The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, & Politics (Nasser Abourahme and Daniel Boyarin)

Quick Overview

The anti-Zionist idea does not exist; only anti-Zionist practice, which emerges as both the effect and condition of the anti-colonial subject and must be anti-imperialist. This practice necessitates a concrete struggle to defeat Zionism, not reform it, and must originate from the terrain of colonized land and the lived experiences of those in struggle, rather than from Zionism's own genealogies or European intellectual frameworks.

Key Points: Anti-Zionism is fundamentally a practice, not merely an idea, and it must be anti-imperialist, emerging from the concrete struggle to defeat Zionism as a political project. Meaningful anti-Zionist knowledge is "abolitional," rooted in the "terrain of struggle on colonized land," and must be "imminent to the actually existing concrete forces of struggle and combat." Beginning anti-Zionist thought with Europe's Jewish question or an "ethics of the other" is a "dead end," as it ensnares the critique in Europe's epistemic world and imposes "impossible symbolic demands" on Palestinians. Ghassan Kanafani's "Returning to Haifa" illustrates that the homeland is "the future" found only in "action and struggle," not in restoring the past or individual acts of memory. Zionism functions as the "ideological alibi" and "moral absolution" for the post-war imperial West, enabling its self-perception as a "white civilizational moral order" after the Holocaust and colonialism. Daniel Boyarin asserts that anti-Zionism is primarily a "Jewish movement" of resistance against the Zionist idea, viewing "any form of possible support for the Palestinian struggle" as the practice stemming from this Jewish anti-Zionist theory. The Palestinian subject, by refusing Zionism, "opposes the world itself," representing the "last inimitable remainder in the West" and offering a path to rebel against the "intolerability of the world today."

Context: This panel discussion features Nasser Abourahme, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies, and Daniel Boyarin, a professor emeritus of Talmudic culture and rhetoric, both authors of recent books on related topics. The session, titled "Anti-Zionist Theory and Practice," explores the historical, theoretical, and political dimensions of anti-Zionism, particularly emphasizing its nature as a form of practice rooted in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, and its relationship to Jewish anti-Zionism.