In 1975, the United Nations adopted Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. Although this resolution would be rescinded in 1991 due to an intense pressure campaign by Israel, it established the global South understanding of Zionism. Specifically, this resolution contextualized Zionism within a world system shaped by the violence of imperialism. The political clarity of this resolution reflected understandings of racism as a technology of imperialism that had been developing for much of the twentieth century. The 1991 UN vote to rescind the resolution reflected not only an effort to exonerate Israel, but also, to reject and unmake the very meanings of race/racism that anticolonial movements had developed.
In his landmark study, Orientalism (1978), published just three years after the UN adoption of Resolution 3379, Palestinian scholar and writer Edward Said theorized the so-called Orient as “the contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” to the “West.” As an ideology of imperial domination, Orientalism, Said argued, was predicated on the impossibility of “political identification” with “the Arab or the Muslim,” and more to the point, “the Palestinian.”
Submodule: Zionism is Anti-Palestinian Racism
In a historic window in which Zionism’s inventory in Gaza has been livestreamed for all to see, the world has an opportunity to reverse-engineer a definition of Zionism from its effects. Three months into the most recent historical chapter of genocide of the people of Gaza, Mohammed El-Kurd, in what we might recognize as a Saidian vein, stated, “Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations.” Just as a determination of genocidal intent does not require explicit statements that reduce Palestinians to “human animals” but instead can be inferred from circumstantial evidence, so too must Zionism be read from and judged by its material effects. At the same time, the infrastructural imposition of conditions of premature death on the Palestinian people derives from ideologies that have facilitated and are encoded in the machinery of annihilation.