Zionism is Racism from the Standpoint of its Victims

Guest Lecture by Professor Max Weiss (Princeton University)

It has been fifty years since UNGA Resolution 3379 (11 November 1975) pithily declared, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Resolution 3379 is a linchpin for understanding the historical rise of “anti-anti-Zionism,” which I define as a counterinsurgent form of knowledge production dedicated to identifying, demonising, and destroying all forms of “anti-Zionism.” While 3379 was superseded at the UN in 1991 through intensive global lobbying efforts, the intervening decade and a half witnessed the elaboration of new claims and arguments by several prominent intellectuals and organisations about race and racism, colonialism and decolonisation. In this talk, Weiss critically examines early examples of anti-anti-Zionism, which might shed a different light on our understandings of the international order, the Question of Palestine, and the history of Zionism itself.

Max Weiss is an intellectual and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, a literary translator from Arabic, and a Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also an Associated Faculty member in Comparative Literature. Most recently, he is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba`thist Syria and the co-editor of Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards a History of the Present. Currently, he is writing a book on anti-anti-Zionism.

For questions, please contact Director Andreas Bandak