Anti-Palestinianism

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An urgent and revelatory primer on the widespread racism against Palestinians in the Western world – where it comes from and whose interests it serves

Over the course of the twentieth century, the Western imperial powers which had spent a hundred years pursuing violent colonial projects around the globe were gradually forced to withdraw, conceding to the overwhelming demand for independence from occupied peoples in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East. But one country was excluded from this historic sea change.

As the colonial apparatus was being dismantled around the world, the colonisation of Palestine was just beginning – moving against the current of history – sponsored and orchestrated by British and American governments. And as the twentieth century wore on, these same Western powers steadily fostered a deep culture of denial and repression against Palestinian people both at home and abroad. They purged representations of Palestine from public life; they decried anyone advocating for the basic human rights of Palestinians as a hateful anti-Semite; they denied the very existence of the Palestinian people.

This constellation of violently prejudiced and misleading narratives is what Saree and Ussama Makdisi call anti-Palestinianism.

In Anti-Palestinianism, the authors set out the stark reality of how Palestine became the last moral carve-out of the post-colonial West. And they show how the pursuit of anti-Palestinian policy has shattered freedom of expression for everyone in the West, our governments choosing to protect a distant project of colonial apartheid over the civil rights of their own people. Clear-eyed and powerfully persuasive, this is an essential primer for anyone seeking to make sense of the ongoing horrors in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the disturbing politics of denial and suppression emerging in response across our own democracy.

© Saree Makdisi and Ussama Makdisi 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

Timely and devastating. Saree and Ussama Makdisi break down the logic of anti-Palestinianism, its settler colonial roots, its ties to other racial regimes, and its enablers in much of the international community. The authors are clear: dismantling the colonial and racial order are preconditions for a free Palestine, and a genuinely free world
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of 'Freedom Dreams'

How is it possible for the Palestinians to be openly dispossessed, subjugated, starved and massacred while the world’s liberal democracies watch on and do almost nothing to save them? Saree and Ussama Makdisi provide a well-argued and brilliantly nuanced answer to that question in this brave, timely and hugely important book. They minutely dissect the way the Palestinian people have been dehumanised and their lives devalued over the course of a century, their very existence erased, so preparing the way for their ethnic cleansing and genocide. Anti-Palestinianism is essential reading to understand the biggest moral issue of our time
William Dalrymple

This book is the most relevant piece of writing I have read anywhere for understanding our present predicament. It patiently and brilliantly deconstructs the greatest fallacy of our era: that those who struggle for Palestinian freedom are by definition antisemitic. Saree and Ussama Makdisi, the most prominent Palestinian intellectuals of our day, identify anti-Palestinianism as a form of racism driven by the engine of Zionist genocidal violence – a form of racism now seeking to negate Palestinian life itself. Anti-Palestinianism makes clear that we must confront this lethal prejudice urgently in order to build a politics of resistance and liberation
Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture

This is an urgent book for a time of genocide. With clarity, rigor, and passion, Saree and Ussama Makdisi demonstrate what anti-Palestinianism is and how deeply it is embedded in the discourse around Israel. But this book offers hope too, for it shows how the narrative of erasure has been challenged, a struggle led by Palestinians themselves, who have stubbornly refused to surrender and disappear, who have never ceased calling to free Palestine
Viet Thanh Nguyen

Saree and Ussama Makdisi have finally given us the correct term for Zionism's erasure of Palestine. Israel's live-streamed genocide in Gaza has shattered 'the old forms of narrative hegemony once exercised by Zionism,' only to have them replaced by ferocious, naked repression of Palestine advocacy under the false label of combating antisemitism
Rashid Khalidi, author of 'The Hundred Years' War on Palestine'

Remarkable, urgent, devastating... This book documents the narrative crafted to erase Palestinians from the Western mind, and the systems of government and culture which deploy it. And it shows the connection between devaluing the lives and history of Palestinians and the institutional targeting and state violence across the West directed at anyone who dares to name or challenge it
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of 'Something About Living'

About Saree Makdisi

Saree Makdisi is the Chair of the English Department at UCLA and a scholar of Palestine, colonial history, and its afterlives. He is the author of Palestine Inside Out (Norton, 2008), which counted Alice Walker, Desmond Tutu, and Howard Zinn among its many supporters, and Tolerance is a Wasteland (UCP, 2022), which Judith Butler called “a beacon of light.” He wrote the introduction for the recent reissue of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, which he presented at Southbank Center in a much-watched speech last fall. He writes frequently for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, n+1, and the London Review of Books. His essay “No Human Being Can Exist” was n+1’s most-read piece of 2023.

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About Ussama Makdisi

Ussama Makdisi is the inaugural May Ziadeh Chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, Professor of History, and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Berkeley. His latest book, Age of Coexistence (University of California Press, 2019), was praised by Peter Beinart and Rashid Khalidi, among others. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Houston Chronicle, The Yale Review, Jewish Currents, and Aeon, as well as on various Arabic media, and he has appeared on numerous television and radio shows including Al Jazeera, TRT International, and NPR’s Morning Edition.

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