The recent recognition of Israel as an apartheid regime by the international human rights community and the growing use of the apartheid framework to conceptualize the Israeli colonization of Palestine have brought to the fore the question of race and its applicability in the Palestinian context. The claim that race is an irrelevant category in understanding the question of Palestine is not uncommon. While the liberal and conservative positions insist that the colonization of Palestine is essentially a national conflict between rival groups, on the critical end there is also objection to understanding Palestine in terms of race, insisting instead that it is a colonial, not a colonial-racial, question.
The apartheid reports and the wider reservations about the use of race demonstrate the need for a more nuanced conversation about race and Palestine. This paper is concerned with how to understand and analyze race in Palestine—not as a prescriptive question, but as an analytical and political one. It argue for an analysis of race that accounts for the specificities of the Palestine case and that recognizes and builds on the Palestinian long-standing theorization of race that centers critique of Zionism and Israel as a settler colonial racial project. It also suggest that expanding the race-based analysis of Palestine can benefit from race critical theory itself, and that in turn Palestine can enrich our understanding of the global history of race and settler colonialism. In line with Palestinian critique and with race critical theories that account for the colonial genealogy of race, this paper stresses the importance of locating Palestine, both historically and today, within the wider racial (and gendered) global histories, legacies, and present politics of imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Such engagement helps explicate the political work of race in facilitating, sustaining, and justifying the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine.
Bio: Lana Tatour is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Global Development at the University of New South Wales. She was the 2019-2020 Ibrahim Abu Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is currently completing her monograph provisionally titled Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights. She is also co-editing a book provisionally titled Race and the Question of Palestine.
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