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Abstract
This essay offers a genealogy of the phrase “compulsory Zionism” in order to illuminate its vexed and contradictory intellectual foundations, the ethical and political stakes of the discourse surrounding the phrase, and its accompanying racial project. Scholars of late have taken up the use of this phrase to signal how “common-sense” knowledge about Palestine and Israel is naturalized in ways that privilege Israel and subjugate Palestinian existence. However, I argue that the phrase is also useful for understanding how Palestine solidarity politics are micromanaged within transnational leftist social justice movements and academia.
Endnotes
Notes
1 Adrienne Rich, “Why Support the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel?” MR Online, 8 February 2009, https://mronline.org/2009/02/08/why-support-the-u-s-campaign-for-the-academic-and-cultural-boycott-of-israel/.
2 United Nations Human Rights Council, United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Human Rights in Palestine, and Other Occupied Arab Territories, A/HRC/12/48, 15 September 2009, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/SpecialSessions/Session9/Pages/FactFindingMission.aspx.
3 Rich, “Why Support the U.S. Campaign?”
4 Rich, “Why Support the U.S. Campaign?”
5 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam derive this definition from Michael Denning’s discussion of “political correctness” as “a bizarre kind of superego” that serves to mediate contentious social movements. See Michael Denning, “The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” Radical History Review 54 (1992): pp. 21–47, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1992-54-21; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 341–42.
6 Rich, “Why Support the U.S. Campaign?”
7 For a detailed study of Rich’s position on Zionism and Palestine, see Brooke Lober, “Adrienne Rich’s ‘Politics of Location,’ US Jewish Feminism, and the Question of Palestine,” Women’s Studies 46, no. 7 (2017): p. 674, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2017.1337430.
8 Rich, “Why Support the U.S. Campaign?”
9 Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky, and Lina Baroudi, “The Forgotten ‘-ism’: An Arab American Women’s Perspective on Zionism, Racism, and Sexism,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), pp. 97–112.
10 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 125.
11 Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2017), p. 47.
12 William Arkwright, The Trend (London: John Lane, 1914), p. 69, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433112045137. Italic in the original.
13 Gisela C. Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1978), pp. 60, 96.
14 Erella Shadmi, “Women, Palestinians, Zionism: A Personal View,” News from Within (Jerusalem: Alternative Information Center) 8, nos. 10–11 (1992): pp. 13–16.
15 Isis Nusair, “Women and Militarization in Israel: Forgotten Letters in the Midst of Conflict,” Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, ed. Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 121–22.
16 Umayyah Cable, “An Uprising at The Perfect Moment: Palestine in the 1990s Culture Wars,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26, no. 2 (April 2020): pp. 243–72, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141830.
17 Umayyah Cable, “Cinematic Activism: Film Festivals and the Exhibition of Palestinian Cultural Politics in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2016).
18 See Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
19 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): pp. 631–60, https://doi.org/10.1086/493756.
20 Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” p. 648.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Umayyah Cable
Umayyah Cable (they/them/their) is assistant professor of American culture and film, television, and media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They are completing a book project on the history of media activism in the mobilization of Palestine solidarity activism in the United States.