The below exchange took place on Crit-Geog-Forum: “a forum for the discussion of critical and radical perspectives in geography”. It followed my original post advertising the online launch of my book Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination.

Ashok writes: “It’s stomach-churning to define Zionism as a desire for a Jewish homeland without acknowledging what Zionism means for Palestinians who are killed everyday in the pursuit of that desire. Ask a Palestinian what Zionism means and they’ll tell you it’s 70+ years of brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing. To the author of the silly book that was circulated on this list, it’s not a “conflict” it’s an occupation.”

And Isabel states: “I will also add that it is such a false equivalent to pitch the occupation as a Jewish vs Muslim issue. There are Jewish and Christian Arabs who are also fighting for survival in this. The author wants to acknowledge the wrong that happened by normalising it in the history of colonialism – I don’t plan on normalising any of our modern settler-colonial states. May it be the USA, Brazil, Israel or China – why should any of us be okay with any form of genocide?”

My reply to Ashok: “Dear Ashok The question addressed by my book is why antisemitism (or anti-Jewish racism) tends to be excluded from anti-racist consideration and struggle. Les Back and John Solomos (2000: 191) observe, in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, that “[o]ne of the regrettable features of much contemporary theorising about race and racism has been the tendency to leave the question of anti-semitism to one side, treating it almost as a separate issue.” Glynis Cousin and Robert Fine (2012:181) go further, by spelling out that “[t]he ghost of Israel-Palestine haunts the current separatism between racism and antisemitism”. While my book makes a case for a genuinely universal anti-racist imagination and politics, part of how we get there is by understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict free from ‘the Jewish question’: that is, free from the idea that Jews are harmful to humanity. The Palestinian plight is (and must be) a central part of political and human emancipatory politics. It is perfectly possible to condemn the Israeli state and military repression of the Palestinians while fighting against antisemitism on the Left; it is perfectly possible to call out the weaponisation of antisemitism by a right wing Israeli state and its allies while recognising anti-Jewish racism exists in much (not all) criticism of Israel and Zionism. Kind regards, Camila”

My response to Isabel: “Dear Isabel Thank you for your reply, in which you state: “[t]he author wants to acknowledge the wrong that happened by normalising it in the history of colonialism”. I really recommend this paper by Rachel Busbridge (2018): ‘Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial “Turn”: From Interpretation to Decolonization’, Theory, Culture & Society 35(1), 91–115. I cite this in my book. Busbridge correctly identifies that the absolutist solution of decolonisation is no solution at all since “a faithful adherence to the paradigm [of settler-colonialism] renders” decolonisation “largely unachievable, if not impossible”: “thus [the conflict] hurtles from the past to the present into the future, never to be fully extinguished until the native is, or until history itself ends.” This story becomes one of “‘either total victory or total failure’ (Veracini, 2007)” (Busbridge, 2018: 102). I am committed both to a universal anti-racist imagination and politics, and to a future peaceful co-existence of what are presently two nationally self-defined groups of peoples. Kind regards, Camila”