Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew

Drawing on the history of global anticolonial movements and a rich Palestinian intellectual tradition, two leading legal scholars demonstrate that justice in Palestine cannot be realized without confronting the problem of Zionism

For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. Confronting Zionism takes direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives.

With cutting precision and comprehensive evidence, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds argue that Zionism is colonial and racist in essence and practice. Tracing the history of the Zionist project, the establishment of the Israeli settler colonial state and development of its apartheid laws and institutions—plus the damning failure of diplomatic efforts, including the Oslo peace process—this book provides the concepts and tools for understanding the horrors unfolding in Palestine today.

Erakat and Reynolds also provide a clear-eyed assessment of the role of international law, in a world where its relevance is increasingly in question. Taking lessons from ongoing inequalities in South Africa as well as anticolonial and socialist policies across the global south, Confronting Zionism argues that at this crucial historical juncture, decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.