Cover art for the book Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds

I am, maybe, a reader at cross-purposes from this book’s intent. I translate the challenge of fighting Zionist oppression of Palestine gentiles, somewhat automatically, also to the question, How do we redeem Jewish identity?

Confronting Zionism, by international law scholars Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, reviews the colonial and imperialist legal assumptions in the Balfour declaration, the League of Nations Mandate,and the May 1948 declaration of the State of Israel.

Once seen, it is hard to unsee, the principles that Erakat and Reynolds name as the face of Zionism to Palestinians: domination and dehumanization.

Their work is about failed attempts to use international institutions to protect Gaza since October 7, 2023, and during Zionism’s stages for the past 100 years in its accomplishment of Jewish nationalist rule of Palestine.  They analyze the colonial assumptions in international structures that made the conquest feasible.

There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in being a Jew reading a recounting of Zionist torment of Palestine – reconciling lifetime programming of being of a special and persecuted people, with industrial-scale targeting of non-Jews because they live where nationalist Jews covet.

Norman Finkelstein proposes one rational motive for Jewish anti-Zionism – the wish to keep clear from the Zionist........

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