Palestinian Critiques of Zionism

Palestinian Critiques of Zionism

Palestinian critiques of Zionism encompass a wide range of historical, political, intellectual, legal, and cultural arguments about the development of Zionism and the establishment and subsequent policies of the State of Israel. Across the material collected here, Palestinian writers and scholars frequently analyze Zionism not simply as a Jewish nationalist movement but in relation to European colonialism, territorial settlement, demographic transformation, Palestinian dispossession, and competing claims to political sovereignty.

These critiques have developed over more than a century. Early Palestinian opposition focused heavily on land acquisition, immigration, settlement, and the relationship between the Zionist movement and European imperial powers. Later Palestinian intellectual traditions examined the Nakba, refugeehood, Israeli citizenship, military occupation, apartheid, and the limitations of partition. Contemporary debates increasingly include questions of indigeneity, decolonization, equality, historical redress, and whether political arrangements beyond Zionism could protect both Palestinian rights and Jewish collective life.

The sources also demonstrate that Palestinian criticism of Zionism is not a single ideological position. The material includes Marxist, nationalist, liberal, legal, anti-colonial, human-rights, Indigenous, and decolonial perspectives, as well as discussions involving Jewish and Israeli critics of Zionism.

Zionism as Settler Colonialism

One of the most prominent frameworks in the collected material interprets Zionism through the theory of settler colonialism. Within this analysis, Zionist settlement is understood as part of a continuing political process involving immigration, acquisition and control of land, construction of a separate national society, demographic transformation, and displacement or political marginalization of the existing Palestinian population.

The settler-colonial framework emphasizes structures rather than isolated events. Its proponents therefore connect developments before 1948, the Nakba, Israeli state-building, the occupation beginning in 1967, settlement expansion, annexation, and contemporary disputes over land and sovereignty.

Palestinian scholars have also participated in wider academic debates over the usefulness and limitations of settler-colonial theory. Some sources stress its comparative value, placing Palestine alongside other histories of settler expansion and Indigenous dispossession. Others caution that Palestinian history has distinctive characteristics that should not disappear within a generalized colonial model.

Early Palestinian Critiques of Zionism

Palestinian opposition to Zionism predates the establishment of Israel. Early Palestinian newspapers, political activists, intellectuals, and community leaders expressed concern about Zionist immigration, land purchases, settlement, and the potential political consequences of establishing a separate national project in Palestine.

These early critiques increasingly connected Zionism with European imperial influence. The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate became particularly important to this interpretation because British power provided the political environment within which the Zionist movement developed its institutions and expanded its presence.

Palestinian intellectual traditions subsequently developed more systematic critiques. Writers and political figures analyzed Zionism through nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, class, race, and competing concepts of national self-determination.

Palestinian Intellectual Critiques of Zionism

Palestinian intellectual criticism has included figures and traditions ranging from Marxist and communist movements to nationalist and decolonial scholarship. The collected material discusses thinkers such as Fayez Sayegh, Jabra Nicola, Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, and numerous contemporary Palestinian scholars and commentators.

A recurring distinction within this literature separates Judaism and Jewish identity from Zionism as a political ideology. Palestinian critics have often argued that opposition to Zionism concerns political sovereignty, colonization, displacement, and inequality rather than hostility toward Jews as a people or Judaism as a religion.

These arguments have become especially significant amid controversies over the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The Nakba, Dispossession, and State-Building

The Nakba of 1948 occupies a central place in Palestinian critiques of Zionism. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction or depopulation of numerous Palestinian communities are frequently interpreted as fundamental to understanding Israeli state formation.

Some sources emphasize Zionist discussions of population "transfer" and demographic considerations before 1948. Others examine the military, political, and legal processes through which Palestinian refugees were prevented from returning and their property was subsequently transferred or placed under Israeli control.

Within this perspective, the Nakba is often described not only as a historical event but as the beginning of continuing processes affecting Palestinian land, residency, citizenship, family reunification, refugeehood, and territorial fragmentation.

Refugees and the Right of Return

The Palestinian refugee question is another major point of disagreement between Palestinian political demands and most forms of Zionism. Palestinian writers commonly treat refugee return as an individual and collective right tied to displacement in 1948 and subsequent conflicts.

The collected material argues that maintaining a Jewish demographic majority has frequently conflicted with unrestricted Palestinian refugee return. This tension is particularly important in Palestinian critiques of liberal Zionism, whose supporters may endorse Palestinian statehood and criticize occupation while continuing to oppose a return that could alter Israel's demographic character.

Some contemporary Palestinian scholarship attempts to move discussion of return beyond abstract diplomatic formulas by examining restitution, property, geography, citizenship, economic reconstruction, and practical mechanisms through which return might occur.

Liberal Zionism and Palestinian Critiques

Liberal Zionism receives sustained attention in the material. Palestinian critics frequently argue that liberal Zionism concentrates on the occupation that began in 1967 while insufficiently addressing the political consequences of 1948.

From this perspective, ending West Bank settlement or creating a Palestinian state would not by itself resolve questions concerning refugees, Palestinian citizens of Israel, land ownership, political equality, or the historical consequences of the Nakba.

Critics consequently question whether a political system designed to preserve Jewish national sovereignty and demographic predominance can simultaneously guarantee full Palestinian equality. Defenders of liberal Zionism approach these questions differently, maintaining that Jewish national self-determination and Palestinian national rights can potentially coexist, particularly through territorial partition.

Palestinian Citizens of Israel

The status of Palestinian citizens of Israel raises another set of questions concerning citizenship, nationality, land, and equality. Several sources challenge descriptions of Palestinians inside Israel merely as an ethnic minority, instead identifying them as an Indigenous population incorporated into a state established through settler colonization.

These analyses examine land policy, planning, citizenship law, national institutions, political representation, and differences between formal citizenship and substantive equality.

The debate also affects discussions of Jewish-Arab political cooperation. Palestinian critics sometimes argue that partnership cannot be genuinely equal without acknowledging historical disparities in power and addressing the political structures created through dispossession and state-building.

Apartheid, Equality, and Decolonization

Apartheid has become an increasingly influential framework for analyzing Israeli rule over Palestinians. The collected material discusses discrimination, territorial fragmentation, separate legal arrangements, refugee exclusion, movement restrictions, and differential political rights.

Some Palestinian scholars nevertheless caution that apartheid should not replace settler colonialism as the central analytical framework. They argue that eliminating discriminatory practices without addressing displacement, land, sovereignty, and refugee return could leave fundamental historical questions unresolved.

Decolonization is therefore presented in many sources as a broader political objective. Its meaning varies considerably but generally involves transforming relationships of political domination while addressing historical dispossession and establishing equality.

Indigeneity, Land, and Colonial Narratives

Questions of indigeneity are increasingly prominent in debates surrounding Zionism. Palestinian writers emphasize continuous Palestinian attachment to the land and criticize narratives they believe erase or minimize Palestinian historical presence.

At the same time, some of the material acknowledges Jewish historical and religious connections to Palestine while disputing the proposition that ancient connections justify modern political supremacy or Palestinian displacement.

This produces a complex debate in which historical attachment, Indigenous identity, migration, colonial settlement, nationalism, and sovereignty overlap. Some writers argue that recognizing Jewish attachment to Palestine need not require accepting Zionist political structures, while Palestinian decolonization need not depend upon denying Jewish historical connections.

Land, Space, Mapping, and Erasure

Land is central to Palestinian critiques because Zionist settlement and Israeli state formation transformed ownership, political jurisdiction, geographic terminology, and patterns of residence.

The material examines land acquisition, planning institutions, settlement, mapping, renaming, archives, property law, and digital technologies. These processes are interpreted by some authors as mechanisms through which Palestinian geography and historical memory have been altered or obscured.

Control over maps, archives, archaeological narratives, place names, and cultural property therefore becomes part of the wider struggle over political legitimacy and historical memory.

Oslo and Critiques of the Peace Process

The Oslo peace process is heavily criticized in many of the collected Palestinian sources. Critics argue that negotiations beginning in the 1990s shifted Palestinian politics away from liberation, refugee return, and comprehensive political rights toward limited territorial administration and negotiations over a future state.

Some argue that the Palestinian Authority became structurally dependent on arrangements established through Oslo while Israeli settlements and territorial control continued to expand.

From this perspective, the conventional "peace process" transformed a struggle over colonialism and national rights into negotiations between ostensibly equivalent parties despite significant disparities in territorial, military, and political power.

One State, Two States, and Partition

Debate over political solutions occupies a substantial portion of the material. The traditional two-state model seeks separate Israeli and Palestinian states, while critics question whether territorial fragmentation, settlements, refugee claims, Jerusalem, and interconnected populations have made meaningful partition increasingly difficult.

One-state proposals vary significantly. Some advocate a secular democratic state based on equal individual citizenship. Others propose binational or multinational structures recognizing collective Palestinian and Jewish identities.

Palestinian critics also caution that merely integrating Palestinians into existing Israeli institutions would not necessarily constitute decolonization. They argue that any shared political framework would have to address land, refugees, historical injustice, political power, and collective rights.

Palestinian Resistance, BDS, and Political Strategy

Palestinian political strategy has changed repeatedly, encompassing armed struggle, diplomacy, popular resistance, international law, civil society activism, boycotts, and campaigns for international solidarity.

The material examines disagreements over which strategies can most effectively confront occupation, settlement, displacement, and political inequality. Some authors argue that Palestinian politics should return to a comprehensive anti-colonial framework rather than concentrating primarily on establishing a state in the territories occupied in 1967.

BDS and other international campaigns are frequently discussed within this broader effort to shift attention toward Palestinian rights, including equality, ending occupation, and addressing the refugee question.

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Political Speech

The relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism remains intensely contested. Palestinian writers in the collection generally distinguish opposition to Zionism as a political ideology from prejudice or hostility toward Jews.

The sources also acknowledge that antisemitism is a genuine historical and contemporary phenomenon and that criticism of Israel can sometimes employ antisemitic ideas. The central disagreement concerns whether opposition to Zionism itself should be considered antisemitic.

This controversy has major consequences for political speech, academic debate, activism, and Palestinian advocacy. Several authors argue that automatically equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism restricts Palestinians' ability to describe their own historical experiences and challenge the ideology and institutions they associate with dispossession.

Jewish and Israeli Challenges to Zionism

Criticism of Zionism has not been exclusively Palestinian. The material documents Jewish socialist, communist, religious, binationalist, post-Zionist, and anti-Zionist traditions.

Israeli New Historians and other scholars have also challenged aspects of conventional Zionist historiography, particularly regarding 1948 and Palestinian displacement. Contemporary Jewish critics debate whether Jewish security and collective identity require a specifically Zionist state or could exist within alternative political arrangements based on equality.

These perspectives sometimes overlap with Palestinian critiques while differing over history, terminology, responsibility, and what decolonization should entail.

Decolonization and Alternative Political Futures

A substantial portion of contemporary Palestinian criticism moves beyond diagnosing historical injustice toward considering alternative political arrangements.

Proposals include one democratic state, binational frameworks, federal or confederal arrangements, and other systems intended to guarantee equal citizenship and collective rights. Many emphasize Palestinian refugee return, restitution, political equality, and acknowledgment of historical dispossession.

A central difficulty concerns how decolonization should operate in a society containing millions of Israeli Jews whose lives and identities are now deeply rooted in the country. Some writers argue that decolonization should transform institutions and political relationships rather than reproduce displacement in reverse.

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Palestinian critiques frequently situate Zionism within wider histories of nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, race, and twentieth-century state formation.

Comparisons with other settler societies and anti-colonial struggles are used to illuminate patterns of territorial expansion, Indigenous resistance, demographic engineering, and political inequality. At the same time, scholars debate how far such comparisons can be taken without obscuring the distinctive histories of Jews, Palestinians, antisemitism, European nationalism, and the Middle East.

This comparative approach has helped transform discussion of Zionism from a dispute focused primarily on competing national narratives into a wider academic debate about colonialism, nationalism, sovereignty, and decolonization.

Conclusion

The collected Palestinian critiques portray Zionism through multiple but overlapping frameworks: settler colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, dispossession, demographic transformation, and institutionalized inequality. The Nakba, refugee return, land, citizenship, occupation, settlements, and Palestinian self-determination repeatedly emerge as central issues.

The material also demonstrates considerable diversity within Palestinian political thought. Critics disagree about strategy, terminology, international law, statehood, armed and nonviolent resistance, the usefulness of apartheid and settler-colonial frameworks, and the political arrangements that should replace the existing conflict.

At the center of many of these arguments is a recurring question: whether Jewish collective self-determination in Palestine can be reconciled with Palestinian equality, return, historical redress, and self-determination. Palestinian critics represented in this collection generally contend that a durable political future requires confronting the consequences of dispossession and unequal sovereignty rather than treating them solely as disputes over borders or competing national narratives.

The resulting debate extends beyond the conventional choice between Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. It raises broader questions about how societies emerging from conflict and displacement can address historical injustice while constructing political institutions capable of protecting the individual and collective rights of everyone who lives there.

Zionism as Settler Colonialism

The Gaza Genocide Has Turned the Palestinian Question into an Israeli Problem

| Joseph Massad | Middle East Eye | July 31, 2026

Massad argues that Zionism originated as a European colonial response to Europe's "Jewish question" and examines how Palestinian resistance has prevented the Palestinian question from disappearing despite decades of displacement and domination.

Jews Have Historical Ties to Palestine. Israel Is Still a Settler Colony

| Sleman Altehe | +972 Magazine | June 10, 2026

Altehe argues that acknowledging Jewish historical connections to Palestine does not invalidate a settler-colonial analysis of Zionism, emphasizing the political processes of settlement, dispossession, and sovereignty.

How David Ben-Gurion Got the Palestinians Wrong in 1948

| Marwan Bishara | Al Jazeera | May 15, 2026

This commentary argues that Zionist leaders expected Palestinian displacement to resolve the Palestinian question, but refugee memory, political identity, and demands for justice endured across generations.

Is This a Decisive Moment in the Struggle Against Zionism?

| Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | April 1, 2026

Abunimah considers whether developments in Palestine and changing international attitudes have created a decisive political opening for challenging the Zionist political system.

Christian Zionism in the Global South: The Case of South Africa

| Al-Shabaka Policy Analysts | Al-Shabaka | December 7, 2025

The paper examines Christian Zionism as an ideological and political force supporting Israeli settler colonialism and discusses Palestinian strategies for strengthening anti-colonial solidarity in the Global South.

Israel's Violent Expansion Is Never Done, Yet It Still Cannot 'Finish the Job'

| Joseph Massad | Middle East Eye | November 18, 2025

Massad examines the Zionist concepts of the "conquest of land" and "conquest of labour," arguing that territorial expansion and Palestinian displacement have been structural elements of the movement.

How to Prove Israel Is Not a Settler Colony Even as It Pursues Greater Israel

| Joseph Massad | Middle East Eye | August 31, 2025

The article critiques arguments rejecting the settler-colonial framework and examines attempts to reinterpret Palestinians rather than Zionist settlement as the colonial presence.

Settler Colonialism Is Not an 'Academic Fad'

| Sai Englert | Al Jazeera | February 6, 2024

Englert explains the settler-colonial framework increasingly used to understand Israel-Palestine and why activists view it as more than an academic analogy.

The Continuation of Zionist Settler Colonialism

| Rabea Eghbariah | Al-Shabaka | February 5, 2024

This commentary describes Zionism as an ongoing settler-colonial structure based on elimination, fragmentation, and the suppression of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty.

Playing with Academic Fire: A Review of Colonizing Palestine

| Amahl Bishara | Jadaliyya | January 25, 2024

This review discusses Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's research into Zionist left-wing kibbutzim and their relationships with neighboring Palestinian communities before and during the Nakba.

Palestinian Intellectual Critiques of Zionism

Writing Amid Catastrophe

| Hana Morgenstern | Jewish Currents | March 19, 2026

Morgenstern examines Jabra Nicola and the vibrant anti-Zionist intellectual and literary culture developed by Palestinian communists after the Nakba.

The Outcasts of Zion

| Geoffrey Levin | Boston Review | May 27, 2025

This essay examines Palestinian intellectual Fayez Sayegh, including his influential 1965 analysis Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and his efforts to distinguish criticism of Zionism from hostility toward Jews.

The West's Love for Israel Erases the Middle East's Real History

| Ussama Makdisi | Jacobin | November 29, 2023

Makdisi places Zionism within nineteenth-century European nationalism and colonialism while stressing Palestine's historically pluralistic social environment.

The Right to Speak for Ourselves

| Mohammed El-Kurd | The Nation | November 27, 2023

El-Kurd critiques the constraints placed on Palestinian political speech and argues for Palestinians' ability to narrate their history without being confined to stereotypes of either passive victimhood or terrorism.

Theses on Zionism

| Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | December 9, 2013

Massad presents a series of polemical theses challenging Zionist historical, political, and moral claims from a Palestinian anti-colonial perspective.

Remembering Fouzi El-Asmar, Poet of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

| Terri Ginsberg | The Electronic Intifada | October 1, 2013

This intellectual biography recounts Fouzi El-Asmar's anti-Zionist political activism, writings about Palestinian citizens of Israel, imprisonment, and contribution to Palestinian liberation thought.

Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Colonialism

| Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera | December 24, 2012

Massad examines the relationship among European antisemitism, Christian Zionism, Jewish Zionism, colonialism, and the representation of Palestinian resistance.

Sartre, European Intellectuals and Zionism

| Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | January 31, 2003

Massad critiques European intellectual support for Zionism and examines how Europe's history of antisemitism influenced attitudes toward the colonization of Palestine.

The Palestinians Cannot Be Zionists

| Joseph Massad | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2000s

This essay considers the incompatibility between Palestinian national rights—particularly refugee return and political equality—and Zionism's commitment to a specifically Jewish state.

A Palestinian Revolutionary: Jabra Nicola and the Radical Left

| Ran Greenstein | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2000s

The article examines Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola and an anti-Zionist tradition that analyzed Zionism through colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and class.

Liberal Zionism and Palestinian Critiques

Liberal Zionism: A Veneer for Settler Colonialism

| Muhannad Ayyash and Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | June 27, 2023

Ayyash discusses why Palestinian decolonial critiques challenge liberal Zionism's separation of the 1948 establishment of Israel from the post-1967 occupation.

Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel's Settler Colonial Project

| Muhannad Ayyash | Al-Shabaka | June 14, 2023

Ayyash argues that liberal Zionism accepts the fundamental results of the 1948 Nakba while attempting to reconcile Jewish ethnonational sovereignty with limited Palestinian rights.

Are Liberal American Jews Becoming Afraid to Talk About Israel?

| Edo Konrad | +972 Magazine | November 10, 2022

This article examines tensions among liberal American Jews attempting to reconcile Zionism with increasingly visible evidence of Palestinian dispossession and inequality.

The End of Zionism

| Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | July 15, 2020

Abunimah assesses Peter Beinart's abandonment of the traditional two-state liberal-Zionist framework and argues that equal rights in one political space challenge Zionism's foundations.

Israel's Peace Camp Flirts with Oblivion

| Jonathan Cook | The Electronic Intifada | February 7, 2020

Cook analyzes the decline of Labor and Meretz and argues that Israel's traditional Zionist left failed to resolve the contradiction between Jewish political supremacy and Palestinian equality.

Amos Oz and the End of Liberal Zionism

| Jonathan Ofir | Mondoweiss | December 30, 2018

This critique examines Amos Oz's political legacy and the limitations Palestinian critics identify in liberal Zionist approaches to Palestinian equality.

Beyond Liberal Zionism: How I Became a Non-Zionist

| Daniel J. Solomon | +972 Magazine | December 2, 2018

Solomon describes his move beyond liberal Zionism toward a political framework that does not make Jewish ethnonational sovereignty the governing principle.

The Loving Rituals of Liberal Zionism

| Liz Rose | Mondoweiss | September 13, 2018

Rose reflects on Birthright Israel and the cultural practices through which liberal forms of Zionist identification can obscure Palestinian dispossession.

How Today's Liberal Zionists Echo Apartheid South Africa's Defenders

| Rania Khalek | The Electronic Intifada | February 13, 2014

Khalek compares arguments made by liberal Zionists defending Israel with liberal arguments historically used to preserve apartheid while proposing limited reforms.

Shoot and Cry: Liberal Zionism's Dilemma

| Ben White | The Electronic Intifada | September 19, 2007

White critiques the attempt to combine support for Zionism with moral discomfort about the displacement, occupation, and military violence experienced by Palestinians.

Nakba, Dispossession, and Zionist State-Building

The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Thinking and Practice

| Nur Masalha | Institute for Palestine Studies | November 23, 2023

Masalha examines the role demographic transfer played in Zionist political thinking and its relationship to Palestinian dispossession and the refugee question.

From Balfour to the Nakba: The Settler-Colonial Experience in Palestine

| Ilan Pappé | Middle East Eye | November 4, 2020

Pappé traces Zionist settlement from the Balfour Declaration through the Nakba and interprets Israeli state formation through a settler-colonial framework.

A Century of Complicity

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | June 22, 2020

Reviewing Rashid Khalidi's history, the article examines the role of British, American, and other imperial powers in facilitating Zionist expansion and Palestinian dispossession.

Why Zionism Is Racism

| Asa Winstanley | The Electronic Intifada | May 15, 2020

Winstanley argues that Palestinian displacement and differential access to land and political rights are not accidental outcomes but central consequences of political Zionism.

Nakba 1948: Ethnic Cleansing of Cities, Towns and Villages

| Institute for Palestine Studies Contributors | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2020

This collection examines the destruction and depopulation of Palestinian urban and rural communities during the establishment of Israel.

On the 70th Anniversary of the Nakba: Reflections of a Palestinian Refugee

| Haidar Eid | openDemocracy | May 14, 2018

Eid describes the Nakba from the standpoint of a Palestinian refugee and interprets it as an ongoing consequence of a settler-colonial political structure.

The Future of the Nakba

| Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | May 13, 2018

Massad traces Zionist colonization from the late Ottoman period onward and argues that the Nakba should be understood as an ongoing political process.

Israel: 'A Failed Settler-Colonial Project'

| Joseph Massad | Institute for Palestine Studies | May 10, 2018

Massad evaluates Zionism as a settler-colonial project whose effort to permanently eliminate Palestinian national claims has failed despite displacement and territorial conquest.

Resisting the Nakba

| Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | May 16, 2008

The essay argues that Palestinians should understand the Nakba not simply as a past catastrophe but as a continuing political structure that must be resisted.

Reflections on Al-Nakba

| Mamdouh Nofal | Journal of Palestine Studies | 1998

Nofal reflects on 1948 as a formative event in Palestinian national consciousness and considers its continuing political and personal consequences.

Refugees and the Right of Return

Reframing Palestinian Return: A New Al-Shabaka Policy Circle

| Al-Shabaka Analysts | Al-Shabaka | 2025

Palestinian analysts consider how refugee return can be reframed as an active political, spatial, economic, and restorative process rather than a distant final-status question.

Amnesty Report on Israeli Apartheid with Saleh Hijazi

| Saleh Hijazi and Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | February 24, 2022

Hijazi discusses how Palestinian refugee exclusion and denial of return form a central component of the broader system Amnesty International characterized as apartheid.

Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future

| Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | July 23, 2020

Hawari examines Palestinian political programs based on equality, return, decolonization, and collective rights rather than partition and permanent Palestinian fragmentation.

It's Time to Reclaim UNRWA

| Randa Farah | Al-Shabaka | 2020

Farah examines pressures on UNRWA and argues that refugee policy should strengthen Palestinian collective political agency and the right of return rather than promote permanent resettlement.

The Jewish Nation-State Law: Antecedents and Implications

| Palestinian and Israeli Legal Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2019

The analysis connects Israel's Nation-State Law to earlier legal structures affecting citizenship, land, Palestinian refugees, and the continuing denial of return.

70 Years of Nakba: Where Can Palestinians Go from Here?

| Multiple Palestinian Analysts | Al-Shabaka | May 15, 2018

Contributors argue that Palestinian strategy should move beyond treating the occupation alone as the problem and instead confront Zionism, dispossession, fragmentation, and denial of refugee return.

The Liberal Zionist Inability to Confront the Palestinian Right of Return

| Max Ajl | Mondoweiss | November 2011

This article argues that liberal Zionist discussions of refugees commonly subordinate Palestinian return to preserving Israel's Jewish demographic majority.

The Rights of Israel

| Joseph Massad | Institute for Palestine Studies | May 6, 2011

Massad questions arguments about an abstract Israeli "right to exist" when deployed against concrete Palestinian rights including equality, sovereignty, property, and refugee return.

Returning Palestine's "Abandoned Property" of 1948

| Gish Amit | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2000s

The article examines Palestinian books and property appropriated after 1948 and relates cultural restitution to the broader Palestinian demand for return.

Palestine Versus the Palestinians?

| Mouin Rabbani | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2000s

Rabbani examines diplomatic formulas that subordinate Palestinian collective rights, including refugee return, to territorial arrangements and state-building.

Apartheid, Equality, and Decolonization

The World Radicalized by the Gaza Genocide

| Abdaljawad Omar | Al-Shabaka | December 21, 2025

The essay argues that Palestinian liberation requires dismantling structures of apartheid and dispossession rather than merely restoring an older peace-process framework.

Palestinians Don't Need a State. We Need Justice

| Ahmed Moor | The Guardian | August 11, 2025

Moor argues that Palestinian political goals should center justice, equality, and redress for dispossession rather than treating statehood itself as the ultimate objective.

'International Law' Is an Illusion for Palestinians

| Ahmad Ibsais | The Guardian | December 12, 2024

Ibsais argues that international law has repeatedly failed Palestinians and examines how colonial power structures shape which rights and legal principles are actually enforced.

Equality in Palestine Means Rectifying Past Injustice

| Bashir Bashir | Jacobin | March 22, 2024

The article argues that a future based on equality must address historical Palestinian dispossession rather than simply extending formal equal rights while leaving past injustice untouched.

International Law and the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Movement

| Rania Muhareb | Al-Shabaka | March 23, 2022

Muhareb argues that anti-apartheid advocacy should remain linked to the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism and should include self-determination, return, and decolonization.

Dismantle What? Amnesty's Conflicted Messaging on Israeli Apartheid

| Palestinian Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | February 15, 2022

The commentary welcomes recognition of apartheid while arguing that analysis must address Zionism's settler-colonial foundations rather than treating discriminatory policies in isolation.

Amnesty Looks at Apartheid Israel Through Liberal Lens

| Palestinian Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | February 13, 2022

This critique argues that apartheid analysis becomes politically limited when disconnected from Palestinian theories of colonization, displacement, and decolonization.

Israel's Apartheid and the Myth of the Democratic Jewish State

| Marwan Bishara | Arab Center Washington DC | February 8, 2022

The essay considers the growing use of apartheid analysis and questions whether a state institutionally committed to Jewish political supremacy can simultaneously provide genuine democratic equality.

Limitations and Possibilities of the Apartheid Framework

| Lana Tatour and Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | January 31, 2021

Tatour argues that apartheid is useful but should not replace analysis of settler colonialism, Zionism, racialization, and Palestinian decolonization.

Israel and Palestine in 2018: Decolonisation, Not Peace

| Ilan Pappé | Al Jazeera | May 14, 2018

Pappé argues that the language of a symmetrical Israeli-Palestinian conflict obscures colonial power relations and proposes decolonization as the more appropriate framework.

One State, Two States, and the Politics of Partition

The Palestine-Israel Nightmare Won't End Until We Accept These Basic Truths

| Ahmed Moor | The Guardian | July 8, 2024

Moor argues that a durable political settlement requires dismantling systems of ethno-national privilege and creating meaningful equality for Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

The Question of Palestinian Statehood

| Leila Farsakh | Boston Review | June 5, 2024

Farsakh examines the limitations of Palestinian statehood under conditions of territorial fragmentation and considers political alternatives centered on rights and equality.

The Two-State Solution Is a Recipe for Carnage

| Dahlia Scheindlin | Foreign Policy | February 5, 2024

The article questions whether renewed territorial partition can produce peace when populations, settlements, refugee claims, and political rights are deeply intertwined.

Your Fix for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Won't Work

| Steven A. Cook | Foreign Policy | May 26, 2021

Cook surveys proposals for resolving the conflict, including binational and democratic-state approaches that challenge the assumptions underlying territorial partition.

Envisioning a Post-Colonial Palestine

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | March 23, 2021

Reviewing Jeff Halper's work, the article explores a post-colonial democratic future beyond Zionist ethnonational sovereignty and permanent Palestinian subordination.

Beinart's "Earthquake": The Fallout and What It Means

| Yousef Munayyer | Arab Center Washington DC | August 4, 2020

Munayyer analyzes Peter Beinart's turn toward equal political rights while noting Palestinian criticism that debates about abandoning Zionism often continue to center Jewish rather than Palestinian political concerns.

Annexation Has Made the Palestinian Struggle Anti-Colonial Again

| Meron Rapoport / Honaida Ghanim | +972 Magazine | June 23, 2020

Palestinian sociologist Honaida Ghanim argues that annexation exposes colonial structures obscured by the peace-process framework and may return Palestinian politics to an explicitly anti-colonial orientation.

Munayyer and Beinart's Historic Debate on the Solution to Israel-Palestine

| Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss | June 5, 2015

The report covers Yousef Munayyer and Peter Beinart debating whether Palestinian equality can be reconciled with Zionism and whether partition remains politically or morally viable.

A Response to Lara Friedman: We Must Discuss One State Now

| Noam Sheizaf | +972 Magazine | August 20, 2010

Sheizaf argues that discussion of a joint democratic state forces Israelis to confront the choice between political equality and permanent ethnic separation.

The Re-Emergence of the Single State Solution

| Institute for Palestine Studies | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2010s

This analysis examines renewed interest in a single democratic political framework and the role of Palestinian rights, refugee return, and critiques of Zionism in that debate.

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Political Speech

Stop Calling Right-Wing Criticism of Israel 'Anti-Zionism'

| Jonathan Ofir | Mondoweiss | December 2, 2025

The article distinguishes Palestinian and left-wing anti-Zionism rooted in decolonization and equality from antisemitic or reactionary criticism of Israel originating on the far right.

How 'Zionist' Became a Slur on the US Left

| Chris McGreal | The Guardian | May 12, 2024

The report examines changing understandings of Zionism in American political debate and highlights Palestinian arguments linking the ideology to displacement, ethno-national exclusivity, and settler colonialism.

We Need an Exodus from Zionism

| Naomi Klein | The Guardian | April 24, 2024

Klein presents a Jewish anti-Zionist critique arguing that Jewish identity and safety should be separated from ethnonational supremacy and Palestinian dispossession.

On Addressing Jews

| Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | September 18, 2023

Beinart considers how a political movement for Palestinian equality might recognize Jewish historical and religious attachments to Palestine without accepting Jewish legal or political supremacy.

The Palestinian Cause Is Not a 'Narrative'. It Is the Truth

| Yara Hawari | Middle East Eye | May 24, 2023

Hawari criticizes language that reduces Palestinian dispossession to one competing "narrative" and discusses attempts to equate criticism of Zionism with antisemitism.

Video: Why Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism

| Nora Barrows-Friedman | The Electronic Intifada | October 6, 2021

This discussion distinguishes opposition to Zionist political ideology and Israeli state structures from antisemitic hostility toward Jewish people.

Is Anti-Zionism a Form of Anti-Semitism?

| James J. Zogby | Arab Center Washington DC | March 3, 2019

The article argues that historic Palestinian rejection of Zionism arose primarily from opposition to foreign settlement and dispossession rather than hostility toward Jews as a religious or ethnic group.

Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Balfour Declaration

| Palestinian and Solidarity Contributors | openDemocracy | November 2, 2017

The debate explores arguments concerning Zionism, colonialism, antisemitism, Palestinian resistance, and the political legacy of Britain's Balfour Declaration.

Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | October 18, 2013

Reviewing Jewish anti-Zionist arguments, the article considers efforts to separate Judaism and Jewish identity from Israeli nationalism and Zionist state ideology.

The Rights of Palestinians and the Politics of Anti-Zionism

| Sally Bland | The Electronic Intifada | October 26, 2006

This review of Joseph Massad's The Persistence of the Palestinian Question surveys his arguments concerning Zionism, colonialism, the Nakba, Palestinian political agency, and the relationship between the Jewish and Palestinian questions.

Indigenous Identity, Land, and Colonial Narratives

Race and the Question of Palestine

| Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin | Jadaliyya | August 11, 2025

This discussion examines race, racialization, and settler colonialism from within Palestinian experiences and intellectual traditions rather than importing analytical frameworks without attention to Palestinian history.

Exile in the Interior

| Isabella Hammad | Jewish Currents | July 10, 2023

Hammad examines Anton Shammas's literary challenge to Zionist boundaries of language, identity, territory, and Palestinian belonging within Israel.

Cynthia G. Franklin, Narrating Humanity

| Jadaliyya Editors | Jadaliyya | May 31, 2023

This discussion considers Palestinian life writing as a decolonial practice capable of challenging Zionist efforts to limit Palestinian history, political identity, and claims to belonging.

How Israel Uses Judaism as a Settler-Colonial Weapon

| Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | April 23, 2022

Abunimah argues that Israeli political institutions blur distinctions among Judaism, Jewish identity, and Zionist state power in ways that complicate criticism of settler colonialism.

Minoritization, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Health

| Palestinian Health Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2022

The study examines Palestinian citizens of Israel through Indigenous-health and settler-colonial frameworks, challenging their political classification merely as an ethnic minority.

Using Indigeneity in the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation

| Lana Tatour | Al-Shabaka | 2020s

Tatour examines Palestinian uses of indigeneity and settler-colonial analysis, linking contemporary debates to Fayez Sayegh's pioneering Palestinian critique of Zionism.

Beyond the Boundaries of "The Land of the Deer"

| Palestinian History Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2019

The article examines early Palestinian resistance to Zionism and the development of an understanding of Jewish nationalism in Palestine as connected to European imperial power.

Finding the Truth Amid Israel's Lies

| Rima Najjar | The Electronic Intifada | May 30, 2018

Najjar argues that Zionist political narratives have attempted to weaken Palestinian claims of indigeneity while constructing Jewish settlement as an exclusive process of national return.

Finding My Way to Palestine Through Narrative

| Rana Baker | The Electronic Intifada | August 15, 2013

Baker reflects on Palestinian identity, displacement, and historical memory and describes the Nakba as a colonial process that destroyed hundreds of Palestinian communities.

Separate and Unequal: The History of Arab Labour in Pre-1948 Palestine and Israel

| Raymond Deane | The Electronic Intifada | January 15, 2007

This review examines exclusionary Zionist labor policies and the tension between socialist language and the building of a separate settler economy in Palestine.

Palestinian Resistance, BDS, and Political Strategy

How to Engage with Israelis Who Don't Fully Support Palestinian Rights

| Ahmed Moor | The Electronic Intifada | January 17, 2025

The article debates engagement with Israelis who oppose some state policies while retaining Zionist commitments and asks what meaningful solidarity with Palestinian liberation requires.

Rashid Khalidi: Violent Settler Colonialism Caused This War

| Rashid Khalidi | Jacobin | May 7, 2024

Khalidi situates contemporary violence within a century-long history of settler colonialism, imperial sponsorship, Palestinian dispossession, and resistance.

The Anatomy of Zionist Genocide

| Orly Noy | Al Jazeera | December 21, 2023

The essay analyzes the relationship between Zionist ethnonationalism, colonial power, Palestinian displacement, and the violence unleashed in Gaza after October 2023.

Fanon's Conception of Violence Does Not Work in Palestine

| Mark LeVine | Al Jazeera | October 10, 2023

LeVine considers how Palestinian resistance should be understood within a settler-colonial setting while questioning simplistic readings of Fanon's theory of revolutionary violence.

Podcast Ep 77: Zionism's Inevitable Demise

| Nora Barrows-Friedman and Ghada Karmi | The Electronic Intifada | May 11, 2023

Karmi discusses a post-Zionist political future and argues that demographic and territorial realities increasingly point toward one state based on equal rights.

There's Nothing Complicated About What's Happening in Sheikh Jarrah

| Sumaya Awad and Daphna Thier | Jacobin | May 12, 2021

The authors interpret Palestinian expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah as a contemporary manifestation of the longer settler-colonial process rather than an isolated real-estate dispute.

Israel Is a Settler Colony, Annexing Native Land Is What It Does

| Muhannad Ayyash | Al Jazeera | July 7, 2020

Ayyash argues that annexation should be interpreted as part of Zionism's longer settler-colonial territorial logic rather than as an exceptional departure from Israeli policy.

Video: Ending the Zionist System

| Ali Abunimah | The Electronic Intifada | November 21, 2017

Abunimah argues that Palestinian political strategy should focus on dismantling structures of inequality rather than preserving Zionism through territorial partition.

The Evolution of Palestinian Resistance: A Need to Reassess

| Sam Bahour | openDemocracy | December 18, 2014

The article traces shifts from liberation and refugee return toward ending the 1967 occupation and examines how Oslo transformed Palestinian political strategy.

Peace Is War: Israeli Settler-Colonialism and the Palestinians

| Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera | November 1, 2013

Massad argues that Zionist settlement frequently advanced under the language of peace while producing continuing colonization, displacement, and conflict for Palestinians.

Historical and Comparative Critiques of Zionism

A Future Beyond Israeli Genocide in Palestine

| Enzo Traverso | Jacobin | May 10, 2026

The article examines the Nakba, settler colonialism, Gaza, and the ideological evolution of Zionism while considering possibilities for a post-colonial political future.

The Long Shadow of the "Jewish Question"

| Shaul Magid | The Nation | February 16, 2026

The essay examines how a movement developed partly in response to European Jewish vulnerability produced a new Palestinian question through displacement and political domination.

After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization

| Arab Center Washington DC | Arab Center Washington DC | January 13, 2026

This discussion situates Palestinian suffering within longer histories of European colonialism, racial hierarchy, Zionism, and Western political power.

Israel, From Genocide to Self-Destruction

| Avi Shlaim | Jacobin | January 13, 2026

Shlaim discusses Israeli policies in Gaza in relation to the longer colonial trajectory of Zionism and argues that permanent denial of Palestinian statehood is undermining Israel's own political future.

The Gaza Genocide Radicalized the World

| Abdaljawad Omar | +972 Magazine | December 24, 2025

Omar argues that recent events exposed contradictions in the Zionist assumption that Jewish security could be created through permanent Palestinian displacement and domination.

A Developing Authoritarian-Israeli Nexus in the Middle East

| Imad K. Harb | Arab Center Washington DC | August 3, 2022

Harb examines connections between Israeli regional alliances, authoritarian governance, Palestinian repression, and normalization of the political structures created through Zionism.

The Israel-Palestine Conflict Isn't a "Clash of Cultures." It's About Colonialism

| Bernard Porter | Jacobin | April 28, 2020

Reviewing Rashid Khalidi, Porter argues that colonialism provides a stronger explanation of the conflict's historical development than portrayals of an ancient religious or cultural struggle.

It May Be Time to Go Beyond Zionism

| Bishara Bahbah | Arab Center Washington DC | March 8, 2019

The essay questions whether Zionism can accommodate full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and considers political arrangements beyond an ethnonational state.

Black November

| Ilan Pappé | Al Jazeera | November 2, 2016

Pappé links the Balfour Declaration and the UN partition of Palestine to an enduring process of settlement, partition, displacement, and territorial domination.

Singling Out Israel: A Perspective from the Left

| Ran Greenstein | openDemocracy | June 2, 2015

Greenstein examines why Zionism came to be understood by many Palestinians and left-wing scholars as a European settler-colonial movement and assesses debates surrounding that characterization.

Early Palestinian Critiques of Zionism

Palestinian Literary Criticism in Ghassan Kanafani's "On Zionist Literature"

| Louis Brehony | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2023

This article revisits Ghassan Kanafani's 1967 study of Zionist literature, showing how Kanafani interpreted literary culture as part of a broader Western imperial and settler-colonial project in Palestine.

Colonization and Dispossession

| Palestine Encyclopedia Contributors | Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question / Institute for Palestine Studies | 2020s

This historical overview traces Palestinian opposition to Zionist land acquisition and settlement, emphasizing how newspapers such as al-Karmel and Filastin helped develop an early national consciousness against dispossession and colonial settlement.

The Jewish Agency's Case Before the UNSCOP

| Institute for Palestine Studies | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2010s

This historical analysis examines Zionist testimony before the UN Special Committee on Palestine and highlights language in which Zionist leaders implicitly or explicitly portrayed Jewish immigrants as colonizers and Palestinians as the native population.

Zionist Settlement Ideology and Its Ramifications for the Palestinian People

| Palestinian Scholar | Journal of Palestine Studies | 1980s

The study examines Zionist settlement ideology through its consequences for Palestinian land ownership, agriculture, water access, political sovereignty, and population displacement.

Speech of Yasir Arafat at the United Nations General Assembly

| Yasir Arafat | United Nations / Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question | November 13, 1974

Arafat distinguishes Judaism from Zionism while presenting Zionism as a colonial political movement responsible for Palestinian dispossession and calling for a democratic Palestine in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews could live together.

Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins

| Abdul-Wahab Kayyali | Institute for Palestine Studies | 1970s

Kayyali analyzes political Zionism within the imperial environment of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and emphasizes its reliance on European great-power support for colonization in Palestine.

Citizenship, Indigeneity, and the Jewish State

The False Symmetry of Jewish-Arab Partnership

| Palestinian Contributor | +972 Magazine | February 11, 2026

The article argues that binationalism cannot be based on treating colonizer and colonized as politically symmetrical and presents Palestinian binationalism as an anti-colonial program centered on justice, equality, and historical responsibility.

A Century After Its Founding, the Israeli Communist Party Is at a Crossroads

| Oren Ziv | +972 Magazine | July 28, 2023

This historical assessment discusses Palestinian and Jewish communist struggles against Zionism while examining the party's difficulties in fully embracing Palestinian understandings of Israel as a settler-colonial system.

Planning, Land Ownership, and Settler Colonialism in Israel

| Haim Yacobi | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2022

This study examines how Israeli planning and property institutions facilitate territorial control and explores the relationship between land policy, settlement, and settler-colonial state formation.

Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel

| Lana Tatour | Jadaliyya | December 2, 2019

Tatour argues that Israeli citizenship did not merely incorporate Palestinians into a state but helped transform Palestinian territory into Jewish national space while rendering the Indigenous Palestinian population politically alien within its homeland.

When Left Is Right: How Palestinians Can Burst Israel's Political Bubble

| Amjad Iraqi | Al-Shabaka | March 11, 2018

Iraqi argues that differences between Israel's Zionist left and right often obscure broad agreement over maintaining Jewish political dominance, territorial control, and opposition to Palestinian return.

Apartheid from Within? The Palestinian Citizens of Israel

| Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | November 2017

Hawari examines discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and argues that their condition must be understood within the same political structure governing Palestinians throughout historic Palestine.

Decolonization and Alternative Political Futures

Palestine Beyond Partition and the Nation-State

| Leila Farsakh | Al-Shabaka | 2026

Farsakh argues that Palestinian liberation requires moving beyond partition and reconsidering sovereignty, citizenship, and nationhood within a decolonial framework covering all of historic Palestine.

The Problem with Jewish Advocacy for a "One-State Solution"

| Lara Kilani | Mondoweiss | December 27, 2025

The article argues that even anti-Zionist one-state advocacy can reproduce colonial relationships when Jewish political concerns remain centered over Palestinian liberation and self-determination.

The Settlers Are Not Leaving: Decolonization, Not Coexistence

| Lara Kilani | Mondoweiss | December 16, 2025

The essay explores what Palestinian decolonization might mean when the settler population remains and argues that liberation requires restructuring power rather than merely promoting interpersonal coexistence.

Liberation Is Not Integration: On Liberal Zionism, One-State Fantasies, and What Palestinians Actually Want

| Lara Kilani | Mondoweiss | December 8, 2025

Kilani criticizes proposals that reduce Palestinian liberation to integration into existing Israeli structures and asks how decolonization, accountability, restitution, and political transformation would actually operate.

It Is Time for the One-State Solution to Go Mainstream

| Awad Abdelfattah and Jeff Halper | The Electronic Intifada | December 17, 2020

The authors argue that territorial partition has failed and advocate a single democratic state incorporating equality, Palestinian refugee return, and decolonization.

A Just Future Demands the Decolonization of Palestine

| Awad Abdelfattah and Jeff Halper | +972 Magazine | December 10, 2019

The authors argue that moving beyond partition requires dismantling the political and material structures of settler colonialism while ensuring equal individual and collective rights.

The Difficult Passage from a Two-State Solution to Decolonization

| Jeff Halper | Mondoweiss | July 17, 2019

Halper argues that abandoning the two-state solution requires more than advocating one state; it requires confronting Zionist settler colonialism and developing a concrete process of decolonization.

The One Democratic State Campaign Program for a Multicultural Democratic State in Palestine

| One Democratic State Campaign / Jeff Halper | Mondoweiss | May 3, 2018

This program proposes replacing ethnonational political supremacy with one democratic state, restoration of refugee rights, equal citizenship, and protection for the collective identities of Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

The "End of the Two-State Solution" Spells Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing

| Palestinian Contributor | Jadaliyya | November 17, 2012

The article warns that the collapse of partition does not automatically produce democratic equality and argues that settler-colonial domination must itself be challenged.

The One-State Solution and Rebuilding the Palestinian National Movement

| Palestinian and Israeli Contributors | Jadaliyya | November 16, 2012

The discussion argues that Palestinian political strategy became constrained by the two-state framework and explores rebuilding a liberation movement centered on equality throughout historic Palestine.

Settler Colonialism as an Analytical Framework

The Anthropological Rise of Palestine

| Palestinian Studies Scholars | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2021

This review examines the growth of anthropological research treating Palestine comparatively alongside other Indigenous societies confronting settlement, displacement, and colonial state power.

Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies

| Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour | Jadaliyya | January 14, 2016

The authors explain the resurgence of settler-colonial analysis in Palestine studies and argue that comparative colonial scholarship helps illuminate land seizure, displacement, racialization, and Indigenous resistance.

Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework

| Gabriel Piterberg | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2015

Piterberg examines the development of settler-colonial analysis in Israeli sociology and its implications for understanding Zionist settlement as part of a broader global colonial phenomenon.

Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation

| Lorenzo Veracini | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2013

Veracini distinguishes classical colonialism from settler colonialism and uses the framework to reconsider the relationship between Israel's establishment, the post-1967 occupation, territorial expansion, and Palestinian displacement.

What Is Settler Colonialism?

| Settler Colonial Studies Contributors | Jadaliyya | July 17, 2012

This discussion explains settler colonialism as an enduring political structure rather than a completed historical event and considers how colonial rule fragments Indigenous Palestinian identity and space.

New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

| Omar Jabary Salamanca et al. | Jadaliyya | May 16, 2012

The editors discuss why comparative settler-colonial analysis challenges claims of Israeli-Palestinian exceptionalism and places Zionist settlement within a broader global history of colonialism.

Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

| Jadaliyya Editors | Jadaliyya | March 30, 2012

This special issue brings together research on Judaization, Bedouin dispossession, Palestinian labor, land acquisition, the Nakba, and other dimensions of Zionist colonial settlement.

Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

| Palestine Society at SOAS | Jadaliyya | February 16, 2011

This conference introduction describes Zionism as a settler-colonial project characterized by dispossession, land appropriation, political fragmentation, and attempts to replace Palestinian society.

Land, Space, Mapping, and Erasure

A Century of Colonial Mapping in Palestine

| Zena Agha and Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | October 21, 2020

Agha examines maps as instruments of political power and argues that British and Israeli cartography have helped erase Palestinian geography, rename space, and facilitate territorial control.

Settler Colonialism and Digital Tools of Elimination in Palestinian Jerusalem

| S. Qannam | Jerusalem Quarterly | 2020s

The article examines how surveillance, digital mapping, online platforms, and restrictions on Palestinian digital visibility interact with settler-colonial transformations of Jerusalem.

"Looted & Hidden": Israel's Futile Attempts to Erase Palestinian History

| Rona Sela | Institute for Palestine Studies | October 5, 2017

Sela investigates Palestinian photographs and films seized by Israeli forces and argues that control of archives has been part of an effort to suppress visual evidence of Palestinian society before the Nakba.

"Smart" Colonialism and Digital Divestment: A Case Study

| Palestinian Technology Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2010s

This study examines technological systems used to administer territory and population, connecting digital infrastructure with settlement expansion and the broader Zionist project of territorial control.

Development as Struggle: Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine

| Alaa Tartir | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2010s

Tartir criticizes development policies that treat Palestinian economic hardship as a technical problem while ignoring Israeli settler colonialism and the unequal political structures shaping Palestinian life.

Oslo and the Critique of the "Peace Process"

Palestinian Elites Have Been Collaborating Against the Resistance

| Joseph Massad | Middle East Eye | June 12, 2026

Massad places contemporary Palestinian political elites within a longer history of responses to British colonial rule and Zionism and criticizes institutions that subordinate liberation to accommodation with colonial power.

Why Recognising "Palestine" Rewards Israel's PA Collaborators, Not the Palestinian People

| Joseph Massad | Middle East Eye | September 25, 2025

Massad argues that symbolic recognition of a territorially fragmented Palestinian state can reinforce the post-Oslo order while leaving Zionist sovereignty, refugee exclusion, and colonial power fundamentally unchanged.

2020 and the Palestinian Leadership

| Tareq Baconi and Yara Hawari | Al-Shabaka | December 28, 2020

Baconi argues that the Palestinian leadership increasingly operates within political parameters imposed by Israel and the Oslo framework rather than centering return, liberation, and decolonization.

Oppose Apartheid, Not Just Annexation

| Chance Charley | The Electronic Intifada | July 6, 2020

Charley argues that opposing formal West Bank annexation while accepting the underlying Zionist political structure leaves intact the broader system of Palestinian dispossession and domination.

Twenty Years of Talks: Keeping Palestine Occupied

| Palestinian Contributors | Jadaliyya | September 2013

The article evaluates two decades of Oslo negotiations and argues that diplomatic negotiations failed to stop—and in important respects helped normalize—the expansion of Israeli territorial control.

Post-Oslo Solidarity

| Palestinian Solidarity Contributors | The Electronic Intifada | February 26, 2003

The article revisits Palestinian and Jewish anti-Zionist organizing and argues that solidarity should oppose colonialism and racial privilege rather than simply seek improvements within Oslo's framework.

Apartheid, Law, and Colonial Power

The ICJ Opinions on Palestine: Possibilities and Limitations

| Palestinian Legal Analysts | Al-Shabaka | July 1, 2026

The brief argues that international legal rulings are useful only when incorporated into a broader emancipatory strategy challenging settler colonialism, apartheid, and impunity rather than substituting litigation for political struggle.

Nakba Genocide 2023/24: Attacks on UNRWA and the Palestinian Right of Return

| Palestinian Scholars | Institute for Palestine Studies | March 5, 2024

The authors interpret attacks on UNRWA as part of a longer effort to undermine Palestinian refugee status, collective identity, and the internationally recognized demand for return.

Reporting on Israel's Human Rights Violations in the Context of Settler Colonialism

| Palestinian Legal Scholars | Jadaliyya | September 21, 2023

The article argues that documenting individual human-rights abuses is insufficient unless those abuses are connected to the enduring colonial political structure responsible for them.

How Israel Weaponizes International Law

| Noura Erakat | Boston Review | May 24, 2021

Erakat argues that Israeli legal strategies transform international humanitarian law into an instrument for managing colonial domination while obscuring the deeper structures of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism.

Beyond South Africa: Understanding Israeli Apartheid

| Noura Erakat | Al-Shabaka | April 4, 2013

Erakat examines the colonial foundations of apartheid and argues that Israeli segregation should be understood not merely through comparison with South Africa but through Palestine's specific history of settler colonialism and dispossession.

Jewish and Israeli Challenges to Zionism

False Messiahs

| Shaul Magid | Boston Review | January 4, 2024

Magid argues that Jewish historical connections to Palestine do not create a right to dispossess existing inhabitants and explores the tension between Jewish indigeneity claims and Zionism's colonial political practices.

The Reality of Settler Colonialism

| Shaul Magid | Boston Review | 2024

Magid examines both the usefulness and limits of the settler-colonial framework, acknowledging Palestinian dispossession while asking how decolonization can account for Israeli Jews who now have no external metropole to which they can simply return.

Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues

| Ariella Aïsha Azoulay | Boston Review | November 30, 2021

Azoulay challenges Israeli linguistic and political categories that separate Jewish history from Palestinian dispossession and calls for rethinking citizenship and identity outside Zionist state frameworks.

The Forgotten History of the Jewish, Anti-Zionist Left

| Benjamin Balthaser | Jacobin | July 21, 2020

Balthaser discusses Jewish socialist and communist opposition to Zionism in the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizing critiques of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and separation from Arab workers.

Religiously Inspired Colonial Nationalism Feeds Israel's Wars

| Jonathan Cook | The Electronic Intifada | August 14, 2019

Cook traces continuities between Labor Zionism and contemporary religious nationalism, arguing that territorial settlement and Palestinian exclusion long predate the rise of Israel's religious right.

Dismantling the Distortion About Israel

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | April 27, 2017

The article reviews scholarship presenting political Zionism as a settler-colonial movement whose state-building project depended on establishing demographic and territorial dominance in Palestine.

A Century of Challenges to Zionism

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | April 8, 2015

Reviewing Ran Greenstein's scholarship, the article traces Jewish, Palestinian, communist, binationalist, post-Zionist, and anti-Zionist challenges to mainstream Zionism over the twentieth century.

A "Post-Mortem" on Israeli Challenges to Zionism

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | December 2, 2014

The review examines Israeli post-Zionism and the New Historians while questioning whether academic criticism of Zionist history produced a meaningful political break with the structures of Jewish privilege.

Palestinian Liberation and Solidarity

Can Standing Together Bear the Weight of Its Contradictions?

| +972 Magazine Contributors | +972 Magazine | December 19, 2025

This assessment examines criticism of the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together, including Palestinian concerns that coexistence politics can avoid confronting Zionism and settler colonialism directly.

Who Gets a "Right of Return"?

| Corey Robin | Jacobin | August 4, 2025

Robin critically compares ethnically exclusive claims to ancestral territory and questions political systems in which lineage determines access to land and citizenship while displaced Palestinians remain barred from returning.

What Is the Role of Israelis in the Palestinian Liberation Movement?

| Fadi Shabita | +972 Magazine | April 25, 2025

Shabita argues that Israelis can participate in Palestinian liberation struggles only by confronting colonial privilege and accepting Palestinian leadership, equality, restitution, and decolonization as political goals.

The Right of Return Is Still the Issue

| Salman Abu Sitta | Mondoweiss | January 28, 2025

Abu Sitta argues that refugee return remains the central unresolved Palestinian demand and links Palestinian survival and national continuity to reversing the displacement created by the Nakba.

Grappling with Jewish Fears in a Just Palestinian Struggle

| Haggai Matar | +972 Magazine | November 26, 2024

Matar argues that recognizing Zionism's settler-colonial character need not imply removing Israeli Jews and explores how Palestinian justice and Jewish collective security might coexist after structures of supremacy are dismantled.

My Last Letter: Speak the Words We Were Taught to Fear

| Edo Konrad | +972 Magazine | September 15, 2023

Konrad reflects on moving beyond conventional Zionist discourse toward binationalism, equality, opposition to settler colonialism, and shared political existence throughout historic Palestine.

Sorry, Anti-Zionism Still Doesn't Equal Antisemitism

| Sumaya Awad and Daphna Thier | Jacobin | March 25, 2021

The authors distinguish antisemitic hostility toward Jews from political opposition to Zionism and describe anti-Zionism as part of a struggle against Israeli apartheid and Palestinian colonization.

Cultural and Intellectual Resistance

The Time Beneath the Concrete: In Conversation with Nasser Abourahme

| Nasser Abourahme | Institute for Palestine Studies | October 24, 2025

Abourahme uses the Palestinian refugee camp as a site for understanding temporality, return, displacement, and the foundational dynamics of Israeli settler colonialism.

We Are Not from Where We Are From

| Palestinian Literary Contributor | Boston Review | March 12, 2024

The essay reflects on Palestinian exile and historical memory while tracing resistance to Zionist settlement and British colonial rule during the early twentieth century.

The Dangerous Exceptionalism of Christian Zionism

| Yara Asi and Tariq Kenney-Shawa | Al-Shabaka | October 3, 2023

The authors examine Christian Zionism's relationship with Israeli apartheid, white supremacy, antisemitism, and US foreign policy and argue for coalitions opposing these interconnected political systems.

Israel — The Last of the Settler Colonies

| John Docker | openDemocracy | September 10, 2014

Docker compares Palestine with other histories of settler colonialism and argues against portraying the Israeli-Palestinian struggle as historically unique or detached from colonial precedents.

The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

| Gilbert Achcar | openDemocracy | April 19, 2010

Achcar examines competing historical narratives and explains why Palestinians understood Zionist settlement as another expression of European colonial expansion into the Arab world.

Zionism, the Nakba, and Continuing Dispossession

The Nakba in the Time of Genocide

| Yousef Munayyer | Arab Center Washington DC | May 14, 2026

Munayyer argues that the Nakba should be understood not as an isolated event in 1948 but as a continuing process of Zionist territorial expansion, Palestinian displacement, economic separation, and state violence.

What Was the Scale of the Nakba, and Why Do Palestinians Understand It as a Catastrophe?

| Arab Center Washington DC | Arab Center Washington DC | 2026

This overview describes the destruction of Palestinian communities, mass displacement, land loss, cultural destruction, and refugee creation that accompanied the establishment of Israel and explains why Palestinians understand these developments as foundational to the continuing conflict.

A Gaza of Siege and Genocide: In Conversation with Abdelrahman Ashour

| Abdelrahman Ashour | Institute for Palestine Studies | July 26, 2024

Ashour discusses Gaza's history under siege and connects contemporary destruction with longer Palestinian experiences of displacement, colonial control, and resistance.

The Epistemicide of the Palestinians: Israel Destroys Pillars of Knowledge

| Palestinian Contributor | Institute for Palestine Studies | February 2, 2024

The article examines attacks on Palestinian universities, libraries, archives, and intellectual institutions as part of a broader destruction of Palestinian cultural and historical knowledge.

Freekeh and Fellahin: A Symbiotic Relationship of Sumud

| Palestinian Contributor | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2024

The article uses Palestinian agriculture and food culture to explore sumud, attachment to land, and the effects of Zionist settler colonialism on Palestinian rural society.

Gaza: The Caged Context

| Palestinian Contributor | Institute for Palestine Studies | October 13, 2023

The essay situates Gaza within a longer history of Zionist colonialism, Palestinian displacement, territorial fragmentation, siege, and international tolerance of Israeli domination.

Seventy-Five Years after the Nakba: What Does the Future Hold?

| Multiple Palestinian Analysts | Arab Center Washington DC | May 15, 2023

Palestinian contributors assess the Nakba as an ongoing political structure and consider apartheid, settler colonialism, Palestinian resistance, international solidarity, and strategies for achieving national rights.

Land, Annexation, and Settler Colonialism

Is the West Bank Heading for a Settler Pogrom After Tell?

| Palestinian Contributor | Institute for Palestine Studies | July 27, 2026

The article examines escalating settler attacks and Israeli territorial policies in the West Bank within a broader structure of displacement, settlement expansion, and Palestinian dispossession.

Annexation Through Law: Land Registration and Palestinian Dispossession in the West Bank

| Alaa Mahajna | Arab Center Washington DC | May 7, 2026

Mahajna explains how Israeli land-registration policies can transform Palestinian property into state land and argues that legal and administrative mechanisms are increasingly institutionalizing de facto annexation.

The New Occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories

| Mohanad Mustafa | Arab Center Washington DC | October 31, 2024

Mustafa argues that Israeli proposals for Gaza and the West Bank reflect a colonial strategy of permanent military control, Palestinian administrative dependency, displacement, and expanding settlement.

On the Struggle Between the Founding Colonialists and the New Colonialists of Israel

| Palestinian/Arab Center Contributor | Arab Center Washington DC | 2023

The analysis argues that contemporary struggles within Israeli Zionism concern competing approaches to advancing a common settler-national project rather than a fundamental dispute over Palestinian political equality.

Tourism in Service of Occupation and Annexation

| Yara Asi | Al-Shabaka | October 13, 2020

Asi argues that Israeli and Christian Zionist tourism can normalize settlement, appropriate Palestinian religious and archaeological sites, and reinforce narratives used to justify territorial control.

Israeli Annexation: Precedents, Ramifications, and Resistance

| Yara Hawari and Rania Muhareb | Al-Shabaka | 2020

Hawari and Muhareb examine annexation within the longer development of Zionist territorial policy and consider Palestinian strategies for resisting continuing land appropriation.

Urban Planning, Colonialism, and the Pro-Jerusalem Society

| Roberto Mazza | Institute for Palestine Studies | 2010s

The article examines British Mandate-era planning in Jerusalem and how colonial institutions and competing national projects reshaped the city's political and physical landscape.

Palestinian Labor and the Colonial Economy

Insulation Not Isolation: Israel's Super-Sparta War Economy

| Al-Shabaka Policy Analyst | Al-Shabaka | March 11, 2026

The brief analyzes Israel's increasingly militarized economy and argues that efforts to replace Palestinian workers with foreign labor reflect a settler-colonial preference for Palestinian removal over economic integration.

Israel's Exploitation of Palestinian Labor: A Strategy of Erasure

| Palestinian Policy Analyst | Al-Shabaka | 2026

This policy brief argues that Zionist labor policy has alternated between exploiting Palestinian workers and excluding them, linking labor dependency to broader strategies of territorial expansion and Palestinian displacement.

Racism on the Rails

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | February 26, 2019

Reviewing research on multinational corporations and dispossession, Such examines corporate participation in Israeli infrastructure projects that facilitate settlement and unequal control over Palestinian territory.

Refugees and Return

Solidarity Means Insisting on Palestinian Right of Return

| Kristian Davis Bailey | The Electronic Intifada | May 14, 2020

Bailey argues that refugee return must remain central to Palestinian liberation and connects the Palestinian struggle with Black, African, and Indigenous anti-colonial movements.

Can a Minority Rule a Majority in Perpetuity?

| Rod Such | The Electronic Intifada | February 7, 2018

Reviewing arguments about democracy and apartheid, the article asks whether permanent Jewish political supremacy can be sustained in a territory containing a large or majority Palestinian population.

My Rights, My Remedy

| Palestinian Contributor | The Electronic Intifada | September 11, 2009

The author argues that abstract diplomatic formulas cannot substitute for individual and collective Palestinian rights, particularly restitution and refugee return.

Relative Humanity: The Fundamental Obstacle to a One-State Solution in Historic Palestine

| Palestinian Contributor | The Electronic Intifada | January 6, 2004

The essay argues that any democratic one-state framework must confront unequal valuations of Palestinian and Jewish political rights and address the refugee right of return.

Oslo, Partition, and Palestinian Statehood

Palestine De-Osloized

| Palestinian Contributor | The Electronic Intifada | November 9, 2015

The essay argues for abandoning Oslo's narrow territorial framework and returning Palestinian politics to questions of Zionism, refugee return, colonization, equality, and liberation throughout historic Palestine.

Palestinians and the Dilemmas of Solidarity

| Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | May 14, 2015

Massad examines the history of Palestinian solidarity politics and argues that earlier liberation movements explicitly identified Zionism with colonialism rather than limiting their struggle to the post-1967 occupation.

Palestine 2010: Time for Plan B

| Mouin Rabbani | Al-Shabaka | June 7, 2010

Rabbani argues that territorial fragmentation and Israeli settlement expansion made the prevailing two-state diplomatic framework increasingly incapable of producing meaningful Palestinian sovereignty.

History Matters

| Joseph Levine | Boston Review | May 2008

Levine contrasts mainstream Zionist and Palestinian historical narratives and explains the Palestinian interpretation of Zionism as a colonial enterprise backed by imperial power and accompanied by Indigenous dispossession.

Zionism, Law, and Constitutional Inequality

The Dozen Ds That Drive Israel's Propaganda

| Rami G. Khouri | Arab Center Washington DC | April 17, 2024

Khouri critiques narratives used to legitimize Zionism and Israeli policy and places the Balfour Declaration and subsequent state formation within the history of British colonialism.

Proposed Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People

| Hassan Jabareen and Suhad Bishara / Adalah | Arab Center Washington DC | July 16, 2018

This legal analysis argues that defining national self-determination exclusively as Jewish institutionalizes unequal citizenship and reinforces Zionist policies of Judaization, demographic control, and Palestinian exclusion.

From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Colonization of Palestine

| Raymond Deane | The Electronic Intifada | June 19, 2010

Reviewing Victor Kattan's legal history, Deane examines the relationship among European antisemitism, imperial strategy, Zionism, partition, and the legal mechanisms surrounding Palestinian dispossession.

Zionism and Palestinian Liberation Strategy

Palestine and Europe: Opening Remarks

| Azmi Bishara | Arab Center Washington DC | November 14, 2025

Bishara describes Zionism as a continuing settler-colonial project and argues that Israeli opposition both to meaningful Palestinian statehood and equal citizenship has produced an apartheid political order.

Resisting Domination: Palestinian Strategies beyond Oslo

| Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel and Tariq Dana | Jadaliyya | June 27, 2024

This discussion of Resisting Domination examines Palestinian resistance through decolonial and Indigenous frameworks and emphasizes land, autonomy, political agency, and liberation beyond conventional peace-process assumptions.

Annual Palestine Forum: Opening Keynote

| Azmi Bishara | Arab Center Washington DC | February 7, 2023

Bishara calls for rigorous analysis of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid and argues that Palestinian scholarship should challenge political narratives that normalize or obscure structures of domination.

Boycotts Are Legitimate Tools of Protest Against Injustice

| Contributor | The Electronic Intifada | January 26, 2021

The article defends boycott as a legitimate political strategy and critiques attempts to characterize economic pressure against Israeli policies as inherently discriminatory.

Israel's Fear of Boycott Rooted in Tactic's Historic Victories Against Colonialism

| Tithi Bhattacharya | The Electronic Intifada | December 2, 2014

Bhattacharya places BDS within the history of anti-colonial boycott campaigns and emphasizes refugee return and opposition to settler colonialism as central Palestinian demands.

Zionism's Dead End

| Jonathan Cook | The Electronic Intifada | June 27, 2008

Cook argues that early Zionist political and economic separation from Palestinians anticipated later territorial and demographic policies and discusses a secular democratic state as an alternative.

Culture, Narrative, and Colonial Erasure

The British Museum Cannot Erase Palestine

| Ilan Pappé | The Electronic Intifada | February 24, 2026

Pappé critiques cultural and historical narratives that marginalize Palestinian history and examines museums and public institutions as arenas where colonial understandings of Palestine are reproduced or contested.

Indigenous Intifadas and Resurgent Solidarity from Turtle Island to Palestine

| Chandni Desai | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2021

Desai examines solidarity between Indigenous movements in North America and Palestine and situates Palestinian resistance within comparative histories of settler colonialism.

The Journal of Palestine Studies in the Twenty-First Century

| Journal of Palestine Studies Editors | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2021

This retrospective discusses the increasing prominence of Palestinian scholarship addressing Zionism, settler colonialism, apartheid, displacement, and other frameworks once marginalized in mainstream discussion.

Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut

| Louis Brehony | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2020

The article examines Ghassan Kanafani's literary criticism and his view that Zionist cultural production functioned alongside political and military power in the colonization of Palestine.

Colonialism, Apartheid, and the Future

Rethinking Our Definition of Apartheid: Not Just a Political Regime

| Andy Clarno | Al-Shabaka | August 27, 2017

Clarno argues that Palestinian analysis of apartheid should address racial capitalism and economic inequality as well as formal political discrimination, drawing lessons from South Africa's incomplete economic decolonization.

Talking Palestine: What Frame of Analysis? Which Goals and Messages?

| Ingrid Jaradat Gassner and Rania Madi | Al-Shabaka | April 12, 2017

The authors argue for an anti-apartheid framework that incorporates settler-colonial analysis and challenges fragmentation of Palestinians into separate legal and geographic populations.

The Long War against the Palestinians

| Rashid Khalidi | Journal of Palestine Studies | 2017

Khalidi interprets the modern history of Palestine as a prolonged colonial confrontation involving Zionist settlement backed at key moments by British, American, and other external powers while emphasizing sustained Palestinian resistance.