This session will examine the relationship between the US and Israel/Palestine from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. The papers will focus on Muslim and Jewish approaches to this connection.
Discussions of the religious and affective elements of U.S. support for Israel often invoke dispensationalist theology, Christian and Jewish Zionisms, and Jewish American support for a Jewish state. All are important. Yet U.S. support for Israel is also more complex and conflicted. This paper takes the U.S. border as a heuristic to explore the boundaries of political and religious dissent involving U.S. support for Israel. I examine the curious affective politics of this support and its implications for the public policing of dissent. To develop this argument, I introduce the construct of “AmericaIsrael, " in which Israel and America act in concert as interwoven expressions of redemption. The border between the two states is both posited and suspended. For many Americans, Israel—both the State of Israel and the idea of U.S. support for Israel—represents a unique capacity for boundless collective self-realization. AmericaIsrael is a central figure in the US spiritual-political imagination.
This paper argues that Arab American Midwesterners, both Christians and Muslims, identified inter-religious unity as a foundation of Arab American solidarity with Palestine from the time of the Palestinian revolt in 1936 until a more confessional politics overtook Arab Midwestern civil society in the 1950s. Using the writings of many Arab American Midwesterners as well as news articles published in the Indianapolis-based Syrian Ark newspaper, I show how Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism were presented as an inter-religious concern among Muslim, Orthodox, and Melkite leaders of the mainly Syrian-Lebanese Americans of the Midwest. In addition, this presentation asserts that a commitment to Palestine was not in tension with Arab Midwesterners' local, regional, and national identities but was in fact generative of communal solidarity and homemaking in all of these domains.
In the recent past, debates have popularized concerning the value and meaning of the term
apartheid. Is it a term that is adequate for discerning Israel’s subjugation of Palestine, or not? In
this paper, I provide a conceptual comparative framework for understanding the various
dimensions of apartheid as it relates to settler-colonialism and racial capitalism. Through
engaging in contemporary debates within Palestine Studies, I demonstrate that the term apartheid
has always been used to describe the legal, political, economic and gendered ways in which
apartheid was understood in South Africa and globally. With regards to the concepts of settler-
colonialism and racial capitalism, I place them within debates emanating from Decolonial
Theory which outline their varied dimensions as understood by the long-duree critique of
coloniality and capitalism. In conclusion, I argue that approaching the definition of apartheid
from within this comparative conceptual framework demonstrates that their meanings are co-
constitutive and co-determinative.