JVL Introduction
This new book, reviewed here by the Electronic Intifada looks at a number of issues relating to the only example of actual Zionism now but also the history of the ideology, rooted in colonialism. This is not their assertion but as noted in Wikipedia for example, "(m)any of the fathers of Zionism described Zionist activity in Palestine as “colonization”, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said “Zionism is a colonization adventure”. Theodore Herzl in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, described the Zionist project as “something colonial”….In 1905 Max Nordau said, “Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of ‘sneaking’ into Palestine”, and that instead it advocates “that the existing and promising beginnings of a Jewish colonization shall be looked after and maintained till the movement will be possible on a large scale”.
The reviewer also notes that the book “raises the troubling but very real question of whether a single, secular democratic state can still appeal to Palestinians in light of the genocide. The authors quote Palestinian American researcher Lara Kilani, who wrote in Mondoweiss in late 2025, “Who wants to be made to live and share space with genocidaires?”
This looks like an important addition to the writing on Palestine in the current context. Despite the terrible conditions for Palestinians the authors have hope that finally decolonialising Palestine will be a key to building the world anew
This article was originally published by Electronic Intifada on Tue 22 Sep 2026.
Imagining a post-Zionism future
Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew, by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, Haymarket Books (2026)
by Rod Such , Electronic Intifada
Of the windfall of books published on Israel this year, Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew may well be the most radical critique yet.
Written by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, it is radical in the sense of the word’s Latin origin radix – meaning root or going to the roots, getting to the core, the origin, the foundation or essential part of something.
The Zionist ideology of the state of Israel is the root problem facing the Palestinian struggle for liberation, Erakat and Reynolds argue.
Confronting it cannot be avoided because it is fundamental to Israeli settler colonialism, its racism, its system of apartheid, its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and its genocide against them – a genocide now visible for the whole world to see.
Both Erakat and Reynolds are experts in international human rights law. Reynolds is an associate professor of law at Maynooth University in Ireland and the author of Empire, Emergency and International Law (2017). Erakat is a full professor at Rutgers University in the US and the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019), a critique of the failures and key flaws in international law.
In many ways Confronting Zionism is a fulfillment of a promise Erakat made in Justice for Some to define a new political vision and program for how to win Palestinian liberation.
That program calls for a concerted and many-faceted effort at decolonization by exposing how Zionism envisioned the creation of Israel as a colonial project. To do this, the authors argue, people must understand the fundamentally racist nature of Zionism with its Jewish supremacist laws and practices, and by seeing settler colonialism as a joint project with Western imperialism.
Like the settler colonial projects that preceded it, Zionism pursues racial elimination and apartheid – with parallels to fascism.
How Oslo failed
Confronting Zionism rejects the political visions that emerged with the failed peace process and its proposed two-state solution. In doing so the authors find themselves drawn to Palestinian writings and political struggles that predated the signing of the Oslo accords by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993.
The authors rely to a great extent on the insights of Palestinian scholar, jurist and activist Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, first published in 1965 but resurrected in a 2012 special issue of the journal Settler Colonial Studies.
Erakat and Reynolds also devote almost an entire chapter to the emergence of solidarity with Palestine from formerly colonized countries that resulted in the 1975 United Nations General Assembly declaration of Zionism as a form of racism.
Confronting Zionism also draws parallels between Zionism and fascism, recalling that in 1985 the monitoring body for the UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid found similarities between the apartheid regimes in southern Africa and the fascist – and genocidal – governments of Germany and Italy in the mid-20th century.
These parallels seem especially relevant today with the extreme rightward turn of the Donald Trump administration.
Of course, the process of decolonization articulated by Erakat and Reynolds is also informed by newly minted insights into the nature of Zionism that go beyond the Palestinian struggles preceding Oslo and the emergence of solidarity with Palestine – often from formerly colonized countries.
Those insights begin with the authors’ analysis of why Oslo failed. They point to the 2017 Israeli execution of Palestinian intellectual Bassel al-Araj as making clear to Palestinians engaged in popular resistance that the Palestinian Authority created by Oslo was little more than a subcontractor to the Israeli occupation.
Al-Araj had been an activist organizing against ceaseless settler encroachment in the occupied West Bank, beginning with a 2011 bus protest modeled after the nonviolent Freedom Rides challenging segregationist Jim Crow laws in the southern United States.
After al-Araj was released from a Palestinian Authority prison – where he had been held for allegedly plotting attacks against Israel – Israeli soldiers executed him in the town of al-Bireh, located in Area A, allegedly under the full civil and security control of the PA according to the terms of the Oslo agreement.
Defining apartheid
Even seemingly important victories for the Palestinian liberation struggle failed to deflate the colonial control embedded in Zionism. The authors critique reports on apartheid issued by Israeli and Western human rights groups beginning in 2021.
Apparently groundbreaking at first glance, these reports failed to put the apartheid system they described in the context of settler colonialism, the authors argue. The Israeli groups, Yesh Din and B’Tselem, resisted portraying Israeli apartheid as systemic racism, the authors add.
Even more problematically, Erakat and Reynolds write, international law itself lacks the language or tools needed to contextualize apartheid as an inherent aspect of settler colonialism.
Likewise, despite the unprecedented arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the International Criminal Court ignored colonialism because it is not a crime under the Rome Statute that created the ICC. As the authors write, “The primary structural limitation of the 1998 Rome Statute, the founding treaty that gave birth to the ICC, is that it effectively protects colonial crimes and those who committed them from prosecution.”
The ICC announced more charges, including the crime of extermination, against three Hamas leaders, than it did against Netanyahu and Gallant. This is despite the fact that newly decolonized Global South countries’ groundbreaking contribution to international law – the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions – recognized the right of people to engage in armed resistance when “fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”
In a key section on how to use international law tactically while strategically focusing on imperialism and colonialism, the authors cite the example of the “We Charge Genocide” petition submitted by the Civil Rights Congress to the UN in 1951, highlighting the violent oppression of Black Americans. Despite the differences in time and place, Erakat and Reynolds outline how similar tactical approaches to the ICC could serve a broader political strategy for grassroots organizing aimed at exposing the colonial nature of Israeli apartheid.
The authors’ concluding chapter, “Spoon by Spoon: Decolonizing Palestine,” breaks new ground in a discussion of what lessons can be learned about political decolonization in light of what has happened in South Africa since the end of the legal system of apartheid.
It also raises the troubling but very real question of whether a single, secular democratic state can still appeal to Palestinians in light of the genocide. The authors quote Palestinian American researcher Lara Kilani, who wrote in Mondoweiss in late 2025, “Who wants to be made to live and share space with genocidaires?”
Nevertheless, there’s a hopeful note in the book’s subtitle in the phrase “Building the World Anew.” The authors repeatedly make note of the importance of the Unity Intifada of 2021 – which united all Palestinian factions in a general strike and which the authors compare in significance to the 1936 Arab Revolt, the momentous opening salvo of the Palestine liberation struggle
By focusing on Zionism as the ideological underpinning of a racist, militaristic state embraced by Western neocolonialism, Erakat and Reynolds argue that Palestine’s liberation offers a counterpoint view of a new world freed from these plagues.
Palestine, they say, is the compass pointing in the direction of a world freed from militarism, war and racism. About as radical as it gets.
Rod Such is the author of Digging Deeper into the Meaning of Palestine (Changemaker Publications, 2025).
