An urgent and revelatory primer on the widespread racism against Palestinians in the Western world - where it comes from and whose interests it serves
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Western imperial powers which had spent a hundred years pursuing violent colonial projects around the globe were gradually forced to withdraw, conceding to the overwhelming demand for independence from occupied peoples in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East. But one country was excluded from this historic sea change.
As the colonial apparatus was being dismantled around the world, the colonisation of Palestine was just beginning - moving against the current of history - sponsored and orchestrated by British and American governments. And as the twentieth century wore on, these same Western powers steadily fostered a deep culture of denial and repression against Palestinian people both at home and abroad. They purged representations of Palestine from public life; they decried anyone advocating for the basic human rights of Palestinians as a hateful anti-Semite; they denied the very existence of the Palestinian people.
This constellation of violently prejudiced and misleading narratives is what Saree and Ussama Makdisi call anti-Palestinianism.
In Anti-Palestinianism, the authors set out the stark reality of how Palestine became the last moral carve-out of the post-colonial West. And they show how the pursuit of anti-Palestinian policy has shattered freedom of expression for everyone in the West, our governments choosing to protect a distant project of colonial apartheid over the civil rights of their own people. Clear-eyed and powerfully persuasive, this is an essential primer for anyone seeking to make sense of the ongoing horrors in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the disturbing politics of denial and suppression emerging in response across our own democracy.