot. . . . Our sole duty is to Germanize the country by the immigration of Germans, regarding the natives as Redskins.”60

In the 1940s and 1950s Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany’s occupation of France, painstakingly documented the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism in European imperial projects. Arendt explicated the effects for the new state of Israel of being constituted through a category of human population without the right to have rights. In the process, she elucidated how political modernity’s founding documents, most notably the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, constructed a tenuous affiliation between the state and its subjects that would lead to Europe’s pandemic of stateless refugees and national minorities “forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law.”61 In the culmination of this line of argument in Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes:

It turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.62

With the terror of European Jewish extermination in full view, Arendt’s essays like “We Refugees” (1943), “The Crisis of Zionism” (1943), and “Zionism Reconsidered” (1944) problematized the linkages between Zionism and Euro-American imperial projects that embraced a form of nation-state sovereignty hostile to the claims of indigenous peoples. “The Zionists,” wrote Arendt, “if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests.”63 In the early 1960s, as a journalist covering Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt contextualized Nazi genocide within a broader field of twentieth-century imperial culture. In many ways, as the historian Peter Novick has argued, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem—published months after Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross” in the New Yorker—paved the way for a critical appraisal, sometimes silenced or subjugated, of the manners in which U.S. imperial culture remained predicated on comparative rationalizations of state and state-sanctioned racial violence.

This brief historicization of theory illustrates A Shadow over Palestine’s central question: How have artists, activists, intellectuals, state agents, and scholars in the United States written through, about, and against the historical shadowing of Palestine and Palestinians within Euro-American modernity? The figure that figures the other of political Zionism, its own self-definitional outside, is an animating lacuna of modern Euro-American thought. It is an absence that settler colonialism, racial liberalism, and genocide all persistently demand and produce, that they call into being and deterritorialize, that they banish and abandon. Held in a persistent shadow, Palestine secures the expression of imperial sovereignty, animating its “permanently temporary,” read exceptional, measures. The alterity against which Zionism is secured names a supplement that is not simply or solely an exclusion awaiting proper recognition into a stable field of reference. The will and desire toward incorporability and inclusion, toward generating a form of representation capable of securing something like human status to serve as a bulwark against regimes of violence, is built on the tenuous grounds of sociality that define Euro-American modernity. The forces that paradoxically draw on this shadow have been insufficient in interceding in Euro-American modernity’s durable race-making procedures. Palestine’s constitutive absence materializes geographically and has profound spatial repercussions. It materializes historiographically, in how archives are made and unmade and in the warrants that buttress claims about the content and form of those archives. It materializes epistemologically, in the grids of intelligibility that sustain how we know what we know. It infuses the very conceptual apparatus through which we come to understand the relation between knowledge, power, and coloniality. A Shadow over Palestine seeks to clarify how this absent presence came to bear so intensively on a particular historical conjuncture.

Chapter 1, “Specters of Genocide: Cold War Exceptions and the Contradictions of Liberalism,” situates the entanglement of Israel and Palestine in competing post-Holocaust discourses of racial expertise and Cold War geopolitics. To do so, it provides a genealogical account of the 1975 United Nations Resolution 3379, which condemned Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. This resolution overwhelmingly passed the UN General Assembly, bringing widespread attention to the racial dimensions of Zionism as an ideology and practice of settler colonialism aimed at the removal of indigenous Palestinians from the historical land of Palestine. Constructing an account of the resolution in this way surfaces three key elements otherwise lost in the commonsense narrative of the resolution. First is the historical emergence of the UN’s 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the document that provided the crucial precedent for Resolution 3379. The 1963 declaration engaged a tenacious epistemic ambivalence toward anti-Semitism that attempted to manage the post–World War II race–religion distinction as it pertained to Jews. Second, the chapter centralizes the work of the Syrian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Palestine Research Center (PRC), uncovering a key moment in the intellectual history of theorizing racism’s relation to Zionist settler colonialism. From at least the early 1960s, race was already a well-developed heuristic through which the project of Palestinian national liberation advanced its analysis of power and history. Third, situating the resolution in this way emphasizes how U.S. Cold War liberalism was consolidated through articulations of expertise on the race question. Exemplifying this dynamic is the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most important U.S. racial liberal thinkers, policymakers, and politicians of the period, who served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations at the time of the resolution. Moynihan’s work reveals how a dominant culture of American expertise around race matters consistently overwrote Arab and Palestinian racial critiques with the specter of a nebulous Soviet threat or a viral anti-Semitism.

The analysis of racism by the Palestine Research Center was central to the arguments put forth at the UN on behalf of Palestinians. In the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 War, the PRC’s work was adopted—without citation—and transformed to underscore the anticolonial dimensions of Black freedom struggles in the United States. Chapter 2, “Black Power’s Palestine: Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle,” tracks how activists used this anticolonial imagined geography to link race-conscious critiques of the incorporative modalities of U.S. imperialism to Palestinian national liberation. This work diverged from the tradition of Afro-diasporic Zionism that informed liberal and radical Black politics alike, and circulated alternative knowledge of the colonial conditions shaping Palestinian life. Between 1967 and 1975, the associations between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party in the United States, and Algeria, Egypt, and the Palestinian national liberation movement reveal how representations of U.S. decolonization were intimately bound to the emergent legibility of pro-Palestinian politics. SNCC’s infamous 1967 “position paper” on Palestine, purportedly drafted within the organization but reproducing the PRC’s scholarship almost verbatim, becomes a crucial rhetorical performance in this regard. The Black Panther Party’s affiliation with the Palestine Liberation Organization at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers placed this relationship in a broader decolonizing context. The chapter culminates in an extended analysis of the early work of David Graham Du Bois, the son of Shirley Graham Du Bois and stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois. David Du Bois worked as a journalist in Cairo before becoming editor of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. He wrote a quasi-autobiographical novel about African Americans in Egypt titled . . . And Bid Him Sing. Taken together, his work reveals the translational possibilities and limits posed by an Arab–African diasporic cultural imaginary.

The 1967 war catalyzed the anticolonial trajectory of Black freedom struggles and spurred increasingly robust associations with Palestinians and the Arab world. For many American Jews across the political spectrum, however, 1967 facilitated intensified identifications with Israel as a safe haven in a world still scarred by anti-Semitism. These identifications were all the more complex given increasingly vocal critiques of the paucity of American liberalism to secure substantive rights for nonwhite minorities. Chapter 3, “Jewish Conversions: Color Blindness, Anti-Imperialism, and Jewish National Liberation,” turns to a range of culture work embodying these vexed convergences. Against the backdrop of growing visibility for Jewish cultural and political organizations like the American Jewish Committee, this chapter interrogates how the suture between political Zionism and American Jewishness was contingently fashioned in the crucible of racial justice struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These struggles’ imagined geographies drew on a cognitive mapping of U.S. imperial culture that linked Jewish orientations toward Cold War liberalism with the intensification of U.S. state violence in urban U.S. settings and in Southeast Asia alike, as well as with the paradoxical military supremacy and existential vulnerability of the post-1967 Israeli state. Some prominent writers, like Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, and Saul Bellow, doubled down on the exceptionalist promise of American liberty and Israeli military supremacy to ensure Jewish security in a world where Jews were purportedly dangerously “exposed.” By contrast, radical and progressive Jewish New Left organizations (the Jewish Liberation Project, Jews for Urban Justice, etc.) and activists (Michael Lerner, Arthur Waskow, etc.) drew on Zionism’s own anti-imperialist lineage as a Jewish national liberation movement to figure the Jewish diaspora’s revolutionary potential and to imagine the possibilities of Israel as an integrated part of the Third World. Never far from any of this culture work were robust debates about the contours of Black freedom struggles; by the same token, routinely absented were investigations of the settler colonial investments in these expressions of Jewish national liberation.

For many Palestinians and other Arabs living in the United States, the popular political and media discourse framing the 1967 war as a miraculous victory by proxy was nothing short of devastating. While there had been a long history of Arabs attempting to make legible to American audiences both the presence of Palestinian Christians and Muslims concerned with the imposition of Anglo-American interests in the region, and with peoples of Arab descent as part of the fabric of American life, the 1967 war marked a watershed crisis for both projects. Chapter 4, “Arab American Awakening: Edward Said, Area Studies, and Palestine’s Contrapuntal Futures,” situates the development of Said’s Orientalism within this crisis. It turns to a slim 1968 essay Said wrote directly after the June war, “The Arab Portrayed,” alongside the growing knowledge production by a community of scholars of Arab descent. Said’s early argument precedes Orientalism as engaging an analysis of race and epistemology responsive to the shifting post-1967 racialization of Arabs in the United States. Situating Orientalism in this way desediments how the question of Palestine was being fashioned within changing literary studies paradigms; the rise of state-authorized surveillance of so-called ethnic Arabs alongside instrumentalist Cold War area studies; and the organized knowledge projects of scholars of Arab descent in the United States. It likewise illuminates how Said’s contrapuntal mode of analysis was attentive to the incommensurable connections between ideologies and practices of U.S. settler conquest, the human and political devastation of the Holocaust, and the dispossession and dehumanization of Arab communities in Southwest Asia and the United States alike. Said’s post-1967 writings confront the conjuncture’s categorical dismissal of a whole people—the Palestinians—by both reckoning with the symbolic, material, and ontological armature that gives such a dismissal its force while laying claim to the imaginative possibilities of Palestine as a horizon of ineluctable relationality. Palestine serves as a site that proffered Said a relational humanism whose ethic of alterity is matched only by its commitment to a nondominating and noncoercive decolonization.

By the early 1980s the hegemony of the New Right in the United States had substantially deepened relationships with an Israeli state whose mode of governance precluded any substantive self-determined expression of Palestinian national liberation. The anticolonial racial justice movements of the late 1960s were severely curtailed by technologies of U.S. state repression. Holocaust memory in the United States was increasingly sutured to narrow U.S. and Israeli Cold War geopolitical aims. And expressions of Palestinian solidarity were increasingly scrutinized while expressions of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms in popular culture were on the rise. In this context, where and how did an antiracist and anti-imperialist relation to Palestine surface? Chapter 5, “Moving Toward Home: Women of Color Feminisms and the Lebanon Conjuncture” turns to the Black poet, essayist, teacher, and activist June Jordan, whose published and unpublished work on the Middle East reveals and contests broad political shifts in the early 1980s. The chapter’s point of departure is the November 1982 UNICEF fund-raiser for the children of Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s invasion the previous summer. Called “Moving towards Home,” and featuring a dozen poets from the United States, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine, the event registered the complexity of merging the poetic and the geopolitical. “Moving Toward Home”—the event and Jordan’s poem—occurred amid coalitional projects between Arab American and African American civil rights organizations in support of Palestinian self-determination and against the expansion of Cold War militarization. They also occurred amid intensive disputes among U.S. feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the differentiated lived experiences of racism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. White feminism’s hegemony was disrupted in especially robust ways by race-critical analytics that had Israel and Palestine in their ambit, all the more so after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This chapter thus treats Jordan’s poetic and political expression of “becoming-Palestinian” in relation to vexed debates within Jewish, Black, and U.S. third world feminisms on how to conceptualize and enact emancipatory projects that could center antiracism as constitutive of a durable political futurity.

A final introductory note is in order. A Shadow over Palestine attempts to tell a better story about the present entanglement of the United States, Israel, and Palestine through a conjunctural analysis of its past. That is, it is from the vantage point of the political present that I reconstruct its prefiguration.64 If ever there was a time to revisit and reframe this past—not only to recall the texture of its legitimation and the alibis for how things have become as they are but also to listen closely and remember those modes of critique, imagination, and relation envisioning how things might become otherwise—clearly that time has arrived.