Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race

Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Abigail B. Bakan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781780765334
• eBook ISBN: 9781838608798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the situation in Israel/Palestine seems to become ever more intractable and protracted, the need for new ways of looking at recent developments and their historical roots is more pressing than ever. Bearing this in mind, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan discuss the historic and contemporary dynamics in Israel/Palestine, and their international reverberations, from the unique vantage point of 'race', racialization, racism and anti-racism. They therefore offer close analysis of the 'idea' of Israel and the 'absence' of Palestine by examining the concepts of race and identity in the region. With fresh coverage of themes relating to gender, Idigeneity, the environment, surveillance and the war on terror, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race will appeal to scholars in political science, sociology and Middle East studies.

PART ONE

SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE ISRAEL/PALESTINE RACIAL CONTRACT

1 THE IDEA OF ISRAEL AND THE ABSENCE OF PALESTINE: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES FOR SCHOLARSHIP

The challenge of knowing “race” in the Israel/Palestine context

As authors with dual Canadian and US citizenship and as academics based at Canadian universities, we are especially attuned to what we call the challenge of knowing “race” in Israel/Palestine. By this we mean that, while universities in Canada and the United States have often been at the center of debates regarding Israel/Palestine (Abu-Laban and Bakan 2012a; Ageel 2016; Butler 2006b; Dawson and Mullen 2015; Masri 2011; Nadeau and Sears 2010; Salaita 2015; Stewart 2010; Thompson 2011), terms like “race,” “racism,” and “racialization” are not a widely accepted means through which academics or students understand this conflict zone. However, as pivotal arenas of knowledge production, universities have actually been central to the Israel/Palestine racial contract. In this chapter, we examine the underlying ideas broadly considered in the social sciences that render conversations regarding Israel/Palestine notably fraught. We suggest that central to this outcome are contemporary understandings of race and the relevance of such understandings to the Israel/Palestine racial contract in the North American (here meaning US and Canadian) traditions of academic scholarship.¹ To better illustrate this, we focus on two important fields of knowledge: the discipline of political science and the interdisciplinary area of ethnic studies. “Race” is not frequently addressed in much work in political science, and when it is, it is often subsumed under or beside notions of “ethnicity.” The processes of racialization in Israel/Palestine have received particularly scant attention in the discipline. In the area of ethnic studies, while race is more readily addressed, the case of Israel/Palestine similarly remains largely unstudied.

In what follows, the elision of race in the context of Israel/Palestine in both political science and ethnic studies is addressed, followed by a more detailed consideration of the idea of Israel and the absenting of Palestine. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the contribution of concepts such as racial contracts, Indigeneity, and apartheid in the context of Israel/Palestine. These are suggested as valuable conceptual tools in advancing a more comparatively informed and productive critical discourse that contributes to part of our understanding of the Israel/Palestine racial contract, the elaboration of which is developed in subsequent chapters.

Absences: Political science and race and ethnic studies and Palestine

Political science, as the study of states and power, is an academic discipline arguably well suited to the study of race and racialization in Israel/Palestine. However, political science has not generally developed as a welcoming intellectual home for critical race analyses regardless of geographic region or country case study (see Thompson 2008). As a discipline, political science has its origins in the developments of modern social science, and it was given renewed prominence in the decades following the Second World War. Developments in the United States since the mid-twentieth century have heavily shaped the discipline, not least because estimates show that some 75 to 80 percent of the world’s political scientists were located in the United States by the 1990s (Taylor 1999). Moreover, commonly American narratives of the discipline are drawn upon both within and outside of the US context (Gunnell 2002; see also Adcock and Bevir 2005; Klingemann 2007).

This is not to suggest that the subject of race and politics has gone unnoticed. In the case of comparative politics—one of the main subfields in the discipline—there was sporadic attention for much of the postwar period to issues of race and ethnicity, which was further advanced in 1995 with the creation of a new section dealing with race/ethnicity in the American Political Science Association (APSA). However, even with this section in place, analyses of racialization as a historically and socially constructed process were marginal (Taylor 1999) and tended not to intersect with other interdisciplinary approaches that foreground race (Walton, Miller, and McCormick 1995). The complex intersections of race, gender, and class among other forms of inequality also remained marginal (Dawson and Cohen 2002: 503). In 2004, Hanchard and Chung noted, “there has been little discussion of the conceptual and methodological implications of the comparative study of race and ethnicity on contemporary debates and discussion in comparative politics in the US, though a more serious undertaking of these issues in cross-national perspective could greatly enhance the literature” (320). As Dawson and Cohen noted in reviewing the study of race at the beginning of the 2000s:

One central theme … is the need to understand the process of racialization and racial orderings throughout history and from the perspective of different racial and ethnic groups. More often than not political science seems oblivious to the different methods, times, and reasons groups become racialized subjects. Further, the dynamic trajectory of racial ordering and its consequences for not only policy areas such as immigration but also the evolution of state operations and orientations seems noticeably absent from our analyses. Exploring the historical and specific processes of racialization should provide greater insight into such staples of political science inquiry as electoral realignment, public opinion shifts, and interest group proliferation. (2002: 489)

Throughout the 2000s, US and Canadian political scientists identified similar problems with the study of race. Watts, for example, noted that the serious study of Afro-American politics was hampered by mainstream political science approaches, which defined politics in narrow terms, lacked theorization about white domination, fixated on electoral politics, and reified race (2007: 406–28). More broadly, Wilbur Rich (2007) suggested that it was a lack of deep understanding about race in the United States that compounded the problem of political scientists attending to race adequately elsewhere in the world. Debra Thompson (2016) has noted that methods of determining and assessing census data regarding race have varied greatly across states, rendering the most basic comparative analyses notably fraught.

Given this backdrop, there are some welcome recent advances of note. These include the formal creation in 2009 of a “Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics” section in the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) and the production of a new journal entitled Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics through the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). It is significant that in its inaugural March 2016 issue, the journal’s editor observed that, despite the APSA section, “research in race and ethnicity retained a curious place in the discipline” (Ramakrishnan 2016). To quote:

many departments did not know how to evaluate political science publications that were getting published in interdisciplinary journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration Review, and American Indian Quarterly. In addition, many excellent articles were getting rejected from flagship political science journals because their work was seen as too narrow, and scholars who managed to publish in such journals were encouraged to frame their scholarship in ways that would appeal to mainstream audiences. (Ramakrishnan 2016: 2)

As a remedy, the openness of the journal to work that engages subfields across the discipline as well as diverse methodologies and intersectional approaches is a nascent, but encouraging, sign of disciplinary shift (Ramakrishnan 2016: 3).

As it stands, however, other subfields of the discipline have different challenges. In the subfield of political theory—the area within postwar US political science charged with considering normative questions (Gunnell 2006: 484–5)—scholars of democratic theory have turned to the politics of multiculturalism and inclusion, which tends to frame racialization as a feature of illiberal attitudes and premodern practices. In the face of what has been termed the “behavioral revolution,” and the related privileging of certain kinds of research that could inform (US) policy makers, political theory continues to retain a surprising influence (Kettler 2006). In this regard, US political theorists, like their empiricist colleagues, have a strong concern for democratic theory (Berndston 1987). Over the 1970s and 1980s, democratic theory came to be characterized by the debate between liberals and communitarians. However, since 1989 and the attendant waning of the historic Cold War binary between “democracy” and “communism,” political theory has more seriously taken up issues of national identity and multiculturalism. This turn is symbolized significantly with the rising international influence of Canadian political theorists Will Kymlicka (1989, 1995, 1998) and Charles Taylor (1994).

In short, dominant strands of political theory have gone multicultural (May, Modood, and Squires 2004: 3–8). The focus on cultural minorities—largely national minorities within liberal democratic nations—has tended, however, to in effect downplay and/or make less possible a focus on race and processes of racialization, as well as other forms of social differentiation and power relations, through a privileging of “culture” (Dhamoon 2006, 2010). Much of this work theorizes at a very abstract level, with limited attention to empirical realities in distinct contexts (May, Modood, and Squires 2004: 5–6) or historical specificities. The significant exceptions (Carens 2000, 2013) are important, but they have not penetrated the hegemony of liberal multiculturalism. And despite the impressive contributions of Canadian political scientists to studies of multiculturalism, the absence of attention to racialization, as both socially constructed and historically specific, has hampered the study of politics in Canada (Abu-Laban 2007). This is despite analyses of hegemonic multiculturalism within the field of political theory that have foregrounded race and racism (Coulthard 2014; Dhamoon 2010; Galabuzi 2006; Johnson and Enomoto 2007; Kernerman 2005; Tully 1995).

In her article “Is Race Political?,” Debra Thompson addresses the awkward disconnect between the realities of race as factors in power and the near-absence of attention to race in Canadian political science. She writes:

English Canadian political science has been ignoring all the signs that point to the relevance of race: demographic data point to the increasing racial population of Canada; the link between race and politics is clear both in terms of the production of race itself and the political and social barriers faced by racialized populations; and other disciplines in the social sciences have been far more successful than political science at publishing and presenting journal articles that take race as an important subject of research…. Similarly, the dominant approaches to the study of English Canadian political science are unlikely to acknowledge race as a political production or phenomenon…. [I]nstitutions, state parties, and “official politics” are dominant … where racial minorities are currently underrepresented in institutions like the House of Commons and the formal bureaucracy of the Canadian government. Also, political participation in Canada often concerns the activities of citizens, and only of citizens, and until recently political science has not considered the liminal positioning of new immigrants, permanent residents and refugee claimants, the majority of whom belong to racial minority groups. This is not to say that racial minorities are politically passive, but rather that their access to power and decision makers is limited. (Thompson 2008: 534–37)

A legacy of “colonial amnesia” (Choudry 2010), which is characteristic of countries with settler histories and ongoing structures such as Canada’s, bears heavily on contemporary mainstream political science. Other subfields in the discipline, notably in the influential field of international relations (IR), have similarly largely elided a focus on race and racialization. In the context of the Cold War and the interests of US policy makers, as well as the particular dominance of US-based academics in state security, the areas of focus have included issues of national security, nuclear deterrence, and military strength. As an area of study closely linking state policy to research, IR has been described variously as a field or subfield of political science, or as a discipline in its own right. Regardless, it is clear that IR was shaped by the postwar development of political science as a discipline, and it is closely associated with liberal democratic state military policy. As McSweeney points out, “measured in terms of growth since 1945, the study of security is probably the most prestigious sub-field of international relations” (1999: 25). Moreover, at least until the mid-1980s, many questions of international security were framed strictly within the boundaries of the discipline of political science and its objectivist tradition (McSweeney 1999: 33).

Many writers contributed to new directions, including post-Cold War discussions of “new security” and the constructed character of security within IR (Buzan and Waever 2003; Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998; Waever, Buzan, Kelstrup, and Lemaitre 1993). Nonetheless, in practical application, these authors have tended to address the construction of global and regional security threats with scant attention to how processes of racialization impact, define, or affect definitions of security or its risks. Thus, as Chowdhry and Nair state, such “understandings of power relations render invisible or inconsequential the racialized, gendered, and class nature of power in IR” (2013: 6).

The case of Israel figures uneasily in approaches to global security, and similarly within political science. The claimed “Jewish” character of all the significant political institutions in that state is normalized and accepted in international arenas. Moreover, Israel’s exceptionality is widely taken as a given. As Whitaker notes, this exceptionality has dramatically escalated in the post-9/11 context, not least associated specifically with airline security and antiterrorism (2011: 371). The inattention to the construction of racialization has enabled the state’s claimed Jewish identity and representation to be accepted as a fact, rather than as a feature of state hegemony and an ideological project that is subject to intellectual and analytical scrutiny and critique. This dominant and accepted framing of Israel as a normalized “Jewish state” has simultaneously effectively absented Palestinian experience, history, and identity claims. At its most problematic, this absenting is replaced with an assumed stereotype of the “Palestinian” as “terrorist” (Lentin 2008c; Massad 2006). In this process, political science has been consistent with the social sciences generally, presuming Israel to be “a pioneering, settler-immigrant society that is democratic and has little in common with European-colonial ventures” (Zureik 2011: 5). Comparative studies that address Israeli politics tend to presume the place of Israel to be on the same footing as Western liberal democracies (Haklai 2011; Migdal 2001). If history is brought to bear in the analysis, it is commonly according to the hegemonic narrative of a desert “land without a people” brought to bloom by Western settlement in a way that is consistent with Zionist framings. This narrative places European Jewish victims of anti-Semitism (anti-Jewish racism) as benevolent, innovative, and industrious colonists. This frame absents Palestine and Indigenous Palestinians and fails to view Zionism, as Said (1992) starkly poses the question, from the standpoint of its victims.

In recent years, political science associations internationally and in Canada have developed area studies focusing specifically on the politics of race and racism (Dawson and Cohen 2002; Taylor 1999), and political scientists have addressed the significance of race in state policies and practices domestically and internationally (Abu-Laban 2000; Chowdhry and Nair 2013; Saleé 2004; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005; Thompson 2008, 2012, 2016). However, the specific nature of anti-racism as a political project remains largely unaddressed. If political science tends to absent or diminish the significance of race and racialization, arguably ethnic studies should serve as an alternative natural home. But here too, the study of race and racialization regarding Israel/Palestine remains absent or marginal.

In the United States, ethnic studies “as a discipline, emerged in the post-Civil Rights era” (Prashad 2006: 158). It developed in the context of struggles for academic legitimacy, where historic exclusions of “non-white intellectuals” and features of “faculty hesitancy” mitigated the more rapid scholarly development demanded by the subject matter (Clarke 1977: 124). However, by the twenty-first century, ethnic studies had come of age as a recognized disciplinary focus. Combining a series of diverse studies of the minority “other” under a common rubric, the emergent discipline did not “disavow the importance of racialization and of racial oppression,” even when possibly risking becoming “invested in the frozen tundra of identity” (Prashad 2006: 157). Critical challenges, not surprisingly, have arisen concomitant to the mainstreaming of ethnic studies.

Every time the identity of the American people in this continent is celebrated today as a uniquely composite blend of European immigrants who settled the Atlantic colonies or passed through Ellis Island, a political decision and a historical judgment are being made. A decision is being made to represent the Others—American Indians [sic], African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asians, other peoples of colour—as missing, absent or supplemental. (Juan 1991: 467)

Efforts to theorize differences and linkages among various types of racialized experiences generated distinct disciplinary foci and complex debates regarding the relationship between critical scholarship and social justice practices (Juan 1991; Prashad 2006). Notably fraught in this context, and relevant to the study of Israel/Palestine, is the association of “Jewish studies” with both historic exclusion of Jewish minorities comparable to other minority groups and the common ascendance of Israel as a powerful militarized state, closely associated with US imperialist interests in the Middle East. A series of debates regarding the ascribed “model minority” status of American J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue: Why the politics of race?
• Introduction
• Part One Social Sciences and the Israel/Palestine Racial Contract
• Part Two Global Politics and The Israel/Palestine Racial Contract
• Part Three the Israel/Palestine Racial Contract: Rebranding and Resistance
• Conclusion: Global response to the Israel/Palestine racial contract: BDS from South Africa to Palestine
• Epilogue: Toward a politics of solidarity
• References
• Index
• Imprint